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.

⁂

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.)

⁂

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.

⁂

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.

⁂

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.)