The three-by-seven grid and the Sephiroth

I have been working with this layout of the 21 numbered trumps of the Tarot de Marseille.

I arranged the cards in three rows and seven columns for practical reasons. The dimensions of the above image are roughly 3×4, making it convenient to display the whole thing on a computer screen, to print it out on a piece of A4 paper, or to lay the cards out that way on a table. Three columns and seven rows would be a much more awkward 1×4.

Nevertheless, three columns seems more correct conceptually, as it calls to mind the three columns of the Tree of the Sephiroth. Actually, the standard 10-sephirah Tree of Life (absent Da'ath, which presumably corresponds to the Fool) arranges the sephiroth in three columns and seven vertical levels. If we overlay that on our three-by-seven grid, ten of the trumps would be mapped to sephiroth. Ther are four logical ways this could be done: We could start at the Kether level and move down or start at the Malkuth level and move up; and within each level we could go from left to right or from right to left. The most promising mapping starts at the Malkuth level and goes from right to left.

A few of these mappings are obvious "hits." Netzach means "victory," and that is the traditional meaning of the Chariot -- called, in the first known listing of the trumps, Lo carro triumphale, "the chariot of triumph." Yesod, "foundation," is mapped to the Pope. The first pope is supposed to have been St. Peter, of whom Christ said, "upon this rock I will build my church" (Matt. 16:18).

Most of the rest of the mappings are at least understandable and defensible. The first and highest sephirah, from which all the others emanate, is mapped to the Angel, called "Judgment," but representing the love of God. Chokmah, representing direct inspiration, fits well with the bolt from the sun; while Binah, representing reflective wisdom, is well symbolized by the reflected light of the Moon. Geburah, called the "left hand of God" meting out punishment, is the Devil. Tiphareth, "beauty," maps to the beautiful woman subduing a lion, and Hod, "glory," to the Hermit with his blazing lantern. At the gestalt level, the left and right columns correspond to yin/feminine and yang/masculine, as they should.

The only really jarring mapping is between Chesed, "mercy, kindness, benevolence," and Death.

The first row of the three-by-seven grid

In my last post, I discussed this layout of the 21 numbered trumps of the Tarot de Marseille.

In that post, I focused on the second row and suggested that is seven cards represent the Seven Heavenly Virtues: Prudence (the Papess), Faith (the Pope), Justice, Fortitude, Temperance, Hope (the Star), and Charity (the Angel).

The first row also seems to make sense as an orderly progression. The Magician with his wand becomes the Emperor with his scepter. We see this man with crown and scepter again the Chariot, where he directs a wheeled vehicle drawn by two animals -- horses in the classic Tarot de Marseille, but sphinxes (human-animal chimerae) in the deck of Jacques Viéville and those influenced by him. On the next card, the Wheel of Fortune, we see all the same elements: the wheel, the crowned ruler (now a sphinx himself), and the two animals or hybrid creatures -- but the ruler is no longer in control, and his position at the top is no longer stable. The wheel will turn -- there will be a revolution -- and he will fall. The next card, l'Arcane sans nom, shows the aftermath of this: a severed head on the ground, still wearing his crown. After the fall of the individual ruler, the fall of the institution itself: On the next card, a blast from the sun "decapitates" a tower, the top of which resembles a crown, and two young men fall to the ground. The final card in the series seems to show the aftermath of this: the Sun, which destroyed the tower, dominates the scene, and we see the two young men, naked, and behind them a low wall suggesting the ruins of the tower.

Beyond coincidence

My interest in the Tarot, though deep and persistent, is largely theoretical. I hardly ever do readings, though of course I know how and even seem to have a bit of a knack for it. I would estimate that I have done fewer than 20 in my entire life.

The less often you do something, of course, the less likely it is that amazing coincidences will occur in connection with that activity -- but occur they do.

One of the most amazing of these occurred fairly recently when, under circumstances on which this is scarcely the place to elaborate, I had occasion to use the Tarot to interrogate a poltergeist so violent that its antics were later to become potentially life-threatening. "Who are you?" I asked, after shuffling and all the other preliminaries, and turned over the first card: The Devil. "What do you want?" I asked, and turned over the next card: Death.

The perfect answer, right? I don't mean that the geist in question was actually "the devil" or anything; I'm talking about dramatic appropriateness. I mean, if it had been a scene in a horror movie rather than an episode in real life, those two cards -- precisely those two, as answers to those two questions -- are the ones the screenwriter or director would have chosen. And those are the two I drew, by "chance," against odds of 6,084 to 1.

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This past Saturday night, I was trying to sort out my thoughts regarding Donald Trump. Despite my brain telling me that he's not on my side, and that whether he or Biden wins out in the end should be a matter of complete indifference, I find that I am not in fact indifferent -- that I think of him as good, that I will be elated if wins and would view a Biden win as an unmitigated disaster.

Brooding over this cognitive dissonance, I ended up turning to the Rider-Waite deck -- shuffling it, asking "Who is Donald Trump?" and drawing a single card -- and that card was The Sun.

Now, this is considerably less impressive than the other reading I have described in this post. Instead of yielding the single most appropriate card, twice in a row, it yielded one of three possible "perfect" results. I had already written that Mr. Trump's 2016 and 2020 victories were predicted by The Tower and The Judgment, respectively, and had identified The Sun as "the other Trump trump" -- so any of those three would have been "perfect." The odds of drawing one of the three from a 78-card deck is 1 in 26 -- not extremely low, but just low enough to be "statistically significant" by mainstream standards.

And if the Tarot wanted to decline to pass judgment on Mr. Trump one way or the other, it could scarcely have chosen a more perfectly ambiguous card. The Sun is traditionally given a positive meaning, but my own recent meditations on it have uncovered a dark side as well. It represents, among other things, the birdemic (the sole ill) and the number 666. In discussing these two sides of The Sun, I have borrowed a concept from Superman. There is the Yellow Sun of Earth (good) and the Red Sun of Krypton (evil), and the card represents both.

And what is President Trump's characteristic color? But of course: orange.

The Reaper of Marseille

At first glance, there appears to be little to say about L'Arcane sans nom; it's just the Grim Reaper, a standard-issue symbol of death. Actually, though, it differs from the familiar symbol in significant ways. Our modern Reaper is always shrouded in a hooded cloak of black, hiding everything from view except (usually) the skull face and the skeletal fingers that clutch the scythe. (I originally wrote "his" in the preceding sentence but we must remember that death is a feminine noun in all Romance languages and is personified as such; the Grim Reaper is La Faucheuse. Éliphas Lévi calls her "that old queen of the world who is on the march always and wearies never . . . the sordid mistress of our tearful valley.") The Reaper of Marseille is naked. The other striking difference is that, while we are accustomed to seeing the Reaper holding his (sorry, "her") scythe ominously, the Tarot card shows it actually being used to cut human beings to pieces.

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Where does the original Reaper symbol come from? The Bible compares death to sowing, not to reaping. "Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit" (John 12:24).

The earliest use of "reapers" in a death-like role is in the interpretation of the parable of the wheat and the tares (Matthew 13:36-43).

Then Jesus sent the multitude away, and went into the house: and his disciples came unto him, saying, "Declare unto us the parable of the tares of the field."

He answered and said unto them, "He that soweth the good seed is the Son of man; The field is the world; the good seed are the children of the kingdom; but the tares are the children of the wicked one; The enemy that sowed them is the devil; the harvest is the end of the world; and the reapers are the angels. As therefore the tares are gathered and burned in the fire; so shall it be in the end of this world. The Son of man shall send forth his angels, and they shall gather out of his kingdom all things that offend, and them which do iniquity; And shall cast them into a furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth. Then shall the righteous shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father. Who hath ears to hear, let him hear."

The theme "the reapers are the angels" is taken up again in Revelation 14:14-20, this time with much clearer reference to death.

And I looked, and behold a white cloud, and upon the cloud one sat like unto the Son of man, having on his head a golden crown, and in his hand a sharp sickle. 

And another angel came out of the temple, crying with a loud voice to him that sat on the cloud, "Thrust in thy sickle, and reap: for the time is come for thee to reap; for the harvest of the earth is ripe."

And he that sat on the cloud thrust in his sickle on the earth; and the earth was reaped. And another angel came out of the temple which is in heaven, he also having a sharp sickle.

And another angel came out from the altar, which had power over fire; and cried with a loud cry to him that had the sharp sickle, saying, "Thrust in thy sharp sickle, and gather the clusters of the vine of the earth; for her grapes are fully ripe." 

And the angel thrust in his sickle into the earth, and gathered the vine of the earth, and cast it into the great winepress of the wrath of God. And the winepress was trodden without the city, and blood came out of the winepress, even unto the horse bridles, by the space of a thousand and six hundred furlongs.

The blood coming out of the winepress makes it clear that "the vine of the earth" bears human "grapes" and that the reaping angel is killing them. Still, though, as in Matthew, "the harvest is the end of the world." The reaping angel is not a symbol of ordinary death, but of the mass slaughter preceding the second coming. The biblical sickle -- and, even more so, the larger scythe wielded by the Tarot and post-Tarot reapers -- is a tool for cutting a swath through a field, severing hundreds of individual stems with each swing. One never speaks of "mowing down" a single victim.

Also, in the Bible the reaping is done by angels, and even by the golden-crowned Son of Man sitting on a cloud -- not by animated skeletons.

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The animated skeletons (or nearly-skeletal corpses), which come to those Death has chosen and lead them away, are a familiar theme in medieval art -- the Danse Macabre or Totentanz -- but these personifications of death do not cut down their victims with scythes but rather take them by the arm and lead them away. They are rarely armed at all, and when they are, their weapon of choice is not necessarily the scythe. The Nameless Arcanum from the Visconti-Sforza deck has a skeleton with a longbow and arrow, for instance, striking from a distance like far-darting Apollo.

One theory is that both the change from angels to corpses and the introduction of the scythe occurred as a result of the Black Death, when corpses became a familiar sight and when people were indeed being "mown down" on a scale suggestive of the Apocalypse. By the time the plague had ended and regularly scheduled programming had been resumed, the image of Death as a scythe-wielding skeleton had become a permanent fixture of the popular imagination.

It has also been suggested that the Reaper's scythe originally belonged to Father Time -- who in turn got it from the harvest god Saturn, the conflation of Cronos/Saturn with the similarly named Chronos/Time having been a common error since antiquity. The identification may have been reinforced by the myth of Saturn devouring his own children, tying in with the image of time the devourer in Ovid:

Tempus edax rerum, tuque, invidiosa vetustas,
omnia destruitis vitiataque dentibus aevi
paulatim lenta consumitis omnia morte!

Thou glutton Time, and Age that envièth,
All things you wreck, and tear them with your teeth,
Consuming all, by slow degrees, in death.

Once the hybrid figure of Father Time has been created, bearing the hourglass of Chronos and the scythe of Cronos -- what can the latter implement be for if not to cut down those whose sand has run out? From that to the Grim Reaper is but a short step.

If the Reaper did in fact develop out of Father Time, it would make the Nameless Trump a close art-historical cousin to the Hermit, whose lantern was originally an hourglass and whose earliest names were Vecchio (Old Man) and Tempo (Time) -- a bit surprising given the stark contrast between that serene old man and this ghoulish hacker-to-bits!

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The image of the Reaper actually using her scythe -- and not only to kill but to dismember -- is, as far as I know, original to the Tarot and does not exist in pre-Tarot allegories of Death.

For me, the severed body parts that litter the ground are a key part of the meaning of this trump, and I have commented on them before, in relation to Marcus Aurelius's advice to aspiring nihilists Stoics to "look at the individual parts and move from analysis to indifference." Death is fundamentally a matter of severing connections, dissociating parts, de-composing -- which is why analysis can kill.

Dismembering the World

To acquire indifference to pretty singing, to dancing, to the martial arts: Analyze the melody into the notes that form it, and as you hear each one, ask yourself whether you’re powerless against that. That should be enough to deter you.

The same with dancing: individual movements and tableaux. And the same with the martial arts.

And with everything — except virtue and what springs from it. Look at the individual parts and move from analysis to indifference.

Apply this to life as a whole.

— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 11.2

What can we call this process of disassembling a melody into individual notes? Decomposition, of course! And if you wanted a picture to illustrate this philosophy of life, you couldn’t do much better than this:

(What a perfect image! Even the green grass has been “analysed” into its constituent primaries.)

Marcus’s obsession with atoms. “Or perhaps it’s all just atoms” — meaning, to him, meaningless. If a thing has parts, the parts are real and the whole is not.

And how arbitrary is that “except virtue and what springs from it”?

Could you love a severed hand or head or foot or bone? “Apply this to life as a whole.”

But I don’t find the first word of Marcus’s argument convincing. Nor the second, nor the third . . . and you can see where that gets us.