Could the "moon" be Betelgeuse?

In my last post, I mentioned that Sirius and Procyon -- possibly represented by the two dogs or jackals on the Moon card -- form a triangle with a third very bright star, Betelgeuse.

Betelgeuse is red, and the moon is also mostly red in many Tarot de Marseille decks. Could the "moon" actually be Betelgeuse?

The obvious question is why a star would be represented with a waxing crescent shape on it -- but the Tarot itself offers a possible answer. Betelgeuse is the right shoulder of Orion.

On the Chariot card, the charioteer's right shoulder also bears a waxing crescent with a face, very similar to what we see on the Moon.

The problem remains that the dogs are in the wrong position. If Betelgeuse is at the top, Sirius (the larger, bluer dog) should be on the right, and Procyon on the left. If the "moon" is Betelgeuse, the Moon card shows a mirror-image of the Winter Triangle.

The blue and red jackals and the stars

The Moon card of the Tarot de Marseille features a crayfish and two dogs. The constellation Cancer was normally portrayed as a crayfish in the past, and the two dogs would then represent Canis Major and Canis Minor, both of which are in the region of the sky assigned to Cancer.

My recent post "The red and blue jackals" drew my attention to the color of the two dogs, and I realized that a blue canine could well be a representation of the principal star in Canis Major -- Sirius, the Dog Star, the brightest and most obviously blue star in the sky. Sure enough, the Tarot de Marseille always portrays the blue dog as the larger of the two -- Canis Major.

It would be natural to infer, then, that the smaller, pink or buff dog represents Canis Minor and its principal star, Procyon. The problem is that Procyon isn't red. The red star close to Sirius in Betelgeuse -- the third member of the Winter Triangle asterism -- but Betelgeuse is part of Orion and has nothing to do with dogs. Procyon is very nearly white, and much closer to Sirius than to Betelgeuse in color.

Doing a bit of searching on the Internet, I found a few possibly relevant facts. The first is that several cultures have called Sirius the jackal star. I quote the following from a notice in the November 1883 issue of Popular Science, which ties Sirius not only to the jackal but specifically to the jackal as an animal in Indian fables.

The Jackal, the Fox-Fables, and the Dog-Star. -- Herr O. Keller, in a paper on "The Jackal in Antiquity," urges that the Western nations, who had foxes but no jackals, borrowed the traits ascribed to jackals, in Oriental fables, with the fables, and transferred them to their foxes. Thus the Grecian foxes were endowed with the attributes of two animals, and the most curious fox-fables of Aesop are in their origin Indian jackal-fables. Some of Aesop's fables represent the fox as the follower and servant of the lion, which he is not known to be in any sense. The jackal, however, is in the habit of following the lion at a respectful distance, and lives on what he can pick up from the deserted repasts of the king of beasts. This trait was observed by the ancient Indians, and it was a natural result of the observation that their vivid imaginations, discovering royal prerogatives in the lion, should endow his follower with the qualities of a minister and counselor, and make him to assist his majesty by using in his behalf the qualities of slyness and cunning in which the royal beast was deficient. The Greeks substituted foxes for jackals because they knew nothing about them, and their foxes came nearer than any other animal to answering the descriptions of them. The transfer was made easier by the gradual development of the fables from simple nature-stories into moral lessons, in the course of which absolute truth to nature grew less essential, and the representation of abstract qualities under purely conventional masks became more prominent. The incongruous association by the Greeks of the supposed evil influences of Sirius with the harmless dog are susceptible of a similar explanation. The Chinese, however, who also attributed evil qualities to the dog-star, called it the jackal-star, and appropriately; for as the heat and drought of which it is the forerunner are destructive to the crops, so likewise are the jackals, which make their home in the fields, and are constantly running through them in gangs, destroying myriads of plants, in search of their food. To the Egyptians, Sirius was also the jackal-star, but foreboded good, for it appeared just before the time of the inundation. The Mesopotamians also recognized in it a forerunner of beneficent inundations, and gave it the name of the dog, an animal which they held in high esteem. The Greeks borrowed the Mesopotamian name, and kept the Chinese idea, which harmonized well with the character of their own dog-days. The origin of the dog-star has been associated by some other writers with the idea that Sirius, the chief of the stars, was the shepherd-dog to the host of heavenly sheep, represented by the other stars.

The second thing I found was this 1995 article by R. C. Ceragioli in the Journal for the History of Astronomy, called "The Debate Concerning 'Red' Sirius." It begins thus:

A long-standing question in the history of astronomy concerns whether Sirius, the Dog Star (α CMa), could have changed its intrinsic colour since antiquity. Half a dozen Greek, Roman and Near Easter sources refer to Sirius as "reddish", whereas since at least the Renaissance it has always shone a brilliant bluish white. So the question has been posed: could Sirius have changed from reddish to white since Antiquity?

At first sight, this might seem a reasonable possibility: stars do evolve and suffer various kinds of changes during their lifetimes. Could these ancient references to Sirius's redness be evidence for an evolutionary change during the historical period? Most astronomers consider this unlikely, because stellar evolution generally takes eons, not a mere 2,000 years, to produce significant results. Accordingly, they usually reject the ancient evidence for 'red' Sirius out of hand. Yet that evidence is strong . . .

I haven't yet read the whole article, but the idea that Sirius somehow changed from looking red to looking blue is an intriguing one. Paired with the idea that Sirius was originally the jackal-star, it suggests a possible meaning of the Blue Jackal fable, in which an ordinary (red-brown) jackal is dyed blue.

Lightning and falling rocks

In my last post, "Lightning from the Sun?" I refer to the astronomical theories proposed by David Talbott and the Thunderbolts Project and how synchronicity connected them with the Tower card of the Tarot.

Intrigued by the first "Symbols of an Alien Sky" video, I've started watching "Symbols of an Alien Sky, Episode 2: The Lightning Scarred Planet Mars," which is, insofar as a layman can judge, makes a very strong case that the face of Mars was shaped by electrical discharges on an enormous scale. Starting at 18:39, there is even a reference to the question that inspired my first post on the Tower, "What is the House of God?" -- the connection between lightning and "thunderstones," or meteorites.

We have proposed that in a former epoch of planetary instability electric discharge excavated the Martian surface miles deep, throwing massive quantities of rock into space. This would mean that most of the Martian rocks reaching Earth would have come from well below the surface and would not even bear the atmospheric signature of the planet. So, it is not unreasonable to suspect that the planet Mars was not a small contributor but the greatest contributor to meteoric bombardment of Earth in ancient times.

On this question, ancient testimony holds a surprising answer. Worldwide accounts describe apocalyptic wars of the gods punctuated by lightning and falling stone. Rocks from space falling on the Earth have no connection to lightning and thunder in our own time, but the ancient connection is clear. In many different languages meteorites and exotic rocks were called thunderstones, or thundereggs, said to have fallen in the great wars of the gods.

Could this ancient connection have survived in oral tradition all the way down to the French peasants of the 20th century, who, René Guénon reports, "say, in fact, that thunder falls in two ways, 'in fire' or 'in stone'"? Could there really be any connection between this

and this?

Lightning from the Sun?

The earliest recorded names of the 16th trump, known in English as the Tower, show that its primary subject was originally lightning. Old Italian documents call it Fire or The Arrow, and the Vandenborre Tarot (1780) calls it Lightning. The Vandenborre and the Tarot of Bologna, also dating to 1780, are the oldest Tarots I have been able to find that portray lightning in a way somewhat recognizable to us moderns, as zigzag lines.

Vandenborre, Bologna (both 1780)

Even the Vandenborre portrayal is a little odd, though. Note the petal-like tongues of flame or light radiating from the cloud, which seem out of place in a thunderstorm ("dark and stormy" is a cliché for a reason) and belong more to conventional representations of the Sun. The Bolognese card seems to show the bolt coming from the Sun itself.

The Vandenborre card is clearly patterned after the much older Jacques Viéville card, and seems almost to be a modernizing "correction" of its imagery.

Jacques Viéville (c. 1650)

Look at the Viéville card. Does that look anything at all like lightning? The cloud is simply radiating light like the sun. Even the cloud itself is somewhat strange, with its reds and yellows (changed to a more realistic gray in the Vandenborre), but it does at least look like a cloud.

The Bolognese card is based on the Tarot de Marseille, where the lightning comes from the upper right corner of the card, and what it comes from is scarcely visible -- but what it visible of it certainly doesn't look at all like a cloud.

Pierre Madenié (1709), Jean-Pierre Payen (1713)

The lightning appears to be emanating from an object consisting of concentric circles, with pointed rays coming out of it -- nothing at all like cloud, and much more like the Sun. Some decks show a bit more of this object, making its nature clearer.

François Héri (1730)

In some Besançon decks, it is pretty explicitly the Sun.

Johan Jerger (1801)

Isn't that strange? Lightning obviously doesn't come from the Sun, and it's hard to imagine that any one ever thought that it did. Lightning typically occurs during rainstorms, when the sky is overcast and the Sun is not visible.

The other strange thing is the way the lightning itself is portrayed. As I've said, no cards that I know of prior to 1780 show anything we would recognize as lightning. The appearance of lightning -- a narrow, many-angled, often branching line of light -- is so distinctive that any deviation from it demands explanation. But all the oldest Tarots show it either as a diffuse radiance (Viéville), a thick column (Payen), or tongues of flame (most Marseille).

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Over at From the Narrow Desert, I recently posted "Moon River syncs," about synchronicities indirectly related to my earlier post here about the Tower, "What is the House of God?" Something I mentioned in the post made Craig Davis think of the documentary "Symbols of an Alien Sky," and he posted a link to it. He had posted the same link once before, quite some time ago, but I didn't watch most of it because I have little patience with video. This time, though, with a little nudging from the sync fairies, I watched the whole thing.

The video, by David Talbott, presents a fringe astronomical theory which is too involved to summarize here, but the important points are (a) that the planet Saturn used to be much closer to the Earth, so close that it dominated the sky and was referred to as the "sun"; and (b) that when planets are close together, streams of electrified plasma sometimes connect them, and that the vajra, keraunos, and other strange-looking traditional depictions of the thunderbolt are accurate renditions of these plasma streams.

I lack the background knowledge to pass judgment on fringe astronomical theories, but this one fits nicely with the Tarot images discussed in this post, where strange-looking lightning emanates from the "sun." This image from the video bears a certain resemblance to the lightning on the Payen card.

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After writing the above, I went to work, and received immediate confirmation from the synchronicity fairies.

My first class is a very small one, with only two students, a boy and a girl. Today the boy was wearing a shirt that said "SPACE" in English and had a silhouette of the planet Saturn. In the center of Saturn was a "lightning bolt" shape -- a modern one, just a zigzag pointed at either end.

Something like this

Just before the class, I had been thinking of the Tarot in terms of Talbott's theory, thinking that the "sun" from which the lightning was coming might actually be Saturn. Quite a coincidence, right? How often is the planet Saturn associated with lightning?

But the other coincidence was even more impressive. The other student, the girl, had brought a toy which was a little stuffed octopus with short tentacles.

Like this

During the class, she took this octopus out of her bag. She held it with the tentacles up, smooshed them together so they resembled the fingers of a hand, and said, "Teacher, look! 'Raise your hand'!"

Why was that such an impressive coincidence? Because, starting at the 57:56 mark, the "Symbols of an Alien Sky" video shows how a configuration with eight radii can look from a certain angle like a hand.

That's an extremely specific coincidence! The same thing can resemble either a hand or an eight-tentacled "octopus" depending on how you look at it. Paired with the lightning-Saturn shirt, it seems almost uncanny.

Golden Dawn astrological correspondences for the pip cards

In the Golden Dawn system, 7 of the Major Arcana are associated with astrological planets, and 12 of them with zodiac signs. For the logic behind these correspondences, see my old post "Why Waite switched Justice and Strength"; essentially, it's a slight modification of a tradition based on the Hebrew alphabet and laid out in an appendix to the Jewish mystical text Sepher Yetzirah.

Mapping the 22 Major Arcana to the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet and importing traditional Kabbalistic correspondences was a relatively straightforward operation. When it came to the Minor Arcana, though, the Golden Dawn had to create a new system more or less from whole cloth.

The aces and court cards were not given astrological correspondences per se but only elemental ones, as each suit and court rank was associated with one of the four classical elements. Pentacles and Pages mapped to Earth, Swords and Knights to Air, Cups and Queens to Water, and Wands and Kings to Fire. Thus, for example, the Ace of Pentacles was called "The Root of the Powers of Earth" and was mapped to the three Earth signs (Taurus, Virgo, and Capricorn). The Page of Pentacles was "Earth of Earth," the Knight was "Air of Earth," and so on.

There still remained the 36 non-Ace pip cards, 9 in each suit. Each of these was assigned to a particular Planet/Sign combination -- Jupiter in Capricorn, Mars in Taurus, etc. There are 84 such combinations, of which 36 were (seemingly arbitrarily) selected for representation in the Tarot.

This makes for a rather spotty system. For example, if I want to look at the cards that correspond to my birth chart, I find cards for Moon in Libra (Two of Swords), Venus in Aquarius (Five of Swords), and Mars in Pisces (Ten of Cups), but that's all. My other planets (Sun in Pisces, Mercury in Aries, Jupiter in Cancer, and Saturn in Virgo) are not represented at all.

Looking at the table above, it is clear that the correspondences are arbitrary but not random. Certain patterns are immediately obvious. Each suit has already been associated with one of the four elements, and thus with a set of three zodiac signs. Within each suit, the 2, 3, and 4 are mapped to one of those signs; the 5, 6, and 7 to another; and the 8, 9, and 10 to the remaining sign.

You can also see that, once you know the 2, the 5, and the 8 of each suit, you can derive the remaining correspondences from these. When the planets are put in their Ptolemaic order (as I have done in the chart above), the pattern is obvious. So the question is, How are the 2, the 5,  and the 8 assigned? How is it decided which maps to which of its suit's three signs, and how are the planets chosen?

Well, when you tabulate the correspondences as I have done, with both the planets and the signs in their traditional order, the pattern becomes pretty obvious. Ignore the suit signs for now and just focus on the numbers, starting with 2 at Mars in Aries. Go left, then left again, and then diagonally down-left. Left, left, down-left. Keep doing that, wrapping around to the other side when you reach the left edge of the table, and you've got all your numbers. Then add suit signs based on the elements. Fire signs are Wands, Water signs are Cups, and so on. And that's that; that's the whole system.

The only remaining question is, Why start with Mars in Aries? My guess is that it's simply because Aries is the first sign and is traditionally "ruled" by Mars.

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.

Sun in Gemini, Moon in Cancer, and . . . ?

The Sun and Moon cards of the Tarot de Marseille feature very clear references to the zodiac signs of Gemini and Cancer, respectively. I think these identifications are indisputable.

16th-century German woodcut and the Pierre Madenié Tarot of 1709

We think of Cancer as a crab, but throughout the Middle Ages (as also in ancient Babylon) it was depicted as a crayfish, like the one seen on the Moon card. This identification is strengthened by the presence of two dogs on the card -- Canis Major and Canis Minor, both of which are located within the sign of Cancer.

(A "sign," being one-twelfth of the sky, always contains several constellations -- usually not including the one for which it is named. The zodiac must have been created at a time -- the "Age of Aries" -- when each of the 12 zodiacal constellations occupied the sign named for it, but due to the precession of the equinoxes, this is no longer the case. The sign of Aries is now occupied by the constellation Pisces, so this is the Age of Pisces, to be followed by the much-anticipated dawning of the Age of Aquarius. The placement of the two Dogs in Cancer shows that the Tarot de Marseille is a product of the Age of Pisces, much younger than the zodiac. But we already knew that.)

It is equally indisputable that the two figures on the Sun card are specifically the Gemini twins. As in the woodcut, they are clad only in loincloths -- presumably the "heroic nudity" of classical depictions of Castor and Pollux, modified slightly as a concession to Christian modesty. In both the woodcut and the card, each twin is reaching out an touching the other with one hand, but there is still some distance between their two torsos; this reflects the actual layout of the constellation Gemini.

Gemini

Cancer is traditionally said to be ruled by the Moon, so illustrating the Moon card with Cancer and its canine attendants seems logical enough. Gemini, on the other hand is ruled by Mercury, while the Sun rules Leo -- so why does the Sun card so prominently feature Gemini?

The only explanation I've ever come across is that Gemini is a summer sign, covering May 20 to June 20, which is a time when it is hot and sunny. But Leo -- July 22 to August 22 -- actually covers the hottest part of the year in Europe and is ruled by the Sun. Was Gemini a third choice, resorted to only because Leo and Cancer were already claimed by Strength and the Moon?

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It occurred to me that perhaps the Tarot de Marseille as a whole might be pointing to a particular date, one on which the Sun was in Gemini and the Moon was in Cancer. That's not specific enough by itself, though. Since (from the geocentric perspective of astrology) the Moon moves through the zodiac about 13 times as fast as the Sun does, every single Sun/Moon sign combination occurs every single year. For example, in 2020 the Sun was in Gemini and the Moon was in Cancer from May 25 to 27, and every single year will have a few days like that in May or June. To pinpoint a specific year, or at least narrow it down, we need the signs of a few more planets.

The only other card I can think of that may indicate a planet-sign combination is the Star.

This card is together with the Moon and the Sun in the deck, and it has the same format: a heavenly body overhead and a terrestrial scene below suggesting one of the signs of the zodiac -- in this case, Aquarius. This match is not as perfect as the others; Aquarius is typically shown as a man pouring out one jug of water, not a woman pouring out two. However, just as the two dogs that accompany the crayfish on the Moon card cement its identity as Cancer, the bird that appears on the Star card may represent Aquila, the Eagle; this constellation is partly in Aquarius and partly in Capricorn, but its two brightest stars are both in Aquarius, and more of it would have been in Aquarius in the past.

What planet does this card put in the sign of Aquarius? Well, there is broad agreement that "the" Star is the brightest object in the sky after the Sun and Moon, the morning and the evening star -- the planet Venus -- and the presence of a naked woman with flowing golden hair (cf. the Homeric "golden Aphrodite") reinforces that identification.

Unfortunately, it is physically impossible for Venus to be in Aquarius when the Sun is in Gemini. There are three signs between Aquarius and Gemini, and each sign is 30 degrees of arc, so the angular distance between a body in Aquarius and one in Gemini is always greater than 90 degrees. The diagram below shows why Venus can never be 90 degrees from the Sun.

The circle represents the Earth's orbit around the Sun. (Yes, I know it's really an ellipse; that doesn't change anything.) Inferior planets (Mercury and Venus) are always inside that circle, and superior planets (Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and the rest) are always outside it. Anything along the red line would appear from Earth to be 90 degrees' angular distance from the Sun. The orbit of Venus, being inside the circle, can never touch that red line. In fact, looking it up now, I see that Venus's maximum elongation is 47 degrees -- so if the Sun is in Gemini, Venus can only be in Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, or Leo.

Could the Strength card indicate Venus in Leo? That seems forced. The only reason for connecting it with Venus is that it features a woman. (Venus is, apart from the Moon, the only feminine "planet.") But the Star also features a woman, and a much more Venus-like one, and in an explicitly astrological context.

I think the idea that the cards point to a specific date has to be abandoned — and the mystery of the Sun in Gemini card remains unsolved.