The Rider-Waite Magician

Following on from my previous post on the Magician card of the Tarot, this post will look at some of the specific features of the Rider-Waite version of the card, by far the most influential in the English-speaking world.

*

The sign of the Holy Spirit

Four of the Rider-Waite cards (the Magician, Strength, the World, and the Two of Pentacles) feature the lemniscate or infinity sign — derived, in every case, from features suggestive of that shape in the corresponding Tarot de Marseille cards. In the case of the Magician and Strength, the central figures in the Marseille cards are wearing wide-brimmed hats with a lemniscate-like shape. Waite got rid of the hats and replaced them with floating infinity signs.

In his book The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, Waite has this to say about the Magician’s bent halo.

Above his head is the mysterious sign of the Holy Spirit, the sign of life, like an endless cord, forming the figure 8 in a horizontal position. [. . .] With further reference to what I have called the sign of life and its connexion with the number 8, it may be remembered that Christian Gnosticism speaks of rebirth in Christ as a change “unto the Ogdoad.” The mystic number is termed Jerusalem above, the Land flowing with Milk and Honey, the Holy Spirit and the Land of the Lord. According to Martinism, 8 is the number of Christ.

The implication that the sideways figure-eight has a traditional religious significance outside its use in mathematical notation has been hard for me to confirm. The Wikipedia article “Infinity symbol” (qv) asserts that “The shape of a sideways figure eight has a long pedigree; for instance, it appears in the cross of Saint Boniface, wrapped around the bars of a Latin cross.” The source cited for this is John D. Barrow’s Cosmic Imagery, which has the following on page 339.

The infinity sign has a dual resonance. It combines the mystic attraction of the great unknown and unknowable with the cold precision of mathematics and the desire to describe the unimaginable. The ribbon like figure-eight on its side is an ancient symbol, a shadow of the ancient ourobos [sic] symbol of the snake eating its tail.

It provided the mysterious cross of St Boniface in early Christian tradition, but its entrance into the symbolic world of mathematics did not occur until 1655. That distinction fell to the Oxford mathematician John Wallis. . . .

Barrow’s endnote for this passage cites only Wallis’s treatise De sectionibus conicis, which says nothing about St. Boniface or about the symbol’s alleged antiquity. (Wallis says nothing at all about the symbol he has introduced, beyond the parenthetical explanation that “esto enim ∞ nota numeri infiniti.”)

I have scoured the Internet in vain for any image of the “cross of Saint Boniface.” (That saint’s special symbol appears to be a sword stuck through a book, not a cross of any description.) Whoever wrote the Wikipedia article added details (“wrapped around the bars of a Latin cross”) not mentioned by Barrow, suggesting some independent knowledge of this cross. However, all I’ve been able to find is a novel by Robert Waters called The Cross of St. Boniface, the cover of which shows an icon of that saint holding an ordinary, lemniscate-free cross. I’ve even tried contacting Barrow himself, but he wrote the book 10 years ago and understandably no longer has all his references at his fingertips. As for the ouroboros symbol, it has traditionally always been circular, with the lemniscate-shaped variant appearing only after that shape had been established as the mathematical sign for infinity. For now, based on what I have (not) been able to find, my tentative conclusion is that the sideways figure-eight is not an ancient symbol, that Wallis introduced a new symbol rather than repurposing an old one, and that the use of it to represent “life” or the “Holy Spirit” is an innovation of Waite’s own.

[UPDATE: I have since discovered that Waite got the idea from Éliphas Lévi, as shown here.]

The number eight (which was not at that time represented by a figure eight) was indeed associated by the Gnostics with their idea of Holy Spirit, as Waite says. According to Irenaeus (Against Heresies I. v. 2-3), they believed that the Demiurge had created the “seven heavens” — meaning geocentric cosmology’s seven concentric “planetary” spheres of the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn; each ruled by a planetary intelligence called an Archon — “and on this account they term him Hebdomas” (meaning a group of seven, or something with seven parts).  This Demiurge is the son of the goddess Sophia or Achamoth, who occupies the next higher sphere — the eighth, that of the fixed stars — and who on that account is called Ogdoad (meaning a group of eight). Sophia was the Gnostic version of the Holy Ghost, a member of their Trinity, and was seen as Christ’s female counterpart. Irenaeus reports that “this mother they also call Ogdoad, Sophia, Terra, Jerusalem, Holy Spirit, and, with a masculine reference, Lord.”

(Waite also mentions that 8 is the number of Christ “according to Martinism” — that is, the Hermetic system of Louis Claude de Saint-Martin — but the logic behind this identification is opaque. In his book The Life of Louis Claude de Saint-Martin, the Unknown Philosopher, and the Substance of his Transcendental Doctrine, Waite explains that Christ’s “soul invests him with the number 4, his divine being bears the number 1, his body the number 3,” from which it follows that “in his essential elements his number is 8.”)

Waite says that his lemniscate is intended as “the mysterious sign of the Holy Spirit” — but of course the universal sign of the Holy Spirit is the dove, and the question arises as to why Waite did not use it, preferring instead the serpent-like lemniscate. (The connection with the ouroboros has already been mentioned, and indeed an ouroboros also appears explicitly on the card. In LaVeyan Satanism, the lemniscate represents the serpent Leviathan.) Tomberg in his Meditations comments on the unfortunate tendency of occultists, even Christian occultists, to emphasize the serpent at the expense of the dove, and Waite, his Ace of Cups notwithstanding, would appear to be no exception.

Or perhaps things, are not so simple. Close inspection reveals that the Magician card does feature the dove, though in a tiny, barely-noticeable detail.

Clockwise from top left: (1) detail of the Magician’s table, (2) Ace of Cups, (3) the M in “Magician,” (4) the W in “World.”

The front edge of the Magician’s table features a series of three carvings. The first appears to be ocean waves, the second is unrecognizable, and the third is a bird in flight. Comparing it with the bird on the Ace of Cups, which clearly represents the dove of the Holy Spirit, we see that they are almost identical in shape. The cup-shaped capital of the table leg just below the Magician’s bird reinforces the connection. While the dove on the Ace of Cups is white and flies downward, the Magician’s dove is red and flies upward. An additional detail from the Ace of Cups seems to confirm that this inversion is intentional and significant. The cup bears the letter W, which I had always assumed stood for Waite (in keeping with the common practice of cardmakers including their initials on one of the cards, though the Chariot is the more usual choice), or perhaps for Water (the element represented by the suit of Cups). Comparing the W on the cup with the lettering on the other cards, though, we can see that it is not actually a W at all, but an inverted M as in “Magician.” I have to assume that these parallels and contrasts are intentional, and are perhaps echoed in the contrasting red and white of the roses and lilies, and indeed of the Magician’s clothing. A red bird flying upwards (from a capital that is as flame-like as cup-like in its design) suggest the phoenix — a bird paired with the dove in Shakespeare’s poem The Phoenix and the Turtle.

The Holy Spirit is associated with the dove because of its descent upon Christ in that form on the occasion of his baptism — echoing two Old Testament events. In the first chapter of Genesis, at the beginning of Creation, the Spirit of God hovers over the face of the waters. Later, in Genesis 8:8, Noah releases from the ark a dove, which flies about over the waters of the flooded earth and, finding nowhere to rest, returns to the ark. In the Gospels, the Spirit of God in the form of a dove again hovers over the waters — this time, the baptismal waters of the Jordan — alluding to the Flood as the symbolic baptism of the earth, and to baptism as a new Creation. The First Epistle of Peter ties together the Flood, baptism — and, interestingly, the number eight — mentioning Noah’s ark “wherein few, that is, eight souls were saved by water — the like figure whereunto even baptism doth also now save us” (1 Peter 3:20-21). The word translated as figure here is more properly “antitype” — not a numerical figure, much less a shape (as in “figure-eight”) — but the writer still seems to be associating the number eight with both the Flood and baptism — and thus, implicitly, with the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove. Mormons sometimes cite this passage in support of their practice of baptizing children at the age of eight, but baptism on the eighth day (as later advocated in the time of St. Cyprian) seems likelier to me, since baptism replaced circumcision, which was performed on the eighth day. At any rate, the number eight must have had some obvious connection to baptism in the author’s mind.

As mentioned above, several other Rider-Waite cards besides the Magician bear the lemniscate. All of these have their less-explicit precursors in the Tarot de Marseille, but the most striking is the Two of Coins (whence Waite’s Pentacles were derived). The open figure-eight with the two coins is suggestive of the Chinese yin-yang symbol.

The Two of Coins from a Tarot de Marseille, left; and a Chinese Tai Chi Bagua symbol (太極八卦圖), right.

The yin-yang symbol is typically shown surrounded by the eight trigrams, so here we have another link, developed without the influence of Arabic numerals, between a lemniscate-like shape and the number eight.

*

Roses and lilies

The roses and lilies with which the Magician is surrounded are another innovation of Waite’s. The Pictorial Key explains, “Beneath are roses and lilies, the flos campi and lilium convallium, changed into garden flowers, to shew the culture of aspiration.”

The reference is to the Song of Solomon 2:1 — “Ego flos campi, et lilium convallium”  (“I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys”). Although he quotes the Vulgate, Waite must have had the English version in mind, since there are no roses in the Latin. “Flos campi” simply means “flower of the field,” and scholars agree that the original Hebrew refers to some other flower than the rose, with “crocus” being a popular alternative translation.

At first I read Waite’s explanation as meaning that the (mystical) Rose of Sharon and Lily of the Valleys had been changed into (common) garden flowers, but on second thought I think a more likely reading is that (wild) flowers of the field have been changed into (carefully cultivated) garden flowers. (This is evident from his reference to “the culture of aspiration,” which refers to horticulture rather than to “culture” in the sociological sense.) The original meaning of Song 2:1 seems to be that the bride, having been praised for her beauty, is modestly protesting, “I’m just a common wildflower, of no special beauty,” to which the groom, taking her reference to lilies and turning it into another compliment, replies, “As the lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters.”

What did the rose of Sharon and the lily of the valleys mean to Waite? I could have sworn that they appeared in the Litany of the Blessed Virgin as symbolical titles of that personage, but that turns out to have been a hallucination of memory. (The Litany does say “Mystical rose, pray for us,” which is probably where I got that idea.) A cursory search of Bible commentaries shows that most older commentaries identify the two flowers as symbols of Christ himself, while more recent ones generally begin by saying that, contrary to popular belief, they are nothing of the kind — either (depending on how traditional the commentator is) because it is the groom who represents Christ, while the bride stands for the Church; or because the Song of Solomon is simply a love poem with no hidden theological meaning. At any rate, while the specifics may be rather unclear, we can assume that Waite meant by the biblical quotation to invest the Magician’s flowers with sacred significance.

Besides the Song of Solomon, another biblical passage that seems relevant is Matthew 6:28-30, which also mentions lilies as flowers of the field and even refers to Solomon.

And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to day is, and to morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?

The emphasis here is on how the lilies just grow, by the grace of God, without any effort on their part. The Magician, with his “garden flowers” and “culture of aspiration,” represents the addition of conscious will to that process. The Magician has accepted the Adamic task of “dressing the garden and keeping it” — neither passively accepting the situation in which he finds himself, nor replacing it with something wholly artificial, but rather adding conscious direction to a natural process, working as a co-creator with Nature or God.

“Rose” is, as mentioned above, a mistranslation of Waite’s biblical source (as he himself seems to recognize by quoting the rose-less Vulgate), but the error is, as so often, an inspired one. No other pair of flowers would have been as apt as the white lily and the red rose. Occult “correspondences” readily suggest themselves — Moon and Sun, silver and gold (red is, confusingly, the color of gold in alchemy), albedo and rubedo, Chesed and Gevurah (see below) — and the two flowers have often been paired by poets, including Waite’s associate Yeats, whose poem “The Travail of Passion” ends with “Lilies of death-pale hope, roses of passionate dream.”

The lower part of the Rider-Waite Ace of Pentacles. Above is a floating hand bearing the pentacle.

A garden with roses and lilies also appears on the Rider-Waite Ace of Pentacles, though I’m not sure what light that sheds on their meaning in the Magician, except perhaps to suggest that the Magician is standing in an arch or doorway made of roses, through which runs a path leading from the garden to the mountains. Again I am reminded of Yeats’s “The Travail of Passion,” which begins with the lines, “When the flaming lute-thronged angelic door is wide; / When an immortal passion breathes in mortal clay; . . .” The arch of roses could be this flaming door.

Given the presence of the dove from the Ace of Cups and the flowers from the Ace of Pentacles, I searched the Magician for allusions to the other two aces but found nothing — aside from the obvious suit-symbols on the table, of course!

*

The sower soweth the word

About a week after writing my previous post on the Magician, in which I noted the similarity of the Rider-Waite Magician’s wand to the “Fire Wand” of Yeats and to the Chinese “Wenchang pen” (a stylized wooden sculpture of a calligraphy brush, a common feng-shui accessory), I had a dream clearly inspired by it. In the dream, I was walking around out-of-doors, carrying a very long Wenchang pen — perhaps four or five feet in length — and trying to find a suitable place to use it. (I had no very clear idea of what “using” it would involve, but vaguely pictured myself prancing around sort of brandishing it like a Maenad’s thyrsus.) After passing over various plots of land as too rocky, too overgrown, etc., I finally found the perfect place — a room-sized patch of pure, clean sand with no trace of stones, vegetation, or organic material. Having thought to myself, This is the perfect place, I awoke.

I woke up with a line from the Gospel of Mark in my head: “The sower soweth the word” — hence the otherwise bizarre search for appropriate ground on which to use a pen. Interestingly, there is no sandy ground in the parable of the sower. He sows by the roadside, on stony ground, and among thorns — all places I carefully avoided in the dream. But I didn’t choose “good ground” either. All in all, I took the dream as being a negative appraisal of the post on the Magician itself. I had deliberately sown my words in a field (the unpromising, seemingly “sterile” field of commentary on card-game iconography!) in which they would be sure not to bring forth fruit.

This interpretation turned out not to be correct. Shortly after the dream, I began reading (on the strength of a recommendation from Bruce Charlton) the Miscellaneous Remarks of Novalis and found that he opens with this motto: “Friends, the soil is poor, we must scatter seed abundantly for even a modest harvest.” This struck me as a pretty explicit riposte to my interpretation of my dream. Where I had thought that perhaps I shouldn’t be wasting my time sowing in such poor soil, Novalis (and the synchronicity fairies) came back with, “the soil is poor, we must scatter seed abundantly.”

It also occurred to me that at the end of the dream I had all but quoted Brigham Young, who famously declared “This is the place” upon finding the patch of barren desert that would later become Salt Lake City. Latter-day Saints are fond of quoting Isaiah with reference to that transformation: “the desert shall blossom as the rose.” I looked up the source of that quotation.

The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose. It shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice even with joy and singing: the glory of Lebanon shall be given unto it, the excellency of Carmel and Sharon, they shall see the glory of the Lord, and the excellency of our God (Isaiah 35:1-2).

It will not only blossom “as the rose” but be given “the excellency of . . . Sharon” — alluding to the same biblical flower referenced by Waite in his notes on his Magician. This verse and the one in the Song of Solomon are the only two uses of rose as a noun in the whole Bible, translating the same Hebrew word in each case. (Note also the use of the word abundantly, echoing Novalis.) On the Rider-Waite Magician card, too, roses blossom against a yellow background suggestive of a desert. (The bright yellow background is one of this card’s most striking features, and is surely part of what makes it so iconic.)

“The sower soweth the word.” To write is to sow. Only in his Rider-Waite incarnation does the Magician appear as both writer and sower. In my comments on the Italian Bagatto in the previous post I speculated about the possible meaning of his double-headed pen. Did it imply that he was “writing” on earth and heaven simultaneously? (“That in all your recordings it may be recorded in heaven.”) Waite’s Magician also bears a wand in the form of a double-headed pen. He holds it with one end pointing down to the earth, where roses spring forth, and the other pointing up to heaven, where roses also spring forth. (Roses appear both above and below the Magician, but lilies only below, suggesting that they have a different origin — “for the earth bringeth forth fruit of herself,” and “he knoweth not how.”)

*

Din and the sephirothic pillars

The capital of the visible table leg, which I described above as being both cup-like and flame-like, also seems to have the letters “DIN” written on it. It doesn’t exactly jump out at the viewer, but — based on the parallel case of the Temperance card, where the Tetragrammaton is hidden in the folds of the angel’s robe — I think we can assume it is deliberate.

In Kabbalah, Din (“judgment” or “severity”) is an alternative name for the fifth Sephirah, more commonly known as Gevurah (“strength”). Besides being an individual sephirah, Din characterizes the whole left pillar of the Sephirothic tree, the pillar of Severity. The right pillar, in contrast, has the character of Chesed, or mercy. Din is associated with the color red, and Chesed with white. (At least, that is what George Robinson’s Essential Judaism says; many alternative color schemes seem to exist.)

The red dove flies upward from a red pillar labeled Din. By implication, the corresponding white dove which flies downward (on the Ace of Cups) has to do with the pillar of Chesed. This fits remarkably well with Valentin Tomberg’s comments on the two pillars, in his letter on “The Pope” in Meditations on the Tarot.

The two sides of the Cabbala — the “right” side and the “left” side — and the two columns of the Sephiroth Tree, the pillar of Mercy and that of Severity, and similarly the two pillars of the Temple of Solomon, Jachin and Boaz, correspond exactly to the two columns of prayer and benediction on this Card. Because it is Severity which stimulates prayer and it is Mercy which blesses. [. . .] These two elements [prayer and benediction] manifest themselves in all domains of the inner life — mind, heart and will. Thus a relevant problem for the mind, which is not due to curiosity or intellectual collectionism, but rather to the thirst for truth, is fundamentally a prayer. And the illumination by which it may be followed is the corresponding benediction or grace. True suffering, also, is fundamentally always a prayer. And the consolation, peace and joy which can follow are the effects of the benediction corresponding to it.

True effort of the will, i.e. one hundred percent effort, true work, is also a prayer. When it is intellectual work, it is prayer: Hallowed by thy name. When it is creative effort, it is prayer: Thy kingdom come. When it is work with a view to supplying for the material needs of life, it is prayer: Give us this day our daily bread. And all these forms of prayer in the language of work have their corresponding benedictions or graces.

Tomberg associates the pillar of Severity (Din, red) with prayers rising from earth to heaven (the dove flying upward) and the pillar of Mercy (Gevurah, white) with blessings descending from heaven to earth (the dove flying downward). The Magician, it would seem, represents both of these — with his red robe and white tunic, red roses and white lilies, one hand raised to heaven and the other pointing to the earth. (This dual hand sign, according to Waite, “shews the descent of grace, virtue and light, drawn from things above and derived to things below.”) But the explicit presence of the red pillar of Din would seem to identify the Magician more closely with that side of things. If we accept Tomberg’s analysis, that the pillar of Severity corresponds to prayer — and that problems, suffering, and work are all forms of prayer — this is appropriate, since the Magician certainly represents work or activity.

The Magician: preliminary thoughts

 As the first Tarot trump (a position he invariably holds in all known historical orderings of the trumps), the Magician serves as our introduction to the whole series of 21 trumps (or 22, if the Fool is counted). And, at least in English, his name implies that he represents the key to the whole system, insofar as the Tarot is conceived as having something to do with magic. Any interpretation of the Tarot as a whole must begin by coming to terms with this rather slippery character.

Matters are complicated by the fact that “the” Magician card is actually a family of more-or-less related images appearing in the various versions of the Tarot, but the three specimens below — the Three Magi, shall we call them? — cover the main currents of the tradition. Since they represent the Italian, French, and English schools of the Tarot, respectively, it will be convenient to refer to each by the title given him in his native country: the Bagatto, the Bateleur, and the Magician.

From left to right: Il Bagatto, Visconti-Sforza deck (Italy, 15th century, oldest surviving Tarot); Le Bateleur, Tarot de Marseille (France, 17th century, “classic” Tarot); and The Magician, Rider-Waite deck (England, 20th century, extremely popular)

Looking at these three images, several common threads are immediately obvious:

• a young man, colorfully dressed (in red or motley), with a more-or-less lemniscate-shaped hat or halo, holding a rod or wand
• a rectangular table set with an assortment of items, among which are invariably included a yellow cup, a knife or sword, and a circular yellow object or two
• the presence of some sort of vegetation (unless, in the Bagatto’s case, it’s only a green floor)

Despite these surface similarities, a closer look reveals that these three cards represent three entirely different conceptions of who the central figure is and what he is doing. Let us examine each in turn.

*

Il Bagatto

The first thing one notices about the Bagatto is the strange way he is holding his magic wand, almost as if it were a pen — and in fact, closer inspection reveals that that is exactly what it is: something along the lines of an Egyptian reed pen, but rather longer than was customary, and with nibs at both ends. In his excellent and well-researched post The First Tarot Magician, Dr. Michael Pearce argues that all the items on the Bagatto’s table are tools for writing. The knife is a pen knife, for cutting nibs; the cup is for ink, as are the small yellow objects (“seashells or little cups for ink”). As for the strange white object under the Bagatto’s right hand, Dr. Pearce identifies it conclusively as a sea sponge, used by writers of the period for cleaning pens and erasing. It may not look much like a sponge, but Bonifacio Bembo, the artist who painted this deck, also did some pictures of grail knights retrieving holy relics, among which was the sponge with which Jesus was given vinegar to drink on the cross, and the sponge in those pictures looks exactly like the Bagatto’s white object.

As further proof of the identity of the Bagatto’s objects, Dr. Pearce compares the card to a roughly contemporaneous picture by another artist depicting a writer, also with his pen, knife, ink pot, and sponge.

Detail of an illustration from a 15th century Decameron, lifted from Dr. Pearce’s post

He also identifies the Bagatto’s clothing as that typical of Italian scholars of the 15th century, and particularly of graduates of the University of Bologna. I find Dr. Pearce’s interpretation of the Bagatto card completely convincing. We are clearly looking at a writer or scholar, not a prestidigitator or a ceremonial magician. (This explains, incidentally, why the Bagatto, unlike his French and English cousins, is seated.)

Identifying the Bagatto as a writer is a necessary first step to understanding the card, but several unanswered questions remain — the most obvious being, why hasn’t he got anything to write on? The writer depicted in the Decameron illustration above has a pen, a knife, an inkwell, a sponge, and a book — but you will search the Bagatto card in vain for the tiniest scrap of paper, parchment, vellum or anything of the kind. That’s a pretty big omission, and there must be a reason for it. After all, if the Bagatto had been depicted holding his pen over a book, or at least a piece of paper, it wouldn’t have taken a trained art historian to figure out that the guy is supposed to be a writer! (Interestingly, and perhaps not coincidentally, the conspicuously absent book does show up in the next trump, in the hands of the Papessa, or High Priestess.) Despite the lack of paper, the Bagatto is holding his pen as if in the act of writing and is reaching for his sponge. Is he writing on the table itself? But there are no marks on the table. Come to think of it, there’s no ink visible, either — not on the pen, despite the clearly visible nibs, nor in any of the three items identified as inkwells.

The pen itself is pretty strange, too. Why is it so long (at least three times the length of a normal reed pen), and why does it have nibs at both ends? Is the idea that as he writes on the table he is simultaneously (and equally invisibly) writing in the air? As above, so below? Actually, that makes for a pretty handy symbol of magic. And is there a reason he is depicted with a reed pen rather than the more common and more readily identifiable quill pen? Dr. Pearce’s detective work regarding the sponge reminds me that it was on the end of a reed — and surely one longer than an ordinary pen — that the sponge was lifted to the lips of the Crucified (Mark 15:36, Matt. 27:48); could any such allusion be intended here? It may also be significant that the ancient Egyptians used reed pens, and that Thoth (both the inventor of writing and the patron of magic) is often depicted using one. The tradition that the Tarot is in some sense the “book of Thoth” is well known.

Finally, are those two little yellow things really receptacles for ink? Isn’t one inkwell enough? Isn’t it almost irresistible to identify them instead as coins? One needn’t be as explicit about it as Waite (who, with his characteristic subtlety, went ahead and transformed the pen knife into a honking big sword), but isn’t it hard to avoid seeing the four Tarot suits echoed in the Bagatto’s paraphernalia? It is traditional to interpret the suits of wands, cups, and swords, as representing will, emotion, and intellect, respectively — and considering the Bagatto’s tools in that light yields apparently meaningful mappings: the pen of will, the ink of emotion, and the pen knife of intellect. Where the coins fit into the picture is not clear, but there might not even be any coins in the picture after all. At any rate, three of the four suits are very clearly alluded to.

So, to sum up, the Bagatto represents the magician in his aspect as scholar or writer. Think of thrice-great Thoth inventing his hieroglyphics, John Dee writing his Monas Hieroglyphica, a Taoist magician writing out spells on paper (to be burned, and the ashes mixed with water and drunk), or the post-Renaissance image of the magician as a learned porer-over of dusty tomes. Or perhaps that last example should be scratched from the list; it is the passive, reflective book-clutching Papessa of the second trump who is the reader, whereas our Bagatto is essentially an active, creative writer.

*

Le Bateleur

The Bateleur clearly seems to have evolved from a Bagatto-style image. His headgear is roughly similar, though the rest of his outfit could certainly no longer be mistaken for the garb of a scholar. The assortment of objects on his table also appears to be based on the Bagatto’s tools, though their original character as writing instruments has been forgotten. The sponge has disappeared (or perhaps morphed into a bag), but everything else is still there. The knife and the yellow cup particularly stand out as being virtually identical to the Bagatto’s. The knife has acquired a sheath, there is now a second cup, and the number of indistinct roundish objects has multiplied considerably. The only really new additions are the bag and a pair of dice.

Dice — and I owe this insight to John Opsopaus, creator of the “Pythagorean Tarot” — very likely have something to do with why the Tarot deck has the precise number of cards it does. Rolling two dice yields one of 21 possible combinations of numbers, and when three are rolled the number of possibilities is 56. That the Tarot is made up of 21 trumps and 56 suit cards (plus the unnumbered joker-card of the Fool), and that the first trump features a pair of dice among the Bataleur’s suit-symbols, can’t be a coincidence.

Or, rather, it can be a coincidence, but by even thinking and writing about the Tarot we’ve sort of agreed to take the coincidental — better to say the unplanned — seriously. Whether or not the cards of the Tarot deck ever represented particular rolls of the dice, the Tarot’s very character as a deck of cards — designed to be shuffled for “random” selection and combination — implies that chance and serendipity were meant to play a role in its use. More than that, the individual pictures themselves owe quite a bit to serendipity. After all, Le Bateleur is, to every appearance, simply a misunderstanding, a misinterpretation — a corruption — of Il Bagatto. The Italian cards are much older, and while everything on the Bagatto’s table (with the possible exception of the two little yellow things) makes sense in its context, the same cannot be said of the Bateleur. For example, is a pen knife one of the items you would naturally include on a street magician’s table? It’s there because it was there on the Italian card, and it was copied by someone who didn’t understand what it meant. Not every version of Le Bateleur includes dice, either. Marteau's Grimaud deck has two dice, for example, and Noblet’s has three; but Conver’s and Dodal’s just have two more indistinct roundish things. Their transformation into dice, like the interpretation of the card as a whole as depicting a street magician, was likely a mistake pure and simple. Something similar is probably true of nearly every card in the deck. Much ink has been spilled, for example, about the meaning of the enigmatic image on the Temperance card, with its stream of liquid flowing from one cup to another, but it was originally just someone pouring water into wine to dilute it, demonstrating the virtue of temperance in the prosaic sense of “not drinking too much.” The Hermit card, evocative as it is, was just a standard-issue allegory of Time before someone mistook the hourglass for a lantern. Even the four suits are very likely descended from Chinese money-suited cards (coins, wands, and cups being cousins to modern Mahjong’s dots, bamboos, and characters), originally representing nothing deeper than various denominations of money. (Dots were originally coins; bamboos, strings of a hundred coins. Swords and cups likely derive from the Chinese characters for ten and ten thousand, respectively.)

There’s a scene in the Monty Python movie Life of Brian where Jesus is preaching the Sermon on the Mount and people in the crowd are struggling to hear him clearly. “I think it was, ‘Blessed are the cheesemakers,'” says one of them. “What’s so special about cheesemakers?” asks another. “Well, obviously it’s not meant to be taken literally. . . .” Now, I have not the slightest doubt that, if pressed, I could come up with a very clever interpretation of cheesemaking as a metaphor for something beatitude-worthy, but this would obviously be an exercise in futility, since “cheesemakers” is simply an error and as such has no meaning. Before going any further with our interpretation of the Tarot, we had better make sure that we are engaging in something more meaningful than mere cheesemaker-exegesis.

But the analogy — that of the words of Christ himself being corrupted into nonsense — is a poor one. In the case of the Tarot, what we have is not a case of some primordial revelation becoming increasingly garbled over time and losing its profundity, but rather precisely the opposite. As shown by several of the examples already mentioned, there is every indication that the Tarot began its career as a set of money-suited cards and stock allegories and has since evolved into something much deeper. The oldest version of the cards is not necessarily the truest, and what are superficially “mistakes” in the transmission of tradition may in fact be successive steps in the orthogenetic development of the deck. Valentin Tomberg addresses this idea in the 10th letter of his Meditations on the Tarot.

From the point of view of iconography [the Wheel of Fortune] is clearly mediaeval (of the late Middle Ages), as all the other Cards are, but intrinsically it is older, notably pre-Christian.

Is it the oldest or is it simply the least evolved of the twenty-two Cards of the Major Arcana of the Tarot?

The twenty-two Cards of the Major Arcana of the Tarot being an organism, a complete whole, it is not a question of diverse and disparate origins of particular Cards, but rather of the degrees of their evolution or transformation. For the Tarot, also, is not a wheel, a closed circle, but rather a spiral, i.e. it evolves through tradition and reincarnation.

The authors who saw in the Tarot the “Sacred Book of Thoth” (Thoth = Hermes Trismegistus) were both right and wrong at the same time. They were right in so far as they traced back the history of the essence of the Tarot to antiquity, notably to ancient Egypt. And they were wrong in so far as they believed that the Tarot had been inherited from ancient Egypt, i.e. that it had been transmitted from generation to generation subject to minor iconographic changes. [. . .]

No, the Tarot is not inherited, it has reincarnated. It has “reincarnated” in conformity with the experience of modern depth psychology of the school of Jung, who ascertained the upsurge of ancient and even archaic mysteries and cults from the depths of the unconscious of people in the twentieth century. The Tarot is the “Sacred Book of Thoth”—not inherited or transmitted—but reborn.

This idea of the Tarot as the “reincarnation,” rather than the lineal descendant, of the Book of Thoth, is an intriguing one. As with a human reincarnate, the lineal ancestors of the Tarot may be ordinary enough, but it “evolves through tradition and reincarnation” — and apparent mistakes from the point of view of tradition may in fact be subject to the secret influence of something along the lines of a Sheldrakean “morphic field.” Not all who wander from tradition are lost.

A recent comment by Bruce Charlton in a discussion on the meanings of dreams (qv) also seems relevant here.

By analogy consider a myth: what is The myth of King Arthur, or Robin Hood or Merlin? The answer is that there is no canonical or definitive myth, but only many different versions; yet somehow we feel that behind all the versions is a true myth, which operates without words or pictures but at a level of feelings.

So the idea would be that that is the true meaning of a dream: the myth behind the dream – the same deep myth might lead to many different surface dreams.

A Tarot card like the Magician may also be considered analogous to a legendary figure like Arthur or Robin Hood. It exists in many different versions, some of which constitute a more serious contribution to the myth than others. (The Marseille deck is to Tarot what Malory is to the Arthur legend; the recent spate of mostly lightweight “theme” decks has its parallel in the succession of Hollywood Arthurs and Oo-de-lally Robin Hoods.) With the Tarot, as with Arthur and company, the “original” or “historical” version is a matter of speculation but may well have been rather more prosaic than the multifarious myth that has since grown up. Yet, as Bruce says, behind all the versions lies a single myth — and, despite its unhistorical nature, a true one. Anyone who takes any sort of myths or traditional lore seriously must believe something like that. The mechanism by which such “true myths” materialize is an open question, but for now Tomberg’s metaphor of stepwise “reincarnation” will do as well as any. At any rate, we will proceed under the working hypothesis that the various Magician cards represent successive, and perhaps progressive, instantiations of a single underlying symbol, and that even apparent “errors” in the development of the cards are as likely as not to be fortuitous ones and should be accepted and contemplated on their own terms.

Back to our Bateleur. He would appear to be performing some sort of cups-and-balls trick of the sort portrayed in Hieronymus Bosch’s remarkable painting The Conjurer.

Hieronymus Bosch, The Conjurer, c. 1502

Bosch’s conjurer, like the Bateleur, has two cups, several little balls, and a magic wand. He’s even holding a little ball between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. Based on these parallels, we should probably assume that the Bateleur’s round objects are balls, not coins. The three little yellow things in front of the yellow cup could well be coins, though, so the four suits are still represented. It’s not clear what role the knife and the dice have to play in the Bateleur’s trick, but perhaps the details are not important. The main idea is that he has an assortment of objects with which to perform conjuring tricks, and that included among them are allusions to the four suits and perhaps (via the dice) to the 21 trumps as well. What about the remaining card, the Fool? One popular interpretation, based on the Bateleur’s motley attire and his bag, is that he is himself the Fool, having opened his bag and spread out its contents on the table. Or perhaps the Fool is implicitly present as the Bateleur’s audience, those “fooled” by his tricks.

(Incidentally, though Bosch’s painting predates the earliest known Tarot de Marseille, it seems to draw on a similar set of images, and not only Le Bateleur. Take, for instance, the little dog with the strange costume and the tufted tail. Isn’t that the creature we see ascending the Wheel of Fortune on the card of that name? And isn’t the nearby hoop a clear allusion to said wheel? One can surmise that part of the conjurer’s shtick involves having the little dog jump through the hoop — an action which takes on symbolic meaning once the connection with the Wheel of Fortune has been made.)

In the Bateleur we see the Bagatto — the university-educated writer with nothing to write on — transformed into a prestidigitator, performing on the street works of “magic” which are not what they appear to be, and perhaps — if Bosch’s painting can be taken as reflecting how street magicians were viewed in his day — working in cahoots with pickpockets who relieve his distracted audience of their purses.

*

The Magician

Compared with his Continental predecessors, the Magician of the English (i.e., Golden Dawn) tradition is portrayed in a less realistic, more explicitly symbolic manner. Where the Bateleur for example, wears a hat with a shape suggestive of the infinity symbol, the Magician simply has a mathematical symbol floating in the air above his head. Where the Continental magicians have on their tables items that allude to the four suits, the Magician’s table bears the four suit symbols in their standardized “mass-produced” form, precisely as they appear on the pip cards.

The presence of a wand on the Magician’s table is a bit surprising. It seems redundant, since he is already holding a wand in his hand. I can only surmise that the extra wand was necessary because Waite wanted the suit symbols in their “standard” pip-style form, which in the case of his suit of Wands meant a stick about eight or nine feet long. A magician’s magic wand obviously has to be a good deal shorter than that, so Waite put the quarterstaff on the table and gave the Magician a second, much shorter, wand to hold in his hand.

The handheld wand is quite unusual-looking, too — not at all what anyone would come up with if asked to “draw a magic wand.” (You can confirm this by doing a Google image search for “magic wand” and scrolling through as many pages of results as you please. Nothing remotely like this Magician’s implement will turn up.) It’s white, and each end features a shape suggestive of a paintbrush or a candle flame. Similar wands also appear on the Rider-Waite World card.

On a hunch, I tried looking up Golden Dawn magic wands, and the results were quite intriguing. Though I had of course known of the poet Yeats’s involvement in magic and the Golden Dawn, it’s a little weird to think of him actually owning and using a magic wand! Nevertheless, he did, and it bears more than a passing resemblance to our Magician’s. Yeats’s wand, representing the element of Fire, was red and yellow and only had the candle-flame shape at one end. It also had Hebrew words painted on it, though they’re barely visible in the photo. The Magician’s wand seems to be a white, double-ended version of the same thing — double-ended, just like the Bagatto’s reed pen.

Golden Dawn “Fire Wand,” made and consecrated by W. B. Yeats (from Yeats the Initiate by Kathleen Raine)

While the shape of the Golden Dawn “Fire Wand” is presumably intended to resemble a flame, that’s not the first connection I made when I saw it. It reminded me of a decorative object that is fairly common in Taiwan, where I live: a wooden carving of a traditional Chinese ink brush. (Actually, “decorative” is not quite right. It has feng shui significance.) Actual ink brushes, used in Chinese calligraphy, don’t look that much like Yeats’s wand, but stylized wooden carvings of them (called 文昌筆, “Wenchang pen,” after the god of culture and literature) do.

Chinese “Wenchang pen” (wooden carving of an ink brush); Google “文昌筆” for more examples

The similarities are striking, right down to the segmented (bamboo-style) shaft with characters painted on it. Can they possibly be coincidental? Certainly the Golden Dawn borrowed freely from “the East” — mostly from the Hebrews and Egyptians, with a few nods to India — but I know of no other examples of Chinese influence and in fact would assume that they had only a very shallow knowledge of Chinese culture. If the Fire Wand was not consciously patterned after the Wenchang pen, it’s certainly a remarkable example of convergent evolution — or perhaps of the type of “reincarnation” Tomberg discusses. Remember that the original Bagatto had a double-headed reed pen, but that this was later misinterpreted as a magic wand and its original character as a pen forgotten. Centuries later, the Golden Dawn, in an attempt to design a “fiery”-looking magic wand, unwittingly (I assume) duplicated the Chinese Wenchang pen and then put a double-headed version of that pen-wand in the hand of the Bagatto’s lineal descendant, the Magician!

While the Wenchang pen is typically made of wood and looks almost exactly like the Golden Dawn Fire Wand, miniature Wenchang pens made of jade or crystal are also common ornaments, and these tend to bear a much closer resemblance, in both shape and color, to the Magician’s wand as it appears on the card.

Jade ornaments in the form of miniature Wenchang pens

As another example of the “reincarnation” of the Bagatto’s tools, consider that the Fire Wand was just one of a set of four Tarot-inspired “elemental weapons” used by the Golden Dawn. The others were the Water Cup, the Earth “Pentacle” (a term used very loosely; Yeats’s featured a six-pointed star), and the Air Dagger. Although Waite’s Magician has a full-sized sword, and although Yeats himself owned a consecrated sword in addition to an Air Dagger, it was nevertheless the dagger that became the standard magical implement representing the Tarot suit of Swords. When Gerald Gardner created the Wiccan religion, he imported the Golden Dawn’s four elemental weapons but called the dagger an athame. Wikipedia has this to say about the etymology of that word.

The term athame derives, via a series of corruptions, from the late Latin artavus (“quill knife”), which is well attested in the oldest manuscripts of the Key of Solomon. It means “a small knife used for sharpening the pens of scribes” (“Cultellus acuendis calamis scriptorii”). Artavus is well-attested in medieval Latin, although it is not a common word. This explains why it was left untranslated in some French and Italian manuscripts, and ultimately became garbled in various manuscripts as artavo, artavus, arthana, artanus, arthany or arthame.

So the Bagatto’s pen knife evolved into a sword, and the sword into a dagger, which dagger was later given a new name which turns out to be a corruption of the Latin word for “pen knife.” Wikipedia says “quill knife,” implying that it was used for feather pens, but the Latin quotation given uses the word calamus, which properly refers to a reed pen. The parallel with the double-headed reed pen itself, which evolved into an ordinary magic wand and then back into the form of a double-headed pen, is striking. In both cases, the scribal tool evolved into a magical implement, temporarily losing its scribal identity and then fortuitously recovering it while still maintaining the magical character it had since acquired. While each step along the way seems to be driven by coincidence and error, the overall trajectory of the Tarot Magician is anything but random. Tomberg’s concept of the progressive “reincarnation” of the Book of Thoth seems to be right on the money. In particular, the Magician seems to be assiduously asserting his identity as Thoth himself, the reed-pen-wielding god of both magic and writing.

*

Well, that’s about enough for one post. Having taken a broad, diachronic look at the Magician, the next step will be to examine some of his specific instantiations in greater depth.