Major Arcana · I
☿︎ Mercury · ב Beth · Thoth: The Magus
You have every tool you need on the table. What matters now is attention: deciding what you want and directing your whole self at it.
Beth, the house, is the first letter of the Torah: Bereshit, “in the beginning”. The rabbis asked why the Torah begins with Beth and not Aleph, and answered that Beth is closed on three sides and open only forward: we may not ask what is above, below or before creation. It is the first of the seven Double letters, which have a hard and a soft pronunciation, and the Sepher Yetzirah gives each Double a pair of opposites; in Kaplan’s translation, Beth’s are Wisdom and Folly. Its value is 2.
The 12th path joins Kether to Binah: the One reaching towards Form. Its 32 Paths name, the Intelligence of Transparency, and the strange word Chazchazit (vision, the place of seers) mark it as the path through which the divine will is seen. Mercury, the messenger, carries the word of Kether to the Great Mother.
Waite’s Magician stands under a lemniscate (the sign of infinity) with one hand raising a wand to the sky and the other pointing to the earth: “as above, so below.” On the table before him lie the four suit emblems, the cup, sword, wand and pentacle; he wears a white robe with a red mantle and a serpent girdle biting its tail, and roses and lilies grow around him. Case’s key word is attention: the Magician is self-consciousness focusing the forces of the superconscious (the Fool) into the subconscious (the High Priestess).
Crowley’s Magus is Thoth-Hermes in motion, juggling the instruments of the art (wand, cup, sword, disk, stylus, papyrus and the caduceus) in a field of radiant yellow, while the Cynocephalus ape of Thoth, the image of the deceiving copy, crouches at his feet. Crowley calls him the Word, the Logos, and warns that every word is also a lie: the ape stands for the falsehood inherent in any expression of truth. The card illustrates the doctrine that the Magus speaks the Word of his Will and the universe is made by it.
In the Marseille deck this is Le Bateleur, the juggler or street conjurer, a sleight-of-hand trickster at a table of cups and balls. Lévi, who gave the card to Aleph, saw him as the Adam Kadmon, the first man, making the shape of Aleph with his arms. The Golden Dawn moved him to Beth and made the trickster into the Adept.
Card image: Pamela Colman Smith, Rider-Waite tarot, 1909 (public domain, via Wikimedia Commons).