The Trumpiest trump

As I have already discussed several times on this blog, trumps 0, 4, 8, 12, 16, and 20 of the Rider-Waite Tarot each correctly predict the winner of the U.S. presidential election in the corresponding year -- 2000, 2004, 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2020. The 20th trump predicted that Trump would win that election -- which he did, of course, but with the unanticipated twist that a usurping Antipresident was sworn in in his place.

Let's review how this trump unambiguously singles out Donald Trump.

1. The angel has Trump's signature orange-blond hair.
2. There is a literal trump in the picture.
3. The trump has a flag on it. Donald Trump was born on Flag Day, June 14.
4. St. George's cross on the flag resembles a red letter T -- red for Republicans, T for Trump.
5. The word trump occurs only twice in the King James Bible (1 Cor. 15:52 and 1 Thes. 4:16), and both instances refer to the scene depicted on the card: the dead rising incorruptible at the sound of the trump. 

John Opsopaus's version of this trump for his Pythagorean Tarot provides another connection to Trump: the number 45.

In Opsopaus's version of the card -- which Paganizes its Christian subject, in keeping with the "Pythagorean" theme -- the banner of St. George is modified slightly so that it bears a three-by-three square.

Opsopaus writes,

The banner also represents the Square of Saturn for, as Kali regularly destroys the world grown corrupt, so also at the end of the Aeon, Saturn will again eat all his children to clear the boards, so to speak, for the new creation.  Thus the three-by-three format of the banner represents a magic square of order three, which is known . . . in the West as the Square of Saturn.

This is the Square of Saturn -- the three-by-three magic square.

Opsopaus writes that the Square "has enormous esoteric significance" and is "organized around the key numbers 4 and especially 5." There are 9 squares, which is 4 + 5. The sum of all the numbers in the squares is 45. The numbers in the four red squares add up to 20, which is 4 × 5; so do the numbers in the four white squares. That's three different ways in which this figure suggests the number 45. (The two 20s also suggest the year 2020, with which we have already associated this trump.)

So, in addition to all the Trump-specific features of this card, it also seems to indicate the reelection of the 45th president rather than the election of a new, 46th one.

Opsopaus gives each of his trumps a Latin motto. The one for this card is "Resurgens in arca incubatus," translated by him as, "Arising again, having been incubated in the arc" (sic; it should be ark). Resurgens perhaps suggests reelection generally, but the motto refers not to an uninterrupted continuation of power, but to a restoration after an apparent defeat and a period of dormancy and inactivity. If the usurper is removed in the end, and Trump restored, this would be most appropriate. Both Waite and Opsopaus place the incubatory "ark" in the water; Trump's own period of "incubation" is taking place primarily at a location with the very aquatic name Mar-a-Lago. Opsopaus's misspelled reference to "the arc" may also be significant, as it ties in with the recent sync themes of Joan of Arc and Noah's ark.

There are a number of ways I could deal with the apparent failure of my prediction of a Trump win in 2020. I could admit that it simply failed, either because it was all a meaningless coincidence in the first place or because, thanks to the reality of free will, "whether there be prophecies, they shall fail" (1 Cor. 13:8) -- that the Tarot, like the Redskins Rule, gave accurate predictions until one day it didn't. Or I could say that the Tarot accurately predicted the true winner of the election, the rightful president, not the usurper. What I honestly believe, though, is that the prediction was and is accurate in the most straightforward sense, and that, as impossible as it seems, Trump really will be restored to power before the Fake President has served out a full term, and probably this year. This trump's inherent imagery of restoration after apparent death, of resurgens in arca incubatus, makes me more confident in that interpretation.

As for the delay -- nearly four months and counting -- I think it has been very clarifying. My old attitude -- that 2020 happened under Trump, so Biden couldn't possibly be much worse -- has been categorically refuted. At the same time, any enthusiasm for Trump has been tempered by the confirmation that he's not really on the right side on certain key issues -- that, for instance, his only objection to the ongoing birdemic peck scam is that he's not being given credit for it. The restoration of Trump is a necessary first step, but it's only that. Samson, not David.

One of the Magician's cups is a leather dice shaker.

One of the cups on the Magician's table in the Tarot de Marseille -- the one marked A below -- was originally a dice shaker, probably a leather one.

This emerged suddenly as an unarguable intuition after many hours spent picking over the details of the Magician's table in early Tarot decks. I don't expect my own intuitions to carry much weight with anyone else, though, so here is a bit of circumstantial evidence to back me up:

The cup has a strange square shape -- vertical sides, horizontal bottom -- unlike a normal cup. In the Viéville deck it is unambiguously rectangular in shape, including the mouth. Compare the strangely shaped "cup" in Viéville to the backgammon dice cups and the medieval British dice shaker below.

Leather is brown, a color not included in the standard 8-color palette of the Tarot de Marseille (an exception is the François Héri deck of 1718, which uses it only for the Hermit's habit). What color would be used for leather, then? Well, belts and shoes are normally made of leather, so that should give us a clue. Looking at the 12 decks in Historic Tarots gallery at the Tarot of Marseilles Heritage website, 8 out of 12 use the same color (yellow) for the Magician's belt, shoes, and cup; and each of these individual elements is yellow in 10 out of 12 decks.

Incidentally, this syncs up with the Pythagorean Tarot of John Opsopaus, which, without any pretense of restoring the original TdM, patterns the Magician after the December illustration in the Chronograph of 354 and puts a rectangular purgos, or ancient Greek dice-shaker, on the table. (The picture below is from the original card drawn by Opsopaus himself; the published version, done by another artist, has a round purgos.)

Dice and the Minor Arcana: Opsopaus's geometrical approach

In his article "Tarot Divination Without Tarot Cards" (qv), John Opsopaus proposes a system of correspondences between the 56 cards of the Minor Arcana and the 56 possible rolls of three dice. This is analogous to his systems for mapping the 21 trumps to the 21 possible throws of two dice -- but is necessarily more complicated because the Minor Arcana are structured in a way that the trumps are not. While the trumps are numbered in a linear fashion, the Minor Arcana are grouped into four suits, each of which has 10 numbered (or "pip") cards and four face (or "court") cards.

Just as 21 is a triangular number, 56 is a tetrahedral one. Since 10 is also a tetrahedral number, the pips of each suit can be assigned to the smaller tetrahedron at one of the corners of the larger one. Once this is done, there remain 16 points at the center, arranged in the shape of a truncated tetrahedron, and these can be assigned to the courts.

The diagram below (which is my own work but is based closely on Opsopaus) shows how the 6th tetrahedral number can be divided into four smaller tetrahedra (red, yellow, green, blue) and a truncated tetrahedron (purple). Purple points represent court cards, and the other four colors represent the four suits of pips.

This is a great way of dealing with the pips, but the problem is that the courts are also divided into four suits, and there seems to be no natural way of quartering our central truncated tetrahedron.

One way of dealing with the courts is to associate each of the court ranks with one of the suits -- which has traditionally been done by way of mapping both the court ranks and the suits to the four classical elements. One popular system is Kings/Clubs/Fire, Queens/Cups/Water, Knights/Swords/Air, Knaves/Coins/Earth.

Notice that our truncated tetrahedron is made up of four hexagons, each of which faces one of the four pip-tetrahedra. For example, in the diagram above, the top surface of the truncated tetrahedron is a hexagon, comprising the rolls {334, 344, 335, 345, 355, 346, 356}, and facing the red tetrahedron. If we assign the red tetrahedron to the suit of Clubs, say, which is associated with the court rank of Kings, then the seven rolls on the red-facing hexagon will correspond to the seven court cards which are Clubs and/or Kings. The roll 345, which is in the center and which thus belongs exclusively to the red-facing hexagon, corresponds to the King of Clubs. Each of the remaining six rolls is shared with one of the other hexagons. For example, the rolls 355 and 356 belong to both the red-facing and the blue-facing hexagons. If we assign blue to Cups, corresponding to Queens, then one of these rolls will be the King of Cups, and the other will be the Queen of Clubs; we can perhaps assign the higher toll, 356, to the former on the grounds that a King should outrank a Queen.

These examples are just examples. I have not yet thought out which tetrahedron should correspond to which suit or any of the other details. Nevertheless, Opsopaus's basic schema seems to have a lot going for it.

Dice and the Tarot Trumps

In my post on the Magician, I mentioned that the number of cards in the Tarot deck (56 suit cards, 21 trumps, and the Fool) likely has something to do with dice, there being 56 possible rolls of three dice and 21 possible rolls of two. (This was drawn to my attention by John Opsopaus, who got it from Gertrude Moakley, according to whom it was first discovered by Maurice G. Kendall.) Although we can probably assume from the numbers that each card originally corresponded to a particular roll of the dice, no record of those correspondences exists, leaving them a matter of inference and guesswork.

Matching the Minor Arcana to dice rolls is complicated by the latter's being divided into four suits, with no obvious way of so dividing the 56 possible rolls of three six-sided dice. The Trumps are somewhat more straightforward, though, since they represent a simple sequence from 1 to 21. All that is required is to rank the 21 possible rolls of two dice from lowest to highest. These possible rolls can be represented schematically in a triangular arrangement, as below, and our task is to convert that triangle into a one-dimensional sequence. (Opsopaus calls this representation of the sixth triangular number a hexactys, by analogy with the Pythagorean tetractys.)

Obviously, "snake eyes" (two aces, 1-1) is the lowest possible roll, followed by 1-2, and these will correspond to trumps 1 and 2 (the Magician and Papess in the Marseille ordering), respectively; at the other end, the highest two trumps (the Judgment and the World) answer to 5-6 and 6-6.

Beyond that, though, several systems are possible. When two dice are rolled, there are three numbers to consider: the number of the higher die, the number of the lower die, and the total. For convenience, I will call these the High, the Low, and the Sum. The ranking of the rolls will depend on which of these three numbers takes precedence over which. Take the third trump, for instance. Should it be 2-2 or 1-3? Both rolls have a Sum of 4, but 1-3 has a higher High, and 2-2 has a higher Low. Logically, there are four possible rules we could follow:

1. Rank rolls according to the High. Among rolls with the same High, rank them according to the Low or the Sum. (The ranking will be the same either way.)
2. Rank rolls according to the Low. Among rolls with the same Low, rank them according to the High or the Sum. (The ranking will be the same either way.)
3. Rank rolls according to the Sum. Among rolls with the same Sum, rank them according to the High.
4. Rank rolls according to the Sum. Among rolls with the same Sum, rank them according to the Low.

Opsopaus considers only the first two systems, saying that they both have their merits and that he is unable to choose between them. He calls the first the Fire Hexactys because he represents it as an upright triangle (like the alchemical symbol for fire) with 1-1 at the top and the sixes at the bottom. The second is the Water Hexactys because he represents it as an inverted triangle (like the alchemical sign for water) with the aces at the top and 6-6 at the bottom. In keeping with the elemental theme, I have dubbed the third system the Air Hexactys (because, as I have diagrammed it, vertically higher rolls outrank lower ones) and the fourth, the Earth Hexactys (for the converse reason).

The diagram below gives the mappings for all four hexactyses. The numerals are the numbers of the Tarot trumps, while the dice rolls are represented by the color scheme introduced above (where red is 1, orange is 2, etc.)

How to decide which of the four systems is the best? I consider the Air Hexactys the most intuitively natural mapping. When rolling dice, it's natural to focus on the Sum first. We think "I rolled seven" first; distinguishing the various "seven" rolls (1-6, 2-5, 3-4) is secondary. I also think it's most natural to consider the High before the Low -- just as in poker, if two players both have Two Pair, we look at the value of each player's higher pair first to determine who wins.

Another thing to consider is that the bottom row of each diagram consists of "doubles," which will be rolled only half as frequently as the other rolls. It makes sense that these less-frequent trumps should be "special" in some way -- as the Magician (1-1) and World (6-6) obviously are. The unnamed 13th Arcanum ("Death") is another obviously special trump, and the Air Hexactys (uniquely) assigns it to a double, 4-4. Appropriately, 4 is the number of death in East Asian cultures, just as 13 is in the West.

Other possible considerations include the trump at the apex of the triangle (another "special" position), and which trumps are adjacent to which others in the diagram. We might also consider whether the six rolls including a given number have anything in common. I will look at these points in detail later, to see whether or not my initial preference for the Air Hexactys is confirmed.