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.