A post from 2010 before I started this thread describing MEM or MIM.
This is the Hebrew letter Mem. It kinda looks like a J. It also is the letter assigned to the Death card in the tarot. But don’t think death as in dying, think death as in life. Elizabeth Haich has a very nice treatment of the death card in her book Wisdom of the Tarot, saying of the skeleton that holds an inverted scythe which resembles the mem, “The skeleton is nothing other than man’s spirit. When the spirit embodied itself in matter and was born as a human being, it was forced to die into matter. It could no longer manifest it’s spiritual qualities, it could no longer be its own spiritual LIFE. It had to bear the qualities of the body and could manifest itself only to a very limited extent through the mortal frame.” She goes on to say a lot more on the subject, I highly recommend this book to any seeker or whatever.
http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4020/4291406484_5035058c8f_o.gif
This is the Hebrew letter Gimel. It kinda looks like the top of an M that has a fish under it. Gimel is assigned to the Queen card in the tarot. Haich writes “She wears a triple-pointed crown on her head. This denotes that she is queen of three aspects of life: birth, life and death. It also means she reigns over space, over the three dimensions. She is ruler of the whole cosmos, the whole universe. She is the queen of heaven, that aspect of God which is procreative and feminine : NATURE.”
So put the two together and you have The Queen is Dead. But ironically,
she isn’t, she is alive. The addition of the little fish indicates that Pisces is lingering, or maybe Pisces is dead and Aquarius is ruling, I dunno. One theory is the story of two Christians meeting in the desert. Not wanting to announce their faith, one draws one half of the fish in the sand as a secret. If the other person completes the fish by drawing the other half, they know they are in good company. It’s a secret handshake sort of thing…permanently etched in the sands of…a beach?