In my Tetragrammaton article on the Emperor I talked a bit about the symbolism of the Aries-Libra opposition, how it relates to Love and Will. Aries being the fiery Will, and Libra being the dual Love.
It is also the motto of the Equinox. “The Method of Science” being Libra and “The Aim of Religion” being Aries.
Idioms
I wanted to dig deep into an esoteric “joke” that I’ve found in this. To start, we have to look at a huge change Aleister Crowley makes to the tarot correspondences, moving He ה to the Star and Tzaddi צ to the Emperor. His holy text Liber AL says it directly:
All these old letters of my Book are aright; but Tzaddi is not the Star. (I:57)
To grasp the joke, let us look at the ideogrammic character of the Hebrew. The Emperor is corresponded to Aries and Tzaddi. Adjustment or Justice is corresponded to Libra and Lamed.
Tzaddi צ is the image of a Hook, a fish hook.
Lamed ל is the image of a Crook, a shepherds staff.
From this we get the old idiom “By hook or by crook”!
While it means “by any means” we can see the symbolism in other idioms:
“The easy way or the hard way” and “Good cop, bad cop” or “the carrot and the stick”.
Over the past two years as I’ve focused more on writing and translation, I have found idioms to be extremely vital, these are linguistic memes that have a seemingly endless hold over or tongues, finding their esoteric significance has been key for my translations.
While this may seem like complete silliness, a connection like this helps visualize what would otherwise be a meaningless and confusing move from Crowley. We can grasp the opposition of Tzaddi and Lamed through this word play, something that would otherwise be entirely esoteric and unassailable to laymen.
Thoughts
My weekly Tarot articles for Tetragrammaton are fairly brief, and I often have more complex ideas to help flesh out the cards, this is the first of what will likely be many addendums to these pieces.
I haven’t been writing much on here as I’ve been working very hard on producing new decks, writing, and translating. If you’re reading this, I’m glad you’ve stuck with me, there’s a lot to come!