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 love of God in the Tarot

If the 21 numbered trumps of the Tarot de Marseille are laid out as below, in seven columns of three, meaningful patterns emerge.

The first thing to notice is that the three virtue cards -- Justice, Strength (originally called Fortitude), and Temperance -- are together in the center of the diagram. Many commentators have pointed out that only three of the four Cardinal Virtues are explicitly included in the Tarot and have tried to associate one of the other trumps (usually the Hermit) with the fourth, Prudence. The Tarot was designed by medieval Christians, though, not by ancient Greeks, and for them there were seven virtues: the four Cardinal Virtues plus the Theological Virtues of Faith, Hope, and Charity. In our table above, the three explicitly named virtues are at the center of a row of seven cards, where they are flanked by the Pope (an obvious symbol of Faith) and the Star (a conventional symbol of Hope). That leaves the Papess and Judgment for the remaining two virtues, Prudence and Charity. The Papess is a good fit for Prudence, since that virtue has sometimes been personified as a crowned woman with a book.

That leaves the Judgment to represent Charity, which is admittedly not an obvious match. Charity, often described as unconditional love, seems the very opposite of judgment; and indeed Din ("judgment") is placed opposite Chesed ("lovingkindess") on the Tree of Life. In fact, though, Judgment is not the trump's original name, and the last judgment is not what it portrays. The earliest name of the 10th trump is The Angel, and the scene it depicts is the resurrection of the dead at the last trump, as described by St. Paul in two of his epistles. Neither passage makes any reference to a judgment.

Here is 1 Corinthians 15:51-57.

Behold, I shew you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.

For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality. So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory.

O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? The sting of death is sin; and the strength of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.

This is not a judgment at all. On the contrary, Paul implies that resurrection is possible because the Law, which makes us guilty sinners worthy of death, has been superseded.

The second "trump" passage is 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18.

But I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep, that ye sorrow not, even as others which have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him. For this we say unto you by the word of the Lord, that we which are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord shall not prevent them which are asleep.

For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.

Wherefore comfort one another with these words.

Again, nothing about judgment -- just a comforting promise that we will be reunited with our dead and with the Lord.

The resurrection of the dead is actually the perfect expression of "charity," or the love of God -- the noun form, in the original Greek, of the verb used in John 3:16-17.

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved.

Resurrection is love. "We know that we have passed from death unto life, because we love the brethren. He that loveth not his brother abideth in death" (1 Jn. 3:14). What we do not love, we are content to let perish. The resurrection is the love of God finding even in such corrupt and imperfect being as ourselves something worthy of being raised to immortality. Those who trust in the love of God can say with David, "my flesh also shall rest in hope, for thou wilt not [i.e. art unwilling to] leave my soul in hell" (Ps. 16:9-10).

St. Paul's discussion of the resurrection in 1 Cor. 15:41-42 also contains something potentially relevant to the part of the Tarot deck we are discussing:

There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars: for one star differeth from another star in glory. So also is the resurrection of the dead. It is sown in corruption; it is raised in incorruption.

The sequence Star, Moon, Sun is invariant in all known historical orderings of the trumps, from Ferrara to Bologna to Marseille -- a fact that has puzzled commentators because it seems at odds with Medieval cosmology. The lowest of the heavenly spheres was that of the Moon, followed by the Inferior Planets, the Sun, the Superior Planets, and finally the Fixed Stars. Placing the Moon between the Stars and the Sun makes no sense -- and yet that is what we find in 1 Corinthians, apparently because Paul is ordering the heavenly bodies not by their location in the cosmos but by their brightness or "glory" as seen from Earth.

Star, Moon, Sun, Judgment, World. If we assume this is a continuation of Paul's scheme, then the Judgment and the World should represent two even higher degrees of glory, brighter than the Sun. The card called the World evolved from representations of the Throne of God, so that checks out. The Judgment, then, is a luminary brighter than the Sun and nigh unto the Throne of God. Astronomically, this would be Kolob, but its deeper meaning can only be "the love of God, which sheddeth itself abroad in the hearts of the children of men; . . . the most desirable above all things" (1 Ne. 11:22). Some old decks make it the highest trump of all, higher even than the World.

If this identification of the seven virtues is correct, their order in the Tarot is: Prudence, Faith, Justice, Fortitude, Temperance, Hope, Charity. This is consistent with Cicero's ordering of the four cardinal virtues in De Inventione and Paul's ordering of the theological virtues in 1 Cor. 13.

Reading for 2022

On the morning of January 4, 2022, I decided to do a reading for the year ahead. Not having any cards handy, I did this in a rather unorthodox way: I put a list of the 78 Tarot cards into random.org's list randomizer, and for each card I wanted to draw, I concentrated on the question and clicked "randomize," and took the first card on the randomized list. To draw the next card, I didn't take the second card on the list, but rather clicked "randomize" again and took the first. As a result, it was possible to draw the same card more than once, and in fact this happened twice.

I decided to look at a few different aspects of the United States in 2022, and I drew two cards for each of these: one for the start of the year, and one for the end -- the idea being that comparing the two would suggest what if any changes would take place over the course of the year.

I'm not entirely sure why I decided to do this, and even less sure why anyone else would want to read about it, since my credibility as a Tarot reader is essentially zero at this point. Readers of this blog will know that I mainly write about the history and symbolism of the cards and rarely ever make Tarot-based predictions -- the one exception being my extremely confident prediction that Trump would win the 2020 election. I made this prediction before the election, when it seemed that I was just stating the obvious, and then I stood by it for months afterwards, insisting that, no matter how increasingly impossible it appeared, somehow the election results would be reversed and Trump would end up back in the White House after all. The message of the cards was just so unmistably clear!

I suppose this could in principle still happen -- my prediction won't be definitively falsified until the 2024 election, after which even if Trump comes back, it won't be as the winner of the 2020 election -- but I'm not holding my breath. I could also try to defend myself with special pleading -- saying for example that I had predicted the true winner of the election, not the usurper who actually took power -- but I'm not going to do that. To all appearances, my prediction simply failed. Given free will, that happens. "Whether there be prophecies, they shall fail" (1 Cor. 13:8). Let's see if I have any better luck this time.

Here's my spread:

A few things immediately jump out here. I have written extensively about the link (originally proposed by Richard Arrowsmith) between the Sun card and the birdemic, and the Sun appears in this spread as one of the two cards for the birdemic. My probably-failed prediction about the 2020 election was entirely based on the extensive links between the Judgement card and Trump, and that card appears here under Trump. Finally, I interpreted a variant of the Strength card as Harris controlling Biden, and the Strength card appears here under Harris. So that's a pretty impressive set of coincidences.

How impressive? The Sun is the only card I have associated with the birdemic, the chance of at least one of the two birdemic cards being the Sun is 2.548%. I have associated two cards, the High Priestess and Strength, with Biden and Harris. The chance of at least one of the four Biden/Harris cards being one of those is 9.869%. I have associated two cards, Judgement and the Sun, with Trump. The chance of at least one of the two Trump cards being one of those is 5.062%. The chance of all three of these things occurring in a single spread is the product of the three percentages given, or 0.01273% -- approximately 1 in 7,856.

Now for my tentative interpretation of the details of the spread.

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Birdemic

The Four of Swords often indicates rest and recuperation, corresponding to the widespread sense at the beginning of the year that the birdemic is winding down and will soon be over. The design of course also suggests death, and it is impossible in this context not to notice the resemblance of the swords to syringes.

It's not really over, though, because at the end of year we have -- the birdemic! In particular, the Sun card depicts the beginning of the birdemic, coming out of China and going forth "conquering and to conquer" (Rev. 6:2). There is widespread expectation that birdemic panic will be ginned up again in the lead-up to the midterm elections in 2022, or perhaps is will be a new phantom menace coming out of China.

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Biden

Biden begins the year as the Page of Wands, whose quarterstaff and feathered cap suggest Robin Hood. The main point, though, is that a page -- a personal attendant of a person of rank -- is not in any way a leader. As is obvious to everyone, Biden is barely even enough of a leader to qualify as a "figurehead"; he is taking orders from someone. A "page of wands" is literally a servant to a wand or staff, and Biden has said before that he's going to "get in trouble with my staff" for taking unapproved questions from the press. "As if the rod should shake itself against them that lift it up, or as if the staff should lift up itself, as if it were no wood" (Isa. 10:15).

The year ends with the Five of Wands -- a chaotic brawl. This same card appears at the end of the year for Trump, suggesting that the chaotic conflict depicted will be between Biden and Trump.

The good news, from Biden's point of view, is that he's apparently still alive at the end of the year!

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Harris

The first card for Kamala Harris is the Devil. Her middle name is Devi, so even the name of the card is a hit! One obvious interpretation is that Harris begins 2022 as "the devil" -- that is, as an extremely unpopular person no one in either party likes. A closer look at the image on the Rider-Waite card suggests a more interesting, reading, though.

Suppose we identify Harris not with the devil himself but with the only female figure on this card. Since it seems obvious that neither Biden nor Harris is really running the country, the devil figure in the background represents whoever or whatever is. The two chained figures, then, would be Biden and Harris -- naked to indicate that they are a public embarrassment. If you ignore the devil figure, Harris is standing on Biden's right, indicating that (to those who can't see what's really going on) he is the leader and she is his "right hand man." In  fact, though, the devil is the central figure and thus the leader, Harris is his "right hand man," and Biden is in the less important "left hand man" position. Furthermore, the devil appears to be using his firebrand (French brandon) to set fire to Biden's tail! I have mentioned many times my persistent premonitions regarding Biden and "spontaneous human combustion"; one dream even had people saying "Joe Biden didn't spontaneously combust" in much the same way they say "Jeffrey Epstein didn't kill himself." Whatever is to be made of this puzzling theme, this card would seem to reinforce it.

The Harris figure's own tail ends in a bunch of grapes, and this made me think of an old sync post which I had not connected with Harris at all at the time: "Vineyard shouting with the bee whom hump" (sic). Hump suggests camel and thus Kamala. Bee is interesting because of the other Harris card in this spread, Strength. As I have said elsewhere, the Strength card is a "female Samson" -- that is, it was originally a picture of Samson killing a lion, but the figure was later misinterpreted as female because of the long hair. The only real "female Samson" -- that is, the only woman ever to fill Samson's role of biblical "judge" -- was Deborah, whose name is the Hebrew word for "bee." The Hebrew name is actually more accurately transliterated as Devorah -- so the nickname Debbie would be equivalent to Devi. Furthermore, the word-salad title "Vineyard shouting with the bee whom hump" is from a Google search result for a video of a sermon about the Hindu goddess Durga, referred to in the sermon as Mata, "Mother." Kamala Devi Harris is named after a Hindu goddess (Kamala is an epithet of Lakshmi), and she goes by Momala even though she is not a mother. Durga, according to Wikipedia, "is worshipped as a principal aspect of the mother goddess Devi," and "is often depicted as a beautiful woman, riding a lion or tiger" (like Magna Mater in Rome). A woman riding a lion is obviously related to the image on the Strength card, and the tiger is interesting because the Year of the Tiger -- and thus of Durga? -- will begin on February 1, 2022.

If the year begins with Harris in a position of weakness -- chained and subjected to the devil -- it ends with her in a position of strength. Where the Devil card has three figures, Strength only has two, and the woman is in control. Which of the figures on the Devil card does the lion correspond to, then -- the chained man (Biden) or the devil (the shadowy power behind the throne)? In my post "Strength in the Grateful Dead 'Ripple' video," I discuss a variant of this card in which the woman is black and is controlling a wolf rather than a lion; I identify the black woman with Harris, and the wolf with Biden (whose horoscope prominently features the constellation Lupus).

Alternatively, the lion could correspond to "the devil, as a roaring lion" (1 Pet. 5:8) and thus to whoever is controlling both Biden and Harris at the beginning of the year. There is widespread speculation that the power behind the throne is Barack Obama, who is a Leo. It is intereting to note that the biblical Deborah controls a man named Barak. I have also floated the idea here that Trump, another leonine figure and a popular "devil," is actually the power behind the throne.

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Trump

Trump begins the year with the Judgement. As I have already detailed many times on this blog, the angel on that card unambiguously represents Trump, encoding his name, his birthday (June 14, Flag Day), and even his trademark orange/blond hair. The image shows that Trump begins the year as quite popular (though his supporters bear a disturbing resemblance to gray "NPCs") but also "in limbo," suspended between heaven and earth, his status unclear. He has no contact with the ground, suggesting that he is increasingly out of touch with his base -- as can be seen in his recent tone-deaf shilling for the pecks, causing his own supporters to boo him.

As mentioned above, the year ends with Trump and Biden locked in some sort of chaotic combat -- with staves, not swords; a brawl, not a war. Is it possible that, after all this time, the result of the 2020 election will be challenged in a meaningful way, so that the year will end with it still up in the air? It can be argued that, since Biden is going to be in office for a while, it is in Trump's best interest to let him serve two years and make his comeback as soon after January 20, 2023, as possible. That way, depending on how the courts interpret the 22nd Amendment, Trump may get a 10-year presidency -- being elected twice, in 2016 and 2024, plus serving just under two years of a term to which someone else was elected (Biden in 2020). I don't think this is likely to work, but it does seem likely that Trump will give it a try and may intensify his efforts to challenge the election around the end of this year.

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Cabal

By "Cabal," I mean Them -- the demonic Establishment, spiritual wickedness in high places. They begin the year with godlike power over the whole World and end it as -- the Knight of Wands? I'm not sure what to make of this, except that it clearly seems to be a step down from the World. There's also an obvious connection to Biden as Page of Wands. A knight is a page's master. The two cards also feature the same background scene of a desert landscape with three mounds or pyramids.

The most optimistic reading would be to note that the Knight of Wands traditionally represents departure or flight, and to see Cabal "on the run" by the end of the year. I lack such optimism, to put it mildly.

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Christianity

Nothing very clear here. The Queen of Cups often means "loyal but stupid; loving, but overlooking the obvious" -- all of which I suppose could be called a fair description of organized Christendom's pathetic loyalty to the satanic System.

The King of Pentacles -- "dogmatic, materialistic, doing only what is expected of him" -- strikes an even bleaker note at the end of the year. We might note that many of the themes from the Devil card -- horns, grapes, a pentagram -- reappear on the King of Pentacles. It doesn't look as if we can expect any mass Christian awakening this year.

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Daily life

Absolutely unchanged! The before and after pictures are the same: Queen of Swords -- representing loneliness, isolation, and pointless cruelty. 

Alchemical birds in the Tarot

There are several symbolic sets or schemata which the Tarot incorporates into its imagery, but incompletely. For example, a few of the signs of the zodiac are clearly alluded to, but only a few. There are trumps for three of the four classical virtues -- Justice, Fortitude (so in Italian; Force in French and Strength in English), and Temperance -- but none for Prudence. The three virtues are even regularly spaced -- 8, 11, 14 -- so that we would expect Prudence to be either 5 or 17, but neither fits the bill. (Those who insist that there must be a Prudence trump generally press the Hermit into service, breaking the pattern.)

"The Birds in Alchemy," a 1979 Hermetic Journal article by Adam McLean, discusses a sequence of five symbolic birds "which occurs in various sources: Black Crow - White Swan - Peacock - Pelican - Phoenix." I find that, like the set of four virtues, this sequence is implicitly present in the Tarot, and in a clear numerical pattern, but only incompletely so.

Trump 19 is the Sun. See "Red crows of the Sun" for a discussion of the Solar Crow and its links to the Tarot.

Trump 20 is the Judgment. As discussed in "The dragon and the subterranean swan," Oswald Wirth (and, independently, my sister Kat) associated the swan with this trump.

Trump 21 is the World. "The Throne and the World" details how this image ultimately derives from biblical visions of creatures that are "full of eyes" like Argus, or like the peacock into which Argus was transformed.

All the links are indirect and implicit -- no crows, swans, or peacocks are actually shown on the cards -- but they are non-arbitrary, and the sequence is exactly right. The Pelican and the Phoenix ought to come next, but of course there are no more trumps after 21.

The Grateful Dead "Ripple" video and January 2021

On December 18, 2020, the Grateful Dead released a new video for their old song "Ripple." Two days later, on December 20, I was led to it by a completely random series of clicks. The video begins and ends with a spread of 13 Tarot cards. In the beginning, all the cards are face down, but we see enough to know that the card at the top is laid down first, then the others clockwise around the circle, and finally the one in the center. At the end of the video, we see the whole spread face up.

This is apparently a version of the "Year Ahead" spread, and since it was posted near the end of 2020, we might naturally interpret it as a year-ahead reading for 2021.

The cards themselves are based closely on the Rider-Waite deck, but with some perplexing differences. I might go through them all, one at a time, later if I feel so inclined, but for now I will focus on the one in the first position, corresponding to January. This is simply because I have a clear idea of "what happened" in January 2021. For the rest of the year so far, no notable month-specific events stand out, but January had two: the Worst Mostly Peaceful Protest Since the Civil War on the 6th, and the inauguration of Antipresident Biden on the 20th.

The "Ripple" video gives the January position to the World card. Here is how it compares to the Rider-Waite on which it is based.

The central figure is obviously copied exactly from the Rider-Waite. The artist must have had the Rider-Waite card in front of him as he drew, and therefore the differences must be deliberate.

The Rider-Waite, like the Marseille cards on which it is based, puts the Four Living Creatures in the four corners of the card. These represent, among other things, the fixed signs of the zodiac: Leo, Taurus, Aquarius (the man or angel), and Scorpio (the eagle). In the "Ripple" video, the angel is replaced with a black bird, and the golden eagle is changed to an American bald eagle. Looking at this now, in August 2021, I thought, "Hey, it's Jim Crow  and Jim Eagle!" And then, remembering that the pie is a bird closely related to the crow, I thought, "No, no, it's an American Eagle and American Pie!"

The two birds have been lowered down from the upper corners to the central part of the card. This was a very strange design choice, since it leaves lots of empty space in the upper corners. The only rationale I can think of is that the five heads (of the central figure and the four creatures) now form a pentagram arrangement that matches the traditional elemental pentagram.

Leo is a Fire sign, Taurus is Earth, Aquarius is (confusingly!) Air, and Scorpio is Water. If the woman in the center represents Spirit, the layout of the "Ripple" card matches the pentagram perfectly. The elemental correspondences have perhaps even been made a little stronger by replacing the Aquarius symbol with a bird and the land-based golden eagle with a species of sea eagle.

The fact that the birds have been moved down from their rightful place at the top of the World card made me think of the Patty Griffin song made famous by the Dixie Chicks (and recently featured on my friend S. K. Orr's blog).

Think I broke the wings off that little song bird

She's never gonna fly to the top of the world right now

So, how does all of this relate to the events of January 2021?

January 6 is only hinted at. On the Rider-Waite card, the wreath separates the woman within from the four creatures without, but on the "Ripple" card, this boundary has been breached, and the creatures have entered the inner sanctum.

Next we come to the inauguration, when Joe Biden was given the position that rightfully belonged to Donald Trump. This is almost too easy. The Rider-Waite World card features a blond-headed angel (we know it is an angel, not just a man, because of the corresponding figure on the Wheel of Fortune card, which has wings), and the "Ripple" card replaces this with a crow.

Since October 27, 2020, I have identified Trump with the blond-headed angel depicted on the Judgement card of the Rider-Waite deck, who is blowing a trump with a flag on it. (Donald Trump's birthday is Flag Day, June 14). Since the Judgement card is numbered 20, I had interpreted this as a prediction that Trump would win the '20 election.

But on the "Ripple" card, this symbol of Trump is conspicuous by its absence and has been replaced by a large, black bird. On October 24, 2020, just days before connecting the angel of Judgement with Trump, I wrote a post identifying Joe Biden with the Dr. Seuss character Slow Joe Crow. So, where we would expect to see Trump, we see Biden instead -- and both the presidency (the crow) and America itself (the bald eagle) have fallen down a notch from their former lofty positions. Sounds like January 2021 to me.

I've already mentioned in passing that the Rider-Waite deck connects the World card with the Wheel of Fortune. In fact, the central figure strongly resembles the goddess Fortuna.

On the "Ripple" card, as on its Rider-Waite predecessor, Fortuna's face is turned to the left side of the card, so Fortune is smiling on the Left. The creatures on the left are the crow and the bull. The crow represents Biden, by way of Slow Joe Crow. The bull or ox is the traditional symbol of the biblical Tribe of Joseph and thus also represents Joseph Biden. (Colloquially, of course, bull is also a synonym for malarkey.)

On the right of the card, Fortuna has turned her face away from the eagle and the lion. Can it be a coincidence that both of these animals have been used in Trump campaign logos? Both logos were (of course!) criticized in the press as racist dog whistles.

Of course, the thing about the Wheel of Fortune is that it turns. As Dylan put it, "Don't speak too soon, for the wheel's still in spin, and . . . the loser now will be later to win." We might also note that Fortuna's body is facing the right, suggesting that she will shortly turn her face in that direction as well.

The banner of judgment

I've put together this little historical survey of the banner on the trumpet on the Judgment card of the Tarot.

What surprises me is how consistent the color scheme has been over the years, especially given how much color schemes tend to vary from deck to deck. The gold-on-gold cross is seen in the very earliest extant Tarot and remained almost invariable until the end of the 19th century.

This is particularly surprising considering how heraldically bizarre the standard color scheme -- a cross tenné on a field or -- is. Most decks in the larger Marseille tradition used an eight-color palette: black, white, red, yellow, green, blue, gray, and tan. It is very strange that tan -- a color never really used on flags, and associated in heraldry with a "stain" on ones honor -- should have been chosen for the angel's banner.

In 1889, Oswald Wirth broke with tradition and made the angel's banner resemble that of his native Switzerland, and this is perhaps what inspired A. E. Waite to use the colors of England on his own card 20 years later. It is interesting that in his 1927 deck, Wirth made a partial return to tradition, keeping the red field but putting the original flag, like St. Patrick's in the Union Jack, inside the cross itself.

Pre-Tarot iconography associates the Last Trump with no particular flag, and I would have expected this banner to be one of the most variable elements of the Tarot, since it would be so easy to modify the flag to make a political or patriotic statement (as Wirth and Waite appear to have done) or to honor one's aristocratic patrons. Instead, we see this remarkable insistence on a tan-on-gold color scheme corresponding (so far as I have been able to discover) to no flag or arms in the real world.

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.

Who is Joe Biden?

The day after the inauguration, I asked that question, drew a single card -- and got just about the most confusing answer possible:

As I have explained in great detail, this card says Donald Trump loud and clear. I mean, look, it's a guy with orange hair blowing a trumpet with a flag on it. How can we not connect it with a certain orange-haired individual named Trump who was born on Flag Day? It's Trump. Name, birthdate, hair color — it might as well be his damn driver’s license! What can possibly be meant by saying it's Biden?

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As I've detailed elsewhere, the Rider-Waite Tarot has accurately predicted the winner of every U. S. presidential election since 2000 -- with the apparent exception of 2020, since the 20th trump is the Judgement, the Trump trump. We can say that Trump was the "real" winner because Biden won through fraud, or we can hold out hope that the election may yet be invalidated and Trump reinstated, but as things stand right now it just looks like the Tarot got it wrong.

Of course, if this card actually represented Biden all along, then the prediction was right, and this is another example of how prophecies can be deceptive without actually lying. Gee, Bert, whatever made you think I was thinking of Trump?

How can it be Biden, though? How? All I can do at this point is explore some possibilities.

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1. The point is not the details of the picture but the name of the trump: Judgement. God allowed Biden to "win" as a judgment or punishment, giving the American people exactly what we deserve.

2. The orange-haired guy with the trump and flag is indeed Trump, but note that he is an angel -- i.e., "in heaven," dead. Since the reelection of a sitting president could scarcely be represented by an angel's suddenly appearing from heaven, this angel must be departing to heaven, leaving the scene, to the cheers of the "NPC gray" people below. And where is Biden in all this? Nowhere. He's nothing. Remember how popular it was to write the words "Bye Don" in the style of Biden's campaign logo? Biden's only selling point is that he isn't Donald Trump, and so this image of Trump flying away captures his essence.

3. Biden is in some sense the second coming of Trump, continuing Trump's work. That seems impossible, but what after all was Trump's work? He obviously didn't "make America great again." His main contribution seems to have been making it undeniably obvious that the System is irredeemably corrupt -- a revelation represented by the angel sounding a trumpet, broadcasting what had previously been hidden. Biden, if his first few days in office are any indication, is certainly set to continue that work.

4. Biden is Trump's puppet. Is that any less crazy than it sounds? Someone is obviously pulling the strings, and it makes sense that it would be someone who has absolute proof that Biden stole the election and is using that to blackmail him. Who has that proof? China? The EU? -- or Trump? I'll admit this doesn't make a lot of sense. Why would Trump use that proof to control the president when he could have used it to be the president? Just brainstorming here.

5. Trump is still going to win somehow, and the Tarot is telling me to unask a question that presupposes Biden is of any account. I say Mickey Mouse, and the cards shout Donald Duck!

6. The sync fairies are just messing with me, giving me an obviously bogus answer in the hope that I'll put the cards away, disengage from politics, and get on with my life.

It is written in the Book of Thoth: Trump still wins.

When, in late October of this year, I posted on how the Rider-Waite Tarot accurately predicts the results of every U.S. presidential election from 2000 to 2020, it didn't take much chutzpah to declare Trump the prophesied winner of this year's race. Trump winning in a landslide seemed the only possible result, and I dismissed Biden as a soon-to-be-forgotten Walter Mondale figure. Even when the synchronicity fairies kept stubbornly bringing Biden to my attention (via Jay-Z, Dr. Seuss, Steve Martin, and Clickhole), I just couldn't take him seriously as a potential winner. ("I don't know why the synchronicity fairies are feeding me all this material on a man doomed to become irrelevant in two weeks' time," I wrote on October 25, "but who am I to kick against the pics?")

Now that the Media -- supported by their political arm, the Democratic Party -- have "officially" called the race for Biden, I'm going to stick my neck out and double down on my prediction. The Tarot has been 100% accurate in stating the winners of every other presidential election this century -- with the 0th trump predicting the winner in '00, the 4th trump the winner in '04, and so on -- and the 20th trump unambiguously says Trump. I stake my reputation as an interpreter of the Tarot on this prediction. If Trump doesn't win in the end, the Tarot is not what I think it is.

Let's go over what I mean when I say that. For those who don't know it, this is the 20th trump in the Major Arcana, called The Judgement.

1. Did you know that the word trump only occurs twice in the entire King James Bible? Both instances refer to the scene portrayed on this card.

In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed (1 Corinthians 15:52).

For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: (1 Thessalonians 4:16).

An aside: Obviously, the name Biden as such does not occur in the Bible -- but if we ignore spaces, it does: "Thou sayest, Lo, thou hast smitten the Edomites; and thine heart lifteth thee up to boast: abide now at home; why shouldest thou meddle to thine hurt, that thou shouldest fall, even thou, and Judah with thee?" (2 Chronicles 25:19). This seems to allude to Basement Biden's "sheltering in place" and to prophesy his fall after boasting that he has smitten the Edomites. (Edom means "red" in Hebrew, so the Edomites are the Republicans -- and I suppose everyone knows to which modern people the name Judah refers. Judah is of course also the same name as Judas.)

(An even-more-tangential aside: Looking for other 2020 names in the Bible led me to Deuteronomy 14:7, which reads, "Nevertheless these ye shall not eat of them that chew the cud, or of them that divide the cloven hoof; as the camel, and the hare, and the coney: for they chew the cud, but divide not the hoof; therefore they are unclean unto you." The camel, the hare, and the coney. This seems to connect Kamala Harris with another woman who came to prominence in 2020, Amy Coney Barrett, and to pronounce them both unclean. Does this presage some future treachery from ACB?)

2. The trump has a flag attached to it. Trump was born on June 14 -- Flag Day.

3. The flag has a big red cross on it. Red is the Republican color, and the cross resembles T for Trump. This is in fact St. George's flag, signifying victory over the dragon.

4. The angel has a full head of blond hair, with a touch of orange.

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What are we to make of the scene on the lower half of the card, which shows the dead rising from coffins which appear to be floating in the water? A few thoughts:

They could represent Trump voters -- defeated, "dead," and then with their fortunes unexpectedly reversed. The water could represent the Trump's claim that lots of Trump ballots were dumped in rivers.

Alternatively, they could represent actual dead people -- who, as we know, voted in record numbers in 2020! The problem with this is that they appear to be cheering for Trump, when in fact corpses appear to have voted overwhelmingly for Biden.

But perhaps they're cheering because they think they've won -- gotten rid of Trump. He's up in heaven, an angel, dead. Little do they realize that the day of reckoning is coming.

And what's that in the background? Mountains -- or an approaching tsunami?

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What about the prophecy -- which, believe it or not, I also take seriously -- that Trump will invite "Joe Camel" (Joe and Kamala) to the White House? I don't know what to make of that yet, but here's my best guess: The recounts and lawsuits ("Sue sews Slow Joe Crow's clothes," i.e. suits) and everything will not be completed by January 20, Biden will be sworn in, and Trump will peacefully "invite him to the White House." Shortly thereafter, the election results will be overturned by the Supreme Court, and Trump will be restored.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it. The highway is for gamblers. If I end up being wrong, I will, as they say, eat crow.

Can the deck itself be prophetic?

When people talk about the Tarot predicting the future, they're generally talking about a Tarot reading. Cards are selected at random, and the fact of those particular cards' being chosen, rather than others in the deck, is what the divination is based on. But can there be, as it were, "standing prophecies" in the deck itself -- specific future events coded into the cards themselves, independent of any given spread or reading?

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Richard Arrowsmith, the once and (perhaps?) future king of synchromysticism, has recently resurfaced after a seven-year silence and posted on the birdemic. It is, in true Arrowsmith fashion, a very long, sprawling, profusely illustrated post that touches on dozens of different things, but one of the things it does is to tie the birdemic -- the official name of which prominently features the number 19 -- to the 19th Tarot trump, the Sun (especially the Rider-Waite version).

The sun as depicted on the card somewhat resembles the birdemic virus -- a round object with numerous protrusions -- and of course the word corona refers to the outer atmosphere of the sun. The brick wall depicted on the card suggests the lockdowns implemented around the world. But most specifically, and most impressively, the card clearly alludes to the flag of China -- a red flag with one large star and four smaller ones.

One could go further. The sunflowers, as mini-suns, represent the replication of the virus, and they peep over the wall, showing the ineffectiveness of all the lockdown nonsense. The child, with a crown (corona) of mini-mini-suns, goes forth on a white horse, like the first horseman of the Apocalypse, "conquering, and to conquer" -- spreading the birdemic and the subsequent totalitarian coup all over the world.

I find this very impressive, and once pointed out it cannot be un-seen. From here on out, the birdemic is part of the meaning of this card.

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Wondering what other "standing prophecies" might be hidden in the deck, I suddenly had this thought: I'll bet all the trumps whose numbers correspond to U.S. presidential election years -- that is, '00, '04, '08, '12, '16, and '20 -- accurately predict the winners of those elections. So, let's see. Since Mr. Arrowsmith got such impressive results from the Rider-Waite, let's stick with that deck.

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2000: Bush defeats Gore

We're off to a good start. George W. Bush was consistently portrayed as an idiot, but Al Gore was not. He became known for his "Bushims," including the most famous of all: "There's an old saying in Tennessee . . . I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee, that says, 'Fool me once, shame on . . . shame on you. Fool me . . . You can't get fooled again!'" (If you type george w bush f into Google, the second search suggestion, after father, is fool me once.)

The Fool card depicts a man walking. Bush was commonly referred to by his middle initial: W, or “Dubya.” His full name is George Walker Bush.

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2004: Bush defeats Kerry

This is an easy one: The sitting president wins reelection. (So much for not getting fooled again!)

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2008: Obama defeats McCain

The most distinctive thing about Obama is that his father was from Kenya, making him (sort of) the "first black president." The lion is predominantly an African animal, and Kenya has one of the highest lion populations in the world. Taking this a step further, the two figures on the card -- one male and from Africa, the other a white woman -- could symbolize Obama's parents. (I know it's totally racist for the white woman to be represented by a person and the black man by an animal, but that's how it is. There are no black people in the Rider-Waite Tarot, so African-ness has to be represented in some other way.)

When it was first decided that Obama was going to be a "rising star," and nobody really knew who he was yet, I remember that NPR ran a "funny" piece about this poor politician who had the misfortune to have a name so similar to Osama. Osama, of course, means "lion" in Arabic.

It was also in 2008 that the slogan "diversity is our strength" began to gain currency (see evidence here).

(Note added: At the time I posted this, Google Trends showed no hits for "diversity is our strength" until 2008. Clicking the link again now, later the same day, I see that this is no longer true! I'm not sure why data for 2004-2007 would have changed in just a few hours' time. Google Ngrams shows the phrase's popularity peaking in 1997.)

Note added: It turns out that Obama is even a Leo (born August 4, 1961).

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2012: Obama defeats Romney

This one's not as obvious as the others have been so far, but wasn't it around 2012 that the noose began to be promoted as a symbol of anti-black racism and to be used in hate hoaxes (at the University of Wisconsin, for instance)? Implicit in the assumption that nooses are racist is the equation hanged man = black man. Notice also the hanged man's O-shaped halo.

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2016: Trump defeats Clinton

The simplest analysis: a trump called "The Tower" = Trump Tower = Donald Trump.

But doesn't it show the tower being destroyed? It seems that neither the tower itself nor either of the two persons falling from it can represent the winning candidate.

The lightning represents Trump -- a "bolt from the blue" whose win surprised nearly everyone. The woman dressed in Democratic blue is obviously Hillary Clinton, and the man -- whose red outer garment hides the fact that he is blue underneath -- represents the fake-conservative Republican establishment.

The imagery of this card also suggests 9/11, which was a major symbolic undercurrent in the 2016 election. Clinton's campaign logo showed two towers, both blue, being cut through by a big red arrow (cf. the arrow-shaped lightning bolt destroying the tower on the card). Clinton later physically fell down on September 11 at a 9/11 memorial event, and in the early hours of the other 9/11, 9 November, Trump was declared the winner.

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2020: Trump vs. Biden

Not exactly subtle. Which candidate has blond/orange hair and is literally named Trump?