Confirmation that the World card is based on the throne scene in Revelation

The earliest known list of the Tarot trumps comes from the anonymous Sermones de ludo cum aliis ("Discourses on a game played with others"), published in Venice in the late 15th century, probably by a Dominican monk. It follows the Ferrara-Venice ordering of the trumps, which differs in several respects from the now-standard Milan-Marseille ordering. The author includes brief parenthetical comments on some of the trumps, including the World.

The 21st item on the list is (modernizing the spelling) "Il mondo, cioè Dio Padre" -- "The world, that is to say, God the Father."

As detailed in my very long post The Throne and the World, the World card derives from "Christ in majesty" iconography, which in turn is based on the description of God the Father on his throne in Revelation 4-5. That this 15th century writer simply equates the World with God the Father is strong evidence for this connection. It also shows that that version of the World card is older than might otherwise be supposed. The oldest surviving World cards have very different images; for example, the Visconti-Sforza, shows the earth being supported by two winged putti -- an image completely unrelated to the Marseille card or to biblical throne scenes. The list in Sermones is evidence that the World as God was already established in 15th-century Italy and was not a Marseille innovation.

The orientation of ROTA

I found this diagram in Éliphas Lévi's Rituel de la Haute Magie, included apropos of nothing, and with no caption or explanation given.

I don't feel like searching through Agrippa or whoever for the meaning of the various sigils around the edge of the picture, but the main theme is a familiar one: the wheel with ROTA/TARO written around its circumference, a symbol created by Guillaume Postel and much used by Lévi. The four suits of the Tarot also figure in the diagram. The wand (on the right) has the form of a double-headed Wenchang pen, as seen in the Rider-Waite deck, apparently yet another instance of Lévi's influence on Waite. The sword and cup are easily identifiable, and I suppose that the suit of coins is, as in Waite, represented by the "pentacle" -- which, as Lévi uses the word, need not take the form of a five-pointed star. (To break the connection with the numerical prefix penta-, Lévi prefers the nonstandard spelling pantacle, an innovation later followed by Aleister Crowley, with whom it is now primarily associated.)

What caught my attention was the apparent mismatch between the four suits and the four letters. The letter O is paired with the sword, but it resembles a coin. A sword has the form of a cross and should therefore be paired with T. The A used here by Lévi, like the one that appears on the Rider-Waite Wheel of Fortune card, has a flat or rounded top rather than a pointed one, so that when it is turned upside down it looks like a cross-section of a cup with some liquid in it. That leaves the letter R to be paired with the wand, which it does not particularly resemble. However, Spanish and Italian versions of that suit -- a heavy-headed club or mace, not a wand -- do suggest the Greek letter P, and the Sicilian asso di mazze even bears a certain resemblance to an R.

In an arrangement independently arrived at by Whitley Strieber in his book The Path, Lévi puts the cup at the bottom, the coin/pentacle at the top, the sword on the left, and the wand/club on the right. If we rotate our ROTA 90 degrees to the right, the upside-down A (which resembles a cup) will be lined up with the cup, and the O with the coin. Unfortunately, the sword has to be switched with the wand to make those correspondences work.

However, if we rotate the wheel again, so that the A is at the top, we can keep the Lévi/Strieber orientation of the suits. O works for the cup since it is round, and A (which in this case should be written in the usual angular fashion) matches the pentacle. Another word for a pentagram is pentalpha because it consists of five letter A's in different orientations. This mapping also means that the word ROTA gives the suits in their conventional order: wands, cups, swords, pentacles.

All that having been said, I still find that the orientation I prefer is the one with R at the top, matching both the Chrismon of Saint Ambrose (discussed in relation to the Wheel of Fortune here) and the cruciform halo of Christ in the Basilique Saint-Sernin de Toulouse (discussed in relation to the World card here).

(Note that the Christ carving shown is actually a modern one by Jonathan Pageau, based on the original in Toulouse. I chose it because the three letters are more clearly legible than they are in available photos of the original carving. Note also that the letter that looks like W is actually a lowercase omega, corresponding to O.)

In fact, of the four possible orientations of the ROTA, the only one I can't think of any good reason for is the one actually used by Lévi and Waite, with T at the top!

Is there any rhyme or reason to the Petit Lenormand?

The Petit Lenormand is a deck of 36 cards used for divination. Each card has an image (much simpler and more straightforward than those of the Tarot) such as a dog, a book, a tree, etc., and each is associated with a number, from 1 to 36, and with a playing card from the 36-card piquet deck. (Modern piquet uses a 32-card deck, but in the 16th century it was played with 36 cards -- standard French-suited playing cards with ranks 2 through 5 removed. The modern piquet deck removes the sixes as well.) Here's an example of what the cards look like.

And here is a table of the Petit Lenormand cards according to rank and suit. The parenthetical signs after some of the card titles indicate which cards are generally considered to be positive or negative; those without signs are neutral.

How on earth was this arrangement arrived at? I've spent some time trying to winkle out hidden patterns, but so far as I have been able to determine, the combinations of number, playing card, and image are truly random. The only pattern evident is that positive and negative cards are not randomly distributed. There are no negative Spades or Hearts and no positive Clubs; Diamonds is the only suit to contain both positive and negative cards.

The pairing of the images with playing cards appears to be unrelated to the traditional meanings of those cards in cartomancy. For example, the Ace of Spades (traditionally "death") is paired with the Woman, while the Coffin is paired with the Nine of Diamonds (traditionally "profit"). The Queen of Spades, universally considered a card of ill omen, is given a positive meaning. Spades in general are considered an unlucky suit, but the Petit Lenormand associates Spades only with positive and neutral images. Black suits are traditionally masculine and red suits feminine, but the Man and Woman cards in the Petit Lenormand reverse that association.

Nor, if the playing cards are set to one side, does there seem to be any pattern in the numbering of the images. If the cards are listed in order from 1 to 36, no overall pattern is evident. Man and Woman are together, as are Sun and Moon, but that's about it. Traditional meanings of the numbers themselves also seem to have been ignored. For example, even numbers are traditionally considered feminine, and the number 28 particularly so because of its association with the moon and the menstrual cycle -- but 28 is assigned to the Man. The unlucky number 13 is given a positive meaning.

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The Petit Lenormand is inherently less interesting than the Major Aracana of the Tarot because its symbols are so simple. This is true even where there is overlap between the two decks. Where the Moon card of the Tarot is an enigmatic scene featuring towers, dogs, a pool of water, and a crayfish, its Petit Lenormand counterpart is just the moon (and an Eight of Hearts). On the other hand, the Petit Lenormand images are considerably more interesting than the (pre-Waite, non-scenic) Tarot pips -- a rather unpromising symbol set consisting of one sword, two swords, three swords, four swords, five swords, etc.

To me, a big part of the interest of such a system as the Petit Lenormand is that it represents a sort of ontology of life. Implicit in its intended use as a fortune-telling system is that any significant life event or situation can be represented by one of the cards or a combination of them. It's interesting to see what kinds of symbols are selected for such an attempted "alphabet of life." (Another such system would be the Alethiometer symbols of Philip Pullman's novels -- also a set of 36 simple images, with considerable overlap with the Petit Lenormand.)