The playhouse? The house of cards? The house of I?

One of the strange features of the Tarot de Marseille is that the 16th trump, called La Sagitta ("the Arrow") in the earliest Italian decks and The Tower in English, is known in the Marseille tradition as La Maison Dieu. It would be strange enough if it were called The House of God -- seeing as how it's being destroyed by fire from heaven and all -- but it's actually called The House God, without the preposition. 

Pierre Cheminade Tarot (1742)

I know of no other card in the Tarot de Marseille that omits de like this. It's always La Roue de Fortune, Valet de Baston, and so on. The house god is at least grammatical in English, where it means the god of the house, but this sort of "noun-banging" is not allowed in French. (Update: It turns out that maison-Dieu is good French after all; see the comments.)

So is the word de there after all? Consider the following:

• When de precedes a word beginning with a vowel, it is contracted to d' -- as in d'Alembert, langue d'oc, etc.
• Apostrophes are consistently omitted in the Tarot de Marseille, leading to such titles as Lestoille, Roy Despees, etc.
• J and U did not yet exist as separate letters when the TdM was created, but were written as I and V, respectively.

Taking all of this into account, is it possible that the name of this trump is actually La Maison d'Ieu -- or, as we would say in modern French, La Maison de Jeu? Jeu has numerous meanings, including "play" (as in a theatrical performance) and "deck" or "hand" (of cards).

I wonder, though, if de would really be contracted before a consonantal i. When Falstaff says "The Prince is a Iacke," he uses a rather than an because, though spelt with a vowel letter, Iacke was still pronounced Jack. I'm not familiar enough with archaic French to know whether they would have written de Iupiter or d'Iupiter, but I would bet on the former. Such forms as table d'hôte -- where de is contracted before a silent consonant letter -- suggest that French, like English, follows pronunciation rather than spelling. (Update: This is confirmed by the consistent use of LE IVGEMENT, rather than LIVGEMENT, in the Tarot.)

Could it be la maison d'ieu, then -- ieu being the Occitan form of the pronoun je? But maison does not appear to be an Occitan word.

I might as well also mention that the Pierre Madenié deck of 1709 labels this card La Maisonidieu -- whatever that means!

Sun in Gemini, Moon in Cancer, and . . . ?

The Sun and Moon cards of the Tarot de Marseille feature very clear references to the zodiac signs of Gemini and Cancer, respectively. I think these identifications are indisputable.

16th-century German woodcut and the Pierre Madenié Tarot of 1709

We think of Cancer as a crab, but throughout the Middle Ages (as also in ancient Babylon) it was depicted as a crayfish, like the one seen on the Moon card. This identification is strengthened by the presence of two dogs on the card -- Canis Major and Canis Minor, both of which are located within the sign of Cancer.

(A "sign," being one-twelfth of the sky, always contains several constellations -- usually not including the one for which it is named. The zodiac must have been created at a time -- the "Age of Aries" -- when each of the 12 zodiacal constellations occupied the sign named for it, but due to the precession of the equinoxes, this is no longer the case. The sign of Aries is now occupied by the constellation Pisces, so this is the Age of Pisces, to be followed by the much-anticipated dawning of the Age of Aquarius. The placement of the two Dogs in Cancer shows that the Tarot de Marseille is a product of the Age of Pisces, much younger than the zodiac. But we already knew that.)

It is equally indisputable that the two figures on the Sun card are specifically the Gemini twins. As in the woodcut, they are clad only in loincloths -- presumably the "heroic nudity" of classical depictions of Castor and Pollux, modified slightly as a concession to Christian modesty. In both the woodcut and the card, each twin is reaching out an touching the other with one hand, but there is still some distance between their two torsos; this reflects the actual layout of the constellation Gemini.

Gemini

Cancer is traditionally said to be ruled by the Moon, so illustrating the Moon card with Cancer and its canine attendants seems logical enough. Gemini, on the other hand is ruled by Mercury, while the Sun rules Leo -- so why does the Sun card so prominently feature Gemini?

The only explanation I've ever come across is that Gemini is a summer sign, covering May 20 to June 20, which is a time when it is hot and sunny. But Leo -- July 22 to August 22 -- actually covers the hottest part of the year in Europe and is ruled by the Sun. Was Gemini a third choice, resorted to only because Leo and Cancer were already claimed by Strength and the Moon?

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It occurred to me that perhaps the Tarot de Marseille as a whole might be pointing to a particular date, one on which the Sun was in Gemini and the Moon was in Cancer. That's not specific enough by itself, though. Since (from the geocentric perspective of astrology) the Moon moves through the zodiac about 13 times as fast as the Sun does, every single Sun/Moon sign combination occurs every single year. For example, in 2020 the Sun was in Gemini and the Moon was in Cancer from May 25 to 27, and every single year will have a few days like that in May or June. To pinpoint a specific year, or at least narrow it down, we need the signs of a few more planets.

The only other card I can think of that may indicate a planet-sign combination is the Star.

This card is together with the Moon and the Sun in the deck, and it has the same format: a heavenly body overhead and a terrestrial scene below suggesting one of the signs of the zodiac -- in this case, Aquarius. This match is not as perfect as the others; Aquarius is typically shown as a man pouring out one jug of water, not a woman pouring out two. However, just as the two dogs that accompany the crayfish on the Moon card cement its identity as Cancer, the bird that appears on the Star card may represent Aquila, the Eagle; this constellation is partly in Aquarius and partly in Capricorn, but its two brightest stars are both in Aquarius, and more of it would have been in Aquarius in the past.

What planet does this card put in the sign of Aquarius? Well, there is broad agreement that "the" Star is the brightest object in the sky after the Sun and Moon, the morning and the evening star -- the planet Venus -- and the presence of a naked woman with flowing golden hair (cf. the Homeric "golden Aphrodite") reinforces that identification.

Unfortunately, it is physically impossible for Venus to be in Aquarius when the Sun is in Gemini. There are three signs between Aquarius and Gemini, and each sign is 30 degrees of arc, so the angular distance between a body in Aquarius and one in Gemini is always greater than 90 degrees. The diagram below shows why Venus can never be 90 degrees from the Sun.

The circle represents the Earth's orbit around the Sun. (Yes, I know it's really an ellipse; that doesn't change anything.) Inferior planets (Mercury and Venus) are always inside that circle, and superior planets (Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and the rest) are always outside it. Anything along the red line would appear from Earth to be 90 degrees' angular distance from the Sun. The orbit of Venus, being inside the circle, can never touch that red line. In fact, looking it up now, I see that Venus's maximum elongation is 47 degrees -- so if the Sun is in Gemini, Venus can only be in Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, or Leo.

Could the Strength card indicate Venus in Leo? That seems forced. The only reason for connecting it with Venus is that it features a woman. (Venus is, apart from the Moon, the only feminine "planet.") But the Star also features a woman, and a much more Venus-like one, and in an explicitly astrological context.

I think the idea that the cards point to a specific date has to be abandoned — and the mystery of the Sun in Gemini card remains unsolved.

Can the deck itself be prophetic?

When people talk about the Tarot predicting the future, they're generally talking about a Tarot reading. Cards are selected at random, and the fact of those particular cards' being chosen, rather than others in the deck, is what the divination is based on. But can there be, as it were, "standing prophecies" in the deck itself -- specific future events coded into the cards themselves, independent of any given spread or reading?

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Richard Arrowsmith, the once and (perhaps?) future king of synchromysticism, has recently resurfaced after a seven-year silence and posted on the birdemic. It is, in true Arrowsmith fashion, a very long, sprawling, profusely illustrated post that touches on dozens of different things, but one of the things it does is to tie the birdemic -- the official name of which prominently features the number 19 -- to the 19th Tarot trump, the Sun (especially the Rider-Waite version).

The sun as depicted on the card somewhat resembles the birdemic virus -- a round object with numerous protrusions -- and of course the word corona refers to the outer atmosphere of the sun. The brick wall depicted on the card suggests the lockdowns implemented around the world. But most specifically, and most impressively, the card clearly alludes to the flag of China -- a red flag with one large star and four smaller ones.

One could go further. The sunflowers, as mini-suns, represent the replication of the virus, and they peep over the wall, showing the ineffectiveness of all the lockdown nonsense. The child, with a crown (corona) of mini-mini-suns, goes forth on a white horse, like the first horseman of the Apocalypse, "conquering, and to conquer" -- spreading the birdemic and the subsequent totalitarian coup all over the world.

I find this very impressive, and once pointed out it cannot be un-seen. From here on out, the birdemic is part of the meaning of this card.

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Wondering what other "standing prophecies" might be hidden in the deck, I suddenly had this thought: I'll bet all the trumps whose numbers correspond to U.S. presidential election years -- that is, '00, '04, '08, '12, '16, and '20 -- accurately predict the winners of those elections. So, let's see. Since Mr. Arrowsmith got such impressive results from the Rider-Waite, let's stick with that deck.

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2000: Bush defeats Gore

We're off to a good start. George W. Bush was consistently portrayed as an idiot, but Al Gore was not. He became known for his "Bushims," including the most famous of all: "There's an old saying in Tennessee . . . I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee, that says, 'Fool me once, shame on . . . shame on you. Fool me . . . You can't get fooled again!'" (If you type george w bush f into Google, the second search suggestion, after father, is fool me once.)

The Fool card depicts a man walking. Bush was commonly referred to by his middle initial: W, or “Dubya.” His full name is George Walker Bush.

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2004: Bush defeats Kerry

This is an easy one: The sitting president wins reelection. (So much for not getting fooled again!)

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2008: Obama defeats McCain

The most distinctive thing about Obama is that his father was from Kenya, making him (sort of) the "first black president." The lion is predominantly an African animal, and Kenya has one of the highest lion populations in the world. Taking this a step further, the two figures on the card -- one male and from Africa, the other a white woman -- could symbolize Obama's parents. (I know it's totally racist for the white woman to be represented by a person and the black man by an animal, but that's how it is. There are no black people in the Rider-Waite Tarot, so African-ness has to be represented in some other way.)

When it was first decided that Obama was going to be a "rising star," and nobody really knew who he was yet, I remember that NPR ran a "funny" piece about this poor politician who had the misfortune to have a name so similar to Osama. Osama, of course, means "lion" in Arabic.

It was also in 2008 that the slogan "diversity is our strength" began to gain currency (see evidence here).

(Note added: At the time I posted this, Google Trends showed no hits for "diversity is our strength" until 2008. Clicking the link again now, later the same day, I see that this is no longer true! I'm not sure why data for 2004-2007 would have changed in just a few hours' time. Google Ngrams shows the phrase's popularity peaking in 1997.)

Note added: It turns out that Obama is even a Leo (born August 4, 1961).

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2012: Obama defeats Romney

This one's not as obvious as the others have been so far, but wasn't it around 2012 that the noose began to be promoted as a symbol of anti-black racism and to be used in hate hoaxes (at the University of Wisconsin, for instance)? Implicit in the assumption that nooses are racist is the equation hanged man = black man. Notice also the hanged man's O-shaped halo.

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2016: Trump defeats Clinton

The simplest analysis: a trump called "The Tower" = Trump Tower = Donald Trump.

But doesn't it show the tower being destroyed? It seems that neither the tower itself nor either of the two persons falling from it can represent the winning candidate.

The lightning represents Trump -- a "bolt from the blue" whose win surprised nearly everyone. The woman dressed in Democratic blue is obviously Hillary Clinton, and the man -- whose red outer garment hides the fact that he is blue underneath -- represents the fake-conservative Republican establishment.

The imagery of this card also suggests 9/11, which was a major symbolic undercurrent in the 2016 election. Clinton's campaign logo showed two towers, both blue, being cut through by a big red arrow (cf. the arrow-shaped lightning bolt destroying the tower on the card). Clinton later physically fell down on September 11 at a 9/11 memorial event, and in the early hours of the other 9/11, 9 November, Trump was declared the winner.

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2020: Trump vs. Biden

Not exactly subtle. Which candidate has blond/orange hair and is literally named Trump?

The Magician in the Grand Etteilla decks

Many decks bearing the name Le grand Etteilla were published in Europe from the 18th century on, and the exact dating of each version is often a matter of conjecture. There seem to be three main variants of the card called Le Magicien ou le Bateleur, which is numbered 15 and, for some reason not immediately apparent, indicates maladie (illness) in Etteilla's divinatory system. I will label these variants A, B, and C, but this is strictly a matter of convenience and should not be taken as implying that A is the oldest (though that is in fact what I believe).

Version A

Like the Tarot de Marseille, this card shows a man standing at a table out of doors, wearing colorful clothes and a big hat, and holding a wand. That's about where the similarities end, though. All early Tarots portray the Magician as young and beardless, but this one is more of the stereotypical "wizard," with a gray beard, long robes, and a pointed "wizard's hat" with a wide brim. All he's really missing are moons and stars to decorate his outfit, but perhaps the astrological symbols on his tablecloth are close enough. (The symbols for Taurus, Libra, Gemini, Cancer, and the Sun are clearly identifiable, but are mixed up with lots of other apparently meaningless shapes and squiggles.)

The way he is holding his wand makes him look like a Chinese calligrapher -- resonating with the Visconti-Sforza Magician, whose "wand" is actually a long reed pen, and with the "fire wand" later used by the Golden Dawn, which almost exactly resembles a Chinese Wenchang pen (stylized representation of a calligraphy brush). See this post for details.

The most interesting thing, though, is what's on the table. Where a typical Marseille deck has as many as 13 distinct items on the Magician's table, this card has only one: a miniature person with his back to us, who closely but not exactly resembles the Magician himself. The figure wears a long red robe like the Magician's but has a red hood instead of a green wizard's hat.

Is this something along the lines of a voodoo doll, and is that why the card presages illness? Or has the Magician successfully created a homunculus, as the alchemists of old were always trying to do?

In my recent post Writing the Book of Thoth, I speculated that the Visconti-Sforza Magician is using his wand/pen to draw on his table objects which then magically become three-dimensional and real -- and also that he is symbolically creating the Tarot, including, of course, the Magician card itself. If we assume that the Etteilla-A Magician's wand is also a pen, doesn't it look as if he has just drawn a little man and had it come to life? And isn't it almost irresistible to conclude that he has drawn himself? The tablecloth is green, like the grass the Magician stands on -- and if we could see what is in front of the homunculus, wouldn't we see a tiny table draped with a green tablecloth, on which an even tinier red-robed homunculus has just come to life?

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Version B

This strikes me as a corruption of Version A. The Magician is now indoors, with two pillars and a door in the background, and he is performing a more typical magic-wand gesture rather than holding it like a calligraphy brush. We have a frontal view of the homunculus and can see that he is not after all a mini-Magician creating an even tinier homunculus -- but is this a corruption of a card that once showed exactly that?

What is that little contraption the homunculus is standing on? Would it be going to far to propose that the mushroom-shaped thing was once a little table, and that the little vertical object on top of it was once a mini-mini-Magician?

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Version C

This one is definitely a corruption. The wizard's hat has become something like a bishop's miter, and the distinctive shape of the urn on the table strongly suggests that it originated as a miscopying of the homunuclus in Version A.

The draped table is now a solid altar decorated with rams' heads at the corners, and the homunculus-turned-urn is no longer the only thing on it. There is also what looks like either a deck of cards or a very small book, and a total of ten rings. These are clearly rings, not coins or balls, because of the way they overlap or interlock. On the left is a single ring, then two overlapping rings, then three, and finally four. (Audi AG was not founded until 1932.) Interlocking rings are of course an old standby among stage magicians, though the overall tenor of the card suggests that something rather more serious is going on.

All in all, I would say Version C makes no sense on its own terms and can only be seen as a degenerate descendant of Version A.

Writing the Book of Thoth

We are the music makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams

-- Arthur O'Shaughnessy, Ode

Let's step back and return to the earliest -- and, in some ways, the most mysterious -- Magician card: the one painted by Bonifacio Bembo c. 1450 for the Visconti-Sforza family.

As I have discussed elsewhere, Dr. Michael Pearce has demonstrated -- conclusively, in my judgment -- that this is a picture of a writer, not a conjurer. His "magic wand" is actually a reed pen; nibs are clearly visible at both ends, and he holds it as if he were writing with it. The knife is a pen knife for cutting nibs, and the cup is an inkwell. The white blob he is reaching for is a sponge, used for wiping away ink.

This interpretation raises some obvious questions, though:

• What are those two round things? (Pearce says, unconvincingly, they are additional receptacles for ink.)
• Why is there no ink on the pen or in any of the three purported inkwells?
• Why, given that he seems to be in the act of writing, is there no paper for him to write on?

Would it be going too far off the deep end to suggest that

• the ink is gold,
• he's writing -- or rather drawing -- directly on the table, and
• the two round things aren't solid objects at all but have been drawn on the table?

Take a closer look at the pen and the objects near it on the table.

First, look at the pen -- for that is clearly what it is. Notice that the main shaft is painted in two colors: lighter gold along the northwest edge, and darker along the southeast. The nib, though, is entirely the darker-gold color, as if it had been dipped in gold ink.

Now note that the two round objects, and the cup, are not painted as solid objects but as line drawings done in dark gold ink. The color between the lines is simply the background color of the table. This sort of thing is common enough in the Tarot de Marseille, which uses a limited palette of (usually) eight colors, but this is a hand-painted card. Every other solid object is painted in hues and gradations to suggest solidity. Notice how the tabletop itself shades from off-white on the left to yellow on the right, for example. But the interior of the cup is off-white where the table is off-white, yellow where the table is yellow; not a hint of shading has been added to suggest a three-dimensional object, and the same is true of the round things.

We are viewing the table from an angle, and the round things are drawn accordingly -- as circles lying flat on the table and seen from an angle. The cup, though is vertical from our point of view, even though "vertical" on the table should actually be an angle of 36 rather than 90 degrees. (Yes, the Visconti-Sforza Magician card incorporates the geometry of a pentagram.) Of course the Magician could in theory have deliberately drawn it that way, so that it would look vertical from out perspective -- like one of those trompe l'oeil trick-perspective paintings people like to take selfies with.

Or are the things the Magician draws, after the manner of Escher's Reptiles or Drawing Hands, actually transforming into three-dimensional objects? The coins (or whatever they are) are still just drawings, the knife and sponge are solid, and the cup is in between. The implied fact that the ink he is drawing with comes from the cup he has drawn adds another, even more Escherian, layer of paradox.

M. C. Escher, Reptiles (1943)

M. C. Escher, Drawing Hands (1948)

Am I really proposing that Bonifacio Bembo -- to all appearances a creator of straightforward representational art -- had some mind-bending postmodern paradox in mind when he painted this card? Well, probably not, though I wouldn't rule it out. Keep in mind that these cards were commissioned, and that they may reflect his patron's thinking more than his own, just as the cards created by Pamela Colman-Smith reflect the mystical philosophy of A. E. Waite. But are we to believe that anyone in the 15th-century was an Escherian avant la lettre? Well, I wouldn't go that far, but perhaps it should not be all that surprising to see something paradoxical and seemingly impossible on the Magician's table. The seemingly impossible is what magicians do; that's what magic is.

Was the Visconti-Sforza "Magician" a magician all along, then, and not (just) a writer who was misinterpreted as such by later generations of carmakers? I don't know the answer to that. He does not closely resemble typical depictions of conjurers. Cups and balls were a standard part of such depictions -- the 15th-century equivalent of a top hat with a rabbit in it -- but I know of no non-Tarot depictions of a conjurer with a knife and a sponge. His equipage is, with the exception of the two coins, that of a writer.

A typical conjurer, from the Tübinger Hausbuch

But if he's a writer, he's certainly an extremely strange one, since he has no book or paper but is writing directly on the table! No, not writing -- drawing. Once it's been pointed out, it's impossible to un-see the fact that he is drawing coins (or some other round objects) on the table; he's drawn two already and is preparing to draw a third. What on earth can that mean?

At this point I think we have to give up trying to guess what Bembo intended and instead look at the picture on its own terms, keeping in mind that even coincidences and mistakes can be inspired, and not shying away from anachronism.

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Although this was not made explicit until Oswald Wirth's "esoteric" redesign of the Trumps at the end of the 19th century, it is hard not to notice that the Magician's objects -- in both the Tarot de Marseille and the Visconti-Sforza -- appear to allude to the four suits of the Minor Arcana. There are coins, a cup or cups, a knife (suggesting the suit of Swords), and of course the Magician's magic wand.

This means that the Magician's table symbolically represents the Tarot itself. Notice that while conjurers are typically depicted at tables that are round (as in the Tübinger Hausbuch) or square (as in the Bosch painting), Bembo's Magician sits at a rectangular table approximately twice as long as it is wide -- the same dimensions as a Visconti-Sforza Tarot card. The table is gold, reflecting the gilded background of Bembo's trumps and court cards. The Magician, drawing the suit symbols on this golden card-shaped table, is creating the Tarot.

Recall that Oswald Wirth was the first to create a Tarot that explicitly featured a sword, a chalice, and the other suit symbols on the Magician's table. By one of those strange coincidences, Wirth's book Le Tarot des imagiers du Moyen Âge (properly The Tarot of the Medieval Image-makers) was mistranslated into English -- possibly through confusion of the French des imagiers with the German des Magiers -- as The Tarot of the Magicians. Thus, through some strange mistake or stranger paraphrase (Wirth's book has nothing to do with magic), were the image-makers who created the tarot dubbed magicians.

But the Magician of the Visconti-Sforza tarot, imagier though he may be, seems to have the equipment of a writer rather than an artist.  In particular, instead of an artist's paintbrush he has what is very clearly a reed pen -- a very long reed pen, much longer than the ones that were actually in use in the Middle Ages. What it most closely resembles, in fact, is the long reed pen used by the Egyptian god Thoth.

Thoth writing with a reed pen (Tomb of the Nobles, Thebes)

The Magician looks as if he ought to be writing a book, not drawing pictures -- but wait, hasn't the Tarot been called the Book of Thoth? People today probably associate that phrase with Aleister Crowley, but it actually dates back to Antoine Court de Gébelin -- and was prominently used by none other than Oswald Wirth, whose first Tarot book, predating Le Tarot des imagiers du Moyen Âge by 38 years, was called Le Livre de Thot comprenant les 22 arcanes du Tarot.

(As an additional coincidence, note that Thoth in the picture above, and in many other such pictures, has two circles on his writing tablet -- precisely what Bembo's Magician has drawn on his table.)

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The key to the Visconti-Sforza Magician card -- regardless of what Bembo or his patrons may or may not have consciously intended -- is that the objects the Magician is using represent, simultaneously, the tools of the writer who is creating the Tarot, and the Tarot itself -- Escher's Drawing Hands again. The pen is both a pen and the suit of Wands; the knife is both a pen knife and the suit of Swords; the cup is both an inkwell and the suit of Cups. The sponge, aside from its role as a writer's tool, represents the Tarot's capacity to absorb everything, to incorporate as many diverse influences as you care to think of into its symbolism. And what of the two circles, which have no obvious role as writing tools? They are not tools, but symbolize the result of the Magician's work: gold coins. Hermes Thrice Great is, after all, a bit of an alchemist.

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I am a Mormon by upbringing and inclination, and it is perhaps inevitable that this implied metaphor of using the Tarot to create the Tarot -- together with the image of writing with an Egyptian pen on a golden tablet -- brought to mind this passage from the Book of Mormon:

And upon these [golden plates] I write the things of my soul, and many of the scriptures which are engraven upon the plates of brass. For my soul delighteth in the scriptures, and my heart pondereth them, and writeth them for the learning and the profit of my children (2 Nephi 4:15).

When Nephi says that his heart writes the scriptures, he is probably referring to the fact that he is copying down on his own plates some of the things written on the plates of brass -- which latter plates contained Egyptian translations of parts of the Hebrew Bible. But an additional meaning, whether intended by Nephi or not, is that the "things of his soul" he is writing will themselves come to be considered scripture in their own right. He "pondereth them, and writeth them," and the two activities cannot in the end be entirely separated.

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Let this, then, serve as the first post for this new blog, to be called -- for reasons I trust the post itself has made clear -- The Magician's Table. (I eventually plan to copy my old Tarot-related posts from other blogs here, but that's boring, and you know how I am about boring things! In other words, don't hold your breath. In the meantime, see here.)

Out of the strong came forth sweetness.

Briton Rivière, Una and the Lion (1880)

In my last post (qv), I hypothesized that the Strength card of the Tarot de Marseille originated when a depiction of Samson -- long-haired, beardless, and labeled with the grammatically feminine title La Fortezza or La Force -- was misinterpreted as being a woman. (Something similar seems to have happened to no less a personage than Jesus Christ in the World card.)

Visconti-Sforza Tarot, Tübinger Hausbuch, P. Madenié Tarot

As can be seen above, the earliest surviving Tarot cards (painted by Bonifacio Bembo for the Visconti-Sforza family) used Hercules rather than Samson as a representation of the virtue of Fortitude. The hero's identity is made clear by his short hair and by the fact that he carries a club. (Hercules first stunned the Nemean lion with his club and then strangled it with his bare hands; when Samson killed his lion, though, "he had nothing in his hand.")

While depictions of Hercules and the Nemean lion typically show the hero using his club or else grappling with the beast after the fashion of a Greek wrestler, Samson is almost universally depicted holding the lion's jaws open. This may seem strange -- wouldn't you want to hold its jaws closed? -- but reflects the biblical language. While Hercules bludgeoned and strangled his adversary, Samson "rent him as he would have rent a kid" (Judges 14:6). Pictures like the one in the Tübinger Hausbuch show him preparing to tear the beast in two.

The woman in the Tarot de Marseille also holds the lion's jaws open with her hands -- a pose specific to Samson, for a specific biblical reason. For me, this is conclusive evidence confirming my earlier speculation. The Strength card of the TdM came into being as a corruption of what was originally a picture of Samson -- the mistake being facilitated by his long hair and by the strangely androgynous faces so common in medieval and Renaissance art.

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But when it comes to the development of the Tarot, the oldest cards are not always the truest, and a mistake is not always just a mistake. There is evolution at work here -- perhaps literal memetic evolution by natural selection (where only such mistakes as improve the card are preserved and copied), perhaps something more mysterious.

Hercules and the Nemean lion is just a standard hero-slays-monster story, with nothing particularly interesting about it. Vico, though, sees it is a symbolic representation of razing the forests of Nemea so that the land could be cultivated.

In the Samson story, this connection between killing the lion and providing food becomes more explicit, as Samson returns to the lion's carcass some time later and finds honey in it. This is the basis of his famous riddle:

Out of the eater came something to eat.
Out of the strong came something sweet.

I have quoted a version that rhymes -- it's a riddle, it has to rhyme! -- but the King James version says, "Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness" (Judges 14:14). The answer, discovered by his enemies through the treachery of his Philistine girlfriend, is "What is sweeter than honey? and what is stronger than a lion?" (v. 18).

The woman in the TdM image cannot be identified as any particular historical or mythological person, but I have illustrated this post with Briton Rivière's Una and the Lion -- a scene from Spenser -- because that is who she (anachronistically) reminds me of. Waite apparently thought likewise; his Strength card includes the Spenserian detail of the lion's licking Una's hand.

It fortuned out of the thickest wood
   A ramping Lyon rushed suddainly,
   Hunting full greedie after saluage blood;
   Soone as the royall virgin he did spy,
   With gaping mouth at her ran greedily,
   To haue attonce deuour'd her tender corse:
   But to the pray when as he drew more ny,
   His bloudie rage asswaged with remorse,
And with the sight amazd, forgat his furious forse.

In stead thereof he kist her wearie feet,
   And lickt her lilly hands with fawning tong,
   As he her wronged innocence did weet.
   O how can beautie maister the most strong,
   And simple truth subdue auenging wrong?
   Whose yeelded pride and proud submission,
   Still dreading death, when she had marked long,
   Her hart gan melt in great compassion,
And drizling teares did shed for pure affection.

And what is this but Samson's riddle completed? Out of the strong came forth sweetness, and out of the sweet came forth strength.

Samson and the Strength card

Rider-Waite Tarot

One of the deepest and most evocative cards in the Tarot is the trump called variously, Fortitude, Force, or Strength -- showing not some powerful warrior or strongman, but rather a peaceful, serene young woman gently and effortlessly controlling a lion.

As I say, an evocative image. Did it originate by mistake? By what I have taken to calling a Jungian slip?

Today I happened to be (virtually) flipping through the Tübinger Hausbuch, a German tome of the mid-15th century, full of medical, astrological, and geomantic lore, and lavishly illustrated. The picture below (left) caught my eye because of its striking similarity to the Strength card.

Tübinger Hausbuch (left); Pierre Madenié Tarot (right)

I have already noted the convention of depicting Samson holding a lion's jaws open and pointed out two examples from West Minster. The West Minster Samsons are, as is usual, bearded -- Nazarites didn't shave, right? -- but the Tübinger Hausbuch shows him beardless and with flowing golden locks, so that -- were it not for the familiarity of the image, and the helpful scroll in the background labeled "Samson der something-or-other," we just might mistake the Hebrew Hercules for a woman!

Could anyone actually make such a mistake in the Middle Ages, though? Surely the story of Samson, and the associated iconography, would be much too familiar to cause any such confusion.

But suppose we decided Samson was the perfect embodiment of the Classical virtue of fortitude and, instead of labeling his image Samson, wrote instead La Fortezza or La Force -- feminine nouns both. Then would a mistake become more plausible?

Cards on the Magician's table?

In my recent post "What's on the Magician's table?" (qv), I mentioned the Marseille-style 1780 deck of Ignaz Krebs and said that it featured a "domino-like object" which I took to be a corruption of what was originally a die or pair of dice.

I don't know how it is that in a post about cards I failed to notice that what it really resembles is not a domino (which would be divided into two parts) but a playing card. I didn't make the connection until, searching for medieval pictures of gamblers to back up my hunch about a dice shaker, I found this picture.

The resemblance of the Krebs object to the cards in this picture is unmistakable, and, whether or not it originated as a miscopied die, I think we must conclude that for Krebs it was a playing card.

Does any other early Tarot have a card or cards on the Magician's table? The case is a tenuous one, but just maybe. Look at the strange parallelograms on the Jacques Viéville card and notice how closely they resemble parts of a deck of cards and a die.

But where's the rest of them? Is it plausible that Viéville would have accidentally printed only one of the three visible faces of the die and the deck of cards? Well, that sort of thing would hardly be unprecedented. Jean Noblet's Magician card, dating from about the same time as Viéville's, is also missing some elements that the block carver apparently just forgot to include. The two cards below are both from Joseph H. Peterson's Noblet facsimile deck. He included two versions of the Magician: an exact replica of the original (left) and a reconstruction restoring the three fingers and half of the wand that Noblet's printer somehow omitted.

Viéville's cards are crude in the extreme -- easily the ugliest Tarot I've ever seen -- and it would not be at all surprising to find that they featured similar careless omissions. At any rate, no other explanation of the parallelograms suggests itself. They certainly look more like sides of three-dimensional objects than like flat objects lying on a table.

One of the Magician's cups is a leather dice shaker.

One of the cups on the Magician's table in the Tarot de Marseille -- the one marked A below -- was originally a dice shaker, probably a leather one.

This emerged suddenly as an unarguable intuition after many hours spent picking over the details of the Magician's table in early Tarot decks. I don't expect my own intuitions to carry much weight with anyone else, though, so here is a bit of circumstantial evidence to back me up:

The cup has a strange square shape -- vertical sides, horizontal bottom -- unlike a normal cup. In the Viéville deck it is unambiguously rectangular in shape, including the mouth. Compare the strangely shaped "cup" in Viéville to the backgammon dice cups and the medieval British dice shaker below.

Leather is brown, a color not included in the standard 8-color palette of the Tarot de Marseille (an exception is the François Héri deck of 1718, which uses it only for the Hermit's habit). What color would be used for leather, then? Well, belts and shoes are normally made of leather, so that should give us a clue. Looking at the 12 decks in Historic Tarots gallery at the Tarot of Marseilles Heritage website, 8 out of 12 use the same color (yellow) for the Magician's belt, shoes, and cup; and each of these individual elements is yellow in 10 out of 12 decks.

Incidentally, this syncs up with the Pythagorean Tarot of John Opsopaus, which, without any pretense of restoring the original TdM, patterns the Magician after the December illustration in the Chronograph of 354 and puts a rectangular purgos, or ancient Greek dice-shaker, on the table. (The picture below is from the original card drawn by Opsopaus himself; the published version, done by another artist, has a round purgos.)

What's on the Magician's table?

1. The traditional Marseille layout

Tarot de Marseille decks stick very closely to the following layout for the Bateleur's table.

Based on Wilfried Houdouin's 2017 deck; color coding is my own

The details of each element below are taken from the Historical Tarots Gallery at the Tarot of Marseilles Heritage website. Upper row, from left to right: Pierre Madenié (1709), François Héri (1718), François Chosson (1736), Jean-Baptiste Madenié (1739), François Tourcaty (1745), and Rochus Schär (1750). Lower row: Claude Burdel (1751), Nicolas Conver (1760), Jacques Rochias (1782), Arnoux & Amphoux (1793), Suzanne Bernardin (1839), and Lequart (1890).

A: A cup with a round top, vertical sides, and a square bottom. There is very little variation in the shape. The main body of the cup is consistently yellow, and the mouth is most often red but sometimes other colors.

B: Another cup, with a different shape, wider at the top than at the bottom. It looks as if it may have a lid covering it. The color scheme is fairly consistent: yellow cup with a red mouth or lid.

C: It is not clear whether this object should be classified with the cups (A and B) or with the little round objects (D, E, and F). It is much smaller than the two cups but considerably larger than the little round things. While its basic shape is that of a circle divided into two parts, the concave curve of the dividing line suggests a very small, shallow cup, bowl, or dish. This object is most often the same color as the tabletop.

D: Three circular objects with the central one overlapping the one on the lower right (and sometimes the one on the left as well). So slavishly is this arrangement copied from deck to deck that when we see one with only two circles on this part of the table, it seems positively revolutionary! The objects are generally the color of the table. To me the layout suggests flat coins or discs rather than spherical objects. If they were balls, the lower right one (being in the foreground) would overlap the central one rather than vice versa. (On the other hand, the flat bottoms of cups A and B suggest an artist with little understanding of such things.) 

E: This element ranges from two circles side by side, to two overlapping circles, to a divided circle similar to C. The color is generally the same as the tabletop. The uncertainty as to whether this is one object or two suggests that the shapes were being copied blindly by cardmakers who did not know what they represented. My best guess is that the "original" form was a smaller circle in the northeast overlapping a larger one in the southwest, and that this was sometimes misunderstood as a single object due to the influence of the C object. As with the D objects, the direction of the overlap suggests flat rather than spherical objects.

F: Two more round items, vertically arranged. In most cases, they are touching so as to form a figure like an Arabic numeral 8, but in some decks there is a gap between them. Like the other round objects, they are generally the same color as the tabletop, but sometimes one of them is red.

G: A curved knife and its sheath, both generally the color of the table. The shape and orientation is consistent across decks. In one case the sheath has been transformed into a second knife. The knife has a very distinctive shape -- almost like a miniature scimitar with no cross-guard -- that makes me wonder what its purpose is. It certainly doesn't look much like a typical medieval pen knife, hunting knife, or dagger. The handle also seems much too small for the magician's hands, but perhaps that indicates nothing more than poor draftsmanship.

H: A bag, consistently light blue with a yellow mouth and strap. There are between one and three little round things at the mouth of the bag, which presumably represent some sort of latching mechanism. The bag is decorated with a tassel or something of that nature at the lower left corner. Sometimes one end of the strap appears to go behind the table rather than connecting to the bag.

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2. Marseille variants, new and old

We have been looking at some of the oldest and most traditional Marseille decks, mostly from the 18th century, but in modern times the most influential Tarot de Marseille by far has been the 1930 Grimaud deck designed by Paul Marteau. Marteau claimed to be restoring the Nicolas Conver deck (the canonical Tarot de Marseille) but in fact introduced many innovations. Most of these are changes in the color scheme, but some are more substantial. Here is what Marteau's Bateleur has on his table:

If we ignore the colors, this is in line with Conver and the other decks we have examined, with one exception: The F element, realized as two circles in every historical deck we have looked at, has become a pair of dice.

A more recent "restored" Tarot de Marseille, also claiming the mantle of Nicolas Conver, features dice as well. This is the Jodorowsky-Camoin deck of 1997.

Note that Jodorowsky and Camoin have added a third die between the knife and its sheath, and also that the sheath has been given a fantastic new shape in defiance of tradition.

Whence these dice? As far as I am aware, there is only one early deck that unambiguously features dice, but it is one of the earliest: Jean Noblet's deck of c. 1650. Noblet's Tarot is generally very close to the Tarot de Marseille in its iconography, but not so close as to be considered a full member of that tradition. Here is his Bateleur's table:

Notice that Noblet's C element -- realized in the standard Tarot de Marseille as a circle divided into two parts -- appears here as a third and smaller cup. This suggests that what was originally a small cup was distorted over time, by a process of repeated copying without understanding, into the indistinct round object that later became standard.

Isn't it highly probably that some of the other round things on the table in the traditional Tarot de Marseille are also distortions of what were originally distinct objects? Isn't it more likely that indistinctly printed dice would degenerate into circles than that circles would be misinterpreted as dice? Marteau, Jodorowsky, and Camoin seem to have thought so. Noblet has three horizontally arranged dice where the standard Tarot de Marseille has two vertically arranged circles (the F element). Marteau apparently split the difference, keeping just two elements vertically arranged but changing them to dice. Jodorowsky and Camoin put two dice in the same position as Marteau's and add a third between the knife and the sheath, as in Noblet.

Note also that Noblet's D element -- three circles -- is somewhat different. Rather than overlapping, the three circles are more spread out but are connected by two lines. It is not at all clear what sort of object this is intended to represent. The E element -- either two circles or a single divided circle -- is absent.

Also dating to around 1650 is Jacques Viéville's card. The detail below is shown in mirror image in order to facilitate comparison with the TdM.

Here, A is a square cup, B is a round one, and C is apparently a shallow bowl or dish. D is a single round object rather than three, and E is a sort of lozenge divided horizontally into two triangles. Where the F element would be (two circles in TdM, dice in Noblet), we have two rectangular objects, a large one divided in thirds, and a smaller one not so divided. What objects were intended by these abstract geometric shapes is anyone's guess. Despite the early date for this card, it had apparently already been through several generations of ignorant miscopying.

The lozenge shape in Viéville is perhaps historically related to the diagonal lines connecting the circles in Noblet.

A few other not-quite-standard representatives of the greater Marseille tradition also deserve our attention. The 1780 deck of Ignaz Krebs follows Noblet in some ways.

As in Noblet, the D element appears as three non-overlapping circles, and the E element is absent. Instead of Noblet's dice, though, we have between the knife and the sheath a single rectangle with six pip-marks on it. To me this is further confirmation that the "original" design featured dice, since one could imagine dice being incorrectly copied either as circles (as in the mainstream TdM) or as the domino-like object in Krebs.

Jean-Pierre Payen's 1713 deck (a TdM "Type I" deck, as opposed to the mainstream "Type II") has a fairly standard Bateleur (or, rather, "Branchus," that being the anomalous title given to this card) but is interesting because its D element (three round objects) looks more unambiguously like coins rather than balls.

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3. Magician's tables before the Tarot de Marseille

The earliest surviving Tarot cards are the Visconti-Sforza cards painted by Bonifacio Bembo. Bembo's magician has objects on his table similar to those in the TdM but not the same. There is a cup (only one), a knife (but no sheath), and two small round objects of uncertain identity.

The large white object which takes the place of the TdM Bateleur's bag has been variously interpreted, but, as I have explained elsewhere, I find Michael Pearce's case that it is a sea sponge to be completely convincing. Dr. Pearce found several pictures by Bembo depicting holy relics, among them the sponge on a stalk of hyssop which was used to give vinegar to the Crucified, and the sponge very closely resemble's the Magician's white object.

Three sponges (on hyssop stalks) by Bonifacio Bembo

This crucial discovery allows Pearce to reveal the true identity of Bembo's "magician": He is a scribe or writer. His "wand" is actually a reed pen (he holds it like a pen, and nibs are visible if you look closely), the knife is a pen knife, and the cup and other yellow objects are receptacles for ink. Sponges were used in the past for erasing and for cleaning pens; in support of this, Pearce shows an illustration from a 15th-century Decameron which depicts a writer with pen, pen knife, inkwell, and sponge.

The Cary sheet (c. 1550), a sheet of uncut Tarot cards from Milan, shows a broadly Marseille-like assortment of objects on the Magician's table, but the image is too unclear for them to be identified with any confidence. There are two long objects that may be a knife and a sheath, a total of six roundish things, and two cups on the table, with a third in the Magician's right hand. This syncs up pretty well with the Noblet card, which also has three cups, a knife and a sheath, and a total of six small objects (three dice and three round things).

While it is not a Tarot card, Hieronymus Bosch's 1502 painting The Conjurer should also be mentioned here, chiefly because of its similarity to the Cary sheet.

Bosch's Conjurer and the Cary sheet Magician wear similar headgear, and the Cary sheet may even show some sort of bag or basket dangling from the Magician's waist or wrist. In both depictions, the cups on the table are apparently inverted, narrow end up. Finally, and to me most evocatively, the roughly egg-shaped object at the northeast end of the table on the Cary sheet closely resembles the little frog at the west end of Bosch's table. (A second frog is emerging from the mouth of one of the spectators.)

See this post for more on echoes of Bosch in the Tarot.

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4. Wirth and Waite

No overview of the Magician's table would be complete without mentioning the modern, post-Marseille standard, which I believe originated with Oswald Wirth. Although I find it a bit gauche and uninteresting, I feel I ought to give it a few lines.

It's a pretty obvious move to associate the Magician's objects with the four suits of the Tarot. The Magician holds a wand, and on his table are cups, a knife suggesting the suit of Swords, and round objects that might be coins. Oswald Wirth made this explicit.

All the clutter has been eliminated, and there are now only three objects on the table: a cup (not the simple cups of the TdM Bateleur, but a chalice or goblet as in the suit of Cups), a full-size sword, and a giant "coin" the size of a Frisbee (clearly a symbolic representation of the suit of Coins, not an actual piece of currency). The wand in the Magician's hand has been enlarged considerably, too, making it more like the cudgels and scepters in the suit of Bastons than like an actual magician's wand.

A. E. Waite, in his hugely influential Rider-Waite deck, takes Wirth's idea a step further. Apparently wanting to include a large "wand" suggestive of the suit, but without making his Magician look like a baton-twirling drum major, he put two wands on his card: a small one in the Magician's hand, and a large cudgel on the table. (The giant coin is now a "pentacle," that being Waite's take on this suit.)

Waite lived before subways were common.

All in all, I greatly prefer the traditional Bateleur's evocative hodgepodge of gewgaws to the cut-and-dried symbolism of Wirth and Waite.