The origin of the Tarot is quite irrelevant, even if it were certain, It must stand or fall as a system on its own merits.

2. It is beyond doubt a deliberate attempt to represent, in pictorial form, the doctrines of the Qabalah.

3. The evidence for this is very much like the evidence brought forward by a person doing a crossword puzzle. He knows from the "Across" clues that his word is "SCRUN blank H"; so it is certain, beyond error, that the blank must be a "C"

4. These attributions are in one sense a conventional, symbolic map; such could be invented by some person or persons of great artistic imagination and ingenuity combined with almost unthinkably great scholarship and philosophical clarity.

5. Such persons, however eminent we may suppose them to have been, are not quite capable of making a system so abstruse in its entirety without the assistance of superiors whose mental processes were) or are, pertaining to a higher Dimension.

One might take, by way of an analogy, the game of chess. Chess has developed from very simple beginnings. It was a mimic battle for tired warriors; but the subtleties of the modern game-which have now, thanks to Richard Reti, gone quite beyond calculation into the world of aesthetic creation-were latent in the original design. The originators of the game were "building better than they knew" It is of course possible to argue that these subtleties have arisen in the course of the development of the game; and indeed it is quite clear, historically, that the early players whose games are on record had no conscious conception of anything beyond a variety of rather crude and elementary stratagems. It is quite possible to argue that the game of chess is merely one of a number of games which has developed while other games died out, because of some accident. One can argue that it is merely by chance that modern chess was latent in the original game.

The theory of inspiration is really very much simpler, and it accounts for the facts without violation of the law of parsimony.

II

THE TAROT AND THE HOLY QABALAH

THE NEXT issue is the Holy Qabalah. This is a very simple subject, and presents no difficulties to the ordinary intelligent mind. There are ten numbers in the decimal system; and there is a genuine reason why there should be ten numbers, and only ten, in a numerical system which is not merely mathematical, but philosophical. It is necessary, at this point, to introduce the "Naples Arrangement". But first of all, one must understand the pictorial representation of the Universe given by the Holy Qabalah. (See diagram.)

This picture represents the Tree of Life, which is a map of the Universe. One must begin, as a mathematician would, with the idea of Zero, Absolute Zero, which turns out on examination to mean any quantity that one may choose, but not, as the layman may at first suppose. Nothing, in the "absence-of-anything" vulgar sense of the word. (See "Berashith", Paris, 1902).

"THE NAPLES ARRANGEMENT"

The Qabalists expanded this idea of Nothing, and got a second kind of Nothing which they called "Ain Soph"-"Without Limit". (This idea seems not unlike that of Space.) They then decided that in order to interpret this mere absence of any means of definition, it was necessary to postulate the Ain Soph Aur-"Limitless Light". By this they seem to have meant very much what the late Victorian men of science meant, or thought that they meant, by the Luminiferous Ether. (The Space-Time Continuum?) All this is evidently without form and void; these are abstract conditions, not positive ideas. The next step must be the idea of Position. One must formulate this thesis: If there is anything except Nothing, it must exist within this Boundless Light; within this Space; within this inconceivable Nothingness, which cannot exist as Nothingness, but has to be conceived of as a Nothingness composed of the annihilation of two imaginary opposites. Thus appears The Point, which has "neither parts nor magnitude, but only position".

But position does not mean anything at all unless there is something else, some other position with which it can be compared. One has to describe it. The only way to do this is to have another Point, and that means that one must invent the number Two, making possible The Line.

But this Line does not really mean very much, because there is yet no measure of length. The limit of knowledge at this stage is that there are two things, in order to be able to talk about them at all. But one cannot say that they are near each other, or that they are far apart; one can only say that they are distant. In order to discriminate between them at all, there must be a third thing.