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.