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.

What is the "House of God"?

Pierre Madenié (Dijon 1709), Rider-Waite (London 1909)

In the Tarot de Marseille, the card usually known in English as the Tower is called La Maison Dieu -- the House of God -- and I've never really seen a good explanation for that. Some Tarot writers have attributed it to "the anti-clericalism of the period," but I don't think that really works. The Tarot de Marseille portrays the Pope in a very conventional way, and ranks him higher than the Emperor, which hardly seems consistent with an anti-clerical stance. There is also no attempt to make the tower look at all like a church or the two figures falling from it like clergymen. And supposing you did view the institutional church as irredeemably corrupt and wished to portray it being destroyed by a bolt from heaven -- would you really label this doomed edifice "the House of God"? Our hypothetical anti-clerical cardmakers can hardly have been atheists -- the tower is being destroyed by God -- and so they could hardly have been against the church while at the same time acknowledging that it was the House of God.

(Okay, maybe they could have. Jesus both acknowledged the Temple as "my Father's house" and prophesied its destruction. But the fact remains that both the building and the people look quite secular on the card.)

I think the key is to keep in mind that the tower itself may not be the central feature of this card. Old Italian sources call it Sagitta or Fuoco -- Arrow or Fire -- clearly seeing the lightning bolt, not the tower, as the main subject of the card. (Something similar can be seen in the Star, Moon, and Sun cards, each of which features an earthly scene which, were it not for the card title, we might mistake for its primary subject.) This is confirmed by the Jacques Viéville card, which doesn't even feature a tower at all but has a tree being struck by lightning.

And what are those round things falling down from the sky, which also appear on the Marseille card? I'm typing this in my office at the English school, and just outside a student is playing a CD for a listening exercise. Immediately after I typed the above question, the CD chimed in: "What are they? They're rocks."

Are they rocks? I guess the only other real possibility would be hailstones -- the biblical combination of hail and fire (Ex. 9, Ps. 18, and elsewhere) -- but rocks are interesting because they suggest a possible referent for the title "House of God."  In his essay "Thunderbolts," collected in Fundamental Symbols, René Guénon quotes an obscure writer whom he refers to only as Auriger.

In an article published in a special number of Le Voile d'Isis devoted to the Tarot, Auriger, speaking of arcanum XVI, has written: "It seems that a relationship exists between the hail of stones which surround the thunderstruck Tower and the word Beth-el, dwelling place of the Divine, from which 'baetyl' is derived, a word by which the Semites designated meteorites or 'thunderstones.'" This connection was suggested by the name "House of God" given to this arcanum and which is in fact the literal translation of the Hebrew Beth-el.

Unable to find any information about this Auriger character, I tried looking up the name on the French-language Wikipedia, and by a strange coincidence, the first suggestion was a Wikidata article on Betyla auriger, which is apparently an extremely obscure species of tiny ant-like insect. Having just read a quote from Auriger about the meaning of baetyl, I search for his name and find it associated in a completely different context with betyla!

Anyway, whoever Auriger was, his link between baetyls (sacred meteorites), lightning, and the phrase Maison [de] Dieu checks out.

Le mot bétyle provient de l'hébreu « Beth-el » (« demeure divine » ou « Maison de Dieu »). Par la suite, ce mot fut utilisé par les peuples sémitiques pour désigner les aérolithes, appelés également « pierres de foudre ».

Baetyl means Maison de Dieu, and refers to meteorites, which are also called pierres de foudre ("thunder stones" in my translation of Guénon, but more properly "lightning stones"). In the Flemish Vandenborre Tarot (1780), the 16th trump is called La Foudre and closely resembles the Jacques Viéville card -- the main difference being that it shows flames rather than stones falling from the sky.

The Vandenborre shows lightning as fire; Viéville shows it in the form of "lightning stones," also called bétyles; and the Tarot de Marseille also shows these stones and calls the card La Maison Dieu, which is an etymological translation of bétyle. There's clearly something going on here. Is it possible that the card was called La Maison Dieu because it portrayed baetyls, and that it was the influence of this name that led the "tree" form of this card to disappear and the "tower" form to become standard?

Guénon himself goes on to reject Auriger's idea, insisting that "thunder stones" are actually something quite different.

In fact, whether it is a question of baetyls in general, or of "black stones" in particular, neither the one nor the other really have anything in common with "thunderbolts"; and it is on this point that the remark quoted at the outset is gravely mistaken, with a mistake which can be easily explained. It is indeed tempting to suppose that "lightning stones" or "thunder stones" must be stones fallen from heaven, aeroliths, but in reality they are not. We could never have guessed what they are without having learned the truth of it from peasants who, through their oral tradition, have retained the memory of it. Moreover, these peasants themselves are mistaken in their interpretation, that is, in their belief that the stones have fallen with the lightning or that they are lightning itself, which shows that the true sense of the tradition eludes them. They say, in fact, that thunder falls in two ways, "in fire" or "in stone." In the first case it sets fire, while in the second it only shatters; but they know the "thunder stones" very well, and they are mistaken only in attributing to them, because of their name, a celestial origin which they do not have and never had.

The truth is that the "lightning stones" are stones which symbolise the lightning. They are nothing other than prehistoric flint axes, just as the "serpent's egg," the Druid symbol of the World Egg, is in its material form nothing other than the fossil sea urchin. The stone axe is the stone which shatters and splits, and this is why it represents the lightning bolt.

Whether the French peasants are "mistaken" or not is neither here nor there. Certainly modern science finds no more connection between lightning and meteorites than between lightning and flint axes -- but the fact of an old French tradition about "lightning stones," whatever its scientific shortcomings, remains highly relevant when it is a question of interpreting old French symbolism. They say, in fact, that thunder falls in two ways, "in fire" or "in stone" -- isn't that an excellent explanation of the two depictions found on the Vandenborre and Viéville cards? And the fact that these "lightning stones" are called baetyls -- after Beth-El, the vision-inducing meteorite which served as Jacob's pillow -- suggests an explanation of the otherwise confusing title La Maison Dieu.