Pondering his orb

It has just come to my attention that my November 21, 2021, post "The Emperor's orb" coincided with the rise of "pondering my orb" memes, though I was not aware of these memes until a month or so later. In draft, the post had been called "The Emperor's globus cruciger," but I later changed it because the Rider-Waite Emperor's orb doesn't have a cross on it.

I just wanted to add a few orb-related thoughts.

In Le Tarot des imagiers du moyen-âge, Oswald Wirth says that the constellation that corresponds most closely to the Emperor is Hercules, and he includes a drawing of Hercules holding a club in one hand and in the other a branch bearing the golden apples of the Hesperides.

In the text, Wirth explicitly connects the Emperor's scepter with the club of Hercules but does not make the corresponding connection between the orb and the golden apples. He calls the apples "the fruit of initiating knowledge" but sees the orb as a symbol of "universal domination."

The globe of the world which the Emperor holds in his left hand is a sign of universal domination. This globe, moreover, is the symbol, not of the physical universe, but of the Soul of the World, the entity thanks to which all the miracles of Nature and Art are performed. In his right hand the Emperor clasps a mssive sceptre which is not without analogy to the club of Hercules. However, we must not see in this a brutal weapon, but the emblem of the highest initiation, or magical, power.

Although Wirth portrays Herucles holding a branch bearing apples, it was also common in ancient iconography (as in the Hercules of the Forum Boarium, below) to represent him holding the apples themselves in the palm of his left hand, just as the Emperor holds his orb.

Hercules holds three apples, and the Emperor holds a single orb, but this is no very great objection to connecting the two, especially if we follow Vico in interpreting "three" in myths as being primarily an intensifier (as in "Thrice-Great Hermes" or "once, twice, three times a lady"). Vico argued that Neptune's trident and Cerberus's three maws were meant to convey the idea of a great spear and an enormous gullet, respectively, and he would doubtless have taken a similar approach to the three golden apples taken from the three Hesperides. (Vico would also of course have interpreted the apples, like all things golden, as representing corn, but this is too reductive.)

I had forgotten all about Wirth's mention of the golden apples when I ended "The Emperor's orb" with a mention of the golden apple of Eris. In fact, I had not realized until just now that Eris's "apple of discord" was also supposed to have come from the garden of the Hesperides.

In the myth, Paris had to choose to which of three goddesses to give the apple, and each offered a different reward if she was chosen. Paris, being weak and effeminate, rejected Hera's and Athena's offers of greatness and wisdom and awarded the apple to Aphrodite, who promised him another man's wife. When, centuries later, Prodicus wanted to create a parallel story in which the hero made a better choice, he decided to cast Hercules in the role of a more virtuous Paris. Classicists have expressed puzzlement over this choice, since Hercules was hardly a byword for sound moral judgment, but could he have been chosen because of his association with the golden apples? We know Prodicus's parable of the Choice of Hercules only via Xenophon, but even in Xenophon's brief summary the parallels to the story of the Judgment of Paris are obvious. Is it possible that the parallels were closer still in Prodicus's original, even featuring the golden apples?

Although Wirth calls the golden apples "the fruit of initiating knowledge," its function in myth seems to be closer to the biblical tree of life than to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The Norse goddess Iðunn (coincidentally similar to Eden) kept similar apples of immortality, which the gods had to eat from tiem to time to keep from growing old. Gilgamesh brought a plant with this same effect up from the bottom of the sea -- and Gilgamesh was the original, Sumerian name of the constellation later called Hercules. In "The Emperor's orb," I connected the golden apple with the golden ball brought up from the bottom of the pond by the frog in the fairy tale -- a clear echo of Gilgamesh once the golden apple is established as the missing link between the golden ball and the plant of immortality. Just as Hercules went to all the trouble of retrieving the golden apples, only to have Athena return them to the garden in the end, so Gilgamesh brought up the plant of immortality, only to have it eaten by a snake.

In "The Emperor's orb," I connected the Iron Rod and the Liahona -- both associated with the Book of Mormon figure Lehi -- with the Emperor's scepter and orb. (The name Lehi is associated with Samson, the "Hebrew Hercules.") The Iron Rod comes from Lehi's dream of the Tree of Life, bearing fruit which, though white rather than golden, is clearly analogous to the golden apples of immortality.

(I found this by searching for pondering orb liahona,
figuring someone else must have made the connection.)

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Really weird synchronicity: After writing everything above this paragraph, but before finishing the post (I had planned to write some other things, but they ended up not making the final draft), I had to take a break to teach a children's English class. When I went up to the classroom, I found that one of the students had drawn this on the board:

A person wearing a crown and holding a scepter in one hand an an apple in the other! I had been working on this post on the computer in my office, where I'm sure this student could not have seen it. (Even if she had, she's a very young girl who can hardly read any English, and none of the illustrations shows anything recognizable as an apple, scepter, or crown.) So this is either a bit of subconscious telepathy or else just a really bizarre coincidence. It wouldn't be the first time!

The Emperor's orb

Visconti-Sforza (c. 1451, restored), Pierre Madenié (1709),
Oswald Wirth (1889, revised 1926), Rider-Waite (1910)

Emperor cards typically feature the Reichsadler, the scepter, and the globus cruciger. How exactly these are incorporated into the card varies widely from deck to deck.

The Reichsadler -- a black eagle displayed on a gold field -- was the emblem of the Holy Roman Emperors prior to the 15th century, when it was replaced by the double-headed eagle. Bembo's Visconti-Sforza card puts this emblem on a vaguely shield-shaped headdress which does not, so far as I know, resemble anything worn by any historical emperor, and which almost looks more like a mitre than a crown. The Marseille tradition (as typified by Madenié, even though his cards were actually made in Dijon), puts it on a shield -- the traditional "coat of arms." Wirth combines this shield and the throne into a cubic stone marked with the Reichsadler. Waite eliminates the eagle entirely, replacing it with the Aries imagery demanded by his astrological schema.

Bembo's scepter is a simple rod with no ornament at the top. The Marseille tradition tops it with the globus cruciger; Wirth, with a stylized fleur-de-lis. Waite makes the scepter resemble both the Egyptian ankh and the Mesopotamian rod-and-ring.

The emblem I want to focus on here, though, is the globus cruciger, or orb.

Looking at this close-up of the original Visconti-Sforza card (top left), we can see that the "restored" version I used above (because it is clearer) has been restored incorrectly. The orb is topped with a cross pattée atop a short, narrow pedestal, and the orb itself is marked with zigzag ("indented") lines, suggestive of a cracking egg. These form a circle around the equator and a semicircle connected the equator to the north pole, where the cross is.

Where Bembo had put the orb in the Emperor's left hand, the Marseille tradition (top right) puts it at the end of his scepter, thus strengthening the axis mundi symbolism of the latter by making the axis of an actual globe. Having no orb to hold, the Emperor's left hand appears to be holding his own belt. The orb has the same general form as Bembo's, but instead of indented lines, we have have bands of a different color. In many Marseille cards, including Pierre Madenié's, there is also a second, much smaller globus cruciger at the top of the Emperor's crown.

Wirth puts the orb back in the Emperor's hand and gives it the same general form as the Marseille version, but it is idiosyncratic in two ways. First, the orb itself is green, in contrast to the otherwise universal use of gold, both for Tarot cards and for real-world crown jewels. The second oddity is the diminutive size of the cross, also something that has no analogue of which I am aware either in pre-Wirth Tarot or in the real world. The whole point of the globus cruciger symbolism is Christ's dominion over the world, and so the cross is typically about as large as the orb itself.

Orbs with a much smaller cross, though rare to nonexistent among crown jewels, do sometimes appear in paintings of Christ himself in his role as salvator mundi. In such paintings, the orb is also a direct representation of the world rather than of a royal accoutrement, and as such it is often transparent or blue in color rather than gold. The closest parallel I can find in art to Wirth's orb is this Brazilian icon of Christ as a child. Perhaps a bit more digging (this one is straight off Wikipedia) would turn up some similar image from Wirth's neck of the woods.

Another significant feature of Wirth's orb is where it is held relative to the Emperor's body, so that the center of the globe -- the omphalos -- coincides with the presumed location of the Emperor's own navel. Mormons may make of this, and of the Emperor's protruding right knee, what they will.

Waite returns the orb to its traditional gold color but eliminates the cross entirely. While some salvator mundi images (such as Leonardo's) do omit the cross and feature a simple globe, Waite's is not a simple globe, either. Where the cross should be, there is a little nub, almost as if it were the pedestal for a cross without the cross itself. What it really reminds me of, actually, is a gold version of a stereotypical cartoon bomb, the little nub being where the fuse would be attached.

The other thing it reminds me of is the Liahona, described as "a round ball of curious workmanship; and it was of fine brass. And within the ball were two spindles; and the one pointed the way whither we should go into the wilderness." (1 Nephi 16:10). Despite the clear statement that there were two spindles within the ball, artists' depictions of the Liahona invariably show a single protrusion extending out from the top of the ball.

Here is a detail Arnold Friberg's classic Liahona painting, painted in the 1950s and included in many editions of the Book of Mormon since then.

And here is a modern version of the same subject, which has appeared before on this blog. Although the style is very different from Friberg's, the basic design of the Liahona -- a gold-colored ball with a little protrusion at the top -- remains invariable.

It has become common among Mormon intellectuals to contrast the Liahona with another Book of Mormon image, the Iron Rod, a metaphor first used by Richard D. Poll in his 1967 Dialogue article "What the Church Means to People Like Me" (pdf). "Iron Rod" Mormons are more dogmatic and emphasize the authority of the Scriptures and Church leaders, while "Liahona" Mormons are more questing/questioning and emphasize personal inspiration and the guidance of the Holy Ghost. In practice, Liahona and Iron Rod connote "liberal" and "conserative," respectively.

The term Iron Rod comes from Lehi's dream in 1 Nephi 8, where the "rod of iron" is a sort of handrail to which people hold in order not to stray from the path as they pass through the mists of darkness. In Revelation, though, the "rod of iron" seems to be Christ's scepter: "to rule all nations with a rod of iron" (12:15). This imagery, in turn, comes from Psalm 2, where the rod of iron is a weapon with which to smash the heathen to bits, but in Revelation it is consistently used "to rule" (2:27, 12:5, 19:15).

If the iron rod is a scepter, then the Emperor (in most non-Marseille decks) can be seen as holding the Liahona in his left hand and the Iron Rod in his right. This fits with the symbolism just discussed, where the Liahona and Iron Rod symbolize the Mormon "left" and "right." It should also be understood in connection with my earlier discussion of the Emperor's Urim and Thummim, in which the Emperor's right side is associated with the square and his left with the compass. In Mormon use, the square symbolized exactness and honor in keeping covenenats -- clearly an "Iron Rod" concept -- while the compass reminds us of the "Liahona" principle that all truth (not only "official Church doctrine") may be circumscribed into one great whole.

Another thing the gold orb on the Rider-Waite card resembles is a Christmas-tree ornament -- and Waite's Emperor, with his red robes and long, white beard, bears more than a passing resemblance to Father Christmas.

Finally, no discussion of a monarch holding a golden ball would be complete without a nod to the Frog King from the Brothers Grimm. (Irrelevant coincidence: Will Smith's first Golden Globe nomination was for "The Froschprinz of Bel-Air.")

This is clearly an image of Kek, the ancient Egyptian god of chaos whose cult enjoyed such a surprising revival a few years back. (See "The Truth About Pepe The Frog And The Cult of Kek." Apparently Kek has not been entirely forgotten; just after the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict, Anonymous Conservative posted a reminded that "A giant frog statue stands in Rittenhouse Square.") Like many Egyptian deities, Kek is often depicted with a was-scepter and ankh; on the Waite card, the scepter and ankh are combined.

The golden ball also suggests the golden apple of Eris -- Kek's predecessor as deity of a chaos-based parody religion.

Red Sun, Yellow Sun

One day, you'll look
To see I've gone
For tomorrow may rain, so
I'll follow the sun

-- The Beatles

Once you've noticed something, it's everywhere. Found this flipping through a random children's book (Flying Colors by Robert G. Fresson) at a secondhand bookstore.

Apparently, the man in yellow with his yellow sun is leaving the larger country represented by the red sun and becoming independent. Can a Mormon see this and not be reminded of a certain prophet, often depicted in yellow robes, leaving his country and heading east under the guidance of a yellow ball?

This is Lehi holding the Liahona. The name Lehi also occurs in the Bible, where it refers to the jawbone of an ass with which Samson slew a thousand men. The name Samson comes from Shamash, the Sun, and I have repeatedly drawn connections between Samson and the Sun card.

The origin and meaning of the word Liahona is unknown. However, one fanciful but fairly influential proposed etymology analyzes it as l-iah-ona --  the first two elements being the preposition "to" and the divine name Yah, and the last (I told you it was fanciful!) being On, the Hebrew name for the Egyptian city more usually known by its Greek name Heliopolis. Since Heliopolis is the City of the Sun, and the Sun produces light, the whole is supposed to mean "to God is light." The Greek name Heliopolis was used because that city was a cult center of the sun gods Ra and Atum; but the Hebrew On comes from the city's native Egyptian name, which mean "the pillars" -- Samson again!

Note added: The red sun-disc being held by red hands suggests the Egyptian god Ra.

While the country Lehi was leaving was Babylon-occupied Judah, the prototypical country from which people go out under the direction of the Lord is Egypt.

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Not directly related, but also discovered by chance the same day:

Further confirmation that one of the meanings of the 19th trump, The Sun, is the birdemic.

I happened upon this picture because I had seen the Tupperware logo, noticed its obvious resemblance to -- uh, the Wuhan Battle Flag, which also has 19 circles in a sunburst pattern -- and was searching the Internet in vain for anyone else who had noticed the same thing. I found plenty of stories like this one:

But, although it seems impossible, not one of them mentioned the Tupperware logo. I mean, whether as a joke or as a conspiracy theory, how can you not mention it?