Beyond coincidence

My interest in the Tarot, though deep and persistent, is largely theoretical. I hardly ever do readings, though of course I know how and even seem to have a bit of a knack for it. I would estimate that I have done fewer than 20 in my entire life.

The less often you do something, of course, the less likely it is that amazing coincidences will occur in connection with that activity -- but occur they do.

One of the most amazing of these occurred fairly recently when, under circumstances on which this is scarcely the place to elaborate, I had occasion to use the Tarot to interrogate a poltergeist so violent that its antics were later to become potentially life-threatening. "Who are you?" I asked, after shuffling and all the other preliminaries, and turned over the first card: The Devil. "What do you want?" I asked, and turned over the next card: Death.

The perfect answer, right? I don't mean that the geist in question was actually "the devil" or anything; I'm talking about dramatic appropriateness. I mean, if it had been a scene in a horror movie rather than an episode in real life, those two cards -- precisely those two, as answers to those two questions -- are the ones the screenwriter or director would have chosen. And those are the two I drew, by "chance," against odds of 6,084 to 1.

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This past Saturday night, I was trying to sort out my thoughts regarding Donald Trump. Despite my brain telling me that he's not on my side, and that whether he or Biden wins out in the end should be a matter of complete indifference, I find that I am not in fact indifferent -- that I think of him as good, that I will be elated if wins and would view a Biden win as an unmitigated disaster.

Brooding over this cognitive dissonance, I ended up turning to the Rider-Waite deck -- shuffling it, asking "Who is Donald Trump?" and drawing a single card -- and that card was The Sun.

Now, this is considerably less impressive than the other reading I have described in this post. Instead of yielding the single most appropriate card, twice in a row, it yielded one of three possible "perfect" results. I had already written that Mr. Trump's 2016 and 2020 victories were predicted by The Tower and The Judgment, respectively, and had identified The Sun as "the other Trump trump" -- so any of those three would have been "perfect." The odds of drawing one of the three from a 78-card deck is 1 in 26 -- not extremely low, but just low enough to be "statistically significant" by mainstream standards.

And if the Tarot wanted to decline to pass judgment on Mr. Trump one way or the other, it could scarcely have chosen a more perfectly ambiguous card. The Sun is traditionally given a positive meaning, but my own recent meditations on it have uncovered a dark side as well. It represents, among other things, the birdemic (the sole ill) and the number 666. In discussing these two sides of The Sun, I have borrowed a concept from Superman. There is the Yellow Sun of Earth (good) and the Red Sun of Krypton (evil), and the card represents both.

And what is President Trump's characteristic color? But of course: orange.

The reddest red Sun in our hearts

And Satan came among them, saying: I am also a son of God

-- Moses 5:13

There's a bad Sun on the rise

The red sun is the evil sun. I've already discussed how Superman derives his powers from the "yellow" sun of Earth and is rendered helpless by the red sun of Krypton.

Superman's home world, with its red sun, takes its name from the element krypton -- atomic number 36.

A longstanding occult tradition associates each of the astrological "planets" with a particular magic square. The planets are put in their Ptolemaic order (Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn) and assigned magic squares accordingly, with the smallest square being assigned to the most distant planet. Thus, a 3-by-3 magic square (the smallest possible, excluding the trivial case of 1) is associated with Saturn and a 9-by-9 square with the Moon. The 6-by-6 magic square, then, belongs to the Sun.

This magic square contains the first 36 natural numbers -- the atomic number of krypton -- the sum of which is 666, the biblical number of the beast. Thus is Krypton associated with the idea of an evil sun. And, as we know from Superman, this evil sun is red.

While the best known characters in Rudolf Steiner's demonology are Lucifer and Ahriman, he also wrote of a "Sun-Demon" called Sorath -- a name so created as to add up to 666 in Hebrew (samekh vau resh tau = 60 + 6 + 200 + 400 = 666).

One describes the Christ-Being as the genius of the sun who unites himself with the earth and becomes also the genius of the earth. . . . But there is also an opposing principle to the Lamb, there is also a Sun-Demon, the so-called Demon of the Sun, that which works in the evil forces of man, thrusting back the force of the Lamb . . . Sorath is the name of the Sun-Demon, the adversary of the Lamb. . . .  and this, if we convert the several letters into their numbers [in Hebrew gematria] is a very veiled way of expressing 666.

The passage I have quoted is interesting because it introduces two opposing solar beings. Christ is "the genius of the sun who unites himself with the earth and becomes also the genius of the earth" -- i.e., he is specifically the Sun of Earth. In opposition to this good genius is Sorath, the evil "Demon of the Sun," whose number is 666. This is the sum of all the natural numbers from 1 to 36, and 36 is the number of krypton. Thus, in opposition to the Sun of Earth, the Sun of Krypton.

There is a good Sun, then, and an evil one, and the Tarot card called the Sun embraces both in its symbolism. This post will look at what might be called, if the expression can be permitted, the dark side of the Sun -- its aspect as the Red Sun of Krypton.

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The East Is Red

A red sun . . . a demonic red sun . . . hmm, what does that remind me of? 'Tis the east, and Chairman Mao is the sun! Yes, when he wasn't busy earning his Nobel Prize in Killing People, the Chairman pursued a second career as a sun-god.

毛主席是我們心中的紅太陽
Chairman Mao is a red sun in our hearts

Comparing the ruler to the Sun is nothing new, of course -- what else is a crown than a representation of the Sun's "golden" rays? -- but Mao (whose surname means "hair"; Samson again!) stands out as a red Sun -- you know, the evil kind. And not just red, super-duper-red. For the title of this post, I've loosely translated a common Maoist slogan as "the reddest red sun in our hearts" -- but the original Chinese actually calls him "the reddest reddest red sun" (最紅最紅的紅太陽) -- and that, my friends, is pretty damn red. It’s like, how much more red could Chairman Mao be? And the answer is none. None more red. This is a guy who clearly didn't want anyone mistaking him for the Yellow Sun of Earth. (Yellow, incidentally, was the traditional color of the Sons of Heaven who ruled before the revolution, the words for yellow and emperor being homophones.)

The Tarot shows the Sun as yellow -- or, occasionally, green -- never as red. However, other aspects of Red Sun propaganda are echoed in the Rider-Waite card. It is scarcely surprising that the Reddest Red Sun tends to shine down on the red flag of revolution, as seen above. Sunflowers were also a popular theme, the idea being that the people follow Chairman Mao just as faithfully as sunflowers follow the Yellow Sun of Earth. The example below is one of many I could have chosen.

敬愛的毛主席，我們永遠忠於您！
Dear Chairman Mao, we will always be loyal to you!

The Sun card also features a wall, and I thought perhaps I could find a few propaganda posters of the Reddest Red Sun shining down on the Great Wall of China -- but no such luck. The Great Wall was, it turns out, seen as a symbol of feudalism and -- despite Mao's obvious respect for Qin Shi Huang's pioneering work in "burning books and burying scholars" -- was ignored by the Reds. White horses are for similar reasons conspicuous by their absence.

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You say you want a revolution

This whole deep dive into the symbolism of the Sun card was precipitated by Richard Arrowsmith's observation that the Rider-Waite card -- despite being published when the Qing dynasty still ruled -- alludes to the bloody flag of the People's Republic of China.

The large star is the Sun, the four small stars are the sunflowers, and the red flag is the red flag.

Before the People's Republic of China, though, there was the common-or-garden Republic of China -- in exile in Taiwan since Mao took power -- and their flag is also alluded to by the Rider-Waite card.

Red flag, blue sky, Sun -- check, check, and check. It is interesting to note that this flag, called the "Blue Sky, White Sun, Wholly Red Earth," recognizes the true color of the "Yellow" Sun of Earth.

And before that, there was the Wuhan Battle Flag -- also red with a sun-like design.

The original Wuhan flag was the "Iron Blood 18-Star Flag," from the 18 provinces of China proper. Later one more star was added to appease the Manchurians -- bringing the total to 19, the number of the Sun card and also of another famous Wuhan product.

And before that there was the Qing Dynasty, whose flag actually looks Chinese and has nothing to do with the Tarot. It is only the revolutionary flags of China that are prefigured by the Sun card. More generally, a red banner is a universally understood symbol of revolution, and the crowned baby on a white horse represents the "Year Zero" mentality of all such movements.

In addition to its political meaning, revolution refers to the motion of the Earth around the Sun -- or, before the Copernican Revolution, of the Sun around the Earth.

The Beatles' White Album contains two songs called "Revolution" -- "Revolution 1" and "Revolution 9" -- 1 and 9 -- 19. "Revolution 9" is just a collage of noise, but "Revolution 1" has lyrics. And when the lyrics need to cite the name of some particular revolutionary, who do they choose as an example? Ho Chi Minh? Robespierre? Hitler? Lenin? Che Guevara? George Washington? No, you all know the line.

But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao
You ain't gonna make it with anyone anyhow

Sunshine Superman

Superman wears a red cape -- like the red banner on the Rider-Waite Sun card -- and has a big S on his chest -- the 19th letter of the alphabet, and also the initial of sole, soleil, and sun. That alone would be enough to associate him with the 19th trump -- but there's more. There's the Donovan Leitch song that gave this post its title, for example, or Superman's association with the white horse.

More to the point, though, Superman's power comes from the Sun. He's not super under the red sun of Krypton, only under the yellow sun of earth -- a.k.a. the Sun. (This is another variation on the Samson myth, with the Sun's rays being metaphorically its "hair.")

The color of the Sun's rays is the important thing. Even on Earth, Superman loses his powers if someone nefariously uses a blue filter to turn the Sun's yellow rays to green!

A green Sun is certainly a strange idea, but it apparently had some currency in what Nabokov (a famous synaesthete) called "the pale-green eighteenth century," as witness these Tarot cards from 1730-1742.

I looked up the Nabokov passage in question -- Adam Krug going through some of his notes in Bend Sinister -- and found that the paragraph that ends with the pale-green 18th century begins with the Sun.

Old Zoroastrian motif of the rising sun, origin of Persian ogee design. The blood-and-gold horrors of Mexican sacrifices as told by Catholic priests or the eighteen thousand Formosan boys under nine whose little hearts were burned out upon an altar at the command of the spurious prophet Psalmanazar -- the whole thing being a European forgery of the pale-green eighteenth century.

Why would some Tarot cards make the Sun green? I have no idea. Not only is our Sun not green, there are no green stars anywhere in the universe. The stellar spectrum goes from red to white to blue, but the only place you'll ever see a green star is at an Esperanto conference. Héri, Laurent, and Cheminade chose to make the Sun the one color it could never possibly be.

Anyway, if the Sun's rays were green instead of yellow, Superman would fall out of the sky. And what if they were white?

Trick question. The Sun's rays are white, obviously. If they were really yellow, white things (which look white because they reflect all frequencies of visible light equally) would look yellow. The universal idea that the Sun is "yellow" -- despite the fact that it normally appears to be almost perfectly white -- is something of a mystery. A surprising number of people (not scientists, of course) maintain that the Sun really was yellow in the past. They remember it being yellow when they were children and think that it must somehow have changed. (This is sometimes given as an example of the Mandela Effect.) However, young children even today, despite indisputably growing up under a white Sun, naturally and spontaneously say that the Sun is yellow and draw it that color. (I clearly remember a white Sun throughout my childhood. I also remember tree trunks being gray, despite the fact that all the other children I knew inexplicably colored them brown in coloring books.) The Sun does appear yellow when it is low on the horizon -- the "golden hour" -- but it also appears orange or red around sunrise and sunset; none of that changes the fact that its normal color is white.

In fact, due to its temperature, the Sun's peak emission is at a frequency of about 500 nm. In other words, though it emits a great deal of light at all visible frequencies and thus appears white, it emits more green light than any other color. Perhaps those 18th-century cardmakers were on to something after all!

The sole ill

Not to put to fine a point on it
Say I'm the only bee in your bonnet
Make a little birdhouse in your soul

-- They Might Be Giants

I recently posted on how the Sun -- the 19th trump -- foretells the birdemic (a discovery for which all credit goes to Richard Arrowsmith).

Today I noticed the French name of the card: Le Soleil. Le, of course, means "the." Add a space, double the final letter, and you have the sole ill.

How appropriate!

At one level, the birdemic is an illness which is being fought by enforcing solitude -- quarantines, social distancing, solitary confinement -- and those unfortunate enough to die of it die alone, with no visitors in the hospital and no mourners at the grave.

At a level both deeper and more literal, though, institutions around the world have all decided to treat the birdemic as the sole ill -- the only problem -- to the defeat of which all else must be subordinated. No trade-offs need be considered, because no sacrifice is too great if it means saving even one life from the world's one sole ill. As Bruce Charlton recently put it in one of his best posts ever,

If the cost of ridding our world of an invisible rabid-leper-zombies is that most people (including me) are killed by the measures ostensibly taken to rid the world of invisible rabid-leper-zombies - then That is a price worth paying... We can, at least, then look forward to the a birdemic-free-world! A world finally free of fear...

Look again at the Tarot de Marseille card. At the bottom we see two people making contact with each other, labeled "the sole ill." This -- human contect -- is what must be stamped out. At the top is the coronaform Sun, labeled with the number 19, looking down on the world -- which from now on revolves around it. The birdemic is from now on to be, like Chairman Mao, the reddest red sun in our hearts, the only bee in our bonnets. Unless of course it's climate change (represented by the blazing Sun and by carbon dioxide rising into the atmosphere like raindrops in reverse) or racism (two people who look alike daring to be friends!). The exact nature of the sole ill may change from time to time, but the basic situation -- one sole evil, to which all else is to be subordinated -- remains the same.

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Note added: We can take this double-the-l thing a step further. If a world revolving around le soleil is heliocentric, one revolving around the sole ill is -- that's right, hell-iocentric.

The other Trump trump

Thinking about the Sun card and free-associating, I suddenly thought of that creepy baby sun from Teletubbies. Searching for pictures of it led me to some guy whose name on Facebook is "The Sun from Teletubbies" -- and his profile picture, since April 2016, is this:

This is pretty obviously a reference to the proposed wall along the Mexican border which was so central to Donald Trump's 2016 platform, and Trump is depicted as the sun because this guy is "The Sun from Teletubbies" and all his profile pictures -- dating back to 2012, well before Trump entered politics -- are variations on that theme. In other words, the chance of this image's being a deliberate allusion to the Tarot is virtually nil. Nevertheless, the resemblance is striking!

Pierre Madenié, Rider-Waite

The Tarot de Marseille card features a sun with a face, a wall, and a representation of the astrological sign of Gemini. In a recent post, I tried and failed to explain why the TdM would associate the Sun with Gemini. Well, it turns out that Donald Trump is a Gemini, born on June 14.

The Rider-Waite card, with a gray wall and yellow flowers, resembles TSFT's profile picture even more closely. The Gemini imagery is absent, but in its place is an even more specific reference to Trump's date of birth: June 14 is a national holiday in America -- Flag Day.

In a recent comment on another post here, Bruce Charlton referred to the child on the Rider-Waite card as "the crowned Donaldic figure on the horse" -- which reminded me of those Trump Baby balloons. The TdM also features children, and of course the original Sun from Teletubbies had the face of a baby.

Trump's most distinctive physical feature is his hair. Strange to say, some versions of the Tarot de Marseille give the Sun a head of orange hair.

Top: Jean-Baptiste Madenié, Rochus Schär, Claude Burdel
Bottom: Jacques Burdel, François Gassmann

Those cards which give the Sun hair also give it a necklace of flowers -- similar to the crown of flowers worn by the "Donaldic figure" on the Rider-Waite card.

I don't know. Ask the Chinese.

It may be surprising to find Donald Trump, of all people, in the Tarot, but it shouldn't be. Think about it: a former casino owner, named Trump, who wrote The Art of the Deal -- just the sort of person you would expect to be "in the cards."

It is written in the Book of Thoth: Trump still wins.

When, in late October of this year, I posted on how the Rider-Waite Tarot accurately predicts the results of every U.S. presidential election from 2000 to 2020, it didn't take much chutzpah to declare Trump the prophesied winner of this year's race. Trump winning in a landslide seemed the only possible result, and I dismissed Biden as a soon-to-be-forgotten Walter Mondale figure. Even when the synchronicity fairies kept stubbornly bringing Biden to my attention (via Jay-Z, Dr. Seuss, Steve Martin, and Clickhole), I just couldn't take him seriously as a potential winner. ("I don't know why the synchronicity fairies are feeding me all this material on a man doomed to become irrelevant in two weeks' time," I wrote on October 25, "but who am I to kick against the pics?")

Now that the Media -- supported by their political arm, the Democratic Party -- have "officially" called the race for Biden, I'm going to stick my neck out and double down on my prediction. The Tarot has been 100% accurate in stating the winners of every other presidential election this century -- with the 0th trump predicting the winner in '00, the 4th trump the winner in '04, and so on -- and the 20th trump unambiguously says Trump. I stake my reputation as an interpreter of the Tarot on this prediction. If Trump doesn't win in the end, the Tarot is not what I think it is.

Let's go over what I mean when I say that. For those who don't know it, this is the 20th trump in the Major Arcana, called The Judgement.

1. Did you know that the word trump only occurs twice in the entire King James Bible? Both instances refer to the scene portrayed on this card.

In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed (1 Corinthians 15:52).

For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: (1 Thessalonians 4:16).

An aside: Obviously, the name Biden as such does not occur in the Bible -- but if we ignore spaces, it does: "Thou sayest, Lo, thou hast smitten the Edomites; and thine heart lifteth thee up to boast: abide now at home; why shouldest thou meddle to thine hurt, that thou shouldest fall, even thou, and Judah with thee?" (2 Chronicles 25:19). This seems to allude to Basement Biden's "sheltering in place" and to prophesy his fall after boasting that he has smitten the Edomites. (Edom means "red" in Hebrew, so the Edomites are the Republicans -- and I suppose everyone knows to which modern people the name Judah refers. Judah is of course also the same name as Judas.)

(An even-more-tangential aside: Looking for other 2020 names in the Bible led me to Deuteronomy 14:7, which reads, "Nevertheless these ye shall not eat of them that chew the cud, or of them that divide the cloven hoof; as the camel, and the hare, and the coney: for they chew the cud, but divide not the hoof; therefore they are unclean unto you." The camel, the hare, and the coney. This seems to connect Kamala Harris with another woman who came to prominence in 2020, Amy Coney Barrett, and to pronounce them both unclean. Does this presage some future treachery from ACB?)

2. The trump has a flag attached to it. Trump was born on June 14 -- Flag Day.

3. The flag has a big red cross on it. Red is the Republican color, and the cross resembles T for Trump. This is in fact St. George's flag, signifying victory over the dragon.

4. The angel has a full head of blond hair, with a touch of orange.

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What are we to make of the scene on the lower half of the card, which shows the dead rising from coffins which appear to be floating in the water? A few thoughts:

They could represent Trump voters -- defeated, "dead," and then with their fortunes unexpectedly reversed. The water could represent the Trump's claim that lots of Trump ballots were dumped in rivers.

Alternatively, they could represent actual dead people -- who, as we know, voted in record numbers in 2020! The problem with this is that they appear to be cheering for Trump, when in fact corpses appear to have voted overwhelmingly for Biden.

But perhaps they're cheering because they think they've won -- gotten rid of Trump. He's up in heaven, an angel, dead. Little do they realize that the day of reckoning is coming.

And what's that in the background? Mountains -- or an approaching tsunami?

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What about the prophecy -- which, believe it or not, I also take seriously -- that Trump will invite "Joe Camel" (Joe and Kamala) to the White House? I don't know what to make of that yet, but here's my best guess: The recounts and lawsuits ("Sue sews Slow Joe Crow's clothes," i.e. suits) and everything will not be completed by January 20, Biden will be sworn in, and Trump will peacefully "invite him to the White House." Shortly thereafter, the election results will be overturned by the Supreme Court, and Trump will be restored.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it. The highway is for gamblers. If I end up being wrong, I will, as they say, eat crow.

Rider-Waite versus Marseille on the birdemic

I recently posted on how the Rider-Waite Tarot deck predicts both the birdemic and the results of every U.S. presidential election from 2000 to 2020. Curious about the extent to which it is specifically the 1909 Rider-Waite deck (not "the Tarot" in general) that makes these predictions, I will be comparing that deck's trumps with those of the Tarot de Marseille (Pierre Madenié deck). I will cover the birdemic in this post and the elections in a future post.

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The birdemic, the official name of which features the number 19, is predicted by the 19th trump, the Sun.

Here are the points the two cards share:

• The shape of the virus: The sun is shown as a circle with two different types of protrusions, somewhat similar to the shape of the birdemic virus.

The birdemic virus

• Solar corona: The term corona refers to the outer atmosphere of the sun.
• Stay home, stay safe: Both cards feature a brick wall, alluding to the global lockdowns and other totalitarian restrictions.
• Big Brother is watching you: The sun has a face and is looking down on us all, symbolizing government surveillance. The human figures are naked or nearly so, meaning they have no privacy.

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Points specific to the Tarot de Marseille:

• Spike glycoprotein and Trump hair: While Pierre Madenié does not show this, his son Jean-Baptiste (followed by a minority of other cardmakers, including Rochus Schär, Claude and Jacques Burdel, and François Gassmann) puts some of the sun's protrusions in clusters of three, resembling spike glycoprotein, and also gives the sun a head of distinctly Trumpian hair.

François Gassmann

• Droplets of contagion: The (strangely inverted) raindrop figures on the card could represent the spreading of the virus. Back in April, one of my young students spontaneously made the same connection, modifying and labeling this illustration from Aesop's fable The North Wind and the Sun:

• Don't touch anyone: The two figures are touching, which is what we're not supposed to do. (I don't think I can really count this as a hit, though; after all, if they were standing apart and not touching, I'd say it showed social distancing!)

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Points specific to the Rider-Waite

• The flag of China: The child on the horse bears a red flag. The five yellow stars on the Chinese flag -- one large and four small -- are alluded to by the sun itself and the four sunflowers.
• Viruses multiply: The sunflowers, as mini-suns, represent the replication of the virus and the ineffectiveness of walls at preventing its spread.
• Another corona: The child wears a crown (corona) of flowers/viruses.
• Birdemic: The child also has a large feather in its hair.
• White Horse: The first horseman of the Apocalypse goes forth on a white horse, "conquering, and to conquer" -- just as the birdemic has ushered in a worldwide totalitarian takeover. Mormon readers will also have heard of the apocryphal "White Horse Prophecy" attributed to Joseph Smith. It refers to "the White Horse of peace and safety" (mostly peaceful! safety first!) and predicts, "You will see the Constitution of the United States almost destroyed. It will hang like a thread as fine as a silk fiber. . . . A terrible revolution will take place in the land of America, such as has never been seen before . . . and every species of wickedness will be practiced rampantly in the land."

Oswald Wirth's Emperor

The Emperor card in all three versions of Oswald Wirth's Tarot is essentially the same.

Three versions of Oswald Wirth's Emperor card (1889, 1926, 1966)

For comparison, here is Nicolas Conver's 1760 Emperor card, representing the mainstream Tarot de Marseille tradition.

Wirth differs from the standard Marseille design on the following points:

• There are four points at the top of the crown and no points along the brim.
• The scepter bears a fleur-de-lis rather than a globus cruciger.
• The emperor holds a large globus cruciger in his right hand instead of holding his belt.
• The emperor wears a breastplate with a sun and moon on it.
• Instead of having a shield with an eagle leaning against his throne, the emperor sits on a large cube with an eagle on it.
• The emperor's right leg is crossed under his left rather than over it.
• The plant at the left side of the card is a red flower rather than grass.

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Influence of Geneva and Besançon Tarots

Wirth was Swiss, born in the Canton of Bern in 1860, and his Emperor's scepter shows the influence of decks from that country. One thinks of the fleur-de-lis as a French symbol, but in fact the only pre-Wirth Tarot I have been able to find with anything like a fleur-de-lis on the Emperor's scepter is the one printed in the Canton of Geneva in 1840 by François Gassmann.

Gassmann's eagle appears to have influenced Wirth's as well. It is distinctive because of the stylized shape of its wings, suggesting German rather than French heraldic conventions, and because of the escutcheon on its chest. Wirth adopted the stylized wings for his 1926 and 1966 cards, and the 1889 version has what appears to be a lyre on the eagle's chest where the escutcheon would be.

Also relevant is the Tarot de Besançon which, despite taking its name from the French town to which production of the cards was moved in the 19th century, actually originated in Switzerland.

Johan Jerger (Besançon, 1801)

Jerger puts the traditional globus cruciger at the end of his Emperor's scepter, but the strange shape of the shaft itself clearly influenced the 1926 and 1966 Wirth cards. This is also the only pre-Wirth Emperor card I know of that features a flower. (Gassmann has an oak leaf; traditional TdM has only a patch of grass.) The 1926 and 1966 Wirth cards also follow the Tarot de Besançon in giving the Emperor a braided golden necklace but omitting the pendant.

Notice that on Jerger's card, the Emperor's legs are not crossed, and the left leg covers the right one. Jerger also gives the Emperor red hose, as does Wirth, whereas blue and green are the standard TdM colors. The Emperor's skirt is made up of separate tongues of material, like Greek armor, as in Wirth.

We can also see Besançon influence in the shape of the Emperor's beard, hair, and headgear.

Wirth (1889), Jerger (1801), Conver (1760)

There are no points along the brim, and the brim protrudes in the front. The central rib of the crown is divided into three parts. The small gold circles are perhaps influenced by the studs or rivets seen in the Besançon card.

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Other innovations

Of the distinctive features of Wirth's Emperor, it appears that only three -- the globus cruciger, the cubic stone, and the breastplate -- cannot be traced to earlier Swiss cards.

The globus cruciger is easy enough to explain. Since it no longer appears at the end of the Emperor's scepter, Wirth places it in his hand instead. Bonifacio Bembo's Emperor card painted for the Visconti-Sforza family also shows the Emperor holding a scepter in his right hand and a globus cruciger in his left.

The association of the Emperor with the cubic stone of the Freemasons seems to originate with Éliphas Lévi, whose influence on Wirth is indisputable (see his Wheel of Fortune card, for instance). Here is Lévi's description of the Emperor card in Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie:

ד The porte or government of the easterns, initiation, power, the Tetragram, the quaternary, the cubic stone, or its base.

Hieroglyph, THE EMPEROR, a sovereign whose body represents a right-angled triangle and his legs a cross -- image of the Athanor of the philosophers.

The Athanor is an alchemical furnace; the triangle and cross is a symbol of alchemical Sulfur. Elsewhere in the Dogme et Rituel, Lévi refers to the cubic stone as a symbol of alchemical Salt, and also includes the prayer, "Angels of Netsah and Hod, establish me upon the cubic stone of Yesod!" (These are the 7th, 8th, and 9th sephiroth of the Tree of Life, with names meaning "eternity," "splendor," and "foundation," respectively.)

As for the breastplate with a sun on the right breast and a moon on the left, my hunch is that it must have reference to the Urim and Thummim, but I have not been able to find any specific source for this. In Dogme et Rituel, Lévi identifies the shoulder ornaments of the Charioteer as "the URIM and THUMMIM of the sovereign sacrificer, represented by the two crescents of the moon in GEDULAH and GEBURAH" (cf. the two "moon blocks" used in Chinese divination). Elsewhere in the same book, Lévi writes that "the URIM and THUMMIM were the above and beneath, the East and West, the yes and no." Wirth may have combined these two ideas -- the Urim and Thummim as crescent moons, and as polar opposites -- to arrive at his representation of them as sun and moon.

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Influence on the Rider-Waite

The Rider-Waite Tarot was published in 1909 -- after the first version of Wirth's deck but before the two later versions -- and it shows the influence of that particular version of the card.

Here are the points the Rider-Waite Emperor shares with the 1889 Wirth.

• The Emperor wears red clothing and armor. While the breastplate is not visible on the Rider-Waite card, the armored knees and feet are otherwise unique to the 1889 Wirth.
• The Emperor's beard is long as in Wirth, rather than short and pointed as in the Tarot de Marseille.
• The Emperor's legs are uncrossed -- closer to the posture in Wirth than in the TdM.
• The throne, while not cubic, is made of gray stone as in the 1889 Wirth. (The ram decorations are due to Waite's ill-starred schema of astrological correspondences.)
• The Emperor holds an orb in his left hand.