Tuesday, January 18, 2005

power: four of disks (thoth)

Book of Thoth

The Four, Chesed, shows the establishment of the Universe in three dimensions, that is, below the Abyss. The generating idea is exhibited in its full material sense. The card is ruled by the Sun in Capricornus, the Sign in which he is reborn. The disks are very large and solid; the suggestion of the card is that of a fortress. This represents Law and Order, maintained by constant authority and vigilance. The disks themselves are square; revolution is very opposite to the card; and they contain the signs of the Four Elements. For all that, they revolve; defence is valid only when violently active. So far as it appears stationary, it is the "dead centre" of the engineer; and Capricornus is the point at which the Sun "turns again Northward". The background is of deep azure, flecked yellow, suggesting a moat; but beyond this is a pattern of green and indigo to represent the guarded fields whose security is assured by the fortress.

In the Yi King, Sol in Capricornus is represented by the Second Hexagram, Khwan, which is the Female Principle. Compare the English word Queen, Anglo-Saxon Cwen, old Mercian Kwoen. Cognate are Icelandic Kvan, Gothic Kwens, woman. The Indo-Germanic type is g (w)eni and the Sanskrit root GwEN. Note also Cwm, coombe, and agnate words, meaning an enclosed valley, usually with water running from it. Womb——possibly a softened form?

Compare also the innumerable words, derived from the root Cas [see note #2 below], Which imply an enclosed and fortified space. Case, castle, chest, cyst, chaste, incest and so on.

The primary radicle in all this class of words is the guttural. Observe the Hebrew attributions: Gimel, the moon; Cheth, Cancer, the house of the moon; Kaph, the Wheel; Qoph, the Moon, XVIII, Guttur, the throat. Sounds so made suggest the other throat; one is the channel of respiration and nutrition, the other of reproduction and elimination.


queen

1a. The wife or widow of a king. b. A woman sovereign. 2. Something having eminence or supremacy in a given domain and personified as a woman: Paris is regarded as the queen of cities. 3. abbr. Q Games a. The most powerful chess piece, able to move in any direction over any number of empty squares in a straight line. b. A playing card bearing the figure of a queen, ranking above the jack and below the king. 4. The fertile, fully developed female in a colony of social bees, ants, or termites. 5. A mature female cat, especially one kept for breeding purposes. 6. Offensive Slang Used as a disparaging term for a homosexual man.

TRANSITIVE VERB: 1. To make (a woman) a queen. 2. Games To raise (a pawn) to queen in chess.

INTRANSITIVE VERB: Games To become a queen in chess.

IDIOM: queen it To act like a queen; domineer: queens it over the whole family.

ETYMOLOGY: Middle English quene, from Old English cewn. See gWen- in Appendix I.

WORD HISTORY: Queen and quean sound alike, are spelled almost identically, and both refer to women, but of wildly different kinds. Queen comes from Old English cewn, pronounced (kawn), “queen, wife of a king,” and comes from Germanic *kwen-iz, “woman, wife, queen.” Quean comes from Old English cwene, pronounced (kewn'a), “woman, female, female serf”; from the eleventh century on it was also used to mean “prostitute.” The Germanic source of cwene is *kwen-on–, “woman, wife.” Once established, the pejorative sense of quean drove out its neutral senses and especially in the 16th and 17th centuries it was used almost solely to refer to prostitutes. Around the same time, in many English dialects the pronunciation of queen and quean became identical, leading to the obsolescence of the latter term except in some regions. •The Germanic root for both words, *kwen–, “woman,” comes by Grimm's Law from the Indo-European root *gwen–, “woman,” which appears in at least two other English words borrowed from elsewhere in the Indo-European family. One is gynecology, from Greek gune, “woman.” Another, less obvious, one is banshee, “woman of the fairies,” the wailing female spirit attendant on a death, from Old Irish ben, “woman.”

[5:57 AM 9/18/2012]

{1} Updated all links to Wayback Machine.

{2} "derived from the root Gas" :: Gas changed to Cas [Book of Thoth, p. 214] & link also updated to root: kes-. FYI: Thread: Castle and chastity, what do they have in common - etymologically speaking?

{3} Image added, linking to Book of Thoth at Hermetic.com.


final notes: find larger version online to view full detail on this card [i found a good one here]. also check Egregore here & here & here & here (just to get started).



T’ien-t’ai states, "From the indigo, an even deeper blue." This passage means that something dyed repeatedly with indigo becomes even bluer than the indigo plant itself. For us the Lotus Sutra is the indigo plant, and the growing intensity of our practice is "an even deeper blue."Nichiren