The Nine Passions, the deck

Han怒 (nù), anger. Below, 心, the heart, drawn as the organ. Above, 奴, slave, itself a woman 女 and a seizing hand 又: a person taken hold of. The top also lends the sound ETYMOLOGY; the picture reads plainly: the heart, seized READING. Not a choice but a possession, one way Vecnine currently explains a passion, drawn.

Hebrewאַף af, literally the nose. Scripture’s wrath is charon af, “the burning of the nose” (KJV “fierce wrath,” Exodus 32:12). And the idiom’s far end holds the One’s virtue: God’s “longsuffering” (Exodus 34:6) is erek apayim, long of nostrils. Serenity, worded as the slow nose, and Proverbs applies the same idiom to people: “he that is slow to wrath” (14:29) is erek apayim, a long-nosed man; the Greek translators matched it with makrothymia, long-heat. ETYMOLOGY

Han傲 (ào), proud, haughty: a person 亻 beside 敖 (áo), which deserves its own definition. 敖 is an old verb, to saunter, to ramble at leisure; its early form shows going-out plus motion, the free wanderer answerable to no one, whence its second sense, haughty. The compound draws pride as a posture: the person strolling above obligation. 敖 also lends the sound ETYMOLOGY, but here sound and sense travel together, which the tradition itself noticed READING.

Hebrewגַּאֲוָה ga’avah, on the root g-’-h, “to rise, to swell”, used of the swelling sea (Psalm 89:9). The depth worth teaching: the same root voices God’s exaltation at the Red Sea, “he hath triumphed gloriously” (Exodus 15:1, ga’oh ga’ah, the rising rise), and human ruin: “Pride goeth before destruction” (Proverbs 16:18, ga’on). Exaltation received is majesty; exaltation claimed is inflation. One root, two directions. ETYMOLOGY

Han偽 (wěi), false, counterfeit, artificial: a person 亻 beside 為, to do, to make. What is made is not what is, and this is no modern reading: Xunzi, the early Confucian philosopher, made 偽 his technical term for the constructed as against the given. “People’s nature is bad; their goodness is a matter of deliberate effort” opens his twenty-third chapter, and in his hands the made thing is how goodness happens. The one glyph holds the Three’s counterfeit and the Three’s cure: the false front, and the self deliberately worked into truth (Xunzi 23.1, Hutton translation) ETYMOLOGY. Beside it, 詐 (zhà), to deceive: speech 言 plus a sound-part meaning sudden, the springing word.

Hebrewמִרְמָה mirmah, root r-m-h, “to throw, to cast; to beguile”, deceit as a thrown image. It is the very word for Jacob’s theft: “thy brother came with subtilty, and hath taken away thy blessing” (Genesis 27:35). The Three’s counterfeit self, named as manufacture on one side of the world and as a throw on the other. ETYMOLOGY

Han羨 (xiàn), to covet, to long enviously: the sheep 羊, the very radical, a character’s classifying part, that marks goodness across the moral vocabulary (義 righteousness, 美 beauty, 祥 the auspicious), set above 㳄, water falling from an open mouth: saliva, the drool drawn. The prized thing sits inside the ache itself: drooling at the lamb. Pinned: the Shuowen Jiezi files 羨 in its drool section (㳄部, juan 8) and defines it 貪欲也, “covetous desire”; Duan Yucai’s commentary glosses the coveter as one lured from outside. So the classical apparatus hands the school something better than it asked for: the visible form reads sheep over drool, and the classical parse adds the lure, envy as salivation at an enticement ETYMOLOGY.

Hebrewקִנְאָה qin’ah, root q-n-’, burns in both directions and Scripture uses it for both: “Rachel envied her sister” (Genesis 30:1), and “the LORD, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God” (Exodus 34:14, El Qanna). Envy and zeal are one fire differently aimed, the Four’s whole arc: the heat that sickens as comparison is the same heat that, turned, becomes devotion. ETYMOLOGY

Han貪 (tān), greedy, to hoard: 今, now, the present moment, over 貝, the cowrie shell, literal money in the Shang world, still the wealth-radical in the characters for goods, buying, selling. 今 serves as sound in this family (its cousin 念, “to dwell on,” is now + heart) ETYMOLOGY; read as image: the present, closing its hand on holdings READING.

Hebrewבֶּצַע betsa, “gain, unjust profit,” root b-ts-‘, “to cut off”, gain as what is severed from the whole. What judges must hate (“hating covetousness,” Exodus 18:21); what a sick age is given to (Jeremiah 6:13). The Five’s hoarding, worded as amputation: keeping by cutting off. ETYMOLOGY

Han懼 (jù), to fear, to dread: the heart 忄 beside 瞿, two eyes 目目 drawn above the short-tailed bird 隹: the bird’s startled double-take, vigilance as a picture. Heart plus the twice-looking bird, the scan written into the glyph. The bird-part also lends the sound ETYMOLOGY; sense and sound agreeing again READING.

HebrewTwo words hold the whole axis. פַּחַד pachad, trembling dread, solemn enough that Scripture names God by it: “the Fear of Isaac” (Genesis 31:42). And יִרְאָה yir’ah, the fear that is reverence: “the fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom” (Psalm 111:10). Dread and awe, the passion and its transmutation, both called fear, the Six’s path drawn inside one vocabulary. ETYMOLOGY

HanChina wrote insatiability as a face: 饕餮, the taotie, both characters carrying 食, food, to eat, under their crowns, the gaping monster-mask cast into Shang and Zhou bronzes (China’s bronze-age dynasties). The old texts oblige exactly: the Lüshi Chunqiu (chapter 16, “Prophecy”) says the taotie on the Zhou tripods has a head but no body, it devours men, cannot swallow them, and harms itself. And the Zuo Zhuan, first to use the name, pins it on a man: the insatiable son of the Jinyun clan, greedy for food and property alike, a type portrait from the classical canon. One honesty note: the bronze-casters left no name; tradition fixed “taotie” to the masks centuries later ETYMOLOGY. Appetite as a mask with no back to its head READING. The everyday word keeps it plain: 貪食, greed-of-the-mouth.

Hebrewזוֹלֵל zolel, Proverbs’ glutton, root z-l-l, “to be light, to squander”: “the drunkard and the glutton shall come to poverty” (Proverbs 23:21); Deuteronomy’s rebellious son is “a glutton, and a drunkard” (21:20). Gluttony as making light, of food, of the moment, of the self. ETYMOLOGY

Han慾 (yù), craving, lust: a valley 谷, a gaping lack 欠, drawn as a person with mouth open wide, the yawn made visible, and the heart 心 beneath. The valley lends the sound ETYMOLOGY; read as image: a lack in the heart, gaping like a valley, appetite as topology, the Eight’s MORE given a landscape READING.

Hebrewתַּאֲוָה ta’avah, root ’-w-h, “to desire”, craving strong enough that Scripture named ground after it: the people who lusted were buried at Kibroth-hattaavah, “the graves of craving” (Numbers 11:34). Excess writes its own epitaph; the work is to want without being buried by wanting. ETYMOLOGY

HanA pair. 怠 (dài), idle, remiss, the heart 心 beneath a sound-part: the heart gone slack. And 惰 (duò), inert, the heart 忄 beside a part descended from 隋: the heart leaning, sliding. Both phono-semantic, stated plainly ETYMOLOGY; both pictures echo one important Nine mechanism: self-forgetting, the heart’s grip loosening on its own agenda. That mechanism helps explain Sloth/Acedia; it does not replace ordinary laziness, which can also be a literal expression READING.

Hebrewעַצְלוּת atzlut, root ‘-ts-l, “to be sluggish”: Proverbs’ sluggard, the atzel, portrait-painted three thousand years ago: “The slothful man saith, There is a lion without” (26:13); “Go to the ant, thou sluggard” (6:6). The excuse that keeps the self indoors, acedia’s oldest literature. ETYMOLOGY