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.

The Ace of Cups: A brief overview of its development

Pierpont Morgan-Bergamo, Cary-Yale, Marseille, Rider-Waite

The cards pictured above are representative of the different forms the Ace of Cups has taken over the years in Italy, France, and England. None is a straightforward representation of a cup.

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The Pierpont Morgan-Bergamo card depicts a fountain. The main body of it resembles a goblet, but there is a column rising up from the center of this cup, supporting a head with two or more spouts from which water flows down into the cup, and this head is topped with a sculpture of a bird of some kind. This is certainly not the sort of thing that anyone could lift to his lips and drink from. If the lower basin were a bit wider, it would look like the sort of bronze fountain that might serve as a garden ornament; but perhaps the narrowness of the basin is simply an artifact of the shape of the card. The whole thing almost makes me think of a samovar, though of course no real samovar is designed like that.

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The Cary-Yale and Marseille cards share the same basic design: a large goblet covered with a complicated structure resembling a castle or cathedral. I have not been able to find pictures of any real objects quite like the one depicted on these cards, but the Spanish chalice and monstrance shown below, both in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, come close.

Spanish chalice and monstrance (late 15th century)

The chalice, on the left, is apparently almost unique; at any rate, I have not been able to find any other example of a chalice with a cover at all similar to that seen on the Marseille Ace of Cups. (Chalices don't normally have covers at all; any object that looks like a covered chalice is likely a ciborium, for holding hosts.) The monstrance, on the right, is one of a large number of similar objects, and its resemblance to the object on the Ace of Cups is obvious. The rub, of course, is that it's not a cup and lacks any cup-like component. (The purpose of a monstrance is to display some holy item, in this case the Eucharistic host.) If we took the top part of the monstrance and used it as a cover for the chalice, then we'd have something almost exactly like the Marseille Ace of Cups. I have not been able to find any examples of such an object, but apparently there is such a thing as a combined chalice-monstrance, with the monstrance doing double duty as the cover for the chalice. The photo below shows such an object, though the style of the monstrance is quite different from that seen on the card.

I think we must conclude, then, that the version of the Ace of Cups seen in the Cary-Yale and Marseille decks is a chalice with a cover serving as a monstrance. Both cards clearly show windows in the sides of the object, allowing for the display of the host, and the yellow circles in some of the windows on the Marseille card were perhaps originally Communion wafers.

Despite the fact that the Cary-Yale and Marseille cards show what seems clearly to be a Eucharistic chalice, which should contain wine, both appear to contain water instead. A blue squiggle is visible in the window in the Cary-Yale card, and the Marseille card features what I take to be three gouts of blue water spurting out of the chalice portion of the object. As far as I know, while it is customary to add some water to the sacramental wine, a chalice would never normally be filled with water alone.

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Waite, ever the eclectic, alludes to both the Pierpont Morgan-Bergamo and the Marseille cards. The basic Pierpont Morgan-Bergamo layout -- a cup-shaped fountain with a bird at the top -- is reinterpreted in light of the Eucharistic imagery of the Tarot de Marseille. What was a mere birdbath ornament on the Italian card is transformed by Waite into the dove of the Holy Ghost, descending toward the chalice with a consecrated host in its bill. This is fairly common iconography -- see the First Communion clipart below -- but it was a stroke of inspired genius on Waite's part to hit on it as a way of uniting the Italian fountain and the French monstrance in a single image.

Despite this very explicit Eucharistic imagery, though, it is still water, rather than wine or blood, that pours from the chalice. The water issues in four or five streams (five on the card, four in Waite's description in the Pictorial Key; it is unclear which is the error), the shape of which makes it clear that they come from a fountain and not simply from an overflowing cup.

A dove hovering over water calls to mind the baptism of Jesus, and it is perhaps not a coincidence that Jesus connected his baptism with drinking from a cup: "Can ye drink of the cup that I drink of, and be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?" (Mark 10:38). Another scriptural allusion would be to the "living water" of the Fourth Gospel: "But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life" (John 4:14).