The Ace of Cups combines baptismal and Eucharistic imagery

In my 2020 post "The Ace of Cups: A brief overview of its development," I concluded that the Ace of Cups, particularly in its Marseille incarnation, is a "chalice with a cover serving as a monstrance" -- a monstrance, or ostensorium, being an object used to display the Host. I was baffled, though, by the fact that, despite the very clear Eucharistic imagery, the chalice is always shown flowing with water, never with wine or blood. I also failed to see any Eucharistic meaning in the Pierpont Morgan-Bergamo Visconti-Sforza card, which seemed to show a fountain; and I thought that interpreting the bird ornament on the PMB fountain as the dove of the Holy Ghost was an innovation of Waite's.

Now, having followed some leads from Michael J. Hurst's 2007 post "The Ace of Cups: Christian Content in Tarot," I want to revisit some of these questions.

First, the PMB card turns out to be more Eucharistic than I had imagined. Consider this German woodcut of the late 15th century, called by the National Gallery, "Allegory of the Eucharist."

Note the structure of the central object: A pillar rises up from the center of a hexagonal basin; two spouts on the sides of the pillar pour out liquid; and at the top is a dove. The Eucharistic intention is obvious, since it is a fountain of blood with what are apparently Hosts floating in it. (Hurst provides a black-and-white version of this picture and suggests that the two streams of liquid represent the water and blood that flowed from the pierced side of the Crucified; in color, though, we can see that it is all blood.)

Now compare the image above with the Ace of Cups of the PMB Visconti-Sforza deck.

This is an extremely close match. The main differences are that the basin now has a stem and base like a goblet, and that the liquid is water rather than blood.

So why is it water? Why do all these cards have a design that shouts this is the blood of Christ, only to show it as water instead?

In my 202 post, I noted how similar the Marseille Ace of Cups is to this late 15th-century Spanish monstrance.

One important difference, though, is that the monstrance has no bowl -- it lacks the very part of the Ace of Cups that makes it a cup! That's why I conjectured that it must be some sort of combined chalice-and-monstrance, even though I scoured the Net in vain for images of any such object. (I did find combined chalice-monstrances, but not with a design at all similar to that seen on the Ace.) And the question still remains as to why water -- blue, definitely not wine or blood -- should be shown flowing out of the object.

Well, it turns out some old baptismal fonts look a lot like the Ace of Cups -- a large basin on a stem and base, with an ornate "Gothic" cover.

So it appears that the Ace of Cups combines the imagery of chalice, monstrance, and font. The blood/wine/water ambiguity is not entirely unbiblical, either. Several passages present the blood of Christ as something we might drink or wash in; Christ "bled" water as well as blood on the cross; and of course there is the famous miracle at Cana, where water was turned into wine. Jesus connected drinking from a cup with being baptized when he said, "Are you able to drink the cup I drink or to be baptized with the baptism I am baptized with?" (Mark 10:38). In Gethsemane he referred to his coming passion and death as a cup to drink from, and Paul later said baptism was a symbol of Christ's death -- we are "buried with him in baptism" (Col. 2:12). Mormons in particular will appreciate the connection, since the Mormon Eucharist uses water instead of wine and is said to be a renewal of one's baptismal covenants.

Waite's card also, I think, contains both baptismal and Eucharistic imagery.

As I mentioned in my earlier post, a dove flying over a chalice with a Host in its beak is very common Eucharistic iconography. On Waite's card, though, the dove is flying straight down as if it is going to dip the Host into the water. Since the Host is the body of Christ, this corresponds to the baptism of Jesus -- which was also the occasion on which the Holy Ghost descended in the form of a dove. Waite has five streams of water where we would expect four, but if water and blood are interchangeable, they could be a reference to the Five Wounds of the Crucified.

The dove flying over water also appears in the story of Noah, and it is perhaps significant in the present context that after the Flood, Noah invented wine and got drunk. In 1 Peter, baptism is connected with Noah's ark, in which "eight souls were saved by water -- the like figure whereunto even baptism doth also now save us" (3:20-21).

This biblical connection between baptism and the number eight is probably why Mormons baptize at the age of eight, and why so many baptismal fonts are octagonal. It is curious, then, that the German woodcut and the Visconti and Marseille Aces all show a hexagonal structure. Hexagonal baptismal fonts are extremely uncommon, and chalices are round, so where does this come from? Well, according to this post at the Liturgical Arts Journal, the very oldest extant monstrance, dated to 1286, is hexagonal and is an extremely close match for the Marseille Ace.

So I think we have to say that the Ace of Cups combines elements of three different sacred objects: the font, the chalice, and the monstrance.

Synchronistic postscript: After writing the above, I ran an image search on holy grail medieval drawing to see if the Holy Grail was every depicted as an object similar to the Ace of Cups. The search was useless -- most of the results were modern drawings and showed a simple chalice -- but one result got my attention because it appeared at first glance to show a chalice with a Gothic cover. What it actually turned out to be, though, was a combined image of the Grail, a castle, and my friend the owl.

Between a dog and a wolf

In all Marseille-style decks of which I am aware, the Moon card feature two dogs or jackals: a light blue one on the left, and a pink or buff one on the right. (See "The red and blue jackals.") Aside from the color and a slight difference in size (with the larger, blue dog perhaps corresponding to Sirius in Canis Major), the two animals are the same.

This color scheme, universal among Marseille decks, was jettisoned by the early Marseille-influenced esoteric Tarots, beginning with Oswald Wirth's 1889 deck. Wirth's canines are black and white rather than red and blue, but they still both appear to be dogs.

The 1909 Rider-Waite deck uses yet another color scheme, but also introduces more significant differences between the two animals. One has the floppy ears of a domestic dog, while the other has the erect ears and bushy tail of a wolf. Waite confirms this in The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, writing, "The dog and wolf are the fears of the natural mind in the presence of that place of exit, when there is only reflected light to guide it."

This dog and wolf theme is also used -- and rather more competently executed artistically -- in the 1929 Knapp-Hall deck. One animal is clearly a wolf, while the other is a domestic dog complete with a collar.

Mary K. Greer connects this dog-and-wolf theme with the French idiom entre chien et loup, meaning "at twilight." This is an expression of Latin origin (inter canem et lupum) -- with twilight being thought of as "between" the domain of the diurnal dog and that of the nocturnal wolf, or perhaps between the time when people put out their dogs to keep watch and the time the wolves begin to come out. French etymology dictionaries, though, give a different explanation: that it refers to the dim light in which it is difficult to distinguish a dog from a wolf ("l'heure où la lumière décline car on confond alors facilement entre chien et loup"), and it is apparently in this sense that most modern Francophones understand the idiom. (Inter canem et lupum is also sometimes used in the sense of "between a rock and a hard place," but the obvious contrast between man's best friend and his deadly enemy makes it hard to see this as anything but an ignorant corruption.)

Anyway, this Latin and French idiom never made it into English, so it is curious that the French and French-Swiss decks have two dogs, while the English and American decks introduce the entre chien et loup imagery. However, there are precursors in the French literature (with which Waite, having translated much of it, was quite familiar). Wirth's Le tarot des imagiers du moyen-âge (1927) describes the two animals as "the big black dog" and "the little white dog," with no hint that either of them might be a wolf. However, when the opening paragraph of his description of the Moon card is read with the idiom in mind, it is hard to deny its relevance.

In order to display the splendours of the sky, the Night plunges the earth into darkness, for the things above are not revealed to our sight except to the detriment of those below. However we aspire to relate the celestial to the terrestrial by a simultaneous contemplation, which is made possible when the Moon spreads her pale light. The body which is close to the stars without subduing their brightness completely, only half lights up the objects bathed in her uncertain and borrowed light. The Moon does not allow us to distinguish colours; everything her rays strike upon she tinges with a silvery grey or with vague bluish shades, leaving the opaque darkness of the shadows of night to continue.

Papus did not produce a deck of his own. In his Le Tarot des Bohémiens (1889), the section on each trump has two illustration: the 1889 Wirth card and the traditional Tarot de Marseille. Although both of these show two dogs, Papus refers in his commentary to a dog and a wolf.

In the middle, a dog and a wolf howl at the moon, a crayfish comes out of the water and crawls in the midst of these animals. The entry of the Spirit into Matter is a fall all the greater as everything conspires to increase it. The "servile spirits" (dog), the "ferocious larvae" (wolf) and the "crawling elementals" (crayfish) are there who watch for the fall of the soul into matter to try to oppress it even more.

Wirth hints at the idiomatic meaning of entre chien et loup but identifies both animals as dogs. Papus identifies them as a dog and a wolf, despite using cards that portray them both as dogs, and yet his commentary on the card says nothing about twilight of the difficulty of distinguishing things in half-light.

One suspects that the "missing link," or rather the "common ancestor," is Wirth's first Tarot book, Le Livre de Thot comprenant les 22 arcanes du Tarot (1889), but unfortunately I have not yet been able to track down a copy to check. My hypothesis is that this earlier book explicitly refers to the dog and the wolf; that his later book, with its emphasis on astrology, dropped the wolf references in favor of Canes Major and Minor; but that traces of the author's earlier emphasis remain in the introductory paragraph. If I ever do manage to get my hands on Le Livre de Thot, it will be interesting to see if this speculative reconstruction is borne out.