Four rams' heads

One of A. E. Waite's many innovations on his Emperor card was to decorate the Emperor's throne with four rams' heads. While I am not a big fan of the forced system of astrological correspondences that motivated this addition, in this case I think Waite's choice may have been an inspired one.

I have noted in my post "The Emperor and the number 4" that the Emperor is closely associated with the god Zeus, or Jupiter -- beginning with the number of the trump. The Arabic numeral 4 suggests the astrological symbol for Jupiter. The Greek numeral Δ is the initial letter of Διεύς, "Zeus." The Roman name Jupiter (IVPITER) begins with the Roman numeral IV. In fact, the piter element simply means "father," so the divine name proper is simply the number four. In the statue of Jupiter now on display at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, we see all the essential elements of the Emperor card: a beared man seated on a throne, a scepter in one hand and an orb in the other, with an eagle on his left. (The eagle is absent on the Rider-Waite card, but most decks have it.)

Well another attribute of Zeus, in his character as Zeus Ammon, was a pair of ram's horns. This came from a syncretistic identification of Zeus with the Egyptian god Amun, whose statue at Megalopolis had the head of a ram. Alexander the Great, a prototype of the "emperor" figure, was supposed to be the son of Zeus Ammon, and ancient coins depict him with ram's horns. (The personage called the "two-horned man" in the Quran is generally believed to be Alexander.)

So a ram's head suggests Zeus and Alexander and is thus appropriate for the Emperor -- but the Emperor's throne features four rams' heads. There is an Egyptian god that is usually depicted with four rams' heads: the Ram of Mendes. This figure typically appears at the center of an Egyptian hypocephalus -- a circular amulet placed under the head of the deceased.

The most famous hypocephalus is of course the fragmentary Joseph Smith hypocephalus, restored by him and "translated" as the Second Facsimile from the Book of Abraham. The Facsimile does not show four rams' heads on the central figure because that part of the hypocephalus was missing and was (Egyptologists would say) incorrectly restored by Smith. Smith identifies this figure -- originally a god with four rams' heads -- as Kolob.

In Egyptian, the words for "soul" and "ram" are both pronounced ba (plural baw). The ba of a god was often conceived of, and personified, as being distinct from the god itself. The Ram of Mendes is said to represent Amun in his aspect as a cosmic god, and the heads of the four rams (baw) signify that he incorporates the souls (baw) of the four gods Ra, Shu, Geb, and Osiris (corresponding respectively to fire, air, earth, and water).

It is this same Amun that was later combined with Zeus into the ram-horned god Zeus Ammon and said to be the father of proto-emperor Alexander the Great.

I have said that the ba, or soul, though more often represented as a human-headed bird, can also be represented by the ram because "ram" is pronounced ba in Egyptian. A third such homophone is the Egyptian for "leopard," also ba. It is interesting to note that a four-headed leopard appears in the Bible.

After this I beheld, and lo another [beast], like a leopard, which had upon the back of it four wings of a fowl; the beast had also four heads; and dominion was given to it (Daniel 7:6).

It is even more interesting to note that in the standard interpretation of this symbolic vision, the four-headed leopard represents none other than Alexander the Great -- ram-horned son of Zeus Ammon -- and his empire.

The Emperor's orb

Visconti-Sforza (c. 1451, restored), Pierre Madenié (1709),
Oswald Wirth (1889, revised 1926), Rider-Waite (1910)

Emperor cards typically feature the Reichsadler, the scepter, and the globus cruciger. How exactly these are incorporated into the card varies widely from deck to deck.

The Reichsadler -- a black eagle displayed on a gold field -- was the emblem of the Holy Roman Emperors prior to the 15th century, when it was replaced by the double-headed eagle. Bembo's Visconti-Sforza card puts this emblem on a vaguely shield-shaped headdress which does not, so far as I know, resemble anything worn by any historical emperor, and which almost looks more like a mitre than a crown. The Marseille tradition (as typified by Madenié, even though his cards were actually made in Dijon), puts it on a shield -- the traditional "coat of arms." Wirth combines this shield and the throne into a cubic stone marked with the Reichsadler. Waite eliminates the eagle entirely, replacing it with the Aries imagery demanded by his astrological schema.

Bembo's scepter is a simple rod with no ornament at the top. The Marseille tradition tops it with the globus cruciger; Wirth, with a stylized fleur-de-lis. Waite makes the scepter resemble both the Egyptian ankh and the Mesopotamian rod-and-ring.

The emblem I want to focus on here, though, is the globus cruciger, or orb.

Looking at this close-up of the original Visconti-Sforza card (top left), we can see that the "restored" version I used above (because it is clearer) has been restored incorrectly. The orb is topped with a cross pattée atop a short, narrow pedestal, and the orb itself is marked with zigzag ("indented") lines, suggestive of a cracking egg. These form a circle around the equator and a semicircle connected the equator to the north pole, where the cross is.

Where Bembo had put the orb in the Emperor's left hand, the Marseille tradition (top right) puts it at the end of his scepter, thus strengthening the axis mundi symbolism of the latter by making the axis of an actual globe. Having no orb to hold, the Emperor's left hand appears to be holding his own belt. The orb has the same general form as Bembo's, but instead of indented lines, we have have bands of a different color. In many Marseille cards, including Pierre Madenié's, there is also a second, much smaller globus cruciger at the top of the Emperor's crown.

Wirth puts the orb back in the Emperor's hand and gives it the same general form as the Marseille version, but it is idiosyncratic in two ways. First, the orb itself is green, in contrast to the otherwise universal use of gold, both for Tarot cards and for real-world crown jewels. The second oddity is the diminutive size of the cross, also something that has no analogue of which I am aware either in pre-Wirth Tarot or in the real world. The whole point of the globus cruciger symbolism is Christ's dominion over the world, and so the cross is typically about as large as the orb itself.

Orbs with a much smaller cross, though rare to nonexistent among crown jewels, do sometimes appear in paintings of Christ himself in his role as salvator mundi. In such paintings, the orb is also a direct representation of the world rather than of a royal accoutrement, and as such it is often transparent or blue in color rather than gold. The closest parallel I can find in art to Wirth's orb is this Brazilian icon of Christ as a child. Perhaps a bit more digging (this one is straight off Wikipedia) would turn up some similar image from Wirth's neck of the woods.

Another significant feature of Wirth's orb is where it is held relative to the Emperor's body, so that the center of the globe -- the omphalos -- coincides with the presumed location of the Emperor's own navel. Mormons may make of this, and of the Emperor's protruding right knee, what they will.

Waite returns the orb to its traditional gold color but eliminates the cross entirely. While some salvator mundi images (such as Leonardo's) do omit the cross and feature a simple globe, Waite's is not a simple globe, either. Where the cross should be, there is a little nub, almost as if it were the pedestal for a cross without the cross itself. What it really reminds me of, actually, is a gold version of a stereotypical cartoon bomb, the little nub being where the fuse would be attached.

The other thing it reminds me of is the Liahona, described as "a round ball of curious workmanship; and it was of fine brass. And within the ball were two spindles; and the one pointed the way whither we should go into the wilderness." (1 Nephi 16:10). Despite the clear statement that there were two spindles within the ball, artists' depictions of the Liahona invariably show a single protrusion extending out from the top of the ball.

Here is a detail Arnold Friberg's classic Liahona painting, painted in the 1950s and included in many editions of the Book of Mormon since then.

And here is a modern version of the same subject, which has appeared before on this blog. Although the style is very different from Friberg's, the basic design of the Liahona -- a gold-colored ball with a little protrusion at the top -- remains invariable.

It has become common among Mormon intellectuals to contrast the Liahona with another Book of Mormon image, the Iron Rod, a metaphor first used by Richard D. Poll in his 1967 Dialogue article "What the Church Means to People Like Me" (pdf). "Iron Rod" Mormons are more dogmatic and emphasize the authority of the Scriptures and Church leaders, while "Liahona" Mormons are more questing/questioning and emphasize personal inspiration and the guidance of the Holy Ghost. In practice, Liahona and Iron Rod connote "liberal" and "conserative," respectively.

The term Iron Rod comes from Lehi's dream in 1 Nephi 8, where the "rod of iron" is a sort of handrail to which people hold in order not to stray from the path as they pass through the mists of darkness. In Revelation, though, the "rod of iron" seems to be Christ's scepter: "to rule all nations with a rod of iron" (12:15). This imagery, in turn, comes from Psalm 2, where the rod of iron is a weapon with which to smash the heathen to bits, but in Revelation it is consistently used "to rule" (2:27, 12:5, 19:15).

If the iron rod is a scepter, then the Emperor (in most non-Marseille decks) can be seen as holding the Liahona in his left hand and the Iron Rod in his right. This fits with the symbolism just discussed, where the Liahona and Iron Rod symbolize the Mormon "left" and "right." It should also be understood in connection with my earlier discussion of the Emperor's Urim and Thummim, in which the Emperor's right side is associated with the square and his left with the compass. In Mormon use, the square symbolized exactness and honor in keeping covenenats -- clearly an "Iron Rod" concept -- while the compass reminds us of the "Liahona" principle that all truth (not only "official Church doctrine") may be circumscribed into one great whole.

Another thing the gold orb on the Rider-Waite card resembles is a Christmas-tree ornament -- and Waite's Emperor, with his red robes and long, white beard, bears more than a passing resemblance to Father Christmas.

Finally, no discussion of a monarch holding a golden ball would be complete without a nod to the Frog King from the Brothers Grimm. (Irrelevant coincidence: Will Smith's first Golden Globe nomination was for "The Froschprinz of Bel-Air.")

This is clearly an image of Kek, the ancient Egyptian god of chaos whose cult enjoyed such a surprising revival a few years back. (See "The Truth About Pepe The Frog And The Cult of Kek." Apparently Kek has not been entirely forgotten; just after the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict, Anonymous Conservative posted a reminded that "A giant frog statue stands in Rittenhouse Square.") Like many Egyptian deities, Kek is often depicted with a was-scepter and ankh; on the Waite card, the scepter and ankh are combined.

The golden ball also suggests the golden apple of Eris -- Kek's predecessor as deity of a chaos-based parody religion.

The pointed cubic stone and the Tarot

In an article on the tetraktys and the square of four, René Guénon points out that these two figures together comprise a total of 26 points, which is the value of the Tetragrammaton (yodh he vav he = 10 + 5 + 6 + 5). The 10 point of the tetraktys correspond to the letter yodh, and the 16 points of the square represent the rest of the Name. He illustrates this idea with the following figure.

It occurred to me that the figure looked a bit strange. We would normally think of the nine non-central points of the tetraktys not as being inside a triangle but as forming the edges of one; and the same is true of the 12 exterior points of the square of four. Since in the above diagram, the triangle and the square share an edge, that would be a total of 22 points, not 26, since 4 of the points belong both to the triangle and to the square. That's not the value of the Tetragrammaton, but it is a significant number in its own right, being the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet and the number of Major Arcana in the Tarot.

At the end of his article, Guénon briefly mentions the three-dimensional analogue of his figure.

Finally, if we consider the solid forms in three dimensional geometry that correspond to the plane figures in question here, the cube corresponds to the square, and the figure that corresponds to the triangle is the quadrangular pyramid with the upper face of the cube as its base. The whole forms what Masonic symbolism designates as the 'pointed cubic stone' and which, in the Hermetic interpretation, is considered to be a figure of the 'philosopher's stone'.

This is the Masonic symbol Guénon is referring to.

The fourth cubic number is 64, and the fourth square-pyramidal number is 30. If we combine these in the same way that Guénon combined the square and the triangle, the total value is 94, a number of no obvious significance. If we combine them my way, though, keeping in mind that the cube and the pyramid share between them a plane of 16 points, the number represented by the pointed ashlar is 94 - 16 = 78.

By my reckoning, then, the plane figure has 22 points, and its solid counterpart has 78. This corresponds perfectly to the Tarot deck, which has 22 Major Arcana and a total of 78 cards in all.

The Emperor's Urim and Thummim

Further thoughts on Oswald Wirth's Emperor card (shown below in its 1889, 1926, and 1966 versions):

One of Wirth's innovations was to give the Emperor a breastplate marked with figures of the Sun and the Moon. In my first post on this card, I tentatively connected these with the biblical Urim and Thummim, which were worn on Aaron's "breastplate of judgment."

In his Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, Éliphas Lévi identified the Urim and Thummim with various pairs of polar opposites -- "the above and beneath, the East and West, the yes and no" -- and also with "the two crescents of the moon." I speculated that Wirth, who was deeply influenced by Lévi, had combined these two ideas and represented the Urim and Thummim as the crescent Moon and its polar opposite, the Sun. Further evidence that the Emperor's breastplate is Aaron's can be seen in the braided gold chain he wears (already present in the Tarot de Marseille), which corresponds to the "wreathen chains of gold" described in Exodus 28. Wirth's Besançon-influenced version of the Emperor's scepter also calls to mind Aaron's rod that budded and blossomed and brought forth almonds (Number 17:8).

(We might more naturally associate Aaron, the high priest, with the fifth trump, the Pope or Hierophant, but perhaps that position should be reserved for Moses.)

As I explain in my 2013 post "Lux et Veritas: A hypothesis," there is strong evidence that Mormon temple ritual identifies the square and compass of Freemasonry with the Urim and Thummim. A Masonic initiation involves pressing the angle of a square to the initiate's right breast and the point of a compass to his left. Mormon ritual echoes this by clothing the initiate in a garment marked with the figure of a square on the left breast and that of a compass on the right. The right angle of the square is represented by a shape like the letter L, and the acute angle of the compass by one like V. Given that this is not a very natural orientation for the compass, I concluded that the resemblance to L and V must be intentional and meaningful and that the marks, in addition to representing the square and compass, also stood for Lux et Veritas -- one possible Latin translation of Urim and Thummim, as seen for example on the coat of arms of Yale University.

The Hebrew writing on the book reads "Urim" on the right and "and Thummim" on the left. Note that Urim begins with aleph and Thummim with tav. These are the first and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet, corresponding to alpha and omega. (The letters L and V correspond to the second letters of the letter-names aleph and tav.)

Combining this with the symbolism of Wirth's Emperor, then, we have the following correspondences:

• right breast -- square -- lux (light) -- Urim -- aleph/alpha (beginning) -- Sun
• left breast -- compass -- veritas (truth) -- Thummim -- tav/omega (end) -- Moon

Can we organize all of this into a coherent symbolism? Consider this universal symbol, found in virtually all ancient cultures (and alluded to by the Emperor's globus cruciger): the cross inscribed in a circle.

We have three basic components here: the point at the center, the circumference, and the four radii that connect the former to the latter. The center is God, the Creator, the Source. The radii are God's activity, his creative Word, radiating out from him. The circumference is the phenomenal world, conceptualized as a passive creation of God's. That which acts, the action, and that which is acted-upon.

The square is used to draw the radii; the compass, to draw the circumference. The Sun is always shown with rays of light radiating from it, and it therefore corresponds to the center and the radii. The Moon is stereotypically drawn in crescent form -- as an arc, part of the circumference of a circle -- and therefore corresponds to the circumference.

In the Tarot, the Moon is given the number 18, and the Sun is 19. The Sun and the Moon together, then, represent 18 + 19 = 37. This is a hexagonal number, and can be represented as a (lunar) perimeter of 18 units surrounding a (solar) center of 19.

This is another link to Aaron's breastplate of judgment. Besides containing the Urim and Thummim, it was also set with 12 stones arranged in a 3-by-4 grid, engraved with the names of the 12 tribes of Israel. As detailed by Vernon Jenkins here, each of those names has a gematria value, and the total of all those values is 3,700. Furthermore, the breastplate can be divided into seven sections, each of which has a gematria value that is a multiple of 37.

The Sun, Moon, and 12 tribes of Israel also appear together in one of Joseph's dreams, in which the Sun (Jacob), Moon (Rachel), and 11 stars (the patriarchs of the tribes) bow down to Joseph. Coincidentally, this is recorded in Genesis 37.

The exact meaning of the Hebrew words Urim and Thummim is disputed, but "Lights and Perfections" is a traditional translation. The Vulgate has Doctrina et Veritas, and Yale's motto may be seen as a compromise between these two translations: Lux et Veritas, "Light and Truth." Light obviously corresponds to the Sun and, being the first creation, to aleph. Truth, conceptualized as passive knowing as opposed to active creation, corresponds to the Moon. The Moon reflects the light of the Sun, just as true ideas "reflect" an external reality.

The Mischievous Dog and the Fool

In this post at From the Narrow Desert, I mention seeing -- and failing to take a photo of -- a knockoff Winnie-the-Pooh doll that said "Mischievous Dog" on its T-shirt. Searching the Internet to see if anyone else had taken a photo of such a toy, I found the Wikipedia article about one of Aesop's fables called "The Mischievous Dog."

The story concerns a dog that bites the legs of others. Its master therefore ties a bell around its neck to warn people. The dog, thinking the bell is a reward, shows it off in the streets until an older dog reminds him that the bell is not a reward but a sign of disgrace.

The accompanying illustration reminded me of something.

The dog is given a bell because it bites, but it mistakes this sign of disgrace for an honor. The envious Fool, thinking it unfair that the dog, who is in the wrong, should be so honored, puts bells on himself instead.