Oswald Wirth's "Astronomical Tarot" as a cosmic spread

Setting aside its specifically astrological content, Oswald Wirth's "Astronomical Tarot" can be considered a cosmic spread -- that is, a way of arranging all the Major Arcana into a coherent whole.

There is much to explore here, but what I particularly like is the pairing at the center: Death and the World. I had never thought of these two trumps as a natural pair before, but now it seems obvious. If the World represents everything -- the Cosmos and the life thereof -- then of course its opposite is nothingness, the trump with no name, commonly called Death.

Some years ago I drew a connection between the Homeric Shield of Achilles and the Tibetan Bhavacakra or wheel of life. -- particularly their use of the 2 + 6 + 12 schema. The Shield shows two scenes, of a city at peace and at war; the Bhavacakra has two scenes showing positive and negative karma. The Shield shows six scenes of country life; the Bhavacakra, the six realms of samsara. Where the Shield features the 12 signs of the zodiac, the Bhavacakra shows the "12 links of dependent origination."

At first glance, I thought that Wirth's Astronomical Tarot followed the same pattern, but of course its middle circle has eight section, not six. This put me in mind of something else, though: the sort of octagonal clock commonly used in Chinese culture.

This does have the same structure as Wirth's diagram. On the outside, the 12 hours; closer to the center, the Fu Xi arrangement of the eight trigrams (bagua); and in the center itself, yin and yang, corresponding to Death and the World.

An even closer analogue can be found in this Chinese diagram, which has the 12 Earthly Branches (corresponding to the signs of the Jupiter-based "Chinese zodiac") instead of the hours.

Oswald Wirth, the fleur-de-lis, and Aries

I have unfortunately been unable to get my hands on the original French version of Oswald Wirth's seminal Le Tarot des imagiers du Moyen Âge, and the English translation (available online here) is full of obvious errors -- beginning with the title, in which imagiers ("image-makers") is mistranslated (perhaps under the influence of the German Magiers) as magicians.

On p. 47 of the English version, this "Astronomical Tarot" map or diagram is presented.

As throughout the English text, the errors are numerous and obvious. The Herdsman has been mislabeled as a "Headsman," for example, giving the sickle he carries a rather new and unintended meaning! More confusingly, three different constellations have been labeled with the number 12 (the Hanged Man), when in fact Cancer and Gemini should be 18 and 19 (the Moon and the Sun), respectively. This is made clear in the main text of the book, and in the table that accompanies the diagram.

Note that even this table, even as it corrects the errors in the diagram, contains new errors of its own, such as the misplacement of the astrological symbol for Virgo and the use (repeated throughout the book) of the double-plural arcanas.

I assume that most of these errors are those of the translator, not of Wirth himself. The diagram itself seems to be taken directly from Wirth, though, and his monogram is visible beneath the feet of the Virgin. I assume that the names of the constellations are the only element to have been altered by the translator, and that the numerals (which are not in the same font as the names, and which would do not need translation anyway) are Wirth's own. The thrice-repeated 12, then, may be Wirth's own error.

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My reason for dwelling on these errors or anomalies, and who is responsible for them, is that one particular anomaly -- which I judge to be deliberate, and to be the work of Wirth himself -- caught the eye of one of my readers when I posted a partially corrected version of this diagram on my main blog. (I changed Gemini's number to 19 but hadn't noticed the other errors.) The reader, who goes by Mr. Andrew, wrote, "Is the Ram in 5 holding a fleur-de-lis (Joan of Arc) - or is it a different symbol?"

The flag borne by the Ram is not part of the traditional iconography of Aries (which is supposed to represent Chrysomallus, the winged ram from whom the Golden Fleece was taken), but comes from the Christian symbol known as the Agnus Dei (Lamb of God) or the Paschal (Passover) Lamb. This Lamb is usually depicted with a flag or vexillum. Occasionally the banner is blank or has writing on it -- either Agnus Dei or else a longer quotation from the Latin text of John 1:36 -- but much more often it bears the sign of the cross. More often than not, this is a red "St. George" cross on a white field.

This scan from a heraldry book I read many times as a child shows that Wirth's drawing is not a traditional Ram or Fleece but incorporates the symbolism of the Paschal Lamb.

Having looked online at many different instances of Paschal Lamb or Agnus Dei iconography, I cannot find a single example in which the banner bears a fleur-de-lis or any other heraldic charge than the cross.

Wirth must have known this, and the change to a fleur-de-lis must have been deliberate -- but why? If he didn't want to use explicitly Christian symbolism, he could have just portrayed Aries in the conventional way, as an ordinary ram. Instead, he chose to Christianize this pre-Christian symbol by giving it a banner suggestive of the Lamb of God -- only to de-Christianize it again by replacing the cross with another charge.

(I think that Wirth's identification of Aries with the Passover Lamb is obviously correct. According to the information I have been able to find online, the earliest possible Gregorian date for Passover is March 21, and the latest is April 20. This coincides almost perfectly with the portion of the year assigned to Aries in tropical astrology.)

I have already discussed another instance of Wirth's replacing a cross with a fleur-de-lis: his Emperor card. In the Tarot de Marseille, the Emperor's scepter is topped with a globus cruciger (an orb surmounted by a cross), but Wirth replaces this with a fleur-de-lis. This is obviously not because he has anything against the sign of the cross, since he places a globus cruciger in the Emperor's other hand.

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

It is interesting to note that, while Wirth himself associates Aries with the Pope card, and the Emperor with Hercules, A. E. Waite (whose Emperor was clearly influenced by Wirth's) identified the Emperor with Aries -- a link Wirth had indirectly made by connecting both with the fleur-de-lis.

Wirth explains the meaning of the fleur-de-lis in his article on the Emperor in Le Tarot (pp. 76-77). He uses a somewhat unconventional, stylized version of that symbol.

This emblem is based on the upturned triangle, which represents Water or Soul. A simple cross surmounting this triangle would form the sign of the Great Work (Supreme Glorification of the Soul), but in the fleur-de-lys this cross shape is made more complicated with two foliated scrolls which lead into the horizontal line, while the vertical line is thrust up towards the sky like a plant shoot.

The whole design alludes to a force which comes from the soul both to rise and spread at the same time, as the scrolls show. At work are the highest aspirations which open to give the flower of idealism, to assure it of an irresistible power in the high spheres of human thought.

The Emperor is not a despot who imposes his will in an arbitrary way; there is nothing brutal about his reign: for it is inspired by a great deal of kindness which is symbolized by the Hermetic ideogram from which the connoisseurs of heraldry have taken their fleur-de-lys. It is regrettable that this emblem has not remained the emblem of the French nation . . . . No other sign expresses better nobility of soul, and true generosity which forms the basis of our national character. Removed as we are from all coarse imperialism, it falls to us to rule through the intelligence and with the heart. Let us be the first to understand everything and to be the most sincere in our affection towards others; in this way we will have the right to set up the fleur-de-lys.

Wirth saw the fleur-de-lis as a symbol based on the cross -- an elaboration of the cross, showing its tendency "to rise and spread at the same time."

And what does Wirth say about his identification of Aries (and thus the Lamb of God and the fleur-de-lis) with the Pope? I have considered the connection before, writing, "The Pope, with his shepherd's staff, makes sense as the ram -- the leader of a flock of sheep" -- but Wirth's rationale is entirely different.

No symbol in the sky could be directly linked to the Hierophant, but he makes you think of the high priest of Jupiter-Ammon, the god with the ram's head. We think therefore that we can make arcana 5 correspond to the Aries of the Zodiac which marks the spring equinox, the sign of Fire and the exaltation of the Sun. The fire with which we are concerned here is the fire of life and intelligence, the ancient Agni which came down from heaven to burn in the centre of the vedic cross, called the Swastika, when the rites are being performed. 'Agni' became 'Agnis' and it is thus that the 'agneau pascal', the Pascal Lamb, brings us to the mysteries of a prodigious antiquity.

We would more naturally associate Jupiter with the Emperor, but Wirth was Swiss and was influenced by the Swiss Tarot, which (presumably as a concession to the differing religious sensitivities of its users) replaces the Papess and Pope with Juno and Jupiter, and shows Jupiter with a thunderbolt in each hand. Wirth explicitly acknowledges this influence: "The Jupiter which the Tarot of Besançon puts in the place of the Pope is the master of the celestial Fire . . . . The character of this god is therefore in harmony with arcana 5."

Connecting Aries with the Paschal Lamb and Agnus Dei is clever. Connecting Agnus (and French agneau) with Agni, the Hindu god of fire, is doubly clever (Aries being a fire sign), though it is of course without etymological foundation. I am a bit surprised that the connection was not made by Alexandre Saint-Yves d'Alveydre in his Mission des juifs, given the mileage this latter writer gets out of various equally spurious ovine etymologies. Saint-Yves postulates the existence of an ancient ruler called the Ram and identifies him with Ram or Rama, the seventh avatar of Vishnu; some of the Ram's enemies derisively nicknamed him the Lamb, and this is said to be the origin of the Tibetan title lama. Abraham's name -- originally Ab-ram, "father of Ram" -- is given a similar etymology. (Interestingly, in the story of the binding of Isaac, a ram actually takes the place of Abraham's son!) Saint-Yves also maintains that the Indo-Iranian demonym Aryan is derived from Aries and is a reference to this same Ram. Given all these links, most of them derived from English words, it is a wonder that Saint-Yves did not make the connection between the agneau of his native language and the god Agni.

The banner of judgment

I've put together this little historical survey of the banner on the trumpet on the Judgment card of the Tarot.

What surprises me is how consistent the color scheme has been over the years, especially given how much color schemes tend to vary from deck to deck. The gold-on-gold cross is seen in the very earliest extant Tarot and remained almost invariable until the end of the 19th century.

This is particularly surprising considering how heraldically bizarre the standard color scheme -- a cross tenné on a field or -- is. Most decks in the larger Marseille tradition used an eight-color palette: black, white, red, yellow, green, blue, gray, and tan. It is very strange that tan -- a color never really used on flags, and associated in heraldry with a "stain" on ones honor -- should have been chosen for the angel's banner.

In 1889, Oswald Wirth broke with tradition and made the angel's banner resemble that of his native Switzerland, and this is perhaps what inspired A. E. Waite to use the colors of England on his own card 20 years later. It is interesting that in his 1927 deck, Wirth made a partial return to tradition, keeping the red field but putting the original flag, like St. Patrick's in the Union Jack, inside the cross itself.

Pre-Tarot iconography associates the Last Trump with no particular flag, and I would have expected this banner to be one of the most variable elements of the Tarot, since it would be so easy to modify the flag to make a political or patriotic statement (as Wirth and Waite appear to have done) or to honor one's aristocratic patrons. Instead, we see this remarkable insistence on a tan-on-gold color scheme corresponding (so far as I have been able to discover) to no flag or arms in the real world.

The Trumpiest trump

As I have already discussed several times on this blog, trumps 0, 4, 8, 12, 16, and 20 of the Rider-Waite Tarot each correctly predict the winner of the U.S. presidential election in the corresponding year -- 2000, 2004, 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2020. The 20th trump predicted that Trump would win that election -- which he did, of course, but with the unanticipated twist that a usurping Antipresident was sworn in in his place.

Let's review how this trump unambiguously singles out Donald Trump.

1. The angel has Trump's signature orange-blond hair.
2. There is a literal trump in the picture.
3. The trump has a flag on it. Donald Trump was born on Flag Day, June 14.
4. St. George's cross on the flag resembles a red letter T -- red for Republicans, T for Trump.
5. The word trump occurs only twice in the King James Bible (1 Cor. 15:52 and 1 Thes. 4:16), and both instances refer to the scene depicted on the card: the dead rising incorruptible at the sound of the trump. 

John Opsopaus's version of this trump for his Pythagorean Tarot provides another connection to Trump: the number 45.

In Opsopaus's version of the card -- which Paganizes its Christian subject, in keeping with the "Pythagorean" theme -- the banner of St. George is modified slightly so that it bears a three-by-three square.

Opsopaus writes,

The banner also represents the Square of Saturn for, as Kali regularly destroys the world grown corrupt, so also at the end of the Aeon, Saturn will again eat all his children to clear the boards, so to speak, for the new creation.  Thus the three-by-three format of the banner represents a magic square of order three, which is known . . . in the West as the Square of Saturn.

This is the Square of Saturn -- the three-by-three magic square.

Opsopaus writes that the Square "has enormous esoteric significance" and is "organized around the key numbers 4 and especially 5." There are 9 squares, which is 4 + 5. The sum of all the numbers in the squares is 45. The numbers in the four red squares add up to 20, which is 4 × 5; so do the numbers in the four white squares. That's three different ways in which this figure suggests the number 45. (The two 20s also suggest the year 2020, with which we have already associated this trump.)

So, in addition to all the Trump-specific features of this card, it also seems to indicate the reelection of the 45th president rather than the election of a new, 46th one.

Opsopaus gives each of his trumps a Latin motto. The one for this card is "Resurgens in arca incubatus," translated by him as, "Arising again, having been incubated in the arc" (sic; it should be ark). Resurgens perhaps suggests reelection generally, but the motto refers not to an uninterrupted continuation of power, but to a restoration after an apparent defeat and a period of dormancy and inactivity. If the usurper is removed in the end, and Trump restored, this would be most appropriate. Both Waite and Opsopaus place the incubatory "ark" in the water; Trump's own period of "incubation" is taking place primarily at a location with the very aquatic name Mar-a-Lago. Opsopaus's misspelled reference to "the arc" may also be significant, as it ties in with the recent sync themes of Joan of Arc and Noah's ark.

There are a number of ways I could deal with the apparent failure of my prediction of a Trump win in 2020. I could admit that it simply failed, either because it was all a meaningless coincidence in the first place or because, thanks to the reality of free will, "whether there be prophecies, they shall fail" (1 Cor. 13:8) -- that the Tarot, like the Redskins Rule, gave accurate predictions until one day it didn't. Or I could say that the Tarot accurately predicted the true winner of the election, the rightful president, not the usurper. What I honestly believe, though, is that the prediction was and is accurate in the most straightforward sense, and that, as impossible as it seems, Trump really will be restored to power before the Fake President has served out a full term, and probably this year. This trump's inherent imagery of restoration after apparent death, of resurgens in arca incubatus, makes me more confident in that interpretation.

As for the delay -- nearly four months and counting -- I think it has been very clarifying. My old attitude -- that 2020 happened under Trump, so Biden couldn't possibly be much worse -- has been categorically refuted. At the same time, any enthusiasm for Trump has been tempered by the confirmation that he's not really on the right side on certain key issues -- that, for instance, his only objection to the ongoing birdemic peck scam is that he's not being given credit for it. The restoration of Trump is a necessary first step, but it's only that. Samson, not David.