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.

The Visconti-Sforza Emperor cards

The earliest extant Tarot cards are those commissioned by Filippo Maria Visconti and Francesco Sforza, Dukes of Milan, in the mid-15th century, and most likely painted by Bonifacio Bembo. From these "Visconti-Sforza" Tarot decks, three Emperor cards survive -- making it the most represented of the Visconti-Sforza trumps.

Pierpont-Morgan-Bergamo (c. 1451), Brera-Brambilla (1463), Cary-Yale (c. 1466)

Some notable features of these cards:

Eagle headdress: All three of these cards show the emperor wearing a distinctive fan-shaped headdress marked with the black (or, on the BB card, blue) Reichsadler that was the emblem of the Holy Roman Emperors (and which also featured on the flag of the Duchy of Milan). The strange shape almost reminds one of a "pirate hat" or of the traverse crest of a Roman centurion. Despite considerable searching, I have not been able to find any other examples of such headgear, either in the Tarot or in images of historical Holy Roman Emperors. Bernhard Strigel's portrait of Maximilian I (r. 1486-1519) and his family does show hats with a roughly similar shape, but the differences from the Tarot card are still considerable.

It seems strange that the emperor would be depicted sitting on his throne, holding his orb and scepter, and yet not wearing his crown. The crown does appear as a motif on the PMB emperor's clothing, and in the hands of one of the CY emperor's attendants, but in no case is the monarch actually wearing it. Instead, he has this extraordinary ginkgo-leaf contraption with an eagle on it.

Minimalist scepter: On all three cards, the emperor's scepters is just a simple rod, with no finial. As with the hat, I have been unable to find any parallels in the Tarot or in the regalia of historical Holy Roman Emperors.

Cracked orb: A typical orb has a circular belt around the equator, a semicircular perpendicular band passing through the north pole, and a cross at the apex. Where these bands of jeweled material should be, the PMB and BB cards have zigzag lines instead, like cracks in an egg that is about to hatch, or like the sutures of a human skull. The egg/skull effect is reinforced on the BB card by the fact that the orb is white.

This "cracked orb" design appears to be unique to the Visconti-Sforza cards. On the CY card, there is no conventional orb at all. Instead, the emperor appears to be resting his left elbow on a golden disc etched with concentric circles.

Borromean rings: The PMB emperor's robe is decorated with a repeating motif of crowns and Borromean rings -- that is, three interlocking rings, like a Venn diagram, called "Borromean" because they appear on the coat of arms of the House of Borromeo, a prominent family in Milan which intermarried with the Viscontis.

Vegetation: A bit of leafy vegetation is visible near the PMB emperor's left foot. This was perpetuated in the Tarot de Marseille, further developed by the Swiss cardmakers, and finally turned into a tulip by Oswald Wirth. Why the emperor should be sitting on a throne out of doors, rather than in his palace, is another question.

Crossed legs: The CY card is the first to show the emperor with crossed legs. This, too, was picked up by the Tarot de Marseille, and much was later made of it by the French (and, later, English) occultists, who saw in the emperor's posture a hidden allusion to the alchemical symbol for sulfur.

Armor: It's not obvious, but if you look closely you can see that the CY emperor is wearing a suit of armor, including a breastplate with a second imperial eagle on it. This feature was lost in the Tarot de Marseille but was later reintroduced by Oswald Wirth, from whom it was copied by A. E. Waite.

Attendants: The smaller figures attending the CY emperor have their counterparts in a few other early Italian decks but were never picked up by the Marseille/occult mainstream. On the CY card they appear to be children, but this is more likely an Egyptian-style convention of portraying less important figures as physically smaller. The Emperor from the Rothschild-Bassano deck -- from Florence, and possibly a few decades older than the Visconti-Sforza cards themselves, though not unambiguously a Tarot -- features positively tiny attendants who nevertheless have beards and are thus clearly not children.

Note also that the Rothschild-Bassano figure is holding an oversized florin rather than a globus cruciger, so perhaps he is meant to be the King of Coins rather than the Emperor. In any case, it is an interesting parallel with the golden disc seen on the CY card.

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.

The banner of judgment

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

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

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

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

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

Writing the Book of Thoth

We are the music makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams

-- Arthur O'Shaughnessy, Ode

Let's step back and return to the earliest -- and, in some ways, the most mysterious -- Magician card: the one painted by Bonifacio Bembo c. 1450 for the Visconti-Sforza family.

As I have discussed elsewhere, Dr. Michael Pearce has demonstrated -- conclusively, in my judgment -- that this is a picture of a writer, not a conjurer. His "magic wand" is actually a reed pen; nibs are clearly visible at both ends, and he holds it as if he were writing with it. The knife is a pen knife for cutting nibs, and the cup is an inkwell. The white blob he is reaching for is a sponge, used for wiping away ink.

This interpretation raises some obvious questions, though:

• What are those two round things? (Pearce says, unconvincingly, they are additional receptacles for ink.)
• Why is there no ink on the pen or in any of the three purported inkwells?
• Why, given that he seems to be in the act of writing, is there no paper for him to write on?

Would it be going too far off the deep end to suggest that

• the ink is gold,
• he's writing -- or rather drawing -- directly on the table, and
• the two round things aren't solid objects at all but have been drawn on the table?

Take a closer look at the pen and the objects near it on the table.

First, look at the pen -- for that is clearly what it is. Notice that the main shaft is painted in two colors: lighter gold along the northwest edge, and darker along the southeast. The nib, though, is entirely the darker-gold color, as if it had been dipped in gold ink.

Now note that the two round objects, and the cup, are not painted as solid objects but as line drawings done in dark gold ink. The color between the lines is simply the background color of the table. This sort of thing is common enough in the Tarot de Marseille, which uses a limited palette of (usually) eight colors, but this is a hand-painted card. Every other solid object is painted in hues and gradations to suggest solidity. Notice how the tabletop itself shades from off-white on the left to yellow on the right, for example. But the interior of the cup is off-white where the table is off-white, yellow where the table is yellow; not a hint of shading has been added to suggest a three-dimensional object, and the same is true of the round things.

We are viewing the table from an angle, and the round things are drawn accordingly -- as circles lying flat on the table and seen from an angle. The cup, though is vertical from our point of view, even though "vertical" on the table should actually be an angle of 36 rather than 90 degrees. (Yes, the Visconti-Sforza Magician card incorporates the geometry of a pentagram.) Of course the Magician could in theory have deliberately drawn it that way, so that it would look vertical from out perspective -- like one of those trompe l'oeil trick-perspective paintings people like to take selfies with.

Or are the things the Magician draws, after the manner of Escher's Reptiles or Drawing Hands, actually transforming into three-dimensional objects? The coins (or whatever they are) are still just drawings, the knife and sponge are solid, and the cup is in between. The implied fact that the ink he is drawing with comes from the cup he has drawn adds another, even more Escherian, layer of paradox.

M. C. Escher, Reptiles (1943)

M. C. Escher, Drawing Hands (1948)

Am I really proposing that Bonifacio Bembo -- to all appearances a creator of straightforward representational art -- had some mind-bending postmodern paradox in mind when he painted this card? Well, probably not, though I wouldn't rule it out. Keep in mind that these cards were commissioned, and that they may reflect his patron's thinking more than his own, just as the cards created by Pamela Colman-Smith reflect the mystical philosophy of A. E. Waite. But are we to believe that anyone in the 15th-century was an Escherian avant la lettre? Well, I wouldn't go that far, but perhaps it should not be all that surprising to see something paradoxical and seemingly impossible on the Magician's table. The seemingly impossible is what magicians do; that's what magic is.

Was the Visconti-Sforza "Magician" a magician all along, then, and not (just) a writer who was misinterpreted as such by later generations of carmakers? I don't know the answer to that. He does not closely resemble typical depictions of conjurers. Cups and balls were a standard part of such depictions -- the 15th-century equivalent of a top hat with a rabbit in it -- but I know of no non-Tarot depictions of a conjurer with a knife and a sponge. His equipage is, with the exception of the two coins, that of a writer.

A typical conjurer, from the Tübinger Hausbuch

But if he's a writer, he's certainly an extremely strange one, since he has no book or paper but is writing directly on the table! No, not writing -- drawing. Once it's been pointed out, it's impossible to un-see the fact that he is drawing coins (or some other round objects) on the table; he's drawn two already and is preparing to draw a third. What on earth can that mean?

At this point I think we have to give up trying to guess what Bembo intended and instead look at the picture on its own terms, keeping in mind that even coincidences and mistakes can be inspired, and not shying away from anachronism.

⁂

Although this was not made explicit until Oswald Wirth's "esoteric" redesign of the Trumps at the end of the 19th century, it is hard not to notice that the Magician's objects -- in both the Tarot de Marseille and the Visconti-Sforza -- appear to allude to the four suits of the Minor Arcana. There are coins, a cup or cups, a knife (suggesting the suit of Swords), and of course the Magician's magic wand.

This means that the Magician's table symbolically represents the Tarot itself. Notice that while conjurers are typically depicted at tables that are round (as in the Tübinger Hausbuch) or square (as in the Bosch painting), Bembo's Magician sits at a rectangular table approximately twice as long as it is wide -- the same dimensions as a Visconti-Sforza Tarot card. The table is gold, reflecting the gilded background of Bembo's trumps and court cards. The Magician, drawing the suit symbols on this golden card-shaped table, is creating the Tarot.

Recall that Oswald Wirth was the first to create a Tarot that explicitly featured a sword, a chalice, and the other suit symbols on the Magician's table. By one of those strange coincidences, Wirth's book Le Tarot des imagiers du Moyen Âge (properly The Tarot of the Medieval Image-makers) was mistranslated into English -- possibly through confusion of the French des imagiers with the German des Magiers -- as The Tarot of the Magicians. Thus, through some strange mistake or stranger paraphrase (Wirth's book has nothing to do with magic), were the image-makers who created the tarot dubbed magicians.

But the Magician of the Visconti-Sforza tarot, imagier though he may be, seems to have the equipment of a writer rather than an artist.  In particular, instead of an artist's paintbrush he has what is very clearly a reed pen -- a very long reed pen, much longer than the ones that were actually in use in the Middle Ages. What it most closely resembles, in fact, is the long reed pen used by the Egyptian god Thoth.

Thoth writing with a reed pen (Tomb of the Nobles, Thebes)

The Magician looks as if he ought to be writing a book, not drawing pictures -- but wait, hasn't the Tarot been called the Book of Thoth? People today probably associate that phrase with Aleister Crowley, but it actually dates back to Antoine Court de Gébelin -- and was prominently used by none other than Oswald Wirth, whose first Tarot book, predating Le Tarot des imagiers du Moyen Âge by 38 years, was called Le Livre de Thot comprenant les 22 arcanes du Tarot.

(As an additional coincidence, note that Thoth in the picture above, and in many other such pictures, has two circles on his writing tablet -- precisely what Bembo's Magician has drawn on his table.)

⁂

The key to the Visconti-Sforza Magician card -- regardless of what Bembo or his patrons may or may not have consciously intended -- is that the objects the Magician is using represent, simultaneously, the tools of the writer who is creating the Tarot, and the Tarot itself -- Escher's Drawing Hands again. The pen is both a pen and the suit of Wands; the knife is both a pen knife and the suit of Swords; the cup is both an inkwell and the suit of Cups. The sponge, aside from its role as a writer's tool, represents the Tarot's capacity to absorb everything, to incorporate as many diverse influences as you care to think of into its symbolism. And what of the two circles, which have no obvious role as writing tools? They are not tools, but symbolize the result of the Magician's work: gold coins. Hermes Thrice Great is, after all, a bit of an alchemist.

⁂

I am a Mormon by upbringing and inclination, and it is perhaps inevitable that this implied metaphor of using the Tarot to create the Tarot -- together with the image of writing with an Egyptian pen on a golden tablet -- brought to mind this passage from the Book of Mormon:

And upon these [golden plates] I write the things of my soul, and many of the scriptures which are engraven upon the plates of brass. For my soul delighteth in the scriptures, and my heart pondereth them, and writeth them for the learning and the profit of my children (2 Nephi 4:15).

When Nephi says that his heart writes the scriptures, he is probably referring to the fact that he is copying down on his own plates some of the things written on the plates of brass -- which latter plates contained Egyptian translations of parts of the Hebrew Bible. But an additional meaning, whether intended by Nephi or not, is that the "things of his soul" he is writing will themselves come to be considered scripture in their own right. He "pondereth them, and writeth them," and the two activities cannot in the end be entirely separated.

⁂

Let this, then, serve as the first post for this new blog, to be called -- for reasons I trust the post itself has made clear -- The Magician's Table. (I eventually plan to copy my old Tarot-related posts from other blogs here, but that's boring, and you know how I am about boring things! In other words, don't hold your breath. In the meantime, see here.)

Out of the strong came forth sweetness.

Briton Rivière, Una and the Lion (1880)

In my last post (qv), I hypothesized that the Strength card of the Tarot de Marseille originated when a depiction of Samson -- long-haired, beardless, and labeled with the grammatically feminine title La Fortezza or La Force -- was misinterpreted as being a woman. (Something similar seems to have happened to no less a personage than Jesus Christ in the World card.)

Visconti-Sforza Tarot, Tübinger Hausbuch, P. Madenié Tarot

As can be seen above, the earliest surviving Tarot cards (painted by Bonifacio Bembo for the Visconti-Sforza family) used Hercules rather than Samson as a representation of the virtue of Fortitude. The hero's identity is made clear by his short hair and by the fact that he carries a club. (Hercules first stunned the Nemean lion with his club and then strangled it with his bare hands; when Samson killed his lion, though, "he had nothing in his hand.")

While depictions of Hercules and the Nemean lion typically show the hero using his club or else grappling with the beast after the fashion of a Greek wrestler, Samson is almost universally depicted holding the lion's jaws open. This may seem strange -- wouldn't you want to hold its jaws closed? -- but reflects the biblical language. While Hercules bludgeoned and strangled his adversary, Samson "rent him as he would have rent a kid" (Judges 14:6). Pictures like the one in the Tübinger Hausbuch show him preparing to tear the beast in two.

The woman in the Tarot de Marseille also holds the lion's jaws open with her hands -- a pose specific to Samson, for a specific biblical reason. For me, this is conclusive evidence confirming my earlier speculation. The Strength card of the TdM came into being as a corruption of what was originally a picture of Samson -- the mistake being facilitated by his long hair and by the strangely androgynous faces so common in medieval and Renaissance art.

⁂

But when it comes to the development of the Tarot, the oldest cards are not always the truest, and a mistake is not always just a mistake. There is evolution at work here -- perhaps literal memetic evolution by natural selection (where only such mistakes as improve the card are preserved and copied), perhaps something more mysterious.

Hercules and the Nemean lion is just a standard hero-slays-monster story, with nothing particularly interesting about it. Vico, though, sees it is a symbolic representation of razing the forests of Nemea so that the land could be cultivated.

In the Samson story, this connection between killing the lion and providing food becomes more explicit, as Samson returns to the lion's carcass some time later and finds honey in it. This is the basis of his famous riddle:

Out of the eater came something to eat.
Out of the strong came something sweet.

I have quoted a version that rhymes -- it's a riddle, it has to rhyme! -- but the King James version says, "Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness" (Judges 14:14). The answer, discovered by his enemies through the treachery of his Philistine girlfriend, is "What is sweeter than honey? and what is stronger than a lion?" (v. 18).

The woman in the TdM image cannot be identified as any particular historical or mythological person, but I have illustrated this post with Briton Rivière's Una and the Lion -- a scene from Spenser -- because that is who she (anachronistically) reminds me of. Waite apparently thought likewise; his Strength card includes the Spenserian detail of the lion's licking Una's hand.

It fortuned out of the thickest wood
   A ramping Lyon rushed suddainly,
   Hunting full greedie after saluage blood;
   Soone as the royall virgin he did spy,
   With gaping mouth at her ran greedily,
   To haue attonce deuour'd her tender corse:
   But to the pray when as he drew more ny,
   His bloudie rage asswaged with remorse,
And with the sight amazd, forgat his furious forse.

In stead thereof he kist her wearie feet,
   And lickt her lilly hands with fawning tong,
   As he her wronged innocence did weet.
   O how can beautie maister the most strong,
   And simple truth subdue auenging wrong?
   Whose yeelded pride and proud submission,
   Still dreading death, when she had marked long,
   Her hart gan melt in great compassion,
And drizling teares did shed for pure affection.

And what is this but Samson's riddle completed? Out of the strong came forth sweetness, and out of the sweet came forth strength.

What's on the Magician's table?

1. The traditional Marseille layout

Tarot de Marseille decks stick very closely to the following layout for the Bateleur's table.

Based on Wilfried Houdouin's 2017 deck; color coding is my own

The details of each element below are taken from the Historical Tarots Gallery at the Tarot of Marseilles Heritage website. Upper row, from left to right: Pierre Madenié (1709), François Héri (1718), François Chosson (1736), Jean-Baptiste Madenié (1739), François Tourcaty (1745), and Rochus Schär (1750). Lower row: Claude Burdel (1751), Nicolas Conver (1760), Jacques Rochias (1782), Arnoux & Amphoux (1793), Suzanne Bernardin (1839), and Lequart (1890).

A: A cup with a round top, vertical sides, and a square bottom. There is very little variation in the shape. The main body of the cup is consistently yellow, and the mouth is most often red but sometimes other colors.

B: Another cup, with a different shape, wider at the top than at the bottom. It looks as if it may have a lid covering it. The color scheme is fairly consistent: yellow cup with a red mouth or lid.

C: It is not clear whether this object should be classified with the cups (A and B) or with the little round objects (D, E, and F). It is much smaller than the two cups but considerably larger than the little round things. While its basic shape is that of a circle divided into two parts, the concave curve of the dividing line suggests a very small, shallow cup, bowl, or dish. This object is most often the same color as the tabletop.

D: Three circular objects with the central one overlapping the one on the lower right (and sometimes the one on the left as well). So slavishly is this arrangement copied from deck to deck that when we see one with only two circles on this part of the table, it seems positively revolutionary! The objects are generally the color of the table. To me the layout suggests flat coins or discs rather than spherical objects. If they were balls, the lower right one (being in the foreground) would overlap the central one rather than vice versa. (On the other hand, the flat bottoms of cups A and B suggest an artist with little understanding of such things.) 

E: This element ranges from two circles side by side, to two overlapping circles, to a divided circle similar to C. The color is generally the same as the tabletop. The uncertainty as to whether this is one object or two suggests that the shapes were being copied blindly by cardmakers who did not know what they represented. My best guess is that the "original" form was a smaller circle in the northeast overlapping a larger one in the southwest, and that this was sometimes misunderstood as a single object due to the influence of the C object. As with the D objects, the direction of the overlap suggests flat rather than spherical objects.

F: Two more round items, vertically arranged. In most cases, they are touching so as to form a figure like an Arabic numeral 8, but in some decks there is a gap between them. Like the other round objects, they are generally the same color as the tabletop, but sometimes one of them is red.

G: A curved knife and its sheath, both generally the color of the table. The shape and orientation is consistent across decks. In one case the sheath has been transformed into a second knife. The knife has a very distinctive shape -- almost like a miniature scimitar with no cross-guard -- that makes me wonder what its purpose is. It certainly doesn't look much like a typical medieval pen knife, hunting knife, or dagger. The handle also seems much too small for the magician's hands, but perhaps that indicates nothing more than poor draftsmanship.

H: A bag, consistently light blue with a yellow mouth and strap. There are between one and three little round things at the mouth of the bag, which presumably represent some sort of latching mechanism. The bag is decorated with a tassel or something of that nature at the lower left corner. Sometimes one end of the strap appears to go behind the table rather than connecting to the bag.

⁂

2. Marseille variants, new and old

We have been looking at some of the oldest and most traditional Marseille decks, mostly from the 18th century, but in modern times the most influential Tarot de Marseille by far has been the 1930 Grimaud deck designed by Paul Marteau. Marteau claimed to be restoring the Nicolas Conver deck (the canonical Tarot de Marseille) but in fact introduced many innovations. Most of these are changes in the color scheme, but some are more substantial. Here is what Marteau's Bateleur has on his table:

If we ignore the colors, this is in line with Conver and the other decks we have examined, with one exception: The F element, realized as two circles in every historical deck we have looked at, has become a pair of dice.

A more recent "restored" Tarot de Marseille, also claiming the mantle of Nicolas Conver, features dice as well. This is the Jodorowsky-Camoin deck of 1997.

Note that Jodorowsky and Camoin have added a third die between the knife and its sheath, and also that the sheath has been given a fantastic new shape in defiance of tradition.

Whence these dice? As far as I am aware, there is only one early deck that unambiguously features dice, but it is one of the earliest: Jean Noblet's deck of c. 1650. Noblet's Tarot is generally very close to the Tarot de Marseille in its iconography, but not so close as to be considered a full member of that tradition. Here is his Bateleur's table:

Notice that Noblet's C element -- realized in the standard Tarot de Marseille as a circle divided into two parts -- appears here as a third and smaller cup. This suggests that what was originally a small cup was distorted over time, by a process of repeated copying without understanding, into the indistinct round object that later became standard.

Isn't it highly probably that some of the other round things on the table in the traditional Tarot de Marseille are also distortions of what were originally distinct objects? Isn't it more likely that indistinctly printed dice would degenerate into circles than that circles would be misinterpreted as dice? Marteau, Jodorowsky, and Camoin seem to have thought so. Noblet has three horizontally arranged dice where the standard Tarot de Marseille has two vertically arranged circles (the F element). Marteau apparently split the difference, keeping just two elements vertically arranged but changing them to dice. Jodorowsky and Camoin put two dice in the same position as Marteau's and add a third between the knife and the sheath, as in Noblet.

Note also that Noblet's D element -- three circles -- is somewhat different. Rather than overlapping, the three circles are more spread out but are connected by two lines. It is not at all clear what sort of object this is intended to represent. The E element -- either two circles or a single divided circle -- is absent.

Also dating to around 1650 is Jacques Viéville's card. The detail below is shown in mirror image in order to facilitate comparison with the TdM.

Here, A is a square cup, B is a round one, and C is apparently a shallow bowl or dish. D is a single round object rather than three, and E is a sort of lozenge divided horizontally into two triangles. Where the F element would be (two circles in TdM, dice in Noblet), we have two rectangular objects, a large one divided in thirds, and a smaller one not so divided. What objects were intended by these abstract geometric shapes is anyone's guess. Despite the early date for this card, it had apparently already been through several generations of ignorant miscopying.

The lozenge shape in Viéville is perhaps historically related to the diagonal lines connecting the circles in Noblet.

A few other not-quite-standard representatives of the greater Marseille tradition also deserve our attention. The 1780 deck of Ignaz Krebs follows Noblet in some ways.

As in Noblet, the D element appears as three non-overlapping circles, and the E element is absent. Instead of Noblet's dice, though, we have between the knife and the sheath a single rectangle with six pip-marks on it. To me this is further confirmation that the "original" design featured dice, since one could imagine dice being incorrectly copied either as circles (as in the mainstream TdM) or as the domino-like object in Krebs.

Jean-Pierre Payen's 1713 deck (a TdM "Type I" deck, as opposed to the mainstream "Type II") has a fairly standard Bateleur (or, rather, "Branchus," that being the anomalous title given to this card) but is interesting because its D element (three round objects) looks more unambiguously like coins rather than balls.

⁂

3. Magician's tables before the Tarot de Marseille

The earliest surviving Tarot cards are the Visconti-Sforza cards painted by Bonifacio Bembo. Bembo's magician has objects on his table similar to those in the TdM but not the same. There is a cup (only one), a knife (but no sheath), and two small round objects of uncertain identity.

The large white object which takes the place of the TdM Bateleur's bag has been variously interpreted, but, as I have explained elsewhere, I find Michael Pearce's case that it is a sea sponge to be completely convincing. Dr. Pearce found several pictures by Bembo depicting holy relics, among them the sponge on a stalk of hyssop which was used to give vinegar to the Crucified, and the sponge very closely resemble's the Magician's white object.

Three sponges (on hyssop stalks) by Bonifacio Bembo

This crucial discovery allows Pearce to reveal the true identity of Bembo's "magician": He is a scribe or writer. His "wand" is actually a reed pen (he holds it like a pen, and nibs are visible if you look closely), the knife is a pen knife, and the cup and other yellow objects are receptacles for ink. Sponges were used in the past for erasing and for cleaning pens; in support of this, Pearce shows an illustration from a 15th-century Decameron which depicts a writer with pen, pen knife, inkwell, and sponge.

The Cary sheet (c. 1550), a sheet of uncut Tarot cards from Milan, shows a broadly Marseille-like assortment of objects on the Magician's table, but the image is too unclear for them to be identified with any confidence. There are two long objects that may be a knife and a sheath, a total of six roundish things, and two cups on the table, with a third in the Magician's right hand. This syncs up pretty well with the Noblet card, which also has three cups, a knife and a sheath, and a total of six small objects (three dice and three round things).

While it is not a Tarot card, Hieronymus Bosch's 1502 painting The Conjurer should also be mentioned here, chiefly because of its similarity to the Cary sheet.

Bosch's Conjurer and the Cary sheet Magician wear similar headgear, and the Cary sheet may even show some sort of bag or basket dangling from the Magician's waist or wrist. In both depictions, the cups on the table are apparently inverted, narrow end up. Finally, and to me most evocatively, the roughly egg-shaped object at the northeast end of the table on the Cary sheet closely resembles the little frog at the west end of Bosch's table. (A second frog is emerging from the mouth of one of the spectators.)

See this post for more on echoes of Bosch in the Tarot.

⁂

4. Wirth and Waite

No overview of the Magician's table would be complete without mentioning the modern, post-Marseille standard, which I believe originated with Oswald Wirth. Although I find it a bit gauche and uninteresting, I feel I ought to give it a few lines.

It's a pretty obvious move to associate the Magician's objects with the four suits of the Tarot. The Magician holds a wand, and on his table are cups, a knife suggesting the suit of Swords, and round objects that might be coins. Oswald Wirth made this explicit.

All the clutter has been eliminated, and there are now only three objects on the table: a cup (not the simple cups of the TdM Bateleur, but a chalice or goblet as in the suit of Cups), a full-size sword, and a giant "coin" the size of a Frisbee (clearly a symbolic representation of the suit of Coins, not an actual piece of currency). The wand in the Magician's hand has been enlarged considerably, too, making it more like the cudgels and scepters in the suit of Bastons than like an actual magician's wand.

A. E. Waite, in his hugely influential Rider-Waite deck, takes Wirth's idea a step further. Apparently wanting to include a large "wand" suggestive of the suit, but without making his Magician look like a baton-twirling drum major, he put two wands on his card: a small one in the Magician's hand, and a large cudgel on the table. (The giant coin is now a "pentacle," that being Waite's take on this suit.)

Waite lived before subways were common.

All in all, I greatly prefer the traditional Bateleur's evocative hodgepodge of gewgaws to the cut-and-dried symbolism of Wirth and Waite.