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.

Between a dog and a wolf

In all Marseille-style decks of which I am aware, the Moon card feature two dogs or jackals: a light blue one on the left, and a pink or buff one on the right. (See "The red and blue jackals.") Aside from the color and a slight difference in size (with the larger, blue dog perhaps corresponding to Sirius in Canis Major), the two animals are the same.

This color scheme, universal among Marseille decks, was jettisoned by the early Marseille-influenced esoteric Tarots, beginning with Oswald Wirth's 1889 deck. Wirth's canines are black and white rather than red and blue, but they still both appear to be dogs.

The 1909 Rider-Waite deck uses yet another color scheme, but also introduces more significant differences between the two animals. One has the floppy ears of a domestic dog, while the other has the erect ears and bushy tail of a wolf. Waite confirms this in The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, writing, "The dog and wolf are the fears of the natural mind in the presence of that place of exit, when there is only reflected light to guide it."

This dog and wolf theme is also used -- and rather more competently executed artistically -- in the 1929 Knapp-Hall deck. One animal is clearly a wolf, while the other is a domestic dog complete with a collar.

Mary K. Greer connects this dog-and-wolf theme with the French idiom entre chien et loup, meaning "at twilight." This is an expression of Latin origin (inter canem et lupum) -- with twilight being thought of as "between" the domain of the diurnal dog and that of the nocturnal wolf, or perhaps between the time when people put out their dogs to keep watch and the time the wolves begin to come out. French etymology dictionaries, though, give a different explanation: that it refers to the dim light in which it is difficult to distinguish a dog from a wolf ("l'heure où la lumière décline car on confond alors facilement entre chien et loup"), and it is apparently in this sense that most modern Francophones understand the idiom. (Inter canem et lupum is also sometimes used in the sense of "between a rock and a hard place," but the obvious contrast between man's best friend and his deadly enemy makes it hard to see this as anything but an ignorant corruption.)

Anyway, this Latin and French idiom never made it into English, so it is curious that the French and French-Swiss decks have two dogs, while the English and American decks introduce the entre chien et loup imagery. However, there are precursors in the French literature (with which Waite, having translated much of it, was quite familiar). Wirth's Le tarot des imagiers du moyen-âge (1927) describes the two animals as "the big black dog" and "the little white dog," with no hint that either of them might be a wolf. However, when the opening paragraph of his description of the Moon card is read with the idiom in mind, it is hard to deny its relevance.

In order to display the splendours of the sky, the Night plunges the earth into darkness, for the things above are not revealed to our sight except to the detriment of those below. However we aspire to relate the celestial to the terrestrial by a simultaneous contemplation, which is made possible when the Moon spreads her pale light. The body which is close to the stars without subduing their brightness completely, only half lights up the objects bathed in her uncertain and borrowed light. The Moon does not allow us to distinguish colours; everything her rays strike upon she tinges with a silvery grey or with vague bluish shades, leaving the opaque darkness of the shadows of night to continue.

Papus did not produce a deck of his own. In his Le Tarot des Bohémiens (1889), the section on each trump has two illustration: the 1889 Wirth card and the traditional Tarot de Marseille. Although both of these show two dogs, Papus refers in his commentary to a dog and a wolf.

In the middle, a dog and a wolf howl at the moon, a crayfish comes out of the water and crawls in the midst of these animals. The entry of the Spirit into Matter is a fall all the greater as everything conspires to increase it. The "servile spirits" (dog), the "ferocious larvae" (wolf) and the "crawling elementals" (crayfish) are there who watch for the fall of the soul into matter to try to oppress it even more.

Wirth hints at the idiomatic meaning of entre chien et loup but identifies both animals as dogs. Papus identifies them as a dog and a wolf, despite using cards that portray them both as dogs, and yet his commentary on the card says nothing about twilight of the difficulty of distinguishing things in half-light.

One suspects that the "missing link," or rather the "common ancestor," is Wirth's first Tarot book, Le Livre de Thot comprenant les 22 arcanes du Tarot (1889), but unfortunately I have not yet been able to track down a copy to check. My hypothesis is that this earlier book explicitly refers to the dog and the wolf; that his later book, with its emphasis on astrology, dropped the wolf references in favor of Canes Major and Minor; but that traces of the author's earlier emphasis remain in the introductory paragraph. If I ever do manage to get my hands on Le Livre de Thot, it will be interesting to see if this speculative reconstruction is borne out.

Could the "moon" be Betelgeuse?

In my last post, I mentioned that Sirius and Procyon -- possibly represented by the two dogs or jackals on the Moon card -- form a triangle with a third very bright star, Betelgeuse.

Betelgeuse is red, and the moon is also mostly red in many Tarot de Marseille decks. Could the "moon" actually be Betelgeuse?

The obvious question is why a star would be represented with a waxing crescent shape on it -- but the Tarot itself offers a possible answer. Betelgeuse is the right shoulder of Orion.

On the Chariot card, the charioteer's right shoulder also bears a waxing crescent with a face, very similar to what we see on the Moon.

The problem remains that the dogs are in the wrong position. If Betelgeuse is at the top, Sirius (the larger, bluer dog) should be on the right, and Procyon on the left. If the "moon" is Betelgeuse, the Moon card shows a mirror-image of the Winter Triangle.

The blue and red jackals and the stars

The Moon card of the Tarot de Marseille features a crayfish and two dogs. The constellation Cancer was normally portrayed as a crayfish in the past, and the two dogs would then represent Canis Major and Canis Minor, both of which are in the region of the sky assigned to Cancer.

My recent post "The red and blue jackals" drew my attention to the color of the two dogs, and I realized that a blue canine could well be a representation of the principal star in Canis Major -- Sirius, the Dog Star, the brightest and most obviously blue star in the sky. Sure enough, the Tarot de Marseille always portrays the blue dog as the larger of the two -- Canis Major.

It would be natural to infer, then, that the smaller, pink or buff dog represents Canis Minor and its principal star, Procyon. The problem is that Procyon isn't red. The red star close to Sirius in Betelgeuse -- the third member of the Winter Triangle asterism -- but Betelgeuse is part of Orion and has nothing to do with dogs. Procyon is very nearly white, and much closer to Sirius than to Betelgeuse in color.

Doing a bit of searching on the Internet, I found a few possibly relevant facts. The first is that several cultures have called Sirius the jackal star. I quote the following from a notice in the November 1883 issue of Popular Science, which ties Sirius not only to the jackal but specifically to the jackal as an animal in Indian fables.

The Jackal, the Fox-Fables, and the Dog-Star. -- Herr O. Keller, in a paper on "The Jackal in Antiquity," urges that the Western nations, who had foxes but no jackals, borrowed the traits ascribed to jackals, in Oriental fables, with the fables, and transferred them to their foxes. Thus the Grecian foxes were endowed with the attributes of two animals, and the most curious fox-fables of Aesop are in their origin Indian jackal-fables. Some of Aesop's fables represent the fox as the follower and servant of the lion, which he is not known to be in any sense. The jackal, however, is in the habit of following the lion at a respectful distance, and lives on what he can pick up from the deserted repasts of the king of beasts. This trait was observed by the ancient Indians, and it was a natural result of the observation that their vivid imaginations, discovering royal prerogatives in the lion, should endow his follower with the qualities of a minister and counselor, and make him to assist his majesty by using in his behalf the qualities of slyness and cunning in which the royal beast was deficient. The Greeks substituted foxes for jackals because they knew nothing about them, and their foxes came nearer than any other animal to answering the descriptions of them. The transfer was made easier by the gradual development of the fables from simple nature-stories into moral lessons, in the course of which absolute truth to nature grew less essential, and the representation of abstract qualities under purely conventional masks became more prominent. The incongruous association by the Greeks of the supposed evil influences of Sirius with the harmless dog are susceptible of a similar explanation. The Chinese, however, who also attributed evil qualities to the dog-star, called it the jackal-star, and appropriately; for as the heat and drought of which it is the forerunner are destructive to the crops, so likewise are the jackals, which make their home in the fields, and are constantly running through them in gangs, destroying myriads of plants, in search of their food. To the Egyptians, Sirius was also the jackal-star, but foreboded good, for it appeared just before the time of the inundation. The Mesopotamians also recognized in it a forerunner of beneficent inundations, and gave it the name of the dog, an animal which they held in high esteem. The Greeks borrowed the Mesopotamian name, and kept the Chinese idea, which harmonized well with the character of their own dog-days. The origin of the dog-star has been associated by some other writers with the idea that Sirius, the chief of the stars, was the shepherd-dog to the host of heavenly sheep, represented by the other stars.

The second thing I found was this 1995 article by R. C. Ceragioli in the Journal for the History of Astronomy, called "The Debate Concerning 'Red' Sirius." It begins thus:

A long-standing question in the history of astronomy concerns whether Sirius, the Dog Star (α CMa), could have changed its intrinsic colour since antiquity. Half a dozen Greek, Roman and Near Easter sources refer to Sirius as "reddish", whereas since at least the Renaissance it has always shone a brilliant bluish white. So the question has been posed: could Sirius have changed from reddish to white since Antiquity?

At first sight, this might seem a reasonable possibility: stars do evolve and suffer various kinds of changes during their lifetimes. Could these ancient references to Sirius's redness be evidence for an evolutionary change during the historical period? Most astronomers consider this unlikely, because stellar evolution generally takes eons, not a mere 2,000 years, to produce significant results. Accordingly, they usually reject the ancient evidence for 'red' Sirius out of hand. Yet that evidence is strong . . .

I haven't yet read the whole article, but the idea that Sirius somehow changed from looking red to looking blue is an intriguing one. Paired with the idea that Sirius was originally the jackal-star, it suggests a possible meaning of the Blue Jackal fable, in which an ordinary (red-brown) jackal is dyed blue.

The red and blue jackals

In comparing different historical Tarot de Marseille decks, one quickly discovers that color is one of the most variable elements. It would be hard to find any feature of any card which is the same color in every single Marseille-style deck. Even such basic things as the Sun being yellow are not universal.

However, in every single one of the Marseille and Marseille-like decks in my files, the two dogs on the Moon card are colored the same: the one on the left is light-blue, and the one on the right is pink/buff/flesh-tone. (How exactly the eight colors of the standard Marseille palette are realized varies from deck to deck.) The one exception is the relatively late Lequart Pochoir deck (1890), which is wildly idiosyncratic in its color scheme -- but here even the Lequart doesn't stray far from the consensus, making the dogs blue and red rather than light-blue and pink. Take a quick look at the gallery below and notice how variable the colors are for the moon, the crayfish, and almost everything else in the picture, except the dogs. 

Recently, while searching for something else (Tarot, but otherwise unrelated), I came across a passing reference by Wilfried Houdoin (whose historical Tarot de Marseille facsimile decks I highly recommend) to a very similar pair of colored dogs found in manuscripts of Kalīla wa-Dimna, an 8th-century Arabic adaptation of the Sanskrit Panchatantra, a collection of animal fables dating back to 200 BC or earlier.

Kalīla wa-Dimna, 1220 (above) and 1310 (below)

As the examples above show, there is some variation as to which dog (jackal, actually) is on the left and which on the right, but the Arabic names are constant: The red or pink jackal is Kalīla (Sanskrit Karataka) and the blue one is Dimna (Sanskrit Damanaka).

I've never read Kalīla wa-Dimna, but I do have some passing familiarity with its source material, the Panchatantra, and anyone who has read that will know there is not the slightest chance that either Karataka or Damanaka could have been blue or would ever have been portrayed as blue in Indian art. Why? Because one of the stories told by this pair of jackals revolves around the idea that there is no such thing as a blue jackal, that a "blue jackal" might as well be a creature from another world!

Briefly, the story of "The Blue Jackal" concerns an ordinary jackal who, fleeing from dogs, jumped into a vat to hide and found that it was a vat of blue dye. When he came out, he was blue and scared away the dogs, who did not recognize him as the jackal they had been chasing. Taking advantage of his new color, the Blue Jackal told all the animals that he was a celestial being sent from Indra to be their leader, and they believed him. His first act as King of the Beasts was to banish all the jackals, lest any of them recognize him. Some time later, though, while he was holding court, a pack of jackals happened to be passing by in the distance, and they started howling. The Blue Jackal, unable to restrain himself, joined in the howling. Thus was he recognized as an impostor by the other animals, who turned on him and killed him.

Searching the Wikipedia article on Kalīla wa-Dimna (flagged with "This article's plot summary may be too long or excessively detailed"), I can't find the words blue, dye, or color anywhere, so it appears that "The Blue Jackal" didn't make the cut when the Panchatantra was translated into Arabic. Could the convention of portraying Dimna as blue have been influenced by an Indian illustration for "The Blue Jackal," misunderstood as portraying a different Panchatantra jackal story?

In the story from which Kalīla wa-Dimna takes its name, the two jackals are brothers who work as doormen in the lion king's court. The ambitious, smooth-talking Dimna successfully gains the favor of the king and becomes his most trusted advisor. Later, when a bull becomes his rival for the king's favor, Dimna sows distrust between the lion and the bull and tricks the former into killing the latter.  Through all this, Kalīla is constantly warning Dimna to abandon his ambitious schemes, but Dimna always ignores him. In the end, Dimna's duplicity is revealed, and he is first imprisoned and then executed.

The similarity to "The Blue Jackal" story is apparent; both Dimna and the Blue Jackal use deception to rise higher than their appointed station in life, and both come to a bad end. In some versions of "The Blue Jackal" I have read online, the Blue Jackal even becomes the most trusted advisor of a Lion King, so it appears that the two stories have sometimes been conflated. Perhaps an Indian illustration of the Blue Jackal enjoying a position of high status among the animals was misinterpreted by the Arabs as depicting Damanaka/Dimna, and the original idea that a blue jackal was something highly unnatural was lost. (Perhaps jackal coloration once varied more in the Middle East than it does at present, or than it did in India; cf. the black jackals of Egyptian art, corresponding to no extant species. Gray, or "blue," might have been seen as an unremarkable color for a jackal.)

Whatever the origin of the red and blue jackals seen in Kalīla wa-Dimna illustrations, I think it is reasonably likely that they had a direct influence on the Tarot de Marseille. While the Major Arcana are Christian and European through and through, the Minor Arcana (and our modern playing cards) undeniably descend from Arabic cards brought into Europe in the 14th century with the invading armies of the Mamluk Sultanate. If this bit of Arab Muslim culture was incorporated into the Tarot wholesale, we should scarcely be surprised to see hints of that influence in the Major Arcana as well.

The Emperor's Urim and Thummim

Further thoughts on Oswald Wirth's Emperor card (shown below in its 1889, 1926, and 1966 versions):

One of Wirth's innovations was to give the Emperor a breastplate marked with figures of the Sun and the Moon. In my first post on this card, I tentatively connected these with the biblical Urim and Thummim, which were worn on Aaron's "breastplate of judgment."

In his Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, Éliphas Lévi identified the Urim and Thummim with various pairs of polar opposites -- "the above and beneath, the East and West, the yes and no" -- and also with "the two crescents of the moon." I speculated that Wirth, who was deeply influenced by Lévi, had combined these two ideas and represented the Urim and Thummim as the crescent Moon and its polar opposite, the Sun. Further evidence that the Emperor's breastplate is Aaron's can be seen in the braided gold chain he wears (already present in the Tarot de Marseille), which corresponds to the "wreathen chains of gold" described in Exodus 28. Wirth's Besançon-influenced version of the Emperor's scepter also calls to mind Aaron's rod that budded and blossomed and brought forth almonds (Number 17:8).

(We might more naturally associate Aaron, the high priest, with the fifth trump, the Pope or Hierophant, but perhaps that position should be reserved for Moses.)

As I explain in my 2013 post "Lux et Veritas: A hypothesis," there is strong evidence that Mormon temple ritual identifies the square and compass of Freemasonry with the Urim and Thummim. A Masonic initiation involves pressing the angle of a square to the initiate's right breast and the point of a compass to his left. Mormon ritual echoes this by clothing the initiate in a garment marked with the figure of a square on the left breast and that of a compass on the right. The right angle of the square is represented by a shape like the letter L, and the acute angle of the compass by one like V. Given that this is not a very natural orientation for the compass, I concluded that the resemblance to L and V must be intentional and meaningful and that the marks, in addition to representing the square and compass, also stood for Lux et Veritas -- one possible Latin translation of Urim and Thummim, as seen for example on the coat of arms of Yale University.

The Hebrew writing on the book reads "Urim" on the right and "and Thummim" on the left. Note that Urim begins with aleph and Thummim with tav. These are the first and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet, corresponding to alpha and omega. (The letters L and V correspond to the second letters of the letter-names aleph and tav.)

Combining this with the symbolism of Wirth's Emperor, then, we have the following correspondences:

• right breast -- square -- lux (light) -- Urim -- aleph/alpha (beginning) -- Sun
• left breast -- compass -- veritas (truth) -- Thummim -- tav/omega (end) -- Moon

Can we organize all of this into a coherent symbolism? Consider this universal symbol, found in virtually all ancient cultures (and alluded to by the Emperor's globus cruciger): the cross inscribed in a circle.

We have three basic components here: the point at the center, the circumference, and the four radii that connect the former to the latter. The center is God, the Creator, the Source. The radii are God's activity, his creative Word, radiating out from him. The circumference is the phenomenal world, conceptualized as a passive creation of God's. That which acts, the action, and that which is acted-upon.

The square is used to draw the radii; the compass, to draw the circumference. The Sun is always shown with rays of light radiating from it, and it therefore corresponds to the center and the radii. The Moon is stereotypically drawn in crescent form -- as an arc, part of the circumference of a circle -- and therefore corresponds to the circumference.

In the Tarot, the Moon is given the number 18, and the Sun is 19. The Sun and the Moon together, then, represent 18 + 19 = 37. This is a hexagonal number, and can be represented as a (lunar) perimeter of 18 units surrounding a (solar) center of 19.

This is another link to Aaron's breastplate of judgment. Besides containing the Urim and Thummim, it was also set with 12 stones arranged in a 3-by-4 grid, engraved with the names of the 12 tribes of Israel. As detailed by Vernon Jenkins here, each of those names has a gematria value, and the total of all those values is 3,700. Furthermore, the breastplate can be divided into seven sections, each of which has a gematria value that is a multiple of 37.

The Sun, Moon, and 12 tribes of Israel also appear together in one of Joseph's dreams, in which the Sun (Jacob), Moon (Rachel), and 11 stars (the patriarchs of the tribes) bow down to Joseph. Coincidentally, this is recorded in Genesis 37.

The exact meaning of the Hebrew words Urim and Thummim is disputed, but "Lights and Perfections" is a traditional translation. The Vulgate has Doctrina et Veritas, and Yale's motto may be seen as a compromise between these two translations: Lux et Veritas, "Light and Truth." Light obviously corresponds to the Sun and, being the first creation, to aleph. Truth, conceptualized as passive knowing as opposed to active creation, corresponds to the Moon. The Moon reflects the light of the Sun, just as true ideas "reflect" an external reality.

Sun in Gemini, Moon in Cancer, and . . . ?

The Sun and Moon cards of the Tarot de Marseille feature very clear references to the zodiac signs of Gemini and Cancer, respectively. I think these identifications are indisputable.

16th-century German woodcut and the Pierre Madenié Tarot of 1709

We think of Cancer as a crab, but throughout the Middle Ages (as also in ancient Babylon) it was depicted as a crayfish, like the one seen on the Moon card. This identification is strengthened by the presence of two dogs on the card -- Canis Major and Canis Minor, both of which are located within the sign of Cancer.

(A "sign," being one-twelfth of the sky, always contains several constellations -- usually not including the one for which it is named. The zodiac must have been created at a time -- the "Age of Aries" -- when each of the 12 zodiacal constellations occupied the sign named for it, but due to the precession of the equinoxes, this is no longer the case. The sign of Aries is now occupied by the constellation Pisces, so this is the Age of Pisces, to be followed by the much-anticipated dawning of the Age of Aquarius. The placement of the two Dogs in Cancer shows that the Tarot de Marseille is a product of the Age of Pisces, much younger than the zodiac. But we already knew that.)

It is equally indisputable that the two figures on the Sun card are specifically the Gemini twins. As in the woodcut, they are clad only in loincloths -- presumably the "heroic nudity" of classical depictions of Castor and Pollux, modified slightly as a concession to Christian modesty. In both the woodcut and the card, each twin is reaching out an touching the other with one hand, but there is still some distance between their two torsos; this reflects the actual layout of the constellation Gemini.

Gemini

Cancer is traditionally said to be ruled by the Moon, so illustrating the Moon card with Cancer and its canine attendants seems logical enough. Gemini, on the other hand is ruled by Mercury, while the Sun rules Leo -- so why does the Sun card so prominently feature Gemini?

The only explanation I've ever come across is that Gemini is a summer sign, covering May 20 to June 20, which is a time when it is hot and sunny. But Leo -- July 22 to August 22 -- actually covers the hottest part of the year in Europe and is ruled by the Sun. Was Gemini a third choice, resorted to only because Leo and Cancer were already claimed by Strength and the Moon?

⁂

It occurred to me that perhaps the Tarot de Marseille as a whole might be pointing to a particular date, one on which the Sun was in Gemini and the Moon was in Cancer. That's not specific enough by itself, though. Since (from the geocentric perspective of astrology) the Moon moves through the zodiac about 13 times as fast as the Sun does, every single Sun/Moon sign combination occurs every single year. For example, in 2020 the Sun was in Gemini and the Moon was in Cancer from May 25 to 27, and every single year will have a few days like that in May or June. To pinpoint a specific year, or at least narrow it down, we need the signs of a few more planets.

The only other card I can think of that may indicate a planet-sign combination is the Star.

This card is together with the Moon and the Sun in the deck, and it has the same format: a heavenly body overhead and a terrestrial scene below suggesting one of the signs of the zodiac -- in this case, Aquarius. This match is not as perfect as the others; Aquarius is typically shown as a man pouring out one jug of water, not a woman pouring out two. However, just as the two dogs that accompany the crayfish on the Moon card cement its identity as Cancer, the bird that appears on the Star card may represent Aquila, the Eagle; this constellation is partly in Aquarius and partly in Capricorn, but its two brightest stars are both in Aquarius, and more of it would have been in Aquarius in the past.

What planet does this card put in the sign of Aquarius? Well, there is broad agreement that "the" Star is the brightest object in the sky after the Sun and Moon, the morning and the evening star -- the planet Venus -- and the presence of a naked woman with flowing golden hair (cf. the Homeric "golden Aphrodite") reinforces that identification.

Unfortunately, it is physically impossible for Venus to be in Aquarius when the Sun is in Gemini. There are three signs between Aquarius and Gemini, and each sign is 30 degrees of arc, so the angular distance between a body in Aquarius and one in Gemini is always greater than 90 degrees. The diagram below shows why Venus can never be 90 degrees from the Sun.

The circle represents the Earth's orbit around the Sun. (Yes, I know it's really an ellipse; that doesn't change anything.) Inferior planets (Mercury and Venus) are always inside that circle, and superior planets (Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and the rest) are always outside it. Anything along the red line would appear from Earth to be 90 degrees' angular distance from the Sun. The orbit of Venus, being inside the circle, can never touch that red line. In fact, looking it up now, I see that Venus's maximum elongation is 47 degrees -- so if the Sun is in Gemini, Venus can only be in Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, or Leo.

Could the Strength card indicate Venus in Leo? That seems forced. The only reason for connecting it with Venus is that it features a woman. (Venus is, apart from the Moon, the only feminine "planet.") But the Star also features a woman, and a much more Venus-like one, and in an explicitly astrological context.

I think the idea that the cards point to a specific date has to be abandoned — and the mystery of the Sun in Gemini card remains unsolved.