I found this diagram near the beginning of Oswald Wirth's Le Tarot, des Imagiers du Moyen Age.
Éliphas Lévi, who was the first to introduce into Tarot iconography a wheel marked with letters ambiguously reading either ROTA or TARO, always put T at the top of the wheel. Wirth's diagram is the first example I have found of someone adopting Lévi's idea but changing the orientation of the letters. (In my post on the orientation of ROTA, I spoke favorably of this orientation, with A at the top, because it corresponds with the orientation of the Tarot suits used by both Lévi and Strieber, but still consider R at the top to be the correct orientation.)
Arranging the 22 Major Arcana, rather than the four Minor suits, around the wheel is a little strange, 22 not being divisible by four, but it is central to Wirth's system. Each card is considered to be related to those horizontally and vertically (not diametrically) opposite it on the wheel, as shown in this diagram, also from Wirth.
I haven't yet read and assimilated Wirth's commentary on these proposed mappings, but at first glance the system seems just slightly off. My initial reaction is that I would rotate the cards clockwise 8.18 degrees, so that the horizontal axis lined up perfectly with 0 and 11.
 |
| My proposed modification of Wirth's schema |
The resulting mappings seem much more intuitively correct -- although, as I say, I have not yet looked in any detail either at Wirth's system or at my proposed alternative.
No comments:
Post a Comment