The orientation of ROTA

I found this diagram in Éliphas Lévi's Rituel de la Haute Magie, included apropos of nothing, and with no caption or explanation given.

I don't feel like searching through Agrippa or whoever for the meaning of the various sigils around the edge of the picture, but the main theme is a familiar one: the wheel with ROTA/TARO written around its circumference, a symbol created by Guillaume Postel and much used by Lévi. The four suits of the Tarot also figure in the diagram. The wand (on the right) has the form of a double-headed Wenchang pen, as seen in the Rider-Waite deck, apparently yet another instance of Lévi's influence on Waite. The sword and cup are easily identifiable, and I suppose that the suit of coins is, as in Waite, represented by the "pentacle" -- which, as Lévi uses the word, need not take the form of a five-pointed star. (To break the connection with the numerical prefix penta-, Lévi prefers the nonstandard spelling pantacle, an innovation later followed by Aleister Crowley, with whom it is now primarily associated.)

What caught my attention was the apparent mismatch between the four suits and the four letters. The letter O is paired with the sword, but it resembles a coin. A sword has the form of a cross and should therefore be paired with T. The A used here by Lévi, like the one that appears on the Rider-Waite Wheel of Fortune card, has a flat or rounded top rather than a pointed one, so that when it is turned upside down it looks like a cross-section of a cup with some liquid in it. That leaves the letter R to be paired with the wand, which it does not particularly resemble. However, Spanish and Italian versions of that suit -- a heavy-headed club or mace, not a wand -- do suggest the Greek letter P, and the Sicilian asso di mazze even bears a certain resemblance to an R.

In an arrangement independently arrived at by Whitley Strieber in his book The Path, Lévi puts the cup at the bottom, the coin/pentacle at the top, the sword on the left, and the wand/club on the right. If we rotate our ROTA 90 degrees to the right, the upside-down A (which resembles a cup) will be lined up with the cup, and the O with the coin. Unfortunately, the sword has to be switched with the wand to make those correspondences work.

However, if we rotate the wheel again, so that the A is at the top, we can keep the Lévi/Strieber orientation of the suits. O works for the cup since it is round, and A (which in this case should be written in the usual angular fashion) matches the pentacle. Another word for a pentagram is pentalpha because it consists of five letter A's in different orientations. This mapping also means that the word ROTA gives the suits in their conventional order: wands, cups, swords, pentacles.

All that having been said, I still find that the orientation I prefer is the one with R at the top, matching both the Chrismon of Saint Ambrose (discussed in relation to the Wheel of Fortune here) and the cruciform halo of Christ in the Basilique Saint-Sernin de Toulouse (discussed in relation to the World card here).

(Note that the Christ carving shown is actually a modern one by Jonathan Pageau, based on the original in Toulouse. I chose it because the three letters are more clearly legible than they are in available photos of the original carving. Note also that the letter that looks like W is actually a lowercase omega, corresponding to O.)

In fact, of the four possible orientations of the ROTA, the only one I can't think of any good reason for is the one actually used by Lévi and Waite, with T at the top!

The staurogram, the eight-spoked wheel, and the Wheel of Fortune

In my recent post on Éliphas Lévi's influence on the Wheel of Fortune Tarot card, I discuss the staurogram, consisting of the Greek letters TAPΩ, its probable influence on the image of Christ seen in the Basilique Saint-Sernin de Toulouse, and its incorporation by Lévi into his eight-spoked "Wheel of Ezekiel."

Since writing that post, I have discovered the Chrismon of Saint Ambrose (engraved on one of the walls of Milan Cathedral), which combines the staurogram (TP) and Labarum (XP) into a single glyph, resembling an eight-spoked wheel.

The eight-spoked wheel was itself an early Christian symbol, representing, like the better known "Jesus fish," the Greek word ΙΧΘΥΣ ("fish"), used as an acronym for Ἰησοῦς Χριστὸς Θεοῦ Υἱὸς Σωτήρ ("Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior").

This confirms me in my opinion that, given that Lévi wanted to incorporate a Latinized staurogram into his Wheel of Fortune, where it could be read either as ROTA or as TAROT, he really should have put R at the top of the wheel rather than T. But the real question is whether Lévi had any business identifying Christ and the cross with the Wheel of Fortune in the first place. The Wheel is a symbol of futility and meaninglessness, of endless repetition, of rising only to fall again. What has any of that to do with Christ?

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In his comments on the Chrismon of Saint Ambrose in La bolla di Maria (available in Italian here; see p. 15), Pietro Mazzucchelli connects the eight spokes of the Chrismon with the eight Beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount. We can find an exact analogue in the Buddhist Dharmachakra -- an eight-spoked wheel  representing the Noble Eightfold Path that leads to enlightenment.

This wheel is a basic Buddhist symbol -- so much so that, in countries where Nazicentrism has rendered the swastika unacceptable, it has become the standard iconic representation of Buddhism, taking its place alongside such icons as the cross, the crescent, and the star of David.

The strange thing is that the wheel, in the form of the Bhavachakra or Wheel of Life, is also the standard Buddhist symbol of samsara -- the endless, meaningless cycle of birth, death, and rebirth from which Buddhism is meant to save us. Can we see in Lévi's conceit a Christianization of the same concept -- the transformation of a symbol of futility and nihilism into a symbol of salvation from the same? In the cross itself, a symbol of death has become a symbol of victory over death; could the Wheel be an extension of the same idea?

A wheel (when not mounted on a fixed stand, as it sometimes is in the Tarot) represents the transformation of cyclical repetition into forward, linear motion. As the wheels of a chariot turn, the chariot itself moves forward. 

The Wheel of Fortune: Éliphas Lévi

While Éliphas Lévi did not create a Tarot deck, His influence on the Rider-Waite version of the Wheel of Fortune card is so substantial that he deserves a post of his own.

In Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie (published 1854-56, translated by Waite in 1896 under the title Transcendental Magic), Lévi makes the connection between the words tarot and rota (Latin for "wheel," as in rota fortunae) and associates them with the Tetragrammaton:

The incommunicable axiom [on which the Great Magical Arcanum depends] is enclosed kabalistically in the four letters of the Tetragram, arranged in the following manner: In the letters of the words AZOTH and INRI written kabalistically; and in the monogram of Christ as embroidered on the Labarum, which the Kabalist Postel interprets by the word ROTA, whence the adepts have formed their Taro or Tarot, by the repetition of the first letter, thus indicating the circle, and suggesting that the word is read backwards (Transcendental Magic, Book 1, pp. 19-20).

The above text is accompanied by the following illustration:

In the center we can see the Tetragrammaton -- God's name in Hebrew, usually rendered Jehovah or Yahweh in English -- flanked by INRI (for Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum, "Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews") and by a variant of the Labarum made up of the Greek letters TAPΩ, corresponding to the Latin TARO. (I don't know where we are supposed to see the word AZOTH.)

The Labarum of Constantine properly consists of the Greek letters XP (the first two letters of Χριστός, "Christ"), often accompanied by A and Ω ("Alpha and Omega" being a title applied to Christ in the book of Revelation). Lévi's variant, with T instead of X, can hardly be called "the monogram of Christ," but it turns out to be a genuine Christian symbol, known as the staurogram because it was originally used to abbreviate the Greek word σταυρός, "cross" -- shortened to στρός, with the T and P written as a ligature. Like the XP ligature of the Labarum, the TP ligature was later often accompanied by A and Ω. The image below was found on a Catholic website having nothing to do with Lévi or the Tarot.

With only a single T, this gives us taro -- the root vegetable, not the card game. This is where Lévi is, as he indicates, indebted to Guillaume Postel, who in his Key of Things Kept Secret from the Foundation of the World described a complicated symbol which involved writing the word ROTA (and HOMO, and DEUS, and various other things) around the circumference of a circle. Lévi noticed that when ROTA is thus written, one could just as well begin with the T as the R and read TARO, after which we would arrive again at the T, giving us TAROT. (Despite what Lévi implies, Postel himself did not connect his ROTA with either the staurogram or the Tarot. See details here.)

Incidentally, the staurogram, with A on the left, Ω on the right, and P at the top, sheds some light on something that has perplexed me for a long time: the letters on the cruciform halo of the Maiestas Domini image at the Basilique Saint-Sernin de Toulouse (a sculpture I discuss extensively in my post on the World card). Cruciform halos generally bear the letters  Ὁ ὬΝ ("the existing one"), but this one -- uniquely, so far as I know, and I've looked at a lot of Maiestas Domini images -- bears the letters A, Ω, and R -- a strange mixture of the Greek and Latin alphabets.

Letters enlarged for clarity

Now I assume that the halo is based on the staurogram, with the cross itself representing T. The P has been Latinized as R, but the Ω has not; its significance is that it is the last letter of the alphabet ("Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end"), so changing it to O is out of the question. It is interesting that this particular Maiestas Domini, which I consider to have been uniquely influential in the development of the Tarot, should (also uniquely) include the letters TARΩ in its design.

Lévi's La clef des grands mystères contains this representation of the Wheel of Fortune.

Aleister Crowley's English translation of the Clef adds a note describing the figure thus:

It is a type of the Wheel of Fortune. The wheel itself is erected on a wooden post, and has a crank affixed to the hub. There is no image of Fortuna to turn it. The base of the post is held by a blunt double crescent on the ground, rounded horns slightly up and in parallel like a hot-dog bun. Two nosed serpents issue from the base, cross once and arch toward the post just below the wheel. The wheel is double, having an outer and an inner ring with eight spokes running through both rims. The spokes have a circular expansion with central hole inside and a bit short of the inner rim. These spokes appear to be riveted to the inner rim. At the top of the wheel is the Nemesis seated on a platform as a sphinx with a sword: head cloth, stern male face and woman’s breasts, winged. The sword is hilt to wheel and up to left. 'ARCHEE' is written over the wing to the left. Rising on the right of the wheel is a Hermanubis or variation of Serapis: Dog’s head, human body, carries a caduceus half hidden behind head and wheel, legs before wheel. 'AZOTH' is written above the head of this figure. A demon reminiscent of Proteus descends the wheel on the left. His head is bearded and horned, his legs are tentacular and finned. He carries a trident below. 'HYLE' is written below his head.

Hyle of course means "matter," while Archée (Archeus) and  Azoth are alchemical terms. Archée is defined at this site (in French) as "the immaterial principle of organic life, different from the intelligent soul" -- in other words, something like what is normally called an "astral body." Azoth, which normally refers to the element mercury, is used by Lévi to refer to "the Universal Magical Agent" or "Universal Medicine,"which he explains as follows: "The Azoth or Universal Medicine is, for the soul, supreme reason and absolute justice; for the mind, it is mathematical and practical truth; for the body it is the quintessence, which is a combination of gold and light. In the superior or spiritual world, it is the First Matter of the Great Work, the source of the enthusiasm and activity of the alchemist. In the intermediate or mental world, it is intelligence and industry. In the inferior or material world, it is physical labor." In other words, it can be just about anything, and the precise nature of its relationship to matter and to Archeus is unclear.

It terms of its apparent influence on Waite, the important things to notice about this image are: (1) the striped Egyptian headdress on the sphinx, replacing the traditional crown; (2) the dog-headed man Hermanubis, replacing the dog; and (3) in place of the monkey, a bearded demon with "tentacular" legs, connected by Crowley with Proteus but equally resembling traditional representations of Typhon.

Waite was influenced even more directly by the treatment of the Wheel in The Magical Ritual of the Sanctum Regnum, "translated from the MSS of Éliphaz Lévi and edited by W. Wynn Westcott, M.B., Magus of the Rosicrucian Society of England" and published after Lévi's death, in 1896. It features illustrations which are "facsimile copies of Lévi's own drawings," and there are notes in Westcott's own voice at the end of each chapter. The illustration we are interested in is this one, accompanying a chapter which is called "The Wheel of Fortune" but actually discusses only the "Wheel of Ezekiel."

Again we have an eight-spoked wheel, and the word ROTA/TARO is written along its circumference, interspersed with cursive writing not notable for its legibility. (Reading clockwise from the top, I believe it reads "T électricité A chaleur R magnétisme O lumière" -- meaning, as I suppose is fairly obvious, "electricity, heat, magnetism, light." It is not clear what these terms, borrowed from physics, have to do with anything.)

I would have rotated the word 180 degrees, with R at the top, O on the right, T at the bottom, and A on the left -- corresponding to the orientation of the staurogram and of the Saint-Sernin sculpture. This orientation would also make ROTA the most natural reading, with TARO as a hidden second meaning, rather than the reverse. Furthermore, the letter A, turned so that its point is to the left, exactly resembles the Phoenician aleph -- which means "ox" and thus corresponds to the ox which occupies that position on the Wheel.

The design also features the four letters of the Tetragrammaton and the four living creatures of Ezekiel. (The living creatures are arranged according to the vision of Ezekiel and the camp of Israel, rather than in the astrological arrangement commonly used in the World card. See details here.) The other characters on the Wheel are alchemical symbols, three of which represent the tria prima of Paracelsus: sulfur, mercury, and salt.

These are the three primes, but the Wheel design calls for a fourth -- so Lévi, for reasons I do not pretend to understand, chose the astrological sign for Aquarius, sometimes used in alchemy to represent water, though an inverted triangle is more usual. I am also unsure as to why the sulfur glyph has been rotated 90 degrees but the one for salt has not.

Westcott's notes, appended to Lévi's text on the Wheel of Ezekiel, describe the card in question as follows: "The Tarot Trump marked 10 is named the Wheel of Fortune; the card shows a wheel supported on two upright beams. Hermanubis stands on one side, and Typhon on the other; above is the Sphynx holding a sword in its Lion's jaws. [. . .] This key is figured by Lévi in his Clef des grands mystères, page 117."

Although he references the illustration in the Clef, reproduced above, Westcott's description differs in several particulars from the published version of that illustration. He describes the wheel being supported on two beams rather than one, says the figures on the sides are standing beside the wheel rather than clinging to it, and has the sphinx holding a sword in its jaws rather than its hand. (This last is particularly strange, since human-headed sphinxes don't generally have lion's jaws! He must have meant to write "claws.") He also identifies the Hyle figure as Typhon rather than Proteus, an identification Waite would later follow.

Saint-Sernin Basilica, the Tarot of Marseilles, and Whitley Strieber

 In his book about tarot cards, The Path, Whitley Strieber says there is only one bit of evidence that tarot predates the late fourteenth century, “but it is an important one”:

This is an 11th century stone sculpture at the St. Cernin Basilica near Toulouse, of the 21st card in the Major Arcana, known as the World. . . . The sculpture is complete in every detail. This is not an ‘early’ card, but a fully evolved image, suggesting that at least this one card— which contains the whole path and all the other cards in its symbolism— was already completely formed, and therefore that the whole of the path that leads to it must have been known (p. 21).

This claim interested me enough that I did what Strieber himself obviously didn’t do: I looked up the sculpture in question to see for myself. Here is the Saint-Sernin sculpture can be found here and the Jodorowsky-Camoin World card (the one used by Strieber).

“Complete in every detail” is, to put it charitably, a bit of an exaggeration. Here are some of the ways the sculpture differs from the card:

• The central figure is male (Christ), not female as in the tarot card.
• He is fully clothed in an ankle-length robe, not naked as in the tarot card.
• He is seated on a throne, not dancing as in the tarot card.
• He holds a book reading “Pax vobis” (Peace be with you) and raises his other hand in benediction, rather than holding a wand and a bottle as in the tarot card.
• He wears a halo, absent in the tarot card, marked with a cross and the letters alpha, omega, and R. (Why R? I don’t know.)
• The mandorla (almond-shaped nimbus) is a precise geometric shape, not a wreath of leaves as in the tarot card.
• The angel is on the right (our right, Christ’s left) and the eagle on the left; vice versa in the tarot card.

The World card and the Saint-Sernin sculpture are certainly similar images, and it’s undeniable that must be some connection between them; but it is just as undeniable that, contrary to what Strieber says, the sculpture is an “early card” (or an early version of the image found on the card) and is not “complete in every detail.” And even if it were complete, does the World really contain “the whole path and all the other cards in its symbolism”? Where are the Lovers? The Devil? The Lightning-struck Tower? The World might “include” all these in some broad conceptual sense, but in its actual iconography? Can we honestly say that this image only makes sense as part of the 22-image set we call the Major Arcana?

Actually, the Saint-Sernin sculpture belongs to a well-known type of image, called a “Christ in majesty,” which can be found in many other churches, in illuminated manuscripts, and so on. A Google image search will turn up many examples. It is a perfectly ordinary bit of Christian iconography, representing Jesus Christ as described in the fourth chapter of Revelation, and can be fully understood without reference to tarot cards. Like many other images that predate tarot — depictions of the pope and of the devil, allegories of justice, temperance, and love, etc. — it sheds some light on the origins of the tarot images but provides no evidence for the antiquity of the tarot tradition itself.

If the Saint-Sernin sculpture is so far from being a tarot card “complete in every detail,” why does Strieber so describe it? It doesn’t appear that he’s being deliberately misleading; he just neglected to check up on the claims made by his source — which, thanks to the unusual spelling Cernin, was easy for me to find. Philippe Camoin, the cardmaker who created the deck Strieber uses, wrote a short article called “Ancient Tarots” which seems no longer to be available on his website. The following is from Camoin’s article; I’ve bolded the phrases which were lifted word-for-word by Strieber.

Remarkably, one can find at the St Cernin Basilica near Toulouse a stone sculpture from the 11th century, that looks exactly like Arcanum XXI.

Strieber’s bit about it being a complete, “fully evolved image” appears to be a riff on Camoin’s ill-advised use of the word “exactly.” Camoin, in turn, cites an article in French by Alain-Jacques Bougearel, which I have not been able to find and read.

As a maker of Marseilles-style tarot cards, Camoin has a vested interest in promoting the idea that tarot originated in southern France (rather than, as most tarot historians agree, northern Italy), so his willingness to fudge the evidence a bit is at least understandable. Less understandable is Whitley Strieber’s failure to perform even the most basic fact-checking. (It took me about 15 minutes in a public library to track down a high-quality photo of the basilica sculpture; it’s not that hard.) His credulous repeating of Camoin’s claim strikes me as an uncharacteristic failure of curiosity. Wasn’t he intrigued? Didn’t he want to see this sculpture? Apparently not.