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.

The Ace of Cups combines baptismal and Eucharistic imagery

In my 2020 post "The Ace of Cups: A brief overview of its development," I concluded that the Ace of Cups, particularly in its Marseille incarnation, is a "chalice with a cover serving as a monstrance" -- a monstrance, or ostensorium, being an object used to display the Host. I was baffled, though, by the fact that, despite the very clear Eucharistic imagery, the chalice is always shown flowing with water, never with wine or blood. I also failed to see any Eucharistic meaning in the Pierpont Morgan-Bergamo Visconti-Sforza card, which seemed to show a fountain; and I thought that interpreting the bird ornament on the PMB fountain as the dove of the Holy Ghost was an innovation of Waite's.

Now, having followed some leads from Michael J. Hurst's 2007 post "The Ace of Cups: Christian Content in Tarot," I want to revisit some of these questions.

First, the PMB card turns out to be more Eucharistic than I had imagined. Consider this German woodcut of the late 15th century, called by the National Gallery, "Allegory of the Eucharist."

Note the structure of the central object: A pillar rises up from the center of a hexagonal basin; two spouts on the sides of the pillar pour out liquid; and at the top is a dove. The Eucharistic intention is obvious, since it is a fountain of blood with what are apparently Hosts floating in it. (Hurst provides a black-and-white version of this picture and suggests that the two streams of liquid represent the water and blood that flowed from the pierced side of the Crucified; in color, though, we can see that it is all blood.)

Now compare the image above with the Ace of Cups of the PMB Visconti-Sforza deck.

This is an extremely close match. The main differences are that the basin now has a stem and base like a goblet, and that the liquid is water rather than blood.

So why is it water? Why do all these cards have a design that shouts this is the blood of Christ, only to show it as water instead?

In my 202 post, I noted how similar the Marseille Ace of Cups is to this late 15th-century Spanish monstrance.

One important difference, though, is that the monstrance has no bowl -- it lacks the very part of the Ace of Cups that makes it a cup! That's why I conjectured that it must be some sort of combined chalice-and-monstrance, even though I scoured the Net in vain for images of any such object. (I did find combined chalice-monstrances, but not with a design at all similar to that seen on the Ace.) And the question still remains as to why water -- blue, definitely not wine or blood -- should be shown flowing out of the object.

Well, it turns out some old baptismal fonts look a lot like the Ace of Cups -- a large basin on a stem and base, with an ornate "Gothic" cover.

So it appears that the Ace of Cups combines the imagery of chalice, monstrance, and font. The blood/wine/water ambiguity is not entirely unbiblical, either. Several passages present the blood of Christ as something we might drink or wash in; Christ "bled" water as well as blood on the cross; and of course there is the famous miracle at Cana, where water was turned into wine. Jesus connected drinking from a cup with being baptized when he said, "Are you able to drink the cup I drink or to be baptized with the baptism I am baptized with?" (Mark 10:38). In Gethsemane he referred to his coming passion and death as a cup to drink from, and Paul later said baptism was a symbol of Christ's death -- we are "buried with him in baptism" (Col. 2:12). Mormons in particular will appreciate the connection, since the Mormon Eucharist uses water instead of wine and is said to be a renewal of one's baptismal covenants.

Waite's card also, I think, contains both baptismal and Eucharistic imagery.

As I mentioned in my earlier post, a dove flying over a chalice with a Host in its beak is very common Eucharistic iconography. On Waite's card, though, the dove is flying straight down as if it is going to dip the Host into the water. Since the Host is the body of Christ, this corresponds to the baptism of Jesus -- which was also the occasion on which the Holy Ghost descended in the form of a dove. Waite has five streams of water where we would expect four, but if water and blood are interchangeable, they could be a reference to the Five Wounds of the Crucified.

The dove flying over water also appears in the story of Noah, and it is perhaps significant in the present context that after the Flood, Noah invented wine and got drunk. In 1 Peter, baptism is connected with Noah's ark, in which "eight souls were saved by water -- the like figure whereunto even baptism doth also now save us" (3:20-21).

This biblical connection between baptism and the number eight is probably why Mormons baptize at the age of eight, and why so many baptismal fonts are octagonal. It is curious, then, that the German woodcut and the Visconti and Marseille Aces all show a hexagonal structure. Hexagonal baptismal fonts are extremely uncommon, and chalices are round, so where does this come from? Well, according to this post at the Liturgical Arts Journal, the very oldest extant monstrance, dated to 1286, is hexagonal and is an extremely close match for the Marseille Ace.

So I think we have to say that the Ace of Cups combines elements of three different sacred objects: the font, the chalice, and the monstrance.

Synchronistic postscript: After writing the above, I ran an image search on holy grail medieval drawing to see if the Holy Grail was every depicted as an object similar to the Ace of Cups. The search was useless -- most of the results were modern drawings and showed a simple chalice -- but one result got my attention because it appeared at first glance to show a chalice with a Gothic cover. What it actually turned out to be, though, was a combined image of the Grail, a castle, and my friend the owl.

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 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.

Lightning and falling rocks

In my last post, "Lightning from the Sun?" I refer to the astronomical theories proposed by David Talbott and the Thunderbolts Project and how synchronicity connected them with the Tower card of the Tarot.

Intrigued by the first "Symbols of an Alien Sky" video, I've started watching "Symbols of an Alien Sky, Episode 2: The Lightning Scarred Planet Mars," which is, insofar as a layman can judge, makes a very strong case that the face of Mars was shaped by electrical discharges on an enormous scale. Starting at 18:39, there is even a reference to the question that inspired my first post on the Tower, "What is the House of God?" -- the connection between lightning and "thunderstones," or meteorites.

We have proposed that in a former epoch of planetary instability electric discharge excavated the Martian surface miles deep, throwing massive quantities of rock into space. This would mean that most of the Martian rocks reaching Earth would have come from well below the surface and would not even bear the atmospheric signature of the planet. So, it is not unreasonable to suspect that the planet Mars was not a small contributor but the greatest contributor to meteoric bombardment of Earth in ancient times.

On this question, ancient testimony holds a surprising answer. Worldwide accounts describe apocalyptic wars of the gods punctuated by lightning and falling stone. Rocks from space falling on the Earth have no connection to lightning and thunder in our own time, but the ancient connection is clear. In many different languages meteorites and exotic rocks were called thunderstones, or thundereggs, said to have fallen in the great wars of the gods.

Could this ancient connection have survived in oral tradition all the way down to the French peasants of the 20th century, who, René Guénon reports, "say, in fact, that thunder falls in two ways, 'in fire' or 'in stone'"? Could there really be any connection between this

and this?

Lightning from the Sun?

The earliest recorded names of the 16th trump, known in English as the Tower, show that its primary subject was originally lightning. Old Italian documents call it Fire or The Arrow, and the Vandenborre Tarot (1780) calls it Lightning. The Vandenborre and the Tarot of Bologna, also dating to 1780, are the oldest Tarots I have been able to find that portray lightning in a way somewhat recognizable to us moderns, as zigzag lines.

Vandenborre, Bologna (both 1780)

Even the Vandenborre portrayal is a little odd, though. Note the petal-like tongues of flame or light radiating from the cloud, which seem out of place in a thunderstorm ("dark and stormy" is a cliché for a reason) and belong more to conventional representations of the Sun. The Bolognese card seems to show the bolt coming from the Sun itself.

The Vandenborre card is clearly patterned after the much older Jacques Viéville card, and seems almost to be a modernizing "correction" of its imagery.

Jacques Viéville (c. 1650)

Look at the Viéville card. Does that look anything at all like lightning? The cloud is simply radiating light like the sun. Even the cloud itself is somewhat strange, with its reds and yellows (changed to a more realistic gray in the Vandenborre), but it does at least look like a cloud.

The Bolognese card is based on the Tarot de Marseille, where the lightning comes from the upper right corner of the card, and what it comes from is scarcely visible -- but what it visible of it certainly doesn't look at all like a cloud.

Pierre Madenié (1709), Jean-Pierre Payen (1713)

The lightning appears to be emanating from an object consisting of concentric circles, with pointed rays coming out of it -- nothing at all like cloud, and much more like the Sun. Some decks show a bit more of this object, making its nature clearer.

François Héri (1730)

In some Besançon decks, it is pretty explicitly the Sun.

Johan Jerger (1801)

Isn't that strange? Lightning obviously doesn't come from the Sun, and it's hard to imagine that any one ever thought that it did. Lightning typically occurs during rainstorms, when the sky is overcast and the Sun is not visible.

The other strange thing is the way the lightning itself is portrayed. As I've said, no cards that I know of prior to 1780 show anything we would recognize as lightning. The appearance of lightning -- a narrow, many-angled, often branching line of light -- is so distinctive that any deviation from it demands explanation. But all the oldest Tarots show it either as a diffuse radiance (Viéville), a thick column (Payen), or tongues of flame (most Marseille).

⁂

Over at From the Narrow Desert, I recently posted "Moon River syncs," about synchronicities indirectly related to my earlier post here about the Tower, "What is the House of God?" Something I mentioned in the post made Craig Davis think of the documentary "Symbols of an Alien Sky," and he posted a link to it. He had posted the same link once before, quite some time ago, but I didn't watch most of it because I have little patience with video. This time, though, with a little nudging from the sync fairies, I watched the whole thing.

The video, by David Talbott, presents a fringe astronomical theory which is too involved to summarize here, but the important points are (a) that the planet Saturn used to be much closer to the Earth, so close that it dominated the sky and was referred to as the "sun"; and (b) that when planets are close together, streams of electrified plasma sometimes connect them, and that the vajra, keraunos, and other strange-looking traditional depictions of the thunderbolt are accurate renditions of these plasma streams.

I lack the background knowledge to pass judgment on fringe astronomical theories, but this one fits nicely with the Tarot images discussed in this post, where strange-looking lightning emanates from the "sun." This image from the video bears a certain resemblance to the lightning on the Payen card.

⁂

After writing the above, I went to work, and received immediate confirmation from the synchronicity fairies.

My first class is a very small one, with only two students, a boy and a girl. Today the boy was wearing a shirt that said "SPACE" in English and had a silhouette of the planet Saturn. In the center of Saturn was a "lightning bolt" shape -- a modern one, just a zigzag pointed at either end.

Something like this

Just before the class, I had been thinking of the Tarot in terms of Talbott's theory, thinking that the "sun" from which the lightning was coming might actually be Saturn. Quite a coincidence, right? How often is the planet Saturn associated with lightning?

But the other coincidence was even more impressive. The other student, the girl, had brought a toy which was a little stuffed octopus with short tentacles.

Like this

During the class, she took this octopus out of her bag. She held it with the tentacles up, smooshed them together so they resembled the fingers of a hand, and said, "Teacher, look! 'Raise your hand'!"

Why was that such an impressive coincidence? Because, starting at the 57:56 mark, the "Symbols of an Alien Sky" video shows how a configuration with eight radii can look from a certain angle like a hand.

That's an extremely specific coincidence! The same thing can resemble either a hand or an eight-tentacled "octopus" depending on how you look at it. Paired with the lightning-Saturn shirt, it seems almost uncanny.

What is the "House of God"?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Temperance, the Hermit, and the hourglass

As I pointed out in last year's post "First thoughts on Temperance," the image on the Temperance card -- liquid being poured from one vessel to another -- is conceptually similar to an hourglass, and that an hourglass has actually been used elsewhere as a symbol of that virtue.

Detail from Ambrogio Lorenzetti,
Allegory of Good Government (1338)

Lorenzetti's painting is in fact the earliest known depiction of an hourglass -- and it is captioned Tenperantia (cf. the spelling Tenperance used in most old Marseille decks).

If we look at the hourglass as a symbol of time itself (tempus), the narrow neck in the center represents the present moment. The lower chamber, full of sand which has already passed through that neck, corresponds to the past; and the upper chamber is the future.

Now compare this to the Tarot image of Temperance.

Pierre Madenié (1709)

The angel of Temperance is pouring water from the vessel in her left hand (our right) into the one in her right (our left). Since the original image is of pouring water into wine to dilute it, the upper vessel contains water, and the lower one contains wine. The upper vessel corresponds to the upper chamber of the hourglass, which has the form of an inverted triangle -- the alchemical symbol for Water. The upright triangle of the lower chamber is the alchemical symbol for Fire (with which wine is associated). If we add horizontal lines through the triangles, we have the alchemical symbols for Earth and Air. Just as the angel of Temperance is pouring Water into wine (Fire), an hourglass pours sand (Earth) into an "empty" chamber (Air).

Notice that the grains of sand in the upper chamber of an hourglass move toward the center, while those in the lower chamber move away from the center. In the Aristotelian schema (from On Generation and Corruption), centripetal motion is associated with the Cold elements of Water and Earth, and centrifugal motion with the Hot elements of Fire and Air.

Fire and Air are masculine elements, while Water and Earth are feminine. In the hourglass, and in the vessels of Temperance, we have a sort of reverse-insemination symbolism, with the masculine vessel passively receiving material from the feminine. In the hourglass, this inversion is explicit: the only reason an hourglass works at all is that it artificially inverts the natural arrangement, putting Earth above Air; the motion of the sand is gravity's gradual rectification of this unnatural state of affairs. Notice that both in Lorenzetti's painting and on the Tarot card, the receptive vessel is held in the masculine right hand; and on the card, the other vessel (I can't think of an appropriate antonym for receptive) is held in the feminine left hand.

If the upper vessel represents the future and the lower vessel the past, the main difference between the hourglass and the Temperance image is the present. In the hourglass, as in our common conception of time, the present is where the future and the past meet, and it approximates a dimensionless geometric point. On the Temperance card, the two vessels are separated, and the present -- no longer dimensionless -- corresponds to the stream of water flowing between them. Temperance. The present has been expanded from a point to a line. Our ordinary perception of time is as a line bisected by a point present, but occasionally (mostly in the dreaming state), we have access to the higher-dimensional perspective of meta-time: a time plane bisected by a linear present -- a meta-present which embraces the entire timeline of ordinary experience. (I have posted about this many times; search my blogs for the name Dunne.) In my 2018 post "As the heavens are higher than the earth," I interpret the "higher" perspective referred to by Isaiah as being dimensionally higher.

One sense in which the heavens are higher than the earth is in their higher dimensionality. Strictly speaking, of course, the earth is a spheroid and is just as three-dimensional as the heavens, but the earth as experienced by man is essentially a two-dimensional surface, which is why it is often convenient to represent it with two-dimensional maps. The heavens, in contrast are fully and irreducibly three-dimensional, such that no two-dimensional map would be a close enough approximation to be of any use.

Human thoughts and ways tend to be limited to three spatial dimensions, with the fourth dimension experienced as “time.” God, who is eternal rather than temporal, can be conceptualized as thinking and working (at minimum) “one dimension up” — using the fifth dimension as time, which enables him to see our whole four-dimensional continuum as “present.”

But just as the earth is not truly two-dimensional, human thought and experience is not truly limited to the “temporal” (meaning the perspective from which the fourth dimension is “time”). Just as we can sometimes look down from a mountaintop or an airplane, using the third dimension to get a wider-than-usual view of the two-dimensional surface on which we live and perhaps an inkling of the perspective of “the heavens,” so can we sometimes attain a fleeting glimpse of the higher-dimensional (“eternal”) perspective of God.

These "fleeting glimpses" of the perspective from which the present is not a point but a line -- can they not be symbolized by an hourglass with the two chambers drawn apart, a flowing stream taking the place of the point-like neck? And don't the angel's wings and eye-like headdress also suggest this "higher perspective"?

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If hourglass imagery is implicit in Temperance, it was explicit in the card now known as the Hermit but originally called il Gobbo, il Vecchio, or il Tempo (the Hunchback, the Old Man, or Time). Like the figure in the Lorenzetti painting, the Old Man carried an hourglass, holding the lower chamber in his right hand.

Visconti-Sforza (mid 15th century)

When what presumably began as a copying error transformed the hourglass into a lantern, this character developed into the Hermit of the Tarot de Marseille and his close cousin, the Capuchin of the Tarot de Besançon. (Even some decks that call him the Hermit make an exception to their standard eight-color palette to give him the characteristic brown robe of a Capuchin friar. Historically, the Capuchin style of dress was a deliberate homage to that of the Camaldolese Hermits.)

Pierre Madenié (1709), Johan Jerger (1801)

The Rider-Waite card generally follows this model, deviating from it as described by Waite in The Pictorial Key to the Tarot.

The variation from the conventional models in this card is only that the lamp is not enveloped partially in the mantle of its bearer, who blends the idea of the Ancient of Days with the Light of the World. It is a star which shines in the lantern. I have said that this is a card of attainment, and to extend this conception the figure is seen holding up his beacon on an eminence. Therefore the Hermit is not, as Court de Gebelin explained, a wise man in search of truth and justice; nor is he, as a later explanation proposes, an especial example of experience. His beacon intimates that "where I am, you also may be."

Waite writes the Hermit's number not as VIIII but as IX -- the Greek initials of Jesus Christ -- a decision perhaps not unrelated to his identification of the Hermit with the title "Light of the World" (John 8:12) and with the saying "where I am, there ye may be also" (John 14:3).

The most interesting feature of the Rider-Waite Hermit in the present context, though, is that "it is a star which shines in the lantern" -- specifically, a six-pointed star, or hexagram.

The hexagram in the lantern is interesting for two reasons. First, it reintroduces the hourglass's symbolism of the two opposing elemental triangles.

As shown above, Temperance and the Hermit take the hourglass symbolism in opposite directions. In Temperance, the two chambers of the glass are separated and moved farther apart, expanding the point that connects them (the punctal present of object time) into a stream (the linear present of meta-time). In the Hermit, the two chambers overlap and interpenetrate.

What this could mean in terms of time is hard to make out. While the Temperance image features a linear present -- an extensive region which is neither past nor present -- the hexagram has instead a large two-dimensional region which is both past and present whatever that could mean! So far I have not been able to find any coherent symbolism in this.

The other reason the Rider-Waite star-in-the-lantern image is interesting is that it is a link to the Star card, which in turn is obviously closely related to Temperance.

Marseille decks invariably have eight-pointed stars, and Waite follows that tradition, but in Switzerland the number of points was somewhat variable. Besançon decks often have five-pointed stars, and one deck (only one that I know of) actually has hexagrams like the one in the lantern of Waite's Hermit.

François Héri, Solothurn 1730

I find the Star to be one of the very most enigmatic Tarot trumps, the origin of its iconography a mystery. I suppose it must have come from depictions of the constellation Aquarius -- often shown pouring out two water jugs in Medieval zodiacs -- but in the context of the Tarot deck the similarity to the Temperance image must be intentional and must have some meaning. I have connected Temperance with the Hermit by way of the shared hourglass imagery, and Waite's Hermit completes the triangle by connecting the Hermit with the Star.

I am not yet sure what to make of these connections, but I think in the future I will have to contemplate these three trumps together.

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.