I have long ago speculated that there is an affinity between these two ages and the numbers 9 and 10 in number mysticism - I now wish to return to that thought and develop it.
In the Thoth Tarot by Aleister Crowley (designed by Frieda Harris), there is a great and curious symbolism regarding the numbers, from 1 to 10. The same can be said for other Tarot decks of course, but Thoth Tarot is the one I am most familiar with. As in a standard Tarot deck, there are 40 number cards, divided into four suites of 10 in accordance with the 10 Sephiroth of the Kabbala. The suites represent the elements of fire, earth, air and water. The 9's and 10's in this particular tarot deck look like this:
There is of course much that could be written about each and everyone of these cards, and for that purpose there are sources far better than this blog. Yet a shallow description of the cards suggests that they do have affinities for the ages mentioned above.
For the number 9, we have:
9 of Wands - Strength.
9 of Disks - Gain.
9 of Cups - Happiness.
9 of Swords - Cruelty.
For the number 10, we have:
10 of Wands - Oppression.
10 of Disks - Wealth.
10 of Cups - Satiety.
10 of Swords - Ruin.
I will illustrate my point by briefly analysing the Wands and Swords cards in relation to the modernist and postmodernist eras (as is standard in Tarot, Wands represent fire, Disks represent earth, Cups represent water and Swords represent air).
9 of Wands represents a self-conscious strength, a force that knows itself, full of self-confidence and full of ambition. This relates well to the way Man believed, during the era of modernism, that his all-powerful will would conquer everything, whether in the realm of science, culture or the natural world.
10 of Wands represents a later stage where this all-conquering force has become imprisoned due to the fear that it would destroy everything in its path if it were not contained. This corresponds well to the contemporary fear of nationalism, fascism, masculinity and violence in all of its forms. Everything must be kept safe and harmless, because every instance of powerful self-assertion invokes the specter of masculine tyranny of some sort. The phenomenon of Trumpism is a reaction to this; whether it succeeds in liberating the fire element from its dungeon remains to be seen (so long as it is merely an echo of 9 of Swords, though, chances are that it will not).
9 of Swords stands for the "temperament of the inquisitor", also highly self-aware like the other 9's, but so removed from its source as to lack any higher direction. The mind, the intellect, in this situation, turns itself into God, and begins to weed out whatever it judges as evil in the garden of the world. Fanaticism, intolerance and persecution belong here, as does the most heartless forms of human and animal experimentation. This is where we find the totalitarian "big stories" of communism, nazism and the most dogmatic forms of scientific materialism.
10 of Swords reacts to the 9 by declaring all the big stories to be null and void and deconstructing truth itself as nothing more than a myth. Here, finally, reason turns on itself and the result is intellectual suicide, the breaking down of everything into parts, incoherence, madness.
Finally, when the Swords suite has reached the end the road, even the deconstructivist philosophers of 10 of Swords cannot defend their positions, since by their own definition their own truth claims are no better than anyone else's. At this point, a new "intellectual seed" - Ace of Swords is ready to be sown, initiating a new cycle of the element of air.
Likewise, when 10 of Wands has weakened itself so much that it is completely tamed, then it can no longer resist a new seed of action represented by Ace of Wands.
As Crowley also writes somewhere (I do not have the exact quote): When you reach the bottom, you suddenly find yourself at the top again. Thus in the Tarot at least the 10 is followed by the 1, or - if progress from one cycle to the next can be allowed for - by 11.
