The orientation of ROTA

I found this diagram in Éliphas Lévi's Rituel de la Haute Magie, included apropos of nothing, and with no caption or explanation given.

I don't feel like searching through Agrippa or whoever for the meaning of the various sigils around the edge of the picture, but the main theme is a familiar one: the wheel with ROTA/TARO written around its circumference, a symbol created by Guillaume Postel and much used by Lévi. The four suits of the Tarot also figure in the diagram. The wand (on the right) has the form of a double-headed Wenchang pen, as seen in the Rider-Waite deck, apparently yet another instance of Lévi's influence on Waite. The sword and cup are easily identifiable, and I suppose that the suit of coins is, as in Waite, represented by the "pentacle" -- which, as Lévi uses the word, need not take the form of a five-pointed star. (To break the connection with the numerical prefix penta-, Lévi prefers the nonstandard spelling pantacle, an innovation later followed by Aleister Crowley, with whom it is now primarily associated.)

What caught my attention was the apparent mismatch between the four suits and the four letters. The letter O is paired with the sword, but it resembles a coin. A sword has the form of a cross and should therefore be paired with T. The A used here by Lévi, like the one that appears on the Rider-Waite Wheel of Fortune card, has a flat or rounded top rather than a pointed one, so that when it is turned upside down it looks like a cross-section of a cup with some liquid in it. That leaves the letter R to be paired with the wand, which it does not particularly resemble. However, Spanish and Italian versions of that suit -- a heavy-headed club or mace, not a wand -- do suggest the Greek letter P, and the Sicilian asso di mazze even bears a certain resemblance to an R.

In an arrangement independently arrived at by Whitley Strieber in his book The Path, Lévi puts the cup at the bottom, the coin/pentacle at the top, the sword on the left, and the wand/club on the right. If we rotate our ROTA 90 degrees to the right, the upside-down A (which resembles a cup) will be lined up with the cup, and the O with the coin. Unfortunately, the sword has to be switched with the wand to make those correspondences work.

However, if we rotate the wheel again, so that the A is at the top, we can keep the Lévi/Strieber orientation of the suits. O works for the cup since it is round, and A (which in this case should be written in the usual angular fashion) matches the pentacle. Another word for a pentagram is pentalpha because it consists of five letter A's in different orientations. This mapping also means that the word ROTA gives the suits in their conventional order: wands, cups, swords, pentacles.

All that having been said, I still find that the orientation I prefer is the one with R at the top, matching both the Chrismon of Saint Ambrose (discussed in relation to the Wheel of Fortune here) and the cruciform halo of Christ in the Basilique Saint-Sernin de Toulouse (discussed in relation to the World card here).

(Note that the Christ carving shown is actually a modern one by Jonathan Pageau, based on the original in Toulouse. I chose it because the three letters are more clearly legible than they are in available photos of the original carving. Note also that the letter that looks like W is actually a lowercase omega, corresponding to O.)

In fact, of the four possible orientations of the ROTA, the only one I can't think of any good reason for is the one actually used by Lévi and Waite, with T at the top!

Suits as elemental qualities rather than elements

 Most interpretations of the suit cards (“Minor Arcana,” if you must) in the tarot deck are based on mapping each suit to one of the four classical elements. Typically Clubs (Wands) represent Fire, Swords are Air, Cups are Water, and Coins (Pentacles) are Earth. Sometimes Clubs and Swords are switched. This is pretty standard, but I’ve always found it symbolically unsatisfying. This post explains an alternative system I developed some years ago.

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In Whitley Strieber’s tarot book The Path, he interprets the suits in a way which bypasses the traditional elemental mappings and instead focuses on the suit symbols themselves, drawing on the Gurdjieffian idea of triads. “In the Tarot, the two great opposing forces are symbolized by Swords and Clubs. . . . Masculine violence penetrates, feminine violence crushes. But when the two are in harmony with each other, there is a vast leap into another energetic level entirely. The suit called Money in old Tarots reveals the nature of this energy.” Money, as the power of “codifying wealth into a system of universally recognized symbols,” is “considered to have magical properties” and “actually represents the mind and the energy of seeing, which will be symbolized by the card of the Sun.” As for the remaining suit, Cups, it “contains the three other suits, which, in balance, make a fourth and much greater whole.”

Strieber makes no reference to the classical elements, though his reference to the Sun would seem to link Coins more to Fire than to the traditional Earth. However, in identifying Swords  and Clubs as the two opposing active forces, “penetrating” and “crushing,” respectively, he reminded me of Aristotle’s analysis of the elements in Book II of On Generation and Corruption. In Aristotle’s theory, underlying the four elements are four even more fundamental qualities: hot, cold, dry, and moist.

Hot and cold, and dry and moist, are terms, of which the first pair implies power to act and the second pair susceptibility. ‘Hot’ is that which ‘associates’ things of the same kind (for ‘dissociating’, which people attribute to Fire as its function, is ‘associating’ things of the same class, since its effect is to eliminate what is foreign), while ‘cold’ is that which brings together, i.e. ‘associates’, homogeneous and heterogeneous things alike. And moist is that which, being readily adaptable in shape, is not determinable by any limit of its own: while ‘dry’ is that which is readily determinable by its own limit, but not readily adaptable in shape.

. . .

The elementary qualities are four, and any four terms can be combined in six couples. Contraries, however, refuse to be coupled: for it is impossible for the same thing to be hot and cold, or moist and dry. Hence it is evident that the ‘couplings’ of the elementary qualities will be four: hot with dry and moist with hot, and again cold with dry and cold with moist. And these four couples have attached themselves to the apparently ‘simple’ bodies (Fire, Air, Water, and Earth) in a manner consonant with theory. For Fire is hot and dry, whereas Air is hot and moist (Air being a sort of aqueous vapour); and Water is cold and moist, while Earth is cold and dry.

. . .

The ‘simple’ bodies, since they are four, fall into two pairs which belong to the two regions, each to each: for Fire and Air are forms of the body moving towards the ‘limit’, while Earth and Water are forms of the body which moves towards the ‘centre’. Fire and Earth, moreover, are extremes and purest: Water and Air, on the contrary are intermediates and more like blends.

Hot and Cold are the active qualities according to Aristotle, and they map readily to Strieber’s Swords and Clubs, respectively. The cutting blade of the Sword represents the separating, centrifugal power of Heat; and the crushing Club (think of crushing not as breaking into pieces, but as mashing skin, flesh, and bone together into a single mass) corresponds to the centripetal, bringing-together force of Cold.

The mapping of the remaining two qualities and suits is less straightforward. One could argue for mapping Cups to Dry, since a cup contains other things and imposes its shape on them. Coins, especially if interpreted, following Strieber, as abstract “Money” rather than physical coins, could them be considered Moist, since money has no proper form of its own. However, this seems inconsistent with the identification of Money with the fiery Sun, and to use Cups as a symbol of Dry seems so counterintuitive as to be perverse.

The other option, which I prefer, is to see Cups as Moist and Coins as Dry. Here the suit of Cups does not represent the cup itself so much as the contents of the cup (in line with the traditional identification of Cups with Water), and as such stands for fluidity and the Aristotelian quality of Moist. Strieber’s Cup represents the surrounding environment in which the Sword-Club conflict takes place, and is thus readily identifiable with the Air and Water (the two Moist elements) in which living things live and move. Coins, as the universal and unchanging unit of value, can then represent Dry. The Coins in tarot are generally pictured as gold, and gold (like the diamond, the French-suit counterpart to Coins) is famously unchangeable and incorruptible — that is, “Dry” in the Aristotelian sense. The two Dry elements are Earth and Fire, allowing this system to accommodate both the traditional identification of Coins with Earth and Strieber’s link between Money and the Sun.

In fact this system is for the most part compatible with more traditional interpretations of the suits. Cups as Moist retain their association with Water, and Swords as Hot can be identified with either Air or Fire. The only radical departure from tradition is the identification of Clubs (which, like Swords, have traditionally been mapped to one of the Hot elements) with Cold.

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Aristotle’s elements have a natural hierarchy. Earth (purely centripetal) is the lowest (heaviest, closest to the center), then Water (relatively centripetal), Air (relatively centrifugal), and Fire (purely centripetal). The Hot elements are the highest, the Moist are in the middle, and the Cold are the lowest. There is also supposed to be Fire at the center of the Earth, so Dry should probably be considered even lower than Cold.

The suits also have a natural hierarchy, since they most likely derive ultimately from Chinese money-suited cards. Coins (single coins) are the lowest, then Clubs (strings of 100 coins), then Cups (tens of thousands), and finally Swords (hundreds of thousands). This order is still mostly preserved in French-suited cards, where Spades (Swords) are generally considered the highest (as in the expression “in spades”) with Hearts (Cups) in second place. In Bridge, Clubs are lower than Diamonds (Coins), but many other card games preserve the original ranking.

The hierarchy of the elemental qualities matches the original order of the suits. From lowest to highest: Dry/Coins, Cold/Clubs, Moist/Cups, Hot/Swords.

Saint-Sernin Basilica, the Tarot of Marseilles, and Whitley Strieber

 In his book about tarot cards, The Path, Whitley Strieber says there is only one bit of evidence that tarot predates the late fourteenth century, “but it is an important one”:

This is an 11th century stone sculpture at the St. Cernin Basilica near Toulouse, of the 21st card in the Major Arcana, known as the World. . . . The sculpture is complete in every detail. This is not an ‘early’ card, but a fully evolved image, suggesting that at least this one card— which contains the whole path and all the other cards in its symbolism— was already completely formed, and therefore that the whole of the path that leads to it must have been known (p. 21).

This claim interested me enough that I did what Strieber himself obviously didn’t do: I looked up the sculpture in question to see for myself. Here is the Saint-Sernin sculpture can be found here and the Jodorowsky-Camoin World card (the one used by Strieber).

“Complete in every detail” is, to put it charitably, a bit of an exaggeration. Here are some of the ways the sculpture differs from the card:

• The central figure is male (Christ), not female as in the tarot card.
• He is fully clothed in an ankle-length robe, not naked as in the tarot card.
• He is seated on a throne, not dancing as in the tarot card.
• He holds a book reading “Pax vobis” (Peace be with you) and raises his other hand in benediction, rather than holding a wand and a bottle as in the tarot card.
• He wears a halo, absent in the tarot card, marked with a cross and the letters alpha, omega, and R. (Why R? I don’t know.)
• The mandorla (almond-shaped nimbus) is a precise geometric shape, not a wreath of leaves as in the tarot card.
• The angel is on the right (our right, Christ’s left) and the eagle on the left; vice versa in the tarot card.

The World card and the Saint-Sernin sculpture are certainly similar images, and it’s undeniable that must be some connection between them; but it is just as undeniable that, contrary to what Strieber says, the sculpture is an “early card” (or an early version of the image found on the card) and is not “complete in every detail.” And even if it were complete, does the World really contain “the whole path and all the other cards in its symbolism”? Where are the Lovers? The Devil? The Lightning-struck Tower? The World might “include” all these in some broad conceptual sense, but in its actual iconography? Can we honestly say that this image only makes sense as part of the 22-image set we call the Major Arcana?

Actually, the Saint-Sernin sculpture belongs to a well-known type of image, called a “Christ in majesty,” which can be found in many other churches, in illuminated manuscripts, and so on. A Google image search will turn up many examples. It is a perfectly ordinary bit of Christian iconography, representing Jesus Christ as described in the fourth chapter of Revelation, and can be fully understood without reference to tarot cards. Like many other images that predate tarot — depictions of the pope and of the devil, allegories of justice, temperance, and love, etc. — it sheds some light on the origins of the tarot images but provides no evidence for the antiquity of the tarot tradition itself.

If the Saint-Sernin sculpture is so far from being a tarot card “complete in every detail,” why does Strieber so describe it? It doesn’t appear that he’s being deliberately misleading; he just neglected to check up on the claims made by his source — which, thanks to the unusual spelling Cernin, was easy for me to find. Philippe Camoin, the cardmaker who created the deck Strieber uses, wrote a short article called “Ancient Tarots” which seems no longer to be available on his website. The following is from Camoin’s article; I’ve bolded the phrases which were lifted word-for-word by Strieber.

Remarkably, one can find at the St Cernin Basilica near Toulouse a stone sculpture from the 11th century, that looks exactly like Arcanum XXI.

Strieber’s bit about it being a complete, “fully evolved image” appears to be a riff on Camoin’s ill-advised use of the word “exactly.” Camoin, in turn, cites an article in French by Alain-Jacques Bougearel, which I have not been able to find and read.

As a maker of Marseilles-style tarot cards, Camoin has a vested interest in promoting the idea that tarot originated in southern France (rather than, as most tarot historians agree, northern Italy), so his willingness to fudge the evidence a bit is at least understandable. Less understandable is Whitley Strieber’s failure to perform even the most basic fact-checking. (It took me about 15 minutes in a public library to track down a high-quality photo of the basilica sculpture; it’s not that hard.) His credulous repeating of Camoin’s claim strikes me as an uncharacteristic failure of curiosity. Wasn’t he intrigued? Didn’t he want to see this sculpture? Apparently not.