From the virtue of the preceding (Grand Wheel on page 1 and photograph
opposite) rises the following. Eighteen Major Arcana function in pairs. I-XIX,
II-XVIII etc, passing by V-XV until IX- XI.
Arcana I reads up to IX and XIX reads down to XI, not the other
way around.
Thus, one leaves the Sun and Moon, passes by Star then goes on
to House of God, or
Tower. It is the traditional script of the creative myth of many
religions, a genesis.
We have Cosmic Nature and Paradise followed by a Fall and the
resulting meeting with the
dark/numinous side. And so on to Strength, the complement of the
Hermit. The Judgment
and the Wheel of Fortune frame this course. The World is the centre
and the way. The
Fool is the one who treads on the path.
A statuette representing the Devil of the Conver Tarot of Marseille
was in the Cathedral Notre-Dame of Paris. It was removed at one
unspecified time. But a moulding had been done which made it possible
to reconstitute a counterpart. It is still nowadays with the pediment
of the old templar church of St- Martin, number 78 on street of
Saint-Merry in Paris. Some claim that this statuette - which features
some horned goat hermaphrodite carrying wings of bat - represents
Baphomet (a cryptic deformation of the word Mahomet) of the Templars.
When one applies the secret code of the Tarot of Marseilles of
Nicolas Conver to the
word bAPHOMET, one obtains... 78!
From where does the expression "Our Lady" or "Notre-Dame"
come from? It was coined in the 12th century by the same minds
that ruled the prodigious intellectual life of that
era. When one applies the secret code of the Tarot of Marseilles
here, one obtains...
77, the number of Iniquity in the Christian symbolic system. The
two letters N (14) and
D (4) which do not form part of the code direct us to the fourth
verse of chapter
fourteen of the book of the Apocalypse, a must read. 14 and 4
are also 18, or three
times six, 666. These two excluded letters from the code are paired
twice in Tarot.
See
Le Monde (XXI) and Le Pendu XII), two Arcana were the notion of
inversion is paramount; witness the similar position of the characters.
Witness also the roman numeric assignations that double up together
in reverse mode.
Let's conclude with some more trivia. The name of the general
of the malignant spirits,
bÉELZÉBVTH, is coded. Its number is 77, the number
of Iniquity.
