of the Golden Dawn, was an authoritative determination that the Fool be placed as the first of the Tarot trumps, before the Juggler, (which in the Golden Dawn Tarot was called the Magician). This advanced all the other Trump associations by one letter, (ex, the Magician now being attributed to Beth, instead of Aleph), which puts the imagery of cards into near perfect alignment with their various zodiacal and elemental attributions as given in the Sepher Yetzirah, save for one more exception to the sequence.
The secret of the initiated interpretation, which makes the whole meaning of the Trumps luminous, is simply to put the card marked “0” in its natural place, where any mathematician would have put it, in front of the number One.
But there is still one peculiarity, one disturbance in the natural sequence. For the card XI is called “Strength”; on it appears a Lion, and it quite evidently refers to the zodiacal sign Leo, whereas the card VIII is called “Justice”, and represents the conventional symbolic figure, throned, with sword and balances, thus obviously referring to the zodiacal sign of Libra, the Balance. These cards, VIII and XI, have to be counterchanged.
As soon as one possesses the true attributions of the trumps, the Tarot leaps into life. One is intellectually knocked down by the rightness of it. All the difficulties created by the traditional attributions, as understood by the ordinary scholar, disappear in a flash.
For this reason, one is inclined to credit the claim for the promulgators of the cipher manuscript, that they were guardians of a tradition of Truth.
--Aleister Crowley