17. The Star: Dionysos Teletarche, my initiation Master, you have let me drink often from the fountain of Lethe, Forgetfulness; now let me drink from the waters of Mnemosyne, that I may remember and so ascend beyond the fates.
Christian base: Now we can return to the cards in the first known deck, the Cary-Yale. However instead of Star, Moon and Sun cards, there are cards that scholars have assigned the name Hope, Faith, and Charity, the three "theological virtues" of the Church. In the decks that come after this one, however, there are no cards for these virtues. Only in the Minchiate deck, an expanded 40 trump deck used in Florence and Bologna, are there these three virtues, followed later by Star, Moon, and Sun. There, the virtues follow directly after the cards for the Devil and the Tower.
It is my hypothesis--undoubtedly not original with me, although I haven't read it elsewhere--that between the Cary-Yale and PMB decks, the card-maker or his employer decided to switch to the themes used in nearby Ferrara, while at the same time keeping some of the motifs of the Cary-Visconti cards. The probable reason for the switch in names is so that the heavenly bodies will come in progressively greater intensity: first the star of Bethlehem, our Hope; then Faith lights our dark world like the Moon; and finally Christ comes in full glory at the Second Coming, like the Sun. After that the destruction of the world comes in fire brighter than the sun, and then the New Jerusalem, shining so bright, according to the Book of Revelation, that the sun and moon are no longer needed. (1)
First, look at the two Milanese cards together. There is a heavenly body emitting light at the top right of the Hope card, close to where the star is in the Star card. The major difference is that the lady is kneeling in the one, standing and reaching out in the other. Both are similar to one of Giotto's virtues in Padua, the one labeled "Spes," the name of the Roman Goddess of Hope. The figure is standing and reaching, as in the Sforza Star card. But instead of the heavenly body, Giotto's has a crown. (1a)
Then there are the cards from Ferrara and Bologna (above). In the d'Este card, almost contemporary with the Cary-Visconti, two men in robes look up at a star. One is pointing at the star, the other in a more horizontal direction. One of the men holds a book. In the next card, a little later probably from Bologna, from the fragmentary "Rothschild" deck, the men have crowns, and there is a cross on a globe at the left, just where the man had been pointing in the previous card. They are probably meant to be the Three Wise Men of the Bible, "following yonder star." One has a crown, one has a three-tiered tiara, and one, surprisingly, has the "Phyrgian cap" identifying him as Mithras! (2)
To approach the issue from another angle, let us look at the corresponding Minchiate cards. They are from the 18th century, but the design is probably 17th century, from either Florence or Bologna. The Minchiate Hope card is obviously derived from Giotto image, with its crown. And she is kneeling and praying like the Cary-Yale. She is praying to the King of Kings, the Hope of the World, as heralded by the Star of Bethlehem. He is also the "bright morning star" of Revelation 22:16, who will come to save his own from the destruction at the Apocalypse. For the Star card, we see a man on horseback following a beacon with a star overhead. It is one of the kings or wise men again (his crown is ambiguous), following the star, inspiring the faithful to do likewise. The two cards basically mean the same, in the active and passive modes. (3)
The "Marseille" style cards, starting with Noblet in 1650, show us seven stars, plus one big star in the center. The image of seven stars occurs in Revelation 1:16-20, where they are identified as the angels of the seven churches of Asia. Since this image is at the beginning of John's vision, what is suggested in the card is the beginning of the end-times. On the card, the woman with the jars is often portrayed with one foot on land and the other in the water. This, too, is a sign of the Apocalypse, described in Revelation 10:2: an angel in John's vision "put his right foot on the sea and his left on the land."
Another Christian interpretation, this one from a more recent text, is from Canto XXIX of Dante's Purgatorio, in which Dante sees seven lighted candles, and then in Canto XXXII, seven nymphs, who accompany him to two streams from which he must drink. These seven candles and seven nymphs seem to me a reference to the seven stars of Revelation 1:16, because the stars of the Revelation image are said to be in "candlesticks" (Rev 1:17, King James Version). In Dante's journey, similarly, he is about to leave Purgatory and enter Paradise. The two streams are curiously like the ones on the card. However they may not derive from Christian sources, as we shall see later in relation to Dionysus. (4)
Tarot historians sometimes identify the seven stars on the "Marseille"-style cards as the seven planets. In astrology, they were the rulers of fate; the star outshining them would then be the Star of Bethlehem and the "bright morning star" of Revelation 22:16. It was the coming of Jesus that allowed humanity to transcend fate, this world governed by the stars.
No doubt many purchasers of the cards in the 17th and 18th centuries would have immediately thought of the seven planets. However the seven "candlesticks" are just as likely. In addition, there is another group of seven lights in the sky they might have thought of. In the Bible, the seven planets are not mentioned as having any influence on human affairs. I find only one suggestion of such influence in the Bible, and that is in the Book of Job. God challenges Job, "Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion?" (Job 38:31) The phrase "sweet influences" in the King James Version implies astrological influence, weaker than fate. Some translation say "chains." Job 9:9 also makes reference to the same constellations. (5)
Actually, what the Bible says literally is "the seven sisters," not the Pleiades specifically. The Vulgate, which would have been the Bible familiar to the card-makers, translated one instance of the Hebrew word for "sisters," taken today as the Pleiades (Job 9:9) " as "Hyades," another constellation and group of seven sisters. As a constellation, the Hyades were considered harbingers of rain when they rose in Greece, hence they had a relationship to Aquarius. (6)
But is the woman on the card Aquarius? Aquarius was male, normally with only one jar. And why should the astrological "influences" of these two constellations be of any importance, when in the tradition most familiar to the purchasers of the cards it was the planets and the zodiac that made the most difference? We shall see in the next two sections.
After that, I will give another Cristian interpretation, this time in parallel with alchemical images.
References, Star, Christian:
1. Increasing brightness: M. J. Hurst, "Riddle of Tarot",http://web.archive.org/web/20040919015803/http://geocities.com/cartedatrionfi/Riddle.html.
1a. Goddess, see Wikipedia entry for "Spes." Giotto image: http://www.christusrex.org/www1/giotto/SV-spes.jpg.
2. "Rothschild" image: Kaplan, Encyclopedia of Tarot Vol. 1, p. 129.
3. Minchiate: http://www.unics.uni-hannover.de/rrzn/endebrock/coll/pages/i31.html, although this site is no longer accessible.
4. Dante: http://www.online-literature.com/dante/purgatorio/.5. King James: http://net.bible.org/verse.php?book=Job&chapter=38&verse=31.
6. Vulgate: http://vulgate.org/ot/job_9.htm. Hyades and rain: Pseudo-Hyginus, Fabulae 182, at http://www.theoi.com/Olympios/DionysosMyths.html#Birth.
Greco-Egyptian perspective: The young person pouring from the jars first occurs in the Cary Sheet. But it may not be a female. There are no breasts; yet the face and hair look like a young woman's. Naked, he or she pours water out of two jars into a substantial body of water, where we can see the tails of two fish. Above him or her is one large star surrounded by four smaller stars. There is also a fifth star on her shoulder. A mountain with two trees or flowers is in the background. What can this possibly have to do with Hope and Jesus?
In Egypt, the star-goddess is Sothis, represented on Roman-era columns with a star over her head. These images were in above-ground temples, so I would suppose that some Europeans even in the 15th century would have seen them. And if not ones like that above, then at least in drawings of the Dendera zodiacs, which I will discuss in a moment. The image of a lady with a star over her head appears in alchemy by the 16th century, as we will see in that section.
The Greeks called the star Sirius; it was the brightest thing in the heavens after the sun and moon. Plutarch said the Greeks called the star Isis, but the Egyptians called it Sothis. It was also "Isis' water carrier." In other words, she is the Egyptian version of the Greco-Egyptian Aquarius. (1)
In Egypt her significance was that the star started rising above the horizon, just before sunrise, at the time of the Summer Solstice. Its rising signaled the beginning of the new year and also the start of the annual Nile flood, as explained by Plutarch and other Greek writers. The flood is the rising of Osiris so that the land, personified by Isis, will bear new life. It is what Isis longs for, and the people with her. So when Sothis rises, it is the water-carrier pouring water into the Nile, a time of great hope. (2)
But how did the Renaissance know that this Aquarius was female and poured water from two jars? In all the star-maps, before and since, the figure is male and pouring just one jar. Below is a 1661 representation, and the first few lines of the text, which give the mythological identifications. (3)
Deucalion is associated with the great flood. Perhaps that is why the card is sometimes seen as portending new beginnings. Below the image is a list of names. Ganymede is the cup-bearer of the gods. With him as Aquarius, it would be nectar flowing from the jars, spiritual substance, the drink that makes one immortal. As for Aristaeus, he taught the Greeks of Cous how to defend against the pestilence that occurred during the rising of the Dog Star: it was necessary to sacrifice to it as well as to "rain-making Zeus." (According to Kerenyi, the priests burned a certain plant, and the people breathed its fumes.) Cecops was a man above the waist and a serpent below: he really belongs with Capricorn. The other terms just mean "water-man" or "bucket." None is a young woman. (4)
The image of the young woman, as in the case of the Bateleur's hat and the Empress's scepter, might have come from the great zodiacs at Dendera, of which the Renaissance image-makers could have seen drawings. In fact, there is a zodiac from that time which has several signs in the Egyptian style, one of which is Aquarius, clearly a young woman pouring water from two jars. (We can also see a different set of Twins, which will be relevant to the Sun card. I do not know why there are three fishes.) (5)
The image corresponds to what they would have seen in sketches from Dendera. Another example is below, from a horizontal zodiac (as opposed to the most famous one, which is circular). (6)
Here Sothis, the cow on the right, is followed by two women, one of whom has water pouring from the upturned jugs in her hands. These are the consorts of Khnum, who assist him in managing the flow of the river. Khnum's cult center is on Elephantine Island, at the first cataract, the beginning of the inundation. (7)
It is my hypothesis--undoubtedly not original with me, although I haven't read it elsewhere--that between the Cary-Yale and PMB decks, the card-maker or his employer decided to switch to the themes used in nearby Ferrara, while at the same time keeping some of the motifs of the Cary-Visconti cards. The probable reason for the switch in names is so that the heavenly bodies will come in progressively greater intensity: first the star of Bethlehem, our Hope; then Faith lights our dark world like the Moon; and finally Christ comes in full glory at the Second Coming, like the Sun. After that the destruction of the world comes in fire brighter than the sun, and then the New Jerusalem, shining so bright, according to the Book of Revelation, that the sun and moon are no longer needed. (1)
First, look at the two Milanese cards together. There is a heavenly body emitting light at the top right of the Hope card, close to where the star is in the Star card. The major difference is that the lady is kneeling in the one, standing and reaching out in the other. Both are similar to one of Giotto's virtues in Padua, the one labeled "Spes," the name of the Roman Goddess of Hope. The figure is standing and reaching, as in the Sforza Star card. But instead of the heavenly body, Giotto's has a crown. (1a)
Then there are the cards from Ferrara and Bologna (above). In the d'Este card, almost contemporary with the Cary-Visconti, two men in robes look up at a star. One is pointing at the star, the other in a more horizontal direction. One of the men holds a book. In the next card, a little later probably from Bologna, from the fragmentary "Rothschild" deck, the men have crowns, and there is a cross on a globe at the left, just where the man had been pointing in the previous card. They are probably meant to be the Three Wise Men of the Bible, "following yonder star." One has a crown, one has a three-tiered tiara, and one, surprisingly, has the "Phyrgian cap" identifying him as Mithras! (2)
To approach the issue from another angle, let us look at the corresponding Minchiate cards. They are from the 18th century, but the design is probably 17th century, from either Florence or Bologna. The Minchiate Hope card is obviously derived from Giotto image, with its crown. And she is kneeling and praying like the Cary-Yale. She is praying to the King of Kings, the Hope of the World, as heralded by the Star of Bethlehem. He is also the "bright morning star" of Revelation 22:16, who will come to save his own from the destruction at the Apocalypse. For the Star card, we see a man on horseback following a beacon with a star overhead. It is one of the kings or wise men again (his crown is ambiguous), following the star, inspiring the faithful to do likewise. The two cards basically mean the same, in the active and passive modes. (3)
The "Marseille" style cards, starting with Noblet in 1650, show us seven stars, plus one big star in the center. The image of seven stars occurs in Revelation 1:16-20, where they are identified as the angels of the seven churches of Asia. Since this image is at the beginning of John's vision, what is suggested in the card is the beginning of the end-times. On the card, the woman with the jars is often portrayed with one foot on land and the other in the water. This, too, is a sign of the Apocalypse, described in Revelation 10:2: an angel in John's vision "put his right foot on the sea and his left on the land."
Another Christian interpretation, this one from a more recent text, is from Canto XXIX of Dante's Purgatorio, in which Dante sees seven lighted candles, and then in Canto XXXII, seven nymphs, who accompany him to two streams from which he must drink. These seven candles and seven nymphs seem to me a reference to the seven stars of Revelation 1:16, because the stars of the Revelation image are said to be in "candlesticks" (Rev 1:17, King James Version). In Dante's journey, similarly, he is about to leave Purgatory and enter Paradise. The two streams are curiously like the ones on the card. However they may not derive from Christian sources, as we shall see later in relation to Dionysus. (4)
Tarot historians sometimes identify the seven stars on the "Marseille"-style cards as the seven planets. In astrology, they were the rulers of fate; the star outshining them would then be the Star of Bethlehem and the "bright morning star" of Revelation 22:16. It was the coming of Jesus that allowed humanity to transcend fate, this world governed by the stars.
No doubt many purchasers of the cards in the 17th and 18th centuries would have immediately thought of the seven planets. However the seven "candlesticks" are just as likely. In addition, there is another group of seven lights in the sky they might have thought of. In the Bible, the seven planets are not mentioned as having any influence on human affairs. I find only one suggestion of such influence in the Bible, and that is in the Book of Job. God challenges Job, "Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion?" (Job 38:31) The phrase "sweet influences" in the King James Version implies astrological influence, weaker than fate. Some translation say "chains." Job 9:9 also makes reference to the same constellations. (5)
Actually, what the Bible says literally is "the seven sisters," not the Pleiades specifically. The Vulgate, which would have been the Bible familiar to the card-makers, translated one instance of the Hebrew word for "sisters," taken today as the Pleiades (Job 9:9) " as "Hyades," another constellation and group of seven sisters. As a constellation, the Hyades were considered harbingers of rain when they rose in Greece, hence they had a relationship to Aquarius. (6)
But is the woman on the card Aquarius? Aquarius was male, normally with only one jar. And why should the astrological "influences" of these two constellations be of any importance, when in the tradition most familiar to the purchasers of the cards it was the planets and the zodiac that made the most difference? We shall see in the next two sections.
After that, I will give another Cristian interpretation, this time in parallel with alchemical images.
References, Star, Christian:
1. Increasing brightness: M. J. Hurst, "Riddle of Tarot",http://web.archive.org/web/20040919015803/http://geocities.com/cartedatrionfi/Riddle.html.
1a. Goddess, see Wikipedia entry for "Spes." Giotto image: http://www.christusrex.org/www1/giotto/SV-spes.jpg.
2. "Rothschild" image: Kaplan, Encyclopedia of Tarot Vol. 1, p. 129.
3. Minchiate: http://www.unics.uni-hannover.de/rrzn/endebrock/coll/pages/i31.html, although this site is no longer accessible.
4. Dante: http://www.online-literature.com/dante/purgatorio/.5. King James: http://net.bible.org/verse.php?book=Job&chapter=38&verse=31.
6. Vulgate: http://vulgate.org/ot/job_9.htm. Hyades and rain: Pseudo-Hyginus, Fabulae 182, at http://www.theoi.com/Olympios/DionysosMyths.html#Birth.
Greco-Egyptian perspective: The young person pouring from the jars first occurs in the Cary Sheet. But it may not be a female. There are no breasts; yet the face and hair look like a young woman's. Naked, he or she pours water out of two jars into a substantial body of water, where we can see the tails of two fish. Above him or her is one large star surrounded by four smaller stars. There is also a fifth star on her shoulder. A mountain with two trees or flowers is in the background. What can this possibly have to do with Hope and Jesus?
In Egypt, the star-goddess is Sothis, represented on Roman-era columns with a star over her head. These images were in above-ground temples, so I would suppose that some Europeans even in the 15th century would have seen them. And if not ones like that above, then at least in drawings of the Dendera zodiacs, which I will discuss in a moment. The image of a lady with a star over her head appears in alchemy by the 16th century, as we will see in that section.
The Greeks called the star Sirius; it was the brightest thing in the heavens after the sun and moon. Plutarch said the Greeks called the star Isis, but the Egyptians called it Sothis. It was also "Isis' water carrier." In other words, she is the Egyptian version of the Greco-Egyptian Aquarius. (1)
In Egypt her significance was that the star started rising above the horizon, just before sunrise, at the time of the Summer Solstice. Its rising signaled the beginning of the new year and also the start of the annual Nile flood, as explained by Plutarch and other Greek writers. The flood is the rising of Osiris so that the land, personified by Isis, will bear new life. It is what Isis longs for, and the people with her. So when Sothis rises, it is the water-carrier pouring water into the Nile, a time of great hope. (2)
But how did the Renaissance know that this Aquarius was female and poured water from two jars? In all the star-maps, before and since, the figure is male and pouring just one jar. Below is a 1661 representation, and the first few lines of the text, which give the mythological identifications. (3)
Deucalion is associated with the great flood. Perhaps that is why the card is sometimes seen as portending new beginnings. Below the image is a list of names. Ganymede is the cup-bearer of the gods. With him as Aquarius, it would be nectar flowing from the jars, spiritual substance, the drink that makes one immortal. As for Aristaeus, he taught the Greeks of Cous how to defend against the pestilence that occurred during the rising of the Dog Star: it was necessary to sacrifice to it as well as to "rain-making Zeus." (According to Kerenyi, the priests burned a certain plant, and the people breathed its fumes.) Cecops was a man above the waist and a serpent below: he really belongs with Capricorn. The other terms just mean "water-man" or "bucket." None is a young woman. (4)
The image of the young woman, as in the case of the Bateleur's hat and the Empress's scepter, might have come from the great zodiacs at Dendera, of which the Renaissance image-makers could have seen drawings. In fact, there is a zodiac from that time which has several signs in the Egyptian style, one of which is Aquarius, clearly a young woman pouring water from two jars. (We can also see a different set of Twins, which will be relevant to the Sun card. I do not know why there are three fishes.) (5)
The image corresponds to what they would have seen in sketches from Dendera. Another example is below, from a horizontal zodiac (as opposed to the most famous one, which is circular). (6)
Here Sothis, the cow on the right, is followed by two women, one of whom has water pouring from the upturned jugs in her hands. These are the consorts of Khnum, who assist him in managing the flow of the river. Khnum's cult center is on Elephantine Island, at the first cataract, the beginning of the inundation. (7)
Why did the Egyptians have two jars instead of one? Egyptologist Desroches-Noblecourt says that they represent the Blue and White Nile, the clear and muddy branches upstream, whose outpourings from the mountains preceded the flood in Egypt. In the Dendera images, the streams are not differentiated into clear and muddy. Neither are they on the Cary Sheet. (8)
Until I did some reading on European explorations in Egypt, I assumed that the card-makers would have been ignorant of such an explanation; they just copied what they saw. However, I now think differently. In ancient times, the Greeks explored the Nile as far as the beginnings of the highlands of Ethiopia. They declared, rightly, that the cause of the Nile flood was summer rains in Ethiopia. Plutarch reports this account in Isis and Orisis. (9)
After the fall of Rome, the first major contact by Europeans (including St. Francis) with Egypt was during the final Crusades, 13th century. Then it was by the trade routes through Cairo But in the late 15th century, a European community in Ethiopia. As a result of these travelers, Europeans knew about the Nile and its division into the Blue and White Nile. The Blue Nile was a torrent during the summer, more black than blue, and it came directly from the mountains in the east. The White Nile was filled with white silt, clay from one of its tributaries. It had a relatively steady but meager flow all year long. Behind this river to the southwest there were no mountains that anyone could see, just desert. The silt it brought provided the rich agricultural soil of Egypt. The floodwater from the other Nile, in contrast, was needed to get that silt to the fields. I would imagine that this division of labor between the two Niles impressed medieval Egyptians as well as Europeans, and that the two jars would be readily identified with them. (10)
On the Cary Sheet what differentiates the two streams is that one comes from a jar on the shoulder, while the other is held below the shoulder. Likewise, there is a mountain behind the higher one, but only a plain behind the other. And there is a big fish in the water below the higher jar, but a small fish below the lower jar.
My speculation is that the mountain represents the highlands of Ethiopia, a metaphor for spiritual heights, and the water pouring out of the jar below it corresponds to the Blue Nile. From on high to swell its bank in a mighty turbulence, it is the masculine spiritual principle. The other one, in contrast, comes from the desert yet is rich in nutrients. It is the feminine nurturing principle, one which requires spirit to fulfill itself.
Placed where they are on the card, next to the head and the chest, the implication is that one jar's stream comes from the intellect and the other from the heart. The two streams then correspond to the two Platonic aspects of Venus, which was of great moment in the Renaissance (e.g. Titian's Sacred and Profane Love, although it didn't have this title until the 18th century). Physically nurturing love pertains to the "Common Aphrodite" of Plato's Symposium; spiritual or intellectual love is of "Heavenly Aphrodite." (11)
As for the fish, one possibility is that the relative size indicates the relative importance of the two streams: the one from the head, spirit, has higher status than the other, the heart. The intellect is what leads the heart. Otherwise it is easily misled and subject to much suffering.
Another possibility is that the two fish are Venus and Cupid, who in Greek myth jumped into the Euphrates River and changed into fish to escape the monster Typhon. Since they are at the bottom of the card, they may come from the adjoining constellation of Pisces. For the writer known to the Renaissance as Hyginus, its two fish were in fact associated with the Venus and Cupid of this legend. In another variation, Ovid identified the constellation Pisces as the horses ridden by Venus and Cupid, which changed to fish in the river. From this perspective, the two streams could be the Tigris and Euphrates in Babylonia, which had myths paralleling those of the Egyptians. (12)
One of the stars is on the shoulder of the young woman. This and her nakedness are both marks of Venus. A naked Greek goddess is usually Venus. To the Greeks and their Renaissance admirers, if Harpocrates equaled Priapus, the son of Venus and Dionysus, then Venus equaled Isis, mother of Harpocrates. The four other small stars could be the four other planets. The Egyptians, and even some Greeks, did not consider the Sun and Moon to be planets. (13)
You may have noticed that the water-carrier at Dendera does not have a star over her head. She is not Sothis. She is a river-goddess, with a river plant on her head. Here are three representations side by side (14):
One looks female, the second male, and the third would have looked, due to the breasts, both female and naked. In fact its gender is more ambiguous. River gods were fertility gods. And to ensure fertility, they sometimes had the attributes of both genders. The two Hapi, representing the Upper and Lower Nile, one with a lotus on his head and the other a papyrus, are the classic examples. This could have engendered some confusion in the Renaissance. The Minchiate, which has the signs of the zodiac among its 40 trumps, has an Aquarius emptying two jugs, but it is in male clothing. Another representation, in a book of hours, discreetly makes the figure ambiguous. (15)
On the Cary Sheet image, there are two plants, probably trees, in the near background, one to the left of the woman and one to the right, in front of the mountain. There may be another tree at the top of the mountain. The tree at the top of the mountain may be a nod to Judeo-Christian tradition, of Moses climbing to the top of the mountain and seeing God; Jesus went up the mountain, too, and saw Elias (Matt. 17:1ff, Luke 9:28ff). For the other two trees, well, there are the tree of life and the tree of knowledge. But these do not correlate to a water-carrier.
That completes my exposition of the Cary Sheet, so full of fascinating details. Other card-makers, not appreciating the image, continued showing people being guided by a star, symbolizing Hope. Noblet and the card-makers in the so-called "Marseille" tradition went with the Cary Sheet image, but with some changes.
For one thing, there are seven stars rather than five. In Egypt, the seven stars would have been the Pleiades, identified now as the "seven Hathors" or "seven fates" that set a child's destiny at the time of his or her birth, and perhaps also the cycle of seven good years and seven bad years of the Nile, suggested by the Biblical story of Pharaoh's dream. However I have not found any reference to the seven Hathors in literature available in the 16th century, and the connection to Pharaoh's dream. So for now I have to fall back on the Christian explanation that I already gave, that the seven stars are either the seven planets or the seven Hyades, both representing fate. (16)
What is more significant is the Vulgate's identification of them as the Hyades. Numerous Greek authors widely read in the 15th-17th centuries described the Hyades as the nurses of Dionysus (one of several versions of who his nurses were). In that case, the big star would be Dionysus. In Egypt, Hathor was the mother of Horus in some versions. By the logic of substitution, the seven Hyades are equivalent to the seven Hathors. The big star, then, would be Horus; but the relevant data about Hathor and Horus might not have been known in the 17th century. (17)
Noblet, perhaps looking at the images from Dendera, makes the water-carrier more androgynous than in the Cary Sheet. Dodal and Conver make her more feminine; in fact she appears pregnant, as though to suggest the object of our hope. Noblet gives her a star on her belly, probably for this purpose. In Dodal it is an eye, perhaps the mysterious "eye of Horus" of which they might have heard.
From an Egyptian perspective the bird on the tree could be the bennu, called the phoenix by the Greeks, the bird of regeneration as described in Herodotus, and associated by him with Egypt. The phoenix was usually shown sitting on a fire, but not always. In the Bembine Tablet, it is shown simply in a priest's hand. We can identify it as a Phoenix by the tuft in back of its head.
The example closest to the Chosson and Dodal in place and time is one on the Frontispiece to the French translation of the Hypnerotomachia, Paris 1600, where there is no fire, just a flapping of wings facing the sun.
It is as described by the Roman poet Claudian (http://www.theoi.com/Thaumasios/Phoinix.html). The phoenix at the end of its life-span builds a nest "which shall be at once his tomb and his cradle."
...On this he takes his seat and as he grows weaker greets the Sun with his sweet voice; offering up prayers and supplications he begs that those fires will give him renewal of strength..The sun god sends the bird one of his golden hairs, and soon it is consumed by the flames. But no sooner is that accomplished than:
Straightway the life spirit surges through his scattered limbs; the renovated blood floods his veins. The ashes show signs of life; they begin to move though there is none to move them, and feathers clothe the mass of cinders. He who was but now the sire comes forth from the pyre the son and successor; between life and life lay but that brief space wherein the pyre burned.There are other possibilities--the stork, for example, which in European legend was the bird that brought babies from heaven. Or no particular bird. But it seems to me that the phoenix is the most likely interpretation. It also figured prominently in alchemy, as we shall see. (18)
Why, from an Egyptian perspective, is the woman sometimes shown pouring one jar onto the land and the other into the water? Plutarch reports the ritual mixing of water with earth, Osiris with Isis, to ensure the great mixing of the flood. Hence the water is poured on the land, emulating the flood. The water also goes out to sea; hence water onto water. Camoin and Jodorowsky, in their re-creation of Conver, make the water coming out of that jug muddy, as though to say, on this side is the White Nile, rich in nutrients, now a metaphor for the body as opposed to the spirit. But the muddy water is not in the originals. For further associations we will have to step into the Dionysian mysteries and the doctrine of reincaranation.
References, Star, Egyptian:
1. Isis as dog-star: Plutarch, Isis and Osiris XXI, "Water-carrier": Isis and Osiris XXXVIII. Both at http://thriceholy.net/Texts/Isis.html.
1a. Image: www.christusrex.org/
2. Flood: Plutarch, Isis and Osiris XXXVIII-XXXIX.
3. Aquarius: My source for the image is http://hsci.cas.ou.edu/images/jpg-100dpi-5in/17thCentury/Bayer/1661, although it no longer works for me. Similarly for the text:
http://hsci.cas.ou.edu/images/jpg-100dpi-5in/17thCentury/Bayer/1697/Bayer-1697-K4v.jpg.
4. Information from Wikipedia entries on specific names. Kerenyi citation is in Wikipedia entry on Sothis. However I have not been able to verify the citation.
5. Zodiac: from Ernst and Johanna Lehner, Astrology and Astronomy.
6. Photo by author.
7. Information from Desroches-Noblecourt, Le Fabuleux Heritage de l'Egypte, p. 123, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khnum.
8. Same.
9. Greek explorations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nile. Plutarch: Isis and Osiris XXXIX.
10. 13th century: Many websites describe Europeans in Egypt just before and during the Malmuk period, e.g. http://www.ucalgary.ca/applied_history/tutor/islam/fractured/egypt.html. Ethiopia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nile. On Blue and White Nile: Wikipedia articles with these titles.
11. Titian: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacred_and_Profane_Love. Plato: http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/symposium.html. Search "Aphrodite"
12. Venus and Cupid: Pseudo-Hyginus, Astronomica 2. 30. Pisces: Ovid, Fasti 2. 458 ff. Both at
http://www.theoi.com/Olympios/AphroditeMyths.html.13. Egyptian planets: http://www.egyptologyonline.com/astronomy.htm, among others. Greek planets: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellenistic_astronomy, under "Early Greek astronomy."
14. Desroches-Noblecourt, Le Fabuleux Heritage de l'Egypte.
15. Hapi: http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/Hapi.htm. Image on left: http://www.unics.uni-hannover.de/rrzn/endebrock/coll/pages/i31.html. Image on right: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic-art/31065/4257/Aquarius.
16. Hathors: http://www.egyptianmyths.net/hathor.htm, among others.
17. Vulgate: http://vulgate.org/ot/job_9.htm. Hyades as nurses of Dionysus: Pseudo-Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 3. 26 - 29; Pseudo-Hyginus, Fabulae 192; Pseudo-Hyginus, Astronomica 2. 21; Nonnus, Dionysiaca 14. 143 ff. All at http://www.theoi.com/Olympios/DionysosMyths.html#Birth. Hathor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hathor, http://www.egyptianmyths.net/hathor.htm.
18. Phoenix: Herodotus Histories II.73, http://www.bostonleadershipbuilders.com/herodotus/book02.htm. Claudian: http://www.theoi.com/Thaumasios/Phoinix.html. Image: de Rola, Golden Game p. 25. Also in Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, and Fabricius, Alchemy.
The Dionysian Star: If you compare the lettering of the Chosson, above left, to that of the Conver on the right, you will notice that the letters "ILL" in "LETOILLE" look a lot like a "UL" as in "LE TOULE."
According to Flornoy and others, "Toule" is Marseille dialect for "spring" or "well." What Flornoy thinks is that the right side of the "L" for some reason did not print clearly on the paper, and that the word is clearly "LETOILLE," meaning "The Star." But why are the I and the first L touching only on the bottom, as opposed to both top and bottom, almost, on the Chosson? And no other letters touch at all. If it was a printing error, why wasn't it corrected in the 1761 edition? It seems to me that Conver might have decided to make a visual pun here, taking advantage of the proximity of the two letters I and L on the Chosson. How such a pun would relate to the imagery on the card is as follows. (1)
Daimonax relates the two jars to the description of an famous oracle by the Roman-era Greek travel writer Pausanias. The person wishing to know something had to undergo a certain ordeal. First he is purified with baths and other things. I will quote the passage in full:
He is led by the priests, not at once to the oracle, but to certain springs. Here he must drink what is called the water of forgetfulness, in order that he forget everything he has hitherto thought of. Then he drinks from another water, the water of Memory, that he may remember what he sees below.... After his ascent from [the oracle of] Trophonios the inquirer is again taken in hand by the priests, who set him upon a chair called the chair of Mnemosyne (Memory), which stands not far from the shrine, and they ask of him, when seated there, all he has seen or learned. After gaining this information they then entrust him to his relatives. These lift him, paralysed with terror and unconscious both of himself and of his surroundings, and carry him to the building where he lodged before with Tykhe (Fortune) and the Daimon Agathon (Good Spirit). Afterwards, however, he will recover all his faculties, and the power to laugh will return to him. (1a)
Jane Harrison gives a good argument for this being a Dionysian initiation. In any case, it would have been part of the lore about "the mysteries" in 16th-17th century Europe. Plutarch mentions this site in a list with a few others. He then describes what the person at one of the other sites saw, a certain Timarchos. It was not future events in this life, but a vision of the afterlife. "What Timarchos saw was a vision of heaven and hell, after the fashion of a Platonic myth. His guide instructed him as to the meanings of things and how the soul shakes off the body." (2)
Daimonax says that the jars on the card are the two springs, one of forgetting and one of remembering. But isn't that rather a stretch, from jars to springs?
Let us go to Mantua, halfway between Milan and Ferrara. In 1527-1528 Guilio Romano, a pupil of Raphael, covered the walls and ceilings of the Palacio Te with frescoes on the theme of Cupid and Psyche. In one corner of its centerpiece, the "Banquet of the Gods,” there are two figures, each with two jars, water gushing out of them. Goats are on the far right, possible allusions to Dionysus's childhood. One pair of streams falls on the ground, the other into water. (3)
Italian tarot historian Andrea Vitali, who draws attention to this mural in an essay on the Star card, thinks they relate to "The Cave of the Nymphs," an essay by the 2nd century Neoplatonic philosopher Porphyry. The essay, an allegorical interpretation of a passage in Homer's Odyssey, had recently been translated into Latin. Inside this cave, says Porphyry, there are two doorways, one leading to Heaven and the other to a new incarnation on earth. (4)
It seems to me that the mural does not correspond to Homer's imagery. There may be a cave, into which the nymph dangles her foot. But there is no hint of doorways; what we see are two sets of two jars, with water flowing out of each in an ever-flowing stream, like water coming from two springs, as in Pausanias. In fact, the cave in the mural is as described in Pausanias: a narrow hole at the top, with the springs themselves above. One of them actually flows down into the opening.
In Greek myth, forgetting was associated with the River Lethe, which souls drank of in Hades before returning to the surface in a new incarnation. Similarly, in the mural, we see the water on the ground trickling down out of view; it could be the start of a river. The other body of water looks like a lake. (5)
In ancient literature, Mnemosyne is characterized as a goddess, the mother of the muses. Her identification with a spring is rare. Yet the opposition between Mnemosyne and Lethe is clear enough. The Orphic hymns so beloved by Ficino and Pico invoke Mnemosyne's aid against Lethe:
Daimonax says that the jars on the card are the two springs, one of forgetting and one of remembering. But isn't that rather a stretch, from jars to springs?
Let us go to Mantua, halfway between Milan and Ferrara. In 1527-1528 Guilio Romano, a pupil of Raphael, covered the walls and ceilings of the Palacio Te with frescoes on the theme of Cupid and Psyche. In one corner of its centerpiece, the "Banquet of the Gods,” there are two figures, each with two jars, water gushing out of them. Goats are on the far right, possible allusions to Dionysus's childhood. One pair of streams falls on the ground, the other into water. (3)
Italian tarot historian Andrea Vitali, who draws attention to this mural in an essay on the Star card, thinks they relate to "The Cave of the Nymphs," an essay by the 2nd century Neoplatonic philosopher Porphyry. The essay, an allegorical interpretation of a passage in Homer's Odyssey, had recently been translated into Latin. Inside this cave, says Porphyry, there are two doorways, one leading to Heaven and the other to a new incarnation on earth. (4)
It seems to me that the mural does not correspond to Homer's imagery. There may be a cave, into which the nymph dangles her foot. But there is no hint of doorways; what we see are two sets of two jars, with water flowing out of each in an ever-flowing stream, like water coming from two springs, as in Pausanias. In fact, the cave in the mural is as described in Pausanias: a narrow hole at the top, with the springs themselves above. One of them actually flows down into the opening.
In Greek myth, forgetting was associated with the River Lethe, which souls drank of in Hades before returning to the surface in a new incarnation. Similarly, in the mural, we see the water on the ground trickling down out of view; it could be the start of a river. The other body of water looks like a lake. (5)
In ancient literature, Mnemosyne is characterized as a goddess, the mother of the muses. Her identification with a spring is rare. Yet the opposition between Mnemosyne and Lethe is clear enough. The Orphic hymns so beloved by Ficino and Pico invoke Mnemosyne's aid against Lethe:
Come, blessed power, thy mystic's mem'ry wakeTo holy rites, and Lethe's fetters break. (6)
Given this opposition, if one is described in watery terms, it would be natural to describe the other that way as well.
In the time of the tarot, the two streams of forgetting and remembering were actually very much in the popular consciousness. Even after more than a hundred years, Dante's Divine Comedy was still the masterpiece of the hour. With the invention of the printing press, more people could read what others were talking about. At the very highest part of purgatory, Dante sees two streams next to each other. He asks a woman who is picking flowers about it. She explains:
In the time of the tarot, the two streams of forgetting and remembering were actually very much in the popular consciousness. Even after more than a hundred years, Dante's Divine Comedy was still the masterpiece of the hour. With the invention of the printing press, more people could read what others were talking about. At the very highest part of purgatory, Dante sees two streams next to each other. He asks a woman who is picking flowers about it. She explains:
The water which thou seest springs not from veinRestored by vapour that the cold condenses,Like to a stream that gains or loses breath;But issues from a fountain safe and certain,Which by the will of God as much regainsAs it discharges, open on two sides.Upon this side with virtue it descends,Which takes away all memory of sin;On that, of every good deed done restores it.Here Lethe, as upon the other sideEunoe, it is called; and worketh notIf first on either side it be not tasted.This every other savour doth transcend... (7)
Here the object is to drink a little from Lethe to forget your sins, and then Memory, which he calls by the strange name Eunoe, to remember your good deeds. It is a purification of the mind before entering Paradise. There are two little dots over the last e in Eunoe, indicating that it is a separate syllable. Dante did not make up the word: Eunoe is the name of a nymph, said in some accounts to be the mother of Hecuba, queen of Troy at the time of the Trojan War. The word is compounded of "eu," good, and "nous," mind: awareness of good, in other words. It fits the context. (8)
Dante is beguiled by a nymph swimming in the Lethe, and when he is close enough she dunks his head in it, so that he swallows a little. Beatrice notices immediately that Dante's memory is slipping! She herself leads him to the Eunoe. After drinking, he tells the reader:
Dante is beguiled by a nymph swimming in the Lethe, and when he is close enough she dunks his head in it, so that he swallows a little. Beatrice notices immediately that Dante's memory is slipping! She herself leads him to the Eunoe. After drinking, he tells the reader:
From the most holy water I returnedRegenerate, in the manner of new treesThat are renewed with a new foliage,Pure and disposed to mount unto the stars. (9)
With that the Purgatorio, ends, and we are ready for the Paradiso, and a full awareness of the good there. He has made it clear, I think, that the Divine Comedy is the Christian literary equivalent of an initiation into a mystery cult. His example also gives the card-makers, even of the Cary Sheet, permission to put the two pagan streams in the tarot.
On the tarot card, there are only the two jars. In relation to frescoes, card-makers had to economize in their design, not to make it too cluttered. So we see two jars, one for each spring. One leads to the lake of Memory, the immortals, and Dante's Paradise. The other forms the River Lethe and either keeps one in Purgatory or returns one to our world. On the cards as in the Romano fresco, one side goes into a large body of water while the other falls on the ground, where it could conceivably start a stream.
Since the card is right here, notice the trees. Dante does not mention them.
On the tarot card, one of the trees, the fatter of the two, has leaves that are broad and point upwards; it looks to me like a Mediterranean fig (see illustration below). The fig is sacred to Dionysus. It is the tree that Dionysus used on himself sexually after his return to our world from the underworld. It also resembles both male and female genetilia. (10)
The other tree on the card, the narrower one, could be a white poplar. Poplars were sacred to Persephone and are associated, in her myths and those of other gods, with grief and regeneration. She or her husband Hades turned the nymph Leuce, who had been seduced or raped by him, into a white poplar next the Pool of Memory. This myth is described in Servius and in Virgil's Eclogues. Recall here that Hades and Persephone were assimilated to Dionysus/Liber and Ariadne/Libera in Roman mythology (see "Popess" section). So the association between the poplar and these gods could be where the card-makers got the idea for this tree, as both Servius and Virgil's Eclogues are mentioned often by Cartari/ They are also the only reference I have found to Mnemosyne as a body of water as opposed to a goddess or a spring. (11)
The tree might also be a cypress, because of the density of its branches (see photo above). Cypresses were sacred to Apollo, Hades and Artemis. Since Artemis was the goddess of childbirth and Hades the god of death, that tree suggests birth and death, or death and rebirth. Apollo's associations are similar: he was born in a cypress grove, and a young man who died of love for Apollo was changed into a cypress. The cypress was well-known for its resistance to decay. (12)
Here it is significant that Memory is not only water, it is a pool or lake. The other must just gush out of the ground and become the source for the River Lethe. In both the Guilio Romano fresco and the tarot card, one spring runs onto the ground, the other into a lake or other large body of water.
Earlier we saw that the bird on the tree was probably the phoenix, a symbol of either death and new birth or death and rebirth. From a Dionysian perspective, the trees are the same.
On the tarot card, there are only the two jars. In relation to frescoes, card-makers had to economize in their design, not to make it too cluttered. So we see two jars, one for each spring. One leads to the lake of Memory, the immortals, and Dante's Paradise. The other forms the River Lethe and either keeps one in Purgatory or returns one to our world. On the cards as in the Romano fresco, one side goes into a large body of water while the other falls on the ground, where it could conceivably start a stream.
Since the card is right here, notice the trees. Dante does not mention them.
On the tarot card, one of the trees, the fatter of the two, has leaves that are broad and point upwards; it looks to me like a Mediterranean fig (see illustration below). The fig is sacred to Dionysus. It is the tree that Dionysus used on himself sexually after his return to our world from the underworld. It also resembles both male and female genetilia. (10)
The other tree on the card, the narrower one, could be a white poplar. Poplars were sacred to Persephone and are associated, in her myths and those of other gods, with grief and regeneration. She or her husband Hades turned the nymph Leuce, who had been seduced or raped by him, into a white poplar next the Pool of Memory. This myth is described in Servius and in Virgil's Eclogues. Recall here that Hades and Persephone were assimilated to Dionysus/Liber and Ariadne/Libera in Roman mythology (see "Popess" section). So the association between the poplar and these gods could be where the card-makers got the idea for this tree, as both Servius and Virgil's Eclogues are mentioned often by Cartari/ They are also the only reference I have found to Mnemosyne as a body of water as opposed to a goddess or a spring. (11)
The tree might also be a cypress, because of the density of its branches (see photo above). Cypresses were sacred to Apollo, Hades and Artemis. Since Artemis was the goddess of childbirth and Hades the god of death, that tree suggests birth and death, or death and rebirth. Apollo's associations are similar: he was born in a cypress grove, and a young man who died of love for Apollo was changed into a cypress. The cypress was well-known for its resistance to decay. (12)
Here it is significant that Memory is not only water, it is a pool or lake. The other must just gush out of the ground and become the source for the River Lethe. In both the Guilio Romano fresco and the tarot card, one spring runs onto the ground, the other into a lake or other large body of water.
Earlier we saw that the bird on the tree was probably the phoenix, a symbol of either death and new birth or death and rebirth. From a Dionysian perspective, the trees are the same.
In this analysis of the details on the card, everything except the bird relates to the myth of Dionysus. The trees are his trees. The springs are his springs. Even the word "toule," seemingly on the card relates to him, by way of the springs. And the bird, while from a different myth, expresses the same thought.
Anther consideration, more speculative, is some verses written on gold leaf found in the 19th and 20th centuries, in some tombs in Italy and Greece. On each is the instruction to say "I am a child of Earth and Starry Heaven" when the soul of the deceased arrives at two springs. That sentence is thought to be an Orphic password, letting the guardians know that the soul has been initiated and so is worthy of being with the gods. There is also an instruction on which spring to ask for a drink from. Sometimes a cypress grows by one of them. The instructions vary as to how to identify the right spring; but in every case it reminds the soul to ask for a drink from the spring that is further away. Scholars hypothesize that drinking from one was meant to enable one to join the gods, while with the other, one will go back to our world for a new incarnation. (13)
In one of the verses, the spring to choose is called "Ennoia," meaning "forethought": it is a word very close to Dante's word "Eunoia." My speculation is that Dante knew about one of the gold leaves already in his day, but could not say anything because having it would have been considered grave-robbing. Also, he could not use the word "Ennoia" because in one of the heresies described by the Church Father Irenaeus, that was the name of the feminine aspect of God, corresponding to "Hochma" or "Sophia" in the Hebrew Bible. It would not be advisable to use heretical language. (14)
In any event, the card has a strong Orphic-Dionysian level of meaning, about springs of forgetting and remembering. It calls us to forget our previous modes of being, perhaps in the sense of detaching ourselves from it, but then to remember our deeds in that state of being so that we can advance.
In the 12 step program, this account reminds me of the fourth and ninth step, and so also all the steps in between. In these two steps, those of "inventory" and "making amends," the addict, instead of forgetting with wine, now remembers his actions committed in the throes of addiction; this memory gives hope of salvation. Remembering the harm he has done to people, he scrupulously makes amends to them. It is his purification, his Pugatorio, toward the same end as in Dante, to get past that old self. (15)
What is not in the 12 steps, unfortunately, is remembering why one drank, what the divine purpose was for the soul, and when in his life one fulfilled it in other ways. Even our addictions are good deeds from a certain perspective, good deeds misguided, attempts to achieve things seen briefly but then lost, toward which no other means seemed possible.
More generally, the card calls us to detach from the dominant modes of being in the world at this epoch. Instead, recover "the memory of the world," "la memoire du monde," as Flornoy calls it, that which has been forgotten because it was convenient to forget. Recover the old wisdom, the old mystery-schools, the old secrets. That is what the Renaissance was about, the rebirth of the old; it is what the alchemists, the kabbalists, and the tarot card designers were about, too. It is what the writers on the tarot are doing today when they explore its origins and mythic associations. Then (if I may paraphrase another of Flornoy's figures of speech), perhaps we can add to the water of immortality without disturbing it. (16)
The initiates are perhaps the two streams from the two jars, with two outcomes, one entering the lake of memory and the Eternals, the other the river of forgetfulness and the Eternal Round. Or perhaps the woman herself is Mnemosyne, pouring out two aspects of remembering, that which merges one's little consciousness with the Infinite and that which brings the Infinite into the world. These are also two aspects of hope depicted in the Minchiate Hope and Star cards: mortals briefly apprehending the Eternal One, with the promise of more, and the Eternal One briefly becoming incarnate, with the promise of return.
References, Star, Dionysian:
1. Flornoy: http://www.letarot.com/dossiers-chauds/le-toule/index.html. This copy of the 1760 Conver comes from http://www.camoin.com/tarot/Tarot-Marseille-Conver-1760.html.
1a. Daimonax: http://www.bacchos.org/tarothtm/14et17tempetoile1.html. Pausanias, Description of Greece 9.39.3 at http://www.theoi.com/Titan/TitanisMnemosyne.html.
2. Harrison, Prolegomena to the study of Greek Religion, p. 575. Accessible at Google Books.
3. My reproduction is from Sonia Cavicchioli, The Tale of Cupid and Psyche: An Illustrated History.
4. Vitali is at http://trionfi.com/0/i/c/17/v/. His reproduction of the scene is his Figure 7. The essay by Porphyry is at http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/porphyry_cave_of_nymphs_02_translation.htm.
5. Numerous classical references to the River Lethe are at http://www.theoi.com/Khthonios/PotamosLethe.html.
6. Orphic hymn: http:www.theoi.com/Text/OrphicHymns2.html#76.
7. Purgatorio XXVIII, 130ff. at http://www.online-literature.com/dante/purgatorio/28/. This and the following are cited in Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, at Google Books.
8. Eunoe: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eunoë.
9. Dante quote: http://www.online-literature.com/dante/purgatorio/33/..
10. fig: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dionysian_Mysteries.
11. Leuce: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leuce_(mythology), referencing Graves' Greek Myths and Servius, Commentary on Virgil's Eclogues 7.61.
12. Cypress: http://www.theoi.com/Flora1.html; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypress.
13. gold leaf: http://www.csun.edu/~hcfll004/lamella.htm.Orphics: http://www.bartleby.com/65/or/OrphicMy.html. Springs: Radcliffe G. Edmonds III, Myths of the Underworld Journey: Plato, Aristophanes, and the 'Orphic' Gold Tablets, p. 50, in Google Books. One recent commentator on the Star card, at http://www.cs.utk.edu/~mclennan/BA/PT/M16.html, says that the two trees are dark and white cypresses. Further away: Edmonds, p. 51.
14. Ennoea: Harrison, Prolegomena, p. 584, in Google Books. Irenaeus: Refutation of all heresies, I.1.1, I.12,1, 1.12.3, I.23.2, I.23.5, I.29.1, I.29.2, I.30.1. At http://www.gnosis.org/library/advh1.htm.
15. 12 step program: http://www.12step.org/.
16. memoire du monde: Pelerinage des Bateleurs, p. 190.
The Alchemical Star. Many aspects of the Star card can be found in alchemy. O'Neill associates the lady holding the water jugs with the albedo, the whitening, a process of repeated washings. So we have illustrations of women pouring hot liquid into a washtub and drying the clothes afterwards: Maier's 1617 Atalanta Fugiens emblem III (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9a/Michael_Maier_Atalanta_Fugiens_Emblem_03.jpeg), for which the motto is "Go to the woman washing sheets, do thou likewise"; and Mylius's 1622 Philosophia Reformata emblem 22 (out of 28 in the series), shown below. However there are never two jugs.
O'Neill also refers us to the Splendor Solis; a lady with a star on her head is shown about to clean off a dark man (Emblem 8, which I reproduce from Transformation of the Psyche, p. 84). There are no jugs, just the lady and her star.
This perspective, seeing the card as about cleansing, is somewhat different from my focus thus far, which focused on drinking. However it is consistent with the ritual of washing and anointing as presented both in the Bible and in Homer's Odyssey. For examples from the Odyssey, see my post at ttp://www.tarotforum.net/showpost.php?p=1992464&postcount=67, where I also talk about the a possible pun from "LE TOILE" as the word is seen on some cards, to "LA TOILLE", meaning cloth, and "LA TOILETTE," washing. Here I will focus on biblical examples.
In a diatribe chastising Israel as a harlot, Ezekiel (16:9) counts being washed and anointed as one of the blessings that God has given his ungrateful people. Ezeikiel has God say: "And I washed thee with water, and cleansed away thy blood from thee and I anointed thee with oil." (Et lavi te aqua et emundavi sanguinem tuum ex te et unxi te oleo; at http://vulgate.org/ot/ezekiel_16.htm).
Similarly, Moses has Aaron and his sons washed, and then Aaron, as high priest, anointed (Lev. 8:6-12). In the New Testament, John the Baptist washes Jesus in the Jordan, while the Holy Spirit anoints him (Acts 10:38). Then at the end of Jesus's life, Mary Magdalene washes his feet with her tears and anoints them with oil (John 13:2).
Then there is King David. Upon hearing of the death of his newborn son, he first washes and then anoints himself, and finally breaks the fast he had been on in hopes of winning God's pardon (II Sam. 12:20). His first sin had been to have sex with Bathsheba and beget a child. His second was to have her husband killed in battle, so that David could marry the widow and claim the child. Appropriately, the figure on the Budapest card (above right, from Kaplan vol. 2)) looks down as though contrite. After the bath and anointing, David apparently is cleansed of guilt, because the next thing we hear is that Bathsheba is pregnant again, this time with Solomon (II Sam. 12:24).
On one early version of the Star card, there is a young man who is reminiscent of Michelangelo's David, with a six-pointed star above him. During the 15th-16th centuries such a star was known as the "shield of David" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_of_David)--and a symbol of Christ's reputed ancestor. David is the prototypical "anointed one," (Psalm 89:20), the meaning of "Christos" in Greek. Perhaps our 16th century card player, in seeing the naked man on the card and the six-pointed star, would have thought of a popular statue recently completed in Florence.
My guess is that the meaning is that washing was meant to purify one, while anointing made one holy. It is thus like the two steams in Dante. There, in drinking the one, one forgets one's sins. Drinking the other, one remembers one's good deeds and so prepares for Paradise. Here one is cleansed by the water and made a man of God by the oil.
Comparing other images on the card to images in alchemy, we can see this washing as the culmination of a long process. In Mylius's Anatomia auri, 1628, near the end, six small stars appear with one large one, with the sun and moon above them. De Rola says that they symbolize "the seven Sublimations."
The sublimations are what occur after the Subject is put into a gaseous state. It condenses on the walls of the retort as tiny specks (first below), similar to the globules seen on the Maison-Dieu card, or it falls inside the retort like raindrops (second below). Here are two examples; in each case we see star imagery as part of the process. The first is from Mylius's Anatomia auri,
Above, the left beaker would seem to correspond to the Devil card, the middle the Maison-Dieu, and then the Star. Next in this sequence come Luna and Sol.
Here is another version of the process, from Barchusen's Elementa chemiae, 1718. According to Fabricius (Alchemy p. 235), these are engraved versions of watercolorillustrations in the early 17th century "Crowne of Nature."
Here the stage corresponding to the Star card is a star with a sun and a moon inside it. Its allegorical equivalent, Fabricius tells us, is Latona, mother of Apollo and Diana. Maier shows her and her children in Emblem XI of Atalanta Fugiens, being washed by the alchemist. I suspect that the Splendor Solis's image of a lady with a star on her head also represents the same result, the albedo, from which the new Luna and the new Sol will emerge.
The other part of the emblem, of the philosopher tearing a book to pieces, is not related to the tarot.
So the alchemical interpretation, when extended to include a second jug, comes to much the same thing as in Dante: one steam for cleansing of sin, another for making one suitable for the gods. By the same token, the alchemical version as given, with only one jug, is less developed than the tarot version, which uses two.
The bird in the tree also has its alchemical equivalent. Earlier I showed one detail from the frontispiece to the French translation of the Hypnerotomiachia, showing a phoenix facing the sun with its wings outstretched. The rest of the page, puts the image into an alchemical context:
Here I can do no better than to quote from Gerhart B. Ladner, Images and Ideas in the Middle Ages (in Google Books, although without many of the images)
Jesus was often put in a tree in a similar place, at its top.
The motif of a bird next to a a new shoot coming out of a cut-off tree appears elsewhere at that time. Here is another image, from 1633 (from Roberta Albrecht, The Virgin Mary as alchemical and Lullian Reference in Donne, p. 62, at Google Books):
The accompanying poem says:
Sometimes it was not just Jesus looking down from heaven, but Jesus and his mother together, as sponsus and sponsa. I will talk about the alchemical parallel later.
Pythagorean and Kabbalistic Star. For the Pythagoreans, 17 = 7. Seven is the number of crisis. The crisis has to do with which of the two streams to drink from, Lethe or Mnemosyne. If the one, you enter a new incarnation. If you drink the other, you go to the gods. Dante assures us that you drink from both, and so does Pausanias. But if there is a critical time, then there must be an either/or choice. The gold leaf tablets found in Greece and Italy all say that one must choose one or the other. So would Pythagoreanism.
In Kabbalah, we are at Chesed, the fourth sefira. After the pummeling of Gevurah, we get Chesed's supportive love. We can go back for another incarnation, or we can go higher, whichever we choose, provided we know our jugs. We can even go higher and then back, as at the oracle described by Pausanias.
18. The Moon: Great Phanes, Shining One, Revealer, you illuminate the heights and the depths, the day and the night. I see my divine being.
7. Purgatorio XXVIII, 130ff. at http://www.online-literature.com/dante/purgatorio/28/. This and the following are cited in Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, at Google Books.
8. Eunoe: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eunoë.
9. Dante quote: http://www.online-literature.com/dante/purgatorio/33/..
10. fig: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dionysian_Mysteries.
11. Leuce: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leuce_(mythology), referencing Graves' Greek Myths and Servius, Commentary on Virgil's Eclogues 7.61.
12. Cypress: http://www.theoi.com/Flora1.html; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypress.
13. gold leaf: http://www.csun.edu/~hcfll004/lamella.htm.Orphics: http://www.bartleby.com/65/or/OrphicMy.html. Springs: Radcliffe G. Edmonds III, Myths of the Underworld Journey: Plato, Aristophanes, and the 'Orphic' Gold Tablets, p. 50, in Google Books. One recent commentator on the Star card, at http://www.cs.utk.edu/~mclennan/BA/PT/M16.html, says that the two trees are dark and white cypresses. Further away: Edmonds, p. 51.
14. Ennoea: Harrison, Prolegomena, p. 584, in Google Books. Irenaeus: Refutation of all heresies, I.1.1, I.12,1, 1.12.3, I.23.2, I.23.5, I.29.1, I.29.2, I.30.1. At http://www.gnosis.org/library/advh1.htm.
15. 12 step program: http://www.12step.org/.
16. memoire du monde: Pelerinage des Bateleurs, p. 190.
The Alchemical Star. Many aspects of the Star card can be found in alchemy. O'Neill associates the lady holding the water jugs with the albedo, the whitening, a process of repeated washings. So we have illustrations of women pouring hot liquid into a washtub and drying the clothes afterwards: Maier's 1617 Atalanta Fugiens emblem III (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9a/Michael_Maier_Atalanta_Fugiens_Emblem_03.jpeg), for which the motto is "Go to the woman washing sheets, do thou likewise"; and Mylius's 1622 Philosophia Reformata emblem 22 (out of 28 in the series), shown below. However there are never two jugs.
O'Neill also refers us to the Splendor Solis; a lady with a star on her head is shown about to clean off a dark man (Emblem 8, which I reproduce from Transformation of the Psyche, p. 84). There are no jugs, just the lady and her star.
This perspective, seeing the card as about cleansing, is somewhat different from my focus thus far, which focused on drinking. However it is consistent with the ritual of washing and anointing as presented both in the Bible and in Homer's Odyssey. For examples from the Odyssey, see my post at ttp://www.tarotforum.net/showpost.php?p=1992464&postcount=67, where I also talk about the a possible pun from "LE TOILE" as the word is seen on some cards, to "LA TOILLE", meaning cloth, and "LA TOILETTE," washing. Here I will focus on biblical examples.
In a diatribe chastising Israel as a harlot, Ezekiel (16:9) counts being washed and anointed as one of the blessings that God has given his ungrateful people. Ezeikiel has God say: "And I washed thee with water, and cleansed away thy blood from thee and I anointed thee with oil." (Et lavi te aqua et emundavi sanguinem tuum ex te et unxi te oleo; at http://vulgate.org/ot/ezekiel_16.htm).
Similarly, Moses has Aaron and his sons washed, and then Aaron, as high priest, anointed (Lev. 8:6-12). In the New Testament, John the Baptist washes Jesus in the Jordan, while the Holy Spirit anoints him (Acts 10:38). Then at the end of Jesus's life, Mary Magdalene washes his feet with her tears and anoints them with oil (John 13:2).
Then there is King David. Upon hearing of the death of his newborn son, he first washes and then anoints himself, and finally breaks the fast he had been on in hopes of winning God's pardon (II Sam. 12:20). His first sin had been to have sex with Bathsheba and beget a child. His second was to have her husband killed in battle, so that David could marry the widow and claim the child. Appropriately, the figure on the Budapest card (above right, from Kaplan vol. 2)) looks down as though contrite. After the bath and anointing, David apparently is cleansed of guilt, because the next thing we hear is that Bathsheba is pregnant again, this time with Solomon (II Sam. 12:24).
On one early version of the Star card, there is a young man who is reminiscent of Michelangelo's David, with a six-pointed star above him. During the 15th-16th centuries such a star was known as the "shield of David" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_of_David)--and a symbol of Christ's reputed ancestor. David is the prototypical "anointed one," (Psalm 89:20), the meaning of "Christos" in Greek. Perhaps our 16th century card player, in seeing the naked man on the card and the six-pointed star, would have thought of a popular statue recently completed in Florence.
My guess is that the meaning is that washing was meant to purify one, while anointing made one holy. It is thus like the two steams in Dante. There, in drinking the one, one forgets one's sins. Drinking the other, one remembers one's good deeds and so prepares for Paradise. Here one is cleansed by the water and made a man of God by the oil.
Comparing other images on the card to images in alchemy, we can see this washing as the culmination of a long process. In Mylius's Anatomia auri, 1628, near the end, six small stars appear with one large one, with the sun and moon above them. De Rola says that they symbolize "the seven Sublimations."
The sublimations are what occur after the Subject is put into a gaseous state. It condenses on the walls of the retort as tiny specks (first below), similar to the globules seen on the Maison-Dieu card, or it falls inside the retort like raindrops (second below). Here are two examples; in each case we see star imagery as part of the process. The first is from Mylius's Anatomia auri,
Above, the left beaker would seem to correspond to the Devil card, the middle the Maison-Dieu, and then the Star. Next in this sequence come Luna and Sol.
Here is another version of the process, from Barchusen's Elementa chemiae, 1718. According to Fabricius (Alchemy p. 235), these are engraved versions of watercolorillustrations in the early 17th century "Crowne of Nature."
Here the stage corresponding to the Star card is a star with a sun and a moon inside it. Its allegorical equivalent, Fabricius tells us, is Latona, mother of Apollo and Diana. Maier shows her and her children in Emblem XI of Atalanta Fugiens, being washed by the alchemist. I suspect that the Splendor Solis's image of a lady with a star on her head also represents the same result, the albedo, from which the new Luna and the new Sol will emerge.
The other part of the emblem, of the philosopher tearing a book to pieces, is not related to the tarot.
So the alchemical interpretation, when extended to include a second jug, comes to much the same thing as in Dante: one steam for cleansing of sin, another for making one suitable for the gods. By the same token, the alchemical version as given, with only one jug, is less developed than the tarot version, which uses two.
The bird in the tree also has its alchemical equivalent. Earlier I showed one detail from the frontispiece to the French translation of the Hypnerotomiachia, showing a phoenix facing the sun with its wings outstretched. The rest of the page, puts the image into an alchemical context:
Here I can do no better than to quote from Gerhart B. Ladner, Images and Ideas in the Middle Ages (in Google Books, although without many of the images)
The phoenix on the tree of life appears, for instance, in a late Renaissance pictorial synthesis of alchemistic renewal symbols: the frontispiece of Francois Beroalde de Verville's translation (published in the year 1600) of the famous allegorical novel Hynnoerotiomachia Polifili by Fra Francesco Colonna, O.P. (first published 1499), which in the sixteenth century had greatly influenced hieroglyphics and emblematics, but now was interpreted by Beroalde de Verville from the "stenographic", that is to say, esoteric point of view of alchemy. ...In Beroalde de Verville's image the fountain, the new sprig from the old trunk, the phoenix, the tree of life, and the other symbols of renewal are all connected by the curve of a strong branch which holds this symbolic universe together; the composition is supported furthermore by a vegetative background network formed by a ramifying myrtle tree, which we are told symbolizes the all-pervading power of love. (p. 759f)Ladner explains that the phoenix signified the "mercurial" power of the spirit which the alchemist reached in the final and highest stage of his "work"
. ...in such alchemistic imagery (cf. Fig. 16) the symbolism is no longer that of the Resurrection but of the "highest mercury"; the quasi-mystical matter-transforming and life-renewing core of alchemy (related, of course to ancient Hermetism).Here is Ladner’s illustration, along with a close-up of the relevant detail.
Jesus was often put in a tree in a similar place, at its top.
The motif of a bird next to a a new shoot coming out of a cut-off tree appears elsewhere at that time. Here is another image, from 1633 (from Roberta Albrecht, The Virgin Mary as alchemical and Lullian Reference in Donne, p. 62, at Google Books):
The accompanying poem says:
Behold how Death aymes [aims] with his mortal dart,It is English, in time written in the shadow of Shakespeare's famous "The Turtle and the Phoenix," in which there was a similar linking of hearts in death (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Phoenix_and_the_Turtle):
And wounds a Phoenix with a twin-like hart.[heart].
These are the harts [hearts] of Jesus and his Mother
So linkt [linked] in one, that one without the other
Is not entire...
So they lov'd, as love in twainAfter that there was John Donne's "Love's Alchemy."These poems may or may not be overtly alchemical, but they are very much in a culture which mined alchemy for poetical purposes.
Had the essence but in one;
Two distincts, division none:
Number there in love was slain.
Sometimes it was not just Jesus looking down from heaven, but Jesus and his mother together, as sponsus and sponsa. I will talk about the alchemical parallel later.
Pythagorean and Kabbalistic Star. For the Pythagoreans, 17 = 7. Seven is the number of crisis. The crisis has to do with which of the two streams to drink from, Lethe or Mnemosyne. If the one, you enter a new incarnation. If you drink the other, you go to the gods. Dante assures us that you drink from both, and so does Pausanias. But if there is a critical time, then there must be an either/or choice. The gold leaf tablets found in Greece and Italy all say that one must choose one or the other. So would Pythagoreanism.
In Kabbalah, we are at Chesed, the fourth sefira. After the pummeling of Gevurah, we get Chesed's supportive love. We can go back for another incarnation, or we can go higher, whichever we choose, provided we know our jugs. We can even go higher and then back, as at the oracle described by Pausanias.
18. The Moon: Great Phanes, Shining One, Revealer, you illuminate the heights and the depths, the day and the night. I see my divine being.
Christian base: Let us again compare the Cary-Visconti with the Visconti-Sforza. Instead of holding a finger up in the direction of Heaven, she holds the Moon itself. And instead of a cross, the PMB woman holds what some have taken as a broken bow, one of her attributes. In Petrarch, when Chastity overcomes Love, the virgins break Cupid's arrows. The bow is not mentioned, but it is shown as broken in numerous visual representations of this section of Petrarch's poem. Alternatively, it might be a bridle, a typical symbol of self-control in representations of Chastity or Temperance. (1)
But why the dejected look on the maiden's face. In Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls, broken bows symbolized maidens' regret at their wasted years in Diana's service. A 16th century card (above right) shows similar dejection but without the bow. A dejected look while holding a bridle might mean a similar dissatisfaction with the virginal state. Why such a look would be given to the young woman in the first place is a question not usually asked. One possibility is that the card reflects the attitudes of its commissioner, Galeazzo Maria Sforza. He had a rather powerful and uncontrolled libido, and might have wished to see himself as the liberator from chastity of the virgins and married women in his realm. (2)
The time of the moon is night, when it is not only visible but gives visibility to things in the darkness. It is a combination of darkness and light. The resolution of doubt in faith is expressed in Bosch's St. John the Evangelist at Patmos. The Moon is the image of the Virgin, whoin Christianity replaced Diana as the image of feminine purity. Helped by his silvery angel, John is able to put the devil behind him in the light of the Virgin, our comforter as we wait for the Second Coming. (3)
Here the Moon represents our faith, and the paraclete, which after Christ’s death and resurrection is brighter than a mere hope. It is by it that we may find our way despite the demons who hope to win our souls in dark times.
The Ferrara-style cards took a different tack. They showed one or two astronomers learning geometry from observing the moon. The moon's crescent is one circle intersected by the circumference of a larger circle, as the shadow of the earth cuts off the light of the sun. We are learning geometry, with all its potential, from the Moon. Thereby we may calculate not only how to build cathedrals, but what the circumference of the earth is (a matter of some import in this Age of Discovery).
On the Rothschild sheet, there are two suns on either side of the moon. Are these glimpses harbingers of the light to come, the Second Coming? And on the Gringonneur card, is the yellow object the moon, in the earth's shadow, or the sun, partially blocked by the moon in an eclipse? There is a suitable mystery here, but the general tone is temporary darkness, to be followed by greater light. (4)
In the Minchiate, the Faith card replaces the Cary-Yale cross with what looks like a mirror, except that someone has dabbed it with red. It is the same mirror that is traditionally associated with the virtue of Prudence. The previous card is in fact Prudence, with the mirror in a different hand and a snake companion clumsily added. We get "Faith" by subtracting the snake and adding a flame to shine in the darkness. (5)
Noblet's Marseille-style card (below) is so different, I can hardly discuss it from a Christian perspective. To the Inquisitors and church officials, it can be given the same interpretation as the earlier cards. It is like Bosch's image: the dogs of the Marseille card are the human souls, male and female, looking up to the Moon and putting the demons behind them.
There is one detail Bosch did not include. The Moon is now not just the Virgin; she is the "woman clothed with the sun" of Revelation 12. We see her in this role in Durer's 1497-1498 Apocalypse series. Behind Durer's woman and the Noblet moon emanate rays like those of the sun. Durer's are necessarily in black and white, but Noblet's are red. Durer's engraving in printed form spread quickly all over Europe. Minus the wings, it was much imitated, in such diverse works as the Virgin of Guadalupe and the alchemical illustrations of Thurneisser von Thurn, who saw her as the alchemical "spirit of Mercury" latent in all things. (6)
But why the dejected look on the maiden's face. In Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls, broken bows symbolized maidens' regret at their wasted years in Diana's service. A 16th century card (above right) shows similar dejection but without the bow. A dejected look while holding a bridle might mean a similar dissatisfaction with the virginal state. Why such a look would be given to the young woman in the first place is a question not usually asked. One possibility is that the card reflects the attitudes of its commissioner, Galeazzo Maria Sforza. He had a rather powerful and uncontrolled libido, and might have wished to see himself as the liberator from chastity of the virgins and married women in his realm. (2)
The time of the moon is night, when it is not only visible but gives visibility to things in the darkness. It is a combination of darkness and light. The resolution of doubt in faith is expressed in Bosch's St. John the Evangelist at Patmos. The Moon is the image of the Virgin, whoin Christianity replaced Diana as the image of feminine purity. Helped by his silvery angel, John is able to put the devil behind him in the light of the Virgin, our comforter as we wait for the Second Coming. (3)
Here the Moon represents our faith, and the paraclete, which after Christ’s death and resurrection is brighter than a mere hope. It is by it that we may find our way despite the demons who hope to win our souls in dark times.
The Ferrara-style cards took a different tack. They showed one or two astronomers learning geometry from observing the moon. The moon's crescent is one circle intersected by the circumference of a larger circle, as the shadow of the earth cuts off the light of the sun. We are learning geometry, with all its potential, from the Moon. Thereby we may calculate not only how to build cathedrals, but what the circumference of the earth is (a matter of some import in this Age of Discovery).
On the Rothschild sheet, there are two suns on either side of the moon. Are these glimpses harbingers of the light to come, the Second Coming? And on the Gringonneur card, is the yellow object the moon, in the earth's shadow, or the sun, partially blocked by the moon in an eclipse? There is a suitable mystery here, but the general tone is temporary darkness, to be followed by greater light. (4)
In the Minchiate, the Faith card replaces the Cary-Yale cross with what looks like a mirror, except that someone has dabbed it with red. It is the same mirror that is traditionally associated with the virtue of Prudence. The previous card is in fact Prudence, with the mirror in a different hand and a snake companion clumsily added. We get "Faith" by subtracting the snake and adding a flame to shine in the darkness. (5)
Noblet's Marseille-style card (below) is so different, I can hardly discuss it from a Christian perspective. To the Inquisitors and church officials, it can be given the same interpretation as the earlier cards. It is like Bosch's image: the dogs of the Marseille card are the human souls, male and female, looking up to the Moon and putting the demons behind them.
There is one detail Bosch did not include. The Moon is now not just the Virgin; she is the "woman clothed with the sun" of Revelation 12. We see her in this role in Durer's 1497-1498 Apocalypse series. Behind Durer's woman and the Noblet moon emanate rays like those of the sun. Durer's are necessarily in black and white, but Noblet's are red. Durer's engraving in printed form spread quickly all over Europe. Minus the wings, it was much imitated, in such diverse works as the Virgin of Guadalupe and the alchemical illustrations of Thurneisser von Thurn, who saw her as the alchemical "spirit of Mercury" latent in all things. (6)
I have not seen this image in art before Durer; perhaps that is why Bosch never used it. Perhaps Durer even influenced the Cary Sheet's Moon (below), with similar rays shooting out all over.
References, the Moon, Christian:1. Visual representations: e.g. http://www.jstor.org/pss/861662.
2. Chaucer: Complete Poetical Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, p. 346, in Google Books. 16th century card: in Kaplann, Encyclopedia of Tarot, Vol. 2.
3. Laurinda Dixon, Bosch, p. 255ff.
4. Images: Rothschild, Kaplan, Vol. 1, p. 129; Gringonneur, Innes, The Tarott, p. 55.
5. Minchiate: http://www.unics.uni-hannover.de/rrzn/endebrock/coll/pages/i31.html (which is no longer accessible).
6. Durer: Image, with dating: http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/d/durer/2/12/2apocaly/index.html, search "woman clothed". Guadalupe: http://web.uni-marburg.de/religionswissenschaft/helsinkiWeb/seite1.htm. Anima Mercury: Johannes Fabricius, Alchemy, The Medieval Alchemists and their Royal Art, p. 36.
Greco-Egyptian perspective: Geometry was an Egyptian science, needed to build monuments and redivide land inundated by the flood. The images in the early cards we have been looking at have nothing especially Egyptian to them. Yet even as early as the Cary Sheet, the Egyptian presence--although no one has commented on it--is to me unmistakable.
Above, if you look at the part of the image I have enlarged in the lower right, there is a kind of temple in the center, with columns and flanked with trees. To the left, and maybe also to the right, there is a tall structure. It could be taken for a tree, but it also resembles an obelisk. Since obelisks were built in pairs, we would expect to see one on the right. There is one, but it looks even more like a large bush than the other.
In the foreground is a lake. And in the center on its shore what seems to me not a dog but a crocodile, holding something in its mouth. To the right along the shore is a second crocodile. Their jaws face each other. In the lake is a giant crayfish, claws upward and closed.
Later cards, as for example Noblet and 1761 Conver, put things in those claws, some precious stone or other. I am reminded of the Gnostic "Myth of the Pearl," in which a prince goes to Egypt and fights a giant monster in the Red Sea, to get from it a jewel that had fallen from his father's crown. If we face our demons rather than turning away, as Jesus did with Satan in the wilderness, we will find such a pearl. (1)
In the Renaissance, the crayfish was often used in zodiacs in place of a crab, for the month immediately after the summer solstice. As de Gebelin observed, this month is the beginning of the new year, and of the Nile flood, hence a symbol of regeneration. (2)
2. Chaucer: Complete Poetical Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, p. 346, in Google Books. 16th century card: in Kaplann, Encyclopedia of Tarot, Vol. 2.
3. Laurinda Dixon, Bosch, p. 255ff.
4. Images: Rothschild, Kaplan, Vol. 1, p. 129; Gringonneur, Innes, The Tarott, p. 55.
5. Minchiate: http://www.unics.uni-hannover.de/rrzn/endebrock/coll/pages/i31.html (which is no longer accessible).
6. Durer: Image, with dating: http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/d/durer/2/12/2apocaly/index.html, search "woman clothed". Guadalupe: http://web.uni-marburg.de/religionswissenschaft/helsinkiWeb/seite1.htm. Anima Mercury: Johannes Fabricius, Alchemy, The Medieval Alchemists and their Royal Art, p. 36.
Greco-Egyptian perspective: Geometry was an Egyptian science, needed to build monuments and redivide land inundated by the flood. The images in the early cards we have been looking at have nothing especially Egyptian to them. Yet even as early as the Cary Sheet, the Egyptian presence--although no one has commented on it--is to me unmistakable.
Above, if you look at the part of the image I have enlarged in the lower right, there is a kind of temple in the center, with columns and flanked with trees. To the left, and maybe also to the right, there is a tall structure. It could be taken for a tree, but it also resembles an obelisk. Since obelisks were built in pairs, we would expect to see one on the right. There is one, but it looks even more like a large bush than the other.
In the foreground is a lake. And in the center on its shore what seems to me not a dog but a crocodile, holding something in its mouth. To the right along the shore is a second crocodile. Their jaws face each other. In the lake is a giant crayfish, claws upward and closed.
Later cards, as for example Noblet and 1761 Conver, put things in those claws, some precious stone or other. I am reminded of the Gnostic "Myth of the Pearl," in which a prince goes to Egypt and fights a giant monster in the Red Sea, to get from it a jewel that had fallen from his father's crown. If we face our demons rather than turning away, as Jesus did with Satan in the wilderness, we will find such a pearl. (1)
In the Renaissance, the crayfish was often used in zodiacs in place of a crab, for the month immediately after the summer solstice. As de Gebelin observed, this month is the beginning of the new year, and of the Nile flood, hence a symbol of regeneration. (2)
In the zodiacs at Dendera, the month after the solstice is neither a crab nor a crayfish, but a scarab, the little beetle that deposited its eggs in feces and rolled it into a ball. Then a while later the new scarabs would come out. The Egyptians were amazed at what appeared to be reproduction by one gender only (the male, they thought) and saw the process as an image of the sunrise. Plutarch wrote about it in Isis and Osiris. As a design on signet ring, scarabs became as popular in Greece as in Egypt. (3)
As drawn in Greco-Roman times, the scarab sometimes looks like the crab of the Minchiate Cancer card. In fact the word in Greek, karabos, meant both "beetle" and "crab." (4)
In Egyptian myth, the scarab accompanied the sun in its nightly journey in the netherworld, when the solar boat turned into a funeral boat for the dead sun. It was the scarab that stirred the sun-god to life again. The sun-god felt its presence, drew it closer to him, and gradually returned to life. Egyptologist Wallis Budge gives an illustration from an Egyptian tomb (below. Again the theme is that of the darkness of night and death before the rising of the light, in which there are only brief signs of what is to come. (5)
Did the card-makers know of such myths? Plutarch does not write about this aspect of the scarab specifically, except to compare the movement of the scarab to that of the sun, that they push the dung-balls "with their feet as they walk in the opposite direction, in the same manner as the sun seems to surround the heavens backwards, whilst he himself is traveling from west to east." De Gebelin might have had this text in mind when he identifies the "Crayfish or Crab" as representing "the retrograde motion of the moon." These animals were widely recognized for their backwards motion. (Here is an example, Hamlet to Polonius: "You yourself, sir, should be old as I am, if, like a crab, you could go backward.") (6)
But I suspect that the Renaissance had more particular information about the regenerative role of the scarab. The Encyclopedia Britannica for 1910 reports that a scarab amulet was found in a 4th century b.c.e. tomb in Orvieto, Italy. Scarabs were popular with the Etruscans as well as the Greeks. These amulets were placed in the throat or head area. The article does not say when this amulet was found. During the Renaissance, ancient tombs were of great interest. I would think that people in the 15th century who wanted to know about scarabs could find out readily enough. (7)
On the Marseille card, the crocodiles have become dogs, of the same two colors we saw on the horses of the Noblet chariot, pink and gray. It is Horus and Seth again, each reacting in his own way to Isis, identified by Plutarch with the moon. They are barking at her instead of looking down at the crayfish with the two pearls in its claws. They are frightened by the night and the bright object within it. Or perhaps it is daytime, and we are in a solar eclipse. That is even more frightening to a dog. than the full moon. Similarly, both Horus and Seth are solar deities, to whom a solar eclipse represents great peril. (8)
On the left and right side of the card are two towers, in the Cary Sheet as well as the French cards 150 years later. De Gebelin connects them to the Pillars of Hercules, and also to a passage in Clement of Alexandria's Stromata about the Tropics, which the Egyptians compared to two guard-dogs. (9)
In Clement, the Tropics are the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn. The crayfish tells us that we are mostly dealing here with the Tropic of Cancer, which passes through Egypt.
There was a famous deep well at that place on the Nile, where on the Solstice at noon one could see all the way to the bottom only on that day. That was the only day the sun was exactly overhead. On the same day in Alexandria, the sun still cast a shadow. Erotosthenes used the length of the shadow to compute the circumference of the earth. How accurate he was depends on how long the "stadia" were he gave his answer in. By one measure, he was only off by a few hundred miles (and by all measures much closer to the truth than Columbus!). (10)
Here is what Clement of Alexandria had to say about dogs and Tropics:
As drawn in Greco-Roman times, the scarab sometimes looks like the crab of the Minchiate Cancer card. In fact the word in Greek, karabos, meant both "beetle" and "crab." (4)
In Egyptian myth, the scarab accompanied the sun in its nightly journey in the netherworld, when the solar boat turned into a funeral boat for the dead sun. It was the scarab that stirred the sun-god to life again. The sun-god felt its presence, drew it closer to him, and gradually returned to life. Egyptologist Wallis Budge gives an illustration from an Egyptian tomb (below. Again the theme is that of the darkness of night and death before the rising of the light, in which there are only brief signs of what is to come. (5)
Did the card-makers know of such myths? Plutarch does not write about this aspect of the scarab specifically, except to compare the movement of the scarab to that of the sun, that they push the dung-balls "with their feet as they walk in the opposite direction, in the same manner as the sun seems to surround the heavens backwards, whilst he himself is traveling from west to east." De Gebelin might have had this text in mind when he identifies the "Crayfish or Crab" as representing "the retrograde motion of the moon." These animals were widely recognized for their backwards motion. (Here is an example, Hamlet to Polonius: "You yourself, sir, should be old as I am, if, like a crab, you could go backward.") (6)
But I suspect that the Renaissance had more particular information about the regenerative role of the scarab. The Encyclopedia Britannica for 1910 reports that a scarab amulet was found in a 4th century b.c.e. tomb in Orvieto, Italy. Scarabs were popular with the Etruscans as well as the Greeks. These amulets were placed in the throat or head area. The article does not say when this amulet was found. During the Renaissance, ancient tombs were of great interest. I would think that people in the 15th century who wanted to know about scarabs could find out readily enough. (7)
On the Marseille card, the crocodiles have become dogs, of the same two colors we saw on the horses of the Noblet chariot, pink and gray. It is Horus and Seth again, each reacting in his own way to Isis, identified by Plutarch with the moon. They are barking at her instead of looking down at the crayfish with the two pearls in its claws. They are frightened by the night and the bright object within it. Or perhaps it is daytime, and we are in a solar eclipse. That is even more frightening to a dog. than the full moon. Similarly, both Horus and Seth are solar deities, to whom a solar eclipse represents great peril. (8)
On the left and right side of the card are two towers, in the Cary Sheet as well as the French cards 150 years later. De Gebelin connects them to the Pillars of Hercules, and also to a passage in Clement of Alexandria's Stromata about the Tropics, which the Egyptians compared to two guard-dogs. (9)
In Clement, the Tropics are the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn. The crayfish tells us that we are mostly dealing here with the Tropic of Cancer, which passes through Egypt.
There was a famous deep well at that place on the Nile, where on the Solstice at noon one could see all the way to the bottom only on that day. That was the only day the sun was exactly overhead. On the same day in Alexandria, the sun still cast a shadow. Erotosthenes used the length of the shadow to compute the circumference of the earth. How accurate he was depends on how long the "stadia" were he gave his answer in. By one measure, he was only off by a few hundred miles (and by all measures much closer to the truth than Columbus!). (10)
Here is what Clement of Alexandria had to say about dogs and Tropics:
...For the dogs are symbols of the two hemispheres, which, as it were, go round and keep watch; the hawk, of the sun, for it is fiery and destructive (so they attribute pestilential diseases to the sun); the ibis, of the moon, likening the shady parts to that which is dark in plumage, and the luminous to the light. And some will have it that by the dogs are meant the tropics, which guard and watch the sun’s passage to the south and north. The hawk signifies the equinoctial line, which is high and parched with heat, as the ibis the ecliptic... (11)
I think the idea is that if the sun went any further north in its mid-day course than the Tropic of Cancer, it would make the summer too hot. And if it went any further south at the tropic of Capricorn, the winters would be too cold. Hence the monuments, to keep both sun and moon in their courses. The card, while focusing on the moon, may also be about the sun. on the Noblet card, one disc is wholly inside the other. The Crescent moon does not look like that; it may be representing an eclipse.
It is possible that, as de Gebelin notes, that the Pillars of Hercules, as being on the north and south side of the entrance to the Atlantic Ocean were seen as similar to the dogs, guardhouses and limit-setters. The gods did not want another Phaeton, whose erratic leading of the solar horses burned the land and led to the creation of the Sahara Desert. It strikes me as quite likely that the monuments to Winter and Summer, which de Gebelin mentioned in connection with the Maison-Dieu, were constructed to the same purpose. Another possibility is that the "Pillars" might have been thought of as warning the sun and the moon not to go further west, in the days when the earth was conceived as a flat disc. (12)
Plutarch went so far as to see such towers on the Moon itself. They are great mountain ranges that look to us like the lines of a face on the moon, he said. For Plutarch the moon is where the deceased go for punishment and purification, after which they either go back to the earth for another incarnation or go to the next step, a journey to the Sun, which is the image of God. To get there, one first had to cross from the dark to the sunlit side of the Moon. The passage was by what Plutarch calls “the Gates,” a pass in one of the mountain ranges. (13)
These “gates” perhaps correspond to the two towers on the card. If one can take one's pearl from the crayfish, and then walk straight between the guardhouses, one is ready for the next card in the sequence, the Sun.
Noblet adds drops or rays falling from the Moon, or perhaps going toward it. In the Cary Sheet, these appear only on the Sun card. De Gebelin remembered his Pausanias here, who writes of a Phoenician he met who said that Egyptians saw the summer rains as the "tears of Isis" mourning for the dead Osiris, which in the highlands gather to become the Nile flood, the revivication of Osiris. Grief serves its own resolution. (14)
If rays, they are powerful bits of energy, which the dogs may even be catching in their mouths. Their job is to look up as well as down. If going upwards, they are the souls of the deceased on their way toward the moon.
The dogs’ two colors are their solar and lunar nature, day and night, seen also in the sky, which is perhaps a solar eclipse. Their colors are also in the sky: one is that of the moon, the other that of the sun behind it. The solar is Seth, the lunar is Isis and Osiris.
In this context, the scene between the two towers in the Cary Sheet is worth looking at again. It looks to me like a temple flanked by obelisks. Obelisks were considered harbingers of the sun; their tops caught its first rays. The temple, then, would be the temple of the sun, on the other side of the gates, or in Plutarch the sunlit side of the sun. That, of course, is the subject of the next card in the sequence.
References, Egyptian, Moon:
1. Hymn of the Pearl: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hymn_of_the_Pearl.
2. De Gebelin: http://www.tarotpedia.com/wiki/Du_Jeu_Des_Tarots. Flornoy, Pelerinage des Bateleurs, p. 198f.
3. Dendera: drawings from Desroches-Noblecourt, Fabuleux Heritage de l'Egypte. Scarab: http://mcclungmuseum.utk.edu/permex/egypt/egs-text.htm. Plutarch: Isis and Osiris 74, at http://thriceholy.net/Texts/Isis.html. Scarab in Greek Jewlery: http://www.guyotbrothers.com/jewelry-history/jewelry-history-page7.htm.
4. Word in Greek: http://www.wordinfo.info/words/index/info/view_unit/3559.
5. Image is from Budge, Gods of the Egyptians.
6. De Gebelin: Karlin, Rhapsodies of the Bizarre, p. 25, also http://www.tarotpedia.com/wiki/Du_Jeu_Des_Tarots. Hamlet: 2.2.208, at http://www.bartleby.com/70/4222.
7. Encyclopedia Britannica: article by Hugh Chisolm, in Google Books.
8. In Plutarch, Isis and Osiris: Isis as lunar: LII. Seth as solar: XLI. Horus as solar: XII, LII, LXII. For eclipses as disasters for Osiris, Seth, or Horus: XLIV, LV.
9. De Gebelin: in Karlin, Rhapsodies of the Bizarre, p. 24f.
10. Erotosthenes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_geodesy.
11. Clement on tropics: Stromata Book V Chapter 6, at http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/02105.htm, search "tropics."
12. Phaeton: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaëton. See also the Sun card of the "tarot of Mantegna." Monuments to Winter and Summer: See my section 16, "Maison-Dieu, Egyptian perspective," above.
13. Gates on the Moon: Plutarch, Concerning the Face Which Appears in the Orb of the Moon section 29, at http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Moralia/The_Face_in_the_Moon*/D.html.
14. "Tears of Isis": de Gebelin, in Rhapsodies of the Bizarre, p. 25. Another translation is on line at http://www.donaldtyson.com/gebelin.html. In original, "larmes d'Isis," at http://www.tarock.info/gebelin.htm. Pausanias, Description of Greece 10.32.18, at http://www.theoi.com/Text/Pausanias10C.html.
The Dionysian Moon: What I want to say about the Marseille images is an extension of what I have said about the Cary Sheet image in the previous section on Egypt.
Plutarch went so far as to see such towers on the Moon itself. They are great mountain ranges that look to us like the lines of a face on the moon, he said. For Plutarch the moon is where the deceased go for punishment and purification, after which they either go back to the earth for another incarnation or go to the next step, a journey to the Sun, which is the image of God. To get there, one first had to cross from the dark to the sunlit side of the Moon. The passage was by what Plutarch calls “the Gates,” a pass in one of the mountain ranges. (13)
These “gates” perhaps correspond to the two towers on the card. If one can take one's pearl from the crayfish, and then walk straight between the guardhouses, one is ready for the next card in the sequence, the Sun.
Noblet adds drops or rays falling from the Moon, or perhaps going toward it. In the Cary Sheet, these appear only on the Sun card. De Gebelin remembered his Pausanias here, who writes of a Phoenician he met who said that Egyptians saw the summer rains as the "tears of Isis" mourning for the dead Osiris, which in the highlands gather to become the Nile flood, the revivication of Osiris. Grief serves its own resolution. (14)
If rays, they are powerful bits of energy, which the dogs may even be catching in their mouths. Their job is to look up as well as down. If going upwards, they are the souls of the deceased on their way toward the moon.
The dogs’ two colors are their solar and lunar nature, day and night, seen also in the sky, which is perhaps a solar eclipse. Their colors are also in the sky: one is that of the moon, the other that of the sun behind it. The solar is Seth, the lunar is Isis and Osiris.
In this context, the scene between the two towers in the Cary Sheet is worth looking at again. It looks to me like a temple flanked by obelisks. Obelisks were considered harbingers of the sun; their tops caught its first rays. The temple, then, would be the temple of the sun, on the other side of the gates, or in Plutarch the sunlit side of the sun. That, of course, is the subject of the next card in the sequence.
References, Egyptian, Moon:
1. Hymn of the Pearl: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hymn_of_the_Pearl.
2. De Gebelin: http://www.tarotpedia.com/wiki/Du_Jeu_Des_Tarots. Flornoy, Pelerinage des Bateleurs, p. 198f.
3. Dendera: drawings from Desroches-Noblecourt, Fabuleux Heritage de l'Egypte. Scarab: http://mcclungmuseum.utk.edu/permex/egypt/egs-text.htm. Plutarch: Isis and Osiris 74, at http://thriceholy.net/Texts/Isis.html. Scarab in Greek Jewlery: http://www.guyotbrothers.com/jewelry-history/jewelry-history-page7.htm.
4. Word in Greek: http://www.wordinfo.info/words/index/info/view_unit/3559.
5. Image is from Budge, Gods of the Egyptians.
6. De Gebelin: Karlin, Rhapsodies of the Bizarre, p. 25, also http://www.tarotpedia.com/wiki/Du_Jeu_Des_Tarots. Hamlet: 2.2.208, at http://www.bartleby.com/70/4222.
7. Encyclopedia Britannica: article by Hugh Chisolm, in Google Books.
8. In Plutarch, Isis and Osiris: Isis as lunar: LII. Seth as solar: XLI. Horus as solar: XII, LII, LXII. For eclipses as disasters for Osiris, Seth, or Horus: XLIV, LV.
9. De Gebelin: in Karlin, Rhapsodies of the Bizarre, p. 24f.
10. Erotosthenes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_geodesy.
11. Clement on tropics: Stromata Book V Chapter 6, at http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/02105.htm, search "tropics."
12. Phaeton: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaëton. See also the Sun card of the "tarot of Mantegna." Monuments to Winter and Summer: See my section 16, "Maison-Dieu, Egyptian perspective," above.
13. Gates on the Moon: Plutarch, Concerning the Face Which Appears in the Orb of the Moon section 29, at http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Moralia/The_Face_in_the_Moon*/D.html.
14. "Tears of Isis": de Gebelin, in Rhapsodies of the Bizarre, p. 25. Another translation is on line at http://www.donaldtyson.com/gebelin.html. In original, "larmes d'Isis," at http://www.tarock.info/gebelin.htm. Pausanias, Description of Greece 10.32.18, at http://www.theoi.com/Text/Pausanias10C.html.
The Dionysian Moon: What I want to say about the Marseille images is an extension of what I have said about the Cary Sheet image in the previous section on Egypt.
For some souls, the Moon is a place of punishments to atone for misdeeds in one's previous life. The water on the card would correspond to the Lake (or Pool) of Mnemosyne., the place to recover memories.
In the myth of Dionysus, the lake is the place Dionysus enters the underworld, to find there the complexes that dominate him. The legends reported by Pausanias, Diodorus, and Hyginus say that he rescued his mother. But it is his wife who had just died, slain by Perseus in battle. I suspect that the story was changed. (1)
I imagine the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice as another version of the story. Orpheus rescues his wife Eurydice from Hades. That corresponds to Dionysus looking for Ariadne. (2)
At the last minute Orpheus forgets Hermes' injunction not to look back at her. It is like Psyche bringing back Venus’s beauty ointment in the tale by Apuleius. At the last minute she tries the beauty ointment. She does what she is not supposed to do and so is captive to Persephone, as Venus planned all along. Yet Cupid, Love, can transcend death's call. The beauty ointment, by forcing Cupid to leave his sick bed and rescue Psyche, proves to be a salve of immortality. She is transported to Olympus, where Cupid can be with her forever. (3)
The story of Dionysus's journey to Hades ends the same way. He negotiates his mother's move to Olympus, and then joins her there when his mortal life is over. But that is also where he rejoins Ariadne. How did she get there, when as a mortal she would have gone to Hades? Dionysus must have rescued her, instead of or in addition to his mother. (4)
In the myth of Dionysus, the lake is the place Dionysus enters the underworld, to find there the complexes that dominate him. The legends reported by Pausanias, Diodorus, and Hyginus say that he rescued his mother. But it is his wife who had just died, slain by Perseus in battle. I suspect that the story was changed. (1)
I imagine the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice as another version of the story. Orpheus rescues his wife Eurydice from Hades. That corresponds to Dionysus looking for Ariadne. (2)
At the last minute Orpheus forgets Hermes' injunction not to look back at her. It is like Psyche bringing back Venus’s beauty ointment in the tale by Apuleius. At the last minute she tries the beauty ointment. She does what she is not supposed to do and so is captive to Persephone, as Venus planned all along. Yet Cupid, Love, can transcend death's call. The beauty ointment, by forcing Cupid to leave his sick bed and rescue Psyche, proves to be a salve of immortality. She is transported to Olympus, where Cupid can be with her forever. (3)
The story of Dionysus's journey to Hades ends the same way. He negotiates his mother's move to Olympus, and then joins her there when his mortal life is over. But that is also where he rejoins Ariadne. How did she get there, when as a mortal she would have gone to Hades? Dionysus must have rescued her, instead of or in addition to his mother. (4)
In Plato's myth of Er, instead of a gate leading to the earth, there was the River Lethe, which is where souls in Hades come before they return for a new incarnation. Plato says nothing about another such body of water, such as the lake or pond on our card; but perhaps one may be inferred from the Orphic Hymn to Mnemosyne:
Mnemosyne here is a goddess, but in Pausanias (Description of Greece 9.39.9, at http://www.theoi.com/Khthonios/Trophonios.html) "Mnemosyne" is the name of a spring, the spring of Memory, to be drunk from after drinking from another spring called Lethe, the spring of Forgetting. These might be the two waters on the Star card. If so, the two guardhouses on the Moon card would be beyond them, for souls taking one way or the other. Perhaps the spring of Memory empties into the lake where the crayfish is, and the diamonds in its claws ares what we must find in our own unconscious selves, a process Plato, and Freud after him, called anemnesis, the recovery of what we have forgotten. For Freud it was the recovery of personal memories, often traumatic, from the time before we had speech. For Plato it was memories from a time before that, before our descent into matter at all. It is that memory which is being recovered by Dionysus when he dives into the lake.Come, blessed power, thy mystic's mem'ry wake
to holy rites, and Lethe's fetters break.
http://www.theoi.com/Text/OrphicHymns2.html#76)
But what does Hades have to do with the Moon? Here I must defer to Plutarch, in his essay Concerning the Face Which Appears in the Orb of the Moon section 29, (http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/R ... on*/D.html). His argument starts at line 330. Just before, he was discussing the three parts of the soul, body, soul, and mind. For "mind" he uses the Greek word "nous," which in his time meant something more than our understanding of "mind"; it was the governing principle not only of human beings but of the whole universe. Here is Plutarch:
Plutarch is concerned with what happens to the soul and mind after the death of the body, and especially with the the second death--which is also a birth. When Plutarch speaks of the "goddess here" in the first line below, I think he means Demeter, the goddess in charge of the body.In the composition of these three factors earth furnishes the body, the moon the soul, and the sun furnishes mind to man for the purpose of his generation331 even as it furnishes light to the moon herself. As to the death we die, one death reduces man from three factors to two and another reduces him from two to one;332 and the former takes place in the earth that belongs to Demeter (wherefore "to make an end" is called "to render one's life to her" and Athenians used in olden times to call the dead "Demetrians"), the latter in the moon that belongs to Phersephonê, and associated with the former is Hermes the terrestrial, with the latter Hermes the celestial.
At the uppermost boundary of this Hades, which Plutarch locates between the earth and the moon, is the moon itself. My thought is that the scene on the card might from this perspective be on the surface of the moon, where the better souls rise, enjoying a life comparable to that of the initiates. Yet the moon also has its place of punishment, he goes on to explain, in a great valley, and moreover the moon has two sides, separated by mountains. When we see what looks like a face on the moon, actually we are seeing mountains and valleys, he says. And between mountain ranges are the "Gates." Here is Plutarch again:334 While the goddess here335 dissociates the soul from the body swiftly and violently, Phersephonê gently and by slow degrees detaches the mind from the soul and has therefore been called "single-born" because the best part of man is "born single" when separated off by her.336 Each of the two separations naturally occurs in this p201fashion: All soul, whether without mind or with it,337 when it has issued from the body338 is destined to wander in the region between earth and moon but not for an equal time. Unjust and licentious souls pay penalties for their offences; but the good souls must in the gentlest part of the air, which they call "the meads of Hades,"339 pass a certain set time sufficient to purge and blow away the pollutions contracted from the body as from an evil odour.340 Then, as if brought home from banishment abroad, they savour joy most like that of initiates, which attended by glad expectation is mingled with confusion p203and excitement.341
Why two Gates? Plutarch says that spirits there go in both directions. One is for spirits going to the side facing the earth, the other for those going to the side facing heaven. But Plutarch is not talking about mortals in general, just mortals of the better sort, and about passages on the moon itself. But even spirits on the moon do not remain there, but return to the earth, disembodied, where they tend oracles and such:...just as our earth contains gulfs that are deep and extensive,358 one here pouring in towards us through the Pillars of Heracles and outside the Caspian and the Red Sea with its gulfs,359 so those features are depths and hollows of the moon. The largest of them is called360 "Hecatê's Recess,"361 where the souls suffer and exact penalties for whatever they have endured or committed after having already become p211Spirits;362 and the two long ones are called "the Gates",363 for through them pass the souls now to the side of the moon that faces heaven and now back to the side that faces earth.364 The side of the moon towards heaven is named "Elysian plain,"365 the hither side "House of counter-terrestrial Phersephonê."
By "flashing forth as savior a manifest in war and on the sea," according to the translator, Plutarch means the Dioscuri, Castor and Pollux, whom he sees as spirits descending from the moon. Part of the Dioscuri legend was that they would suddenly appear in the middle of a battle helping the righteous side, or as guides to sailors.Yet not forever do the Spirits tarry upon the moon; they descend hither to take charge of oracles, they attend and participate in the highest of the mystic rituals, they act as warders against misdeeds and chastisers of them, and they flash forth as saviour a manifest in war and on the sea.367 For any act that they perform in these matters not fairly but inspired by wrath or for an unjust end or out of envy they are penalized, for they are cast out upon p213earth again confined in human bodies.
So one gate not only allows spirits to go to the earth-side of the moon, but also to return to the earth itself. Let us look now at the second gate. That one allows souls properly qualified to enter the "Elysian plain." What happens on that other side, the side facing heaven? The spirits there must, at some point, be the ones that returned to the earth, because Plutarch says of those spirits who come to earth as saviors or oracle-tenders that eventually they stop working miracles on earth, because they have achieved the second death. Speaking of the numerous places dedicated to these spirits, he says of them:
The places where spirits work wonders after a time cease their magic; so says this priest of Apollo, Plutarch. The reason is that they have attained their goal, through the mystery of communion with the sun: the separation of mind from soul, as I think we see in the next card in the tarot sequence as well. Plutarch does not say much about this process, other than that the soul faces "heaven" and especially the sun. Perhaps it is not only the sun, but the five other planets as well. Only when--as I may fill in his account using Porphyry--it has successfully attained to Saturn is it ready to join the immortals....their rites, honours, and titles persist but whose powers tended to another place as they achieved the ultimate alteration. They achieve it, some sooner and some later, once the mind has been separated from the soul.373 It is separated by love for the image in the sun through which shines forth manifest the desirable and fair and divine and blessed towards which all nature in one way or another yearns,374 for it must be out of love for the sun that the moon herself goes her rounds and gets into conjunction p215with him in her yearning to receive from him what is most fructifying...
The process does not end there. The Sun takes its own back, a second death, this one of the soul, and also a third birth, assisted by Persephone,this time of mind alone, on the sun. Then soul remains alone on the Moon and is absorbed into it, just as the body is by the earth. But the result does not occur immediately. He cites Homer: Odysseus saw the shade of Heracles in Hades, although Heracles himself, his essence as mind, was with the immortals. Sometimes, Plutarch says, a mindless soul of an irascible nature manages to get through Hades (the space between the earth and the moon) before it is absorbed. The result is destructive creatures like Typhon and the Python, Plutarch says. But at last the soul-substance is dissolved. Then the Sun sows mind in the Moon and she produces new souls, which descend into new bodies.
Plutarch at the end brings in the Fates:
Atropos, the one who cuts the thread, for Plutarch in this essay is the one associated with the Sun and generation. For while in being taken back by the sun the soul dies in bliss, pure mind is born in the sun, and the sun generates new souls in the womb of the moon. Clotho, the one who spins the yarn, the stuff of soul, is associated with the Moon, the place of soul-substance. Finally, Lachesis, the one who measures the thread that determines the length of life, is for Plutarch the fate associated with the earth, for "she has the largest share in chance."Of the three Fates too Atropos enthroned in the sun initiates generation, Clotho in motion on the moon mingles and binds together, and finally upon the earth Lachesis too puts her hand to the task, she who has the largest share in chance.
The early tarot cards, such as the "Charles VI" and "Beaux-Arts-Rothschild," had it differently: Clotho was on the Sun card. One can find biblical justification for such a placement, e.g. Ecclesiastes 1:3: "What profit hath a man of all his labor which he taketh under the sun?" That placement is, however, also supported by what Plutarch says in another essay, "On the Genius of Socrates" (as Ross Caldwell, drawing on notes by Michael J. Hurst, has pointed out to me http://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=401&start=40#p6999). There Clotho is assigned to the sun. The Vieville Moon card of 1650, on the other hand, fits the Plutarch I have been quoting here, in which Clotho is assigned to the moon.
To sum up: The towers are the gates of Cancer and Capricorn, leading downward to a new incarnation on earth, and upwards into immortal realms. They are on the Moon because it is there that souls move back and forth between its two sides, the earth-facing and the heaven-facing, and down to the earth and up toward heaven. In front of the guardhouses is the Lake of Mnemosyne, which before passing to the heaven-facing side the soul must probe to its depths even into Hades itself if necessary, past forgotten trauma to one's inner purity of spirit.
On the other side of the guardhouses is the Temple of the Sun, flanked by its two obelisks, in which blessed minds barely attached to souls sing hymns to the sun. And while backsliding down to a new incarnation on earth is always possible, these minds active in contemplation will someday separate from the soul completely.
A part of the Dionysian interpretation, as I am presenting it, has to do with addictions. What corresponds to the work on the Moon is something not talked about per se in twelve step programs. The recovering addict, if he has strength of will, at this stage develops a spiritual practice--not necessarily religious, it could be art, Jungian therapy and "active imagination," or even walking in the woods, if done meditatively, in a place with spirit. It is a practice not merely in the head but with the senses and the body. Such a practice, done consciously and regularly, is one's inner tie to the divine, bulwark against relapse, and substitute for chemical spirits. Every successful recovering addict I know has found theirs. For one, it was Zen. For another, it was dance. For another, it was painting. These can be addictive too, but not to the same harmful degree as alcohol or drugs. At the worst they are defenses against progressing further. One can work on the new addiction, too. Hopefully there will be a descent into one's inner being, holding there both the darkness and the light.
References, Dionysian, Moon:
1. Pausanias , Guide to Greece 2.37.6. Diodorus Siculus, Library of History 4.25.4.- Hyginus, Fabulae 251. All at http://www.theoi.com/Olympios/DionysosMyths2.html.
2. Ovid Metamorphoses 10.8, at http://www.theoi.com/Khthonios/Haides.html#Orpheus.
3. Beauty ointment: Apuleius, The Metamorphoses, at http://ancienthistory.about.com/library/bl/bl_cupidandpsyche2.htm; search "box."
4. Seneca, Hercules Furens 16: "Not alone has Bacchus [Dionysos] himself or the mother of Bacchus [Semele] attained the skies ... [but also] the heavens wear the crown of the Cretan maid [Ariadne]." At http://www.theoi.com/Olympios/DionysosMyths2.html.
The Alchemical Moon. O'Neill calls the appearance of Luna the "lunar conjunction," explaining that it is expressed in the fighting of the dog and the bitch--or dog and wolf--as a copulation as well as an opposition. I find two instances of this image, in Maier's Atalanta Fugiens and in Lambsprinck's De lapido philosophica of 1625. There is no suggestion in de Rola's or Fabricius's commentary that the fight is either lunar or a copulation. However it is true that it results a mutual death and dissolution into one another, as in the case of the coniunctio; moreover, it is in the right place in the sequence, and what follows it in each case is an emblem signifying the elixir: in the Atalanta, a cup of poison is offered to a king, who after sickness becomes the Stone; in Lambsprinck, it is the Uroboros serpent biting its tail, a symbol of eternity (de Rola, Golden Game, commentaries on emblems 76 and 77, pp. 103f, and commentaries on emblems 160 and 161, p. 197).
O'Neill also suggests that the crayfish in the water represents a foetus in the womb, about to be born. I see no basis for this interpretation in alchemy. The only time I see a crayfish in an alchemical emblem, it is simply the animal associated with Luna astrologically. On the other side of the page are Sol and a lion, for the same reason. (This is from the frontispiece to the Musaeum hermeticum, 1625, de Rola Golden Game p. 184. Higher up on the right, not shown here, Aquarius, symbolizing the element of water, pours from his one jug.)
Yet some parallels remain. The colors on the droplets coming down suggest different planets that were identified with the different sublimations (see Philolethes' commentary on Ripley, http://www.levity.com/alchemy/rpvision.html): red for Mars, green for Venus, yellow for the sun. Ripley's Vision speaks of a multitude of colors--which we saw beginning with the Maison-Dieu--followed by a whitening and then immediately a reddening (http://www.levity.com/alchemy/rpvision.html):
...The Toad with Colours rare through every side was pierc'd;Similarly, Mylius's Anatomia auri of 1628, after the apppearance of the three stars in the beaker, has a white Queen with a white rose on top, and after that a king with a red rose. That looks very much like the Moon followed by the Sun. As for what the two together might mean, that issue will come up in relation to the Sun card.
And White appear'd when all the sundry hews were past:
Which after being tincted Ruddy, for evermore did last...
The Kabbalist and Pythagorean Moon. For the Kabbalist, this is the level of Binah. For Pico, Binah was the place of the "river that flows from Eden (28.11)"; the "great jubilee" (28.13, 11>69); and "penitence" (28.23). Ricci, Gikkatila's translator, spoke similarly (translated by Blau, The Christian Interpretation of the Cabala of the Renaissance, p. 41). Binah is:
...YHVH Elohim, Spirit of God, jubilee, the great trumpet, the female who forms, the conversion of the penitent, the redemption of the world, the life of the world to come.
It is where souls return home to Paradise. That corrresponds to the "Elysian Fields" which Plutarch found there in the valleys of the Moon. It is an arrival at the source of the rivers that flow from Eden.
For the Pythagorean, 18 = 8, the Ogdoad. We are in the myth of Rhea, sometimes identified with the Moon. Saturn is to be overcome by stealth. It is a dark time, but promises a successful outcome. This interpretation fits well with Plutarch's characterization of the Moon as the place where purgatory ends and blessedness begins.
19. The Sun: Accept, Lord Charitodes, Merciful One, this sacrifice of myself, that mortality may know immortality.
Christian base. Instead of a Sun card, the Cary-Visconti deck has a woman suckling a rather large infant. The historians say the subject was Charity. The Visconti-Sforza deck a few years later does have a Sun card. It shows an older and rather more active child holding the sun proudly in his hands. He is the "genius of the Sun," but it is still the sun of God’s everlasting charity, which allows us to become children of God. The sun is brighter than the moon, just as God’s charity makes up for our weak faith. God’s greatest charity, of course, was his coming to earth and making himself a sacrifice for humanity's sake.
Another theme announces itself early, first in the Gringonneur card, then in the Rothschild sheet. A woman holds a spindle, with a wall behind her, then a field, and above her the sun. Vieville took the same design for his Moon card, adding a book and changing the background to a tree in a meadow. In Vieville the thread of the spindle seems tied to the tree. She is one of the Fates, holding the Spindle of Necessity that unravels the thread of our lives in chance rotations of the spindle, according to how the wind blows the tree. The Sun of Christ, however, is above Fate. About the only thing that the Marseille sun card owes to this design is the wall. (1)
Earlier than the spindle, between the two Visconti decks, is the d'Este deck in Ferrara. It is unique in showing one who today we would call "homeless" talking with a young gentleman. It is the philosopher Diogenes, whose residence was said to have been a large barrel with a commanding view of the port of Corinth. The Renaissance gentleman is Alexander the Great. He sees Diogenes and asks if there is any favor he could do him. Diogenes' response is, "Cease to shade me from the sun." (2)
One message of this anecdote is the Biblical proverb "All is vanity under the sun," Ecclesiastes 1:12, 17, applying not only to Alexander's ambitions but to philosophers' prating (Ecc. 2:12.7). Diogenes is the archetypal Cynic. Another message is about the metaphorical sun. Alexander is trying to corrupt Diogenes no matter how noble he thinks he is being. With Alexander comes darkness. Wisdom requires poverty and powerlessness as its very precondition. Alexander's worldly allure would put Diogenes permanently in the shade. The sun here is as in a woodcut of the Conversion of St. Paul, above: its rays inflict him with its wisdom and send him sprawling in the mud, pouring down apart from his will. It's not called enlightenment for nothing. Alexander would stand in the way of all that. (3)
We meet these machine-gun-bullet style rays again in the first Marseille-style card, done around the same time as the St. Paul woodcut. All we have is half the card, but it is enough. The rays shoot out. Andy Pollett has given his idea of the rest of the card. It can be seen below to the right of the other, in orange. There is still only one boy, now a little older, carrying a banner. The result is similar to the Vieville card of 150 years later, except that the carrier of the banner is now on horseback. In between, another card shows just the sun and some trees, the rays shooting down. The sun nourishes the trees in the way that God nourishes the soul. (4)
That the sun is God is clearly indicated in a painting by Bosch (below left). It also brings in the apocalyptic message that we has been sneaking into the cards since the Maison-Dieu. Christ stands in a cloud with the sun behind him, shrugging his shoulders at sinful humanity. The scene below him puts him in the position of Cupid on the Lover card. A minstrel and a devil play sweet tunes to a couple of clearly sensual lovers. The wagon itself, beyond the detail here, is about to fall over an abyss, taking all those on and around it with it.
To the right of the "Haywain" scene, I have put a poor copy of the Catelin Geoffrey card of 1557. It is a scene with definite apocalyptic implications. An angel tries vainly to get a violin-player's attention while smoke and fire billows behind them. Nero fiddling while Rome burns is a metaphor for the apocalypse. (5)
The lovers on the hay wagon may not be those of the Lover card, however. Their arms, the woman's on the man's shoulder, and the man's in the general direction of her breasts, is a kind of burlesque of of an image that may have already been standard in the tarot: a man and a woman together under the sun.
In the Minchiate deck, the Charity card is a lady holding up a burning torch or bush. This is clearly a sun in the place of the mirror on the Minchiate Faith card (see previous section, on the Moon) and the Cary-Visconti Charity card. On the sun card, in contrast to what we have seen previously, a man and woman sit together under the sun, probably holding hands. It is the same scene as Bosch's, only more restrained. A church is behind them.
This pack, besides having Charity and Sun cards, also has cards for each sign of the zodiac. On the Gemini card, what we see is none other than a man and a woman holding hands. This is an unorthodox image for Gemini; yet it corresponds perfectly to the Sun card.
Another example is the Schoen horoscope, whose Houses, of which we have now seen 11 out of 12, each credibly corresponds to a tarot card, either in image or concept. Corresponding to the Sun card is the 11th House, that of play and recreation. The image is of two children, one riding a hobby horse and the other next to him:
On top I have put the House, and on the bottom the Schoen horoscope's image of Gemini, between Cancer and Taurus, crayfish and bull. The genders of the children are not easy to determine on either card. Since boys are stereotypically more active than girls, I would say that in both images the child on the left is male, and on the right female. My only other clue is that the child on the right of the top image has suggestions of two adult-female breasts, whereas the one on the left only has one. The top image, which I assume relates to some tarot image of the time, has the arms in something like the positions of Bosch's couple: the one on the right with its arm on the top part of the other's body, and the other's arm lower down. However both arms are lower in relation to the other than Bosch's. (6)
On top I have put the House, and on the bottom the Schoen horoscope's image of Gemini, between Cancer and Taurus, crayfish and bull. The genders of the children are not easy to determine on either card. Since boys are stereotypically more active than girls, I would say that in both images the child on the left is male, and on the right female. My only other clue is that the child on the right of the top image has suggestions of two adult-female breasts, whereas the one on the left only has one. The top image, which I assume relates to some tarot image of the time, has the arms in something like the positions of Bosch's couple: the one on the right with its arm on the top part of the other's body, and the other's arm lower down. However both arms are lower in relation to the other than Bosch's. (6)
For additional comparisons, here are two tarot cards (7):
The arm positions are all the same here: the figure on the right extends his arm to the left-hand figure's midsection, and the figure on the right puts his or her arm on the other's shoulder. All conform to the pattern already established. But the most striking feature is that the earlier card, almost contemporary with the Bosch couple and the Schoen horoscope, has a grown man on the left and a grown woman on the right. Noblet in 1650 does the same. It is similar to the 1515 zodiac we looked at in relation to the figure on the Star card. Gemini is the sign on the lower far left (8):
With an adult male and an adult female, we could be back in Eden before the Fall, in a state of innocence. The wall is then the wall that separates the Garden from what is outside it, the world to which our first parents were expelled.
Starting with Chosson, however, the gender of the figure on the right changes to a male. Dodal and Conver also have two males.
Chosson and the card-makers after him are "correcting" the earlier tarot's "mistake" of having a man and a woman. They want an accurate correlation with Gemini. On star maps of the era, the Gemini were invariably portrayed as two boys. Since there is considerable variation among images, here are some examples from the time (9):
As you can see, all are males. Otherwise the portrayals are not at all the same. All except the later two portray Castor with a sickle; the later ones have him with a club. (Flamsteed's image, although published in 1729, actually goes back to at least 1689, when he purchased the map as a mural.) Pollux, on the other hand, is portrayed as weaponless in all but one of the images. In that one, Hevelius, Pollux has the club and Castor a flail. Otherwise, Pollux carries only a harp and an arrow, or perhaps in the Hyginus two cups with liquid between them. Why the clubs, sickle, flail, harp and perhaps cups, is not stated in any of the texts.
For the tarot Sun card, we are left with two problems. If there is a correlation with Gemini, why did the earlier tarot, including the Minchiate and Noblet, choose a man and a woman? And second, what do the Gemini have to do with the sun anyway? In Greek mythology, the Gemini are Castor and Polideuces, or Pollux in Latin. Their mother had sex with Zeus and her husband on the same night. As a result, one of the twins is immortal and the other mortal. Not only are they both boys, but they have nothing to do with the sun god! (10)
In relation to what is depicted on the tarot card, however, the Sun is the main character. In Egypt the flood peaks in the sign of Leo, governed by the sun. It is the sun, gathering up moisture from the seas so that Ethiopia can have torrential rain, that makes the flood possible; it is in his month that the flood occurs. (4)
The Sun is the source of all life. But pestilence also comes, bred in the standing water. In the Egyptian religion, the pestilence of the flood-season was attributed to the Lioness daughters of Ra, Sekhmet. The Sun giveth and the Sun taketh away. I do not know if the Renaissance knew about Sekhmet, but they did know about pestilence. If you look closely at the cards, you will see that they stand in a swampy place, where malaria-bearing mosquitoes breed. And the gesture the woman makes to the man could be one of commiseration rather than joy; the man may simply be looking to his wife for support and healing in this time of trouble. (5)
The rays between the couple and the sun on the card, present even in the Cary Sheet, take on a variety of meanings. They are water coming up from the sea. They are water coming down. They are tears at the fate of one of his children--not Shu, who is immortal, but children in the sense that we are all children of God. They are rays of heat, which combined with the water bring death. And they are rays of enlightenment, as in the conversion of St. Paul.
In 1672, as we have seen, the children on the tarot card change to two boys. The Egyptian-style cult of Serapis easily accommodates this shift. Osiris, whose spirit the Egyptians venerated in the Apis bull, is for their Greek conquerors Osir-Apis, or Serapis for short. This deity is not only lord of the dead, but has the face of Zeus, Poseidon's trident and a little sun and moon as well. (7)
Since Serapis is Zeus and sun-god both, Castor and Pollux come under his domain as his son and stepson. Always seen as the protectors of sailors, they now have Isis for a stepmother, and they help her in her new role as protector of the Greco-Egyptian ships that plied the Roman Mediterranean with grain and slaves. Later the Virgin Mary would take on the same function, including the ritual of bringing her effigy from her temple down to the sea, as that described by Apuleius in his account of the cult of Isis. (8)
And for Christianity, Castor, the immortal one of the pair, becomes a prefiguration of Christ, as Joachim Ringleben has argued. The basic text is Pindar's 10th Nemean Ode. Castor appeals to his father Zeus to make Pollux immortal, so that they will not be separated. Zeus can do so on one condition: that Pollux give up half his days as an immortal, so that both will be citizens of Hades half the time. In other words, it is like Christ becoming mortal and dying to save humanity from Hell. Similarly, some must die during the Nile flood, that the nation may live. It is not murder, from this perspective, simply the death that accompanies regenerated life. (9)
6.
7. Serapis: Plutarch Isis and Osiris XXVIII, XXIX, LII, LXII.
8. Witt, Isis in the Ancient World. Chapter XII, "The Procession to the Ship."
9. 10th Nemean Ode: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0162&query=head%3D%2339. Christianity: click on link at end of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castor_and_Pollux.
The Dionysian Sun: In looking at the Fool card, I cast the animal jumping on him as a goat, an animal sacred to Dionysus, and foretold its sacrifice at the end of the ritual. I gave an illustration from Cartari's Latin edition. In the chariot scenes for card 7, we could see a boy leading a goat in the background. Now let me show you two goat-sacrifice scenes. On the right, the same scene as in the Latin edition, but reworked for the 1647 edition. And on the left, from a Roman-era sarcophagus, the goat being set onto the block for sacrifice. It would appear that Cartari used such a scene as the model for the illustration. (1)
On the Marseille card, our initiates look at each other. One is the goat to be sacrificed, by the other, or (in Cartari) Dionysus' son Priapus. It is the addicted side of the personality, or the material nature of the Titans for the Orphics. But it is a willing sacrifice. The one to be sacrificed reaches to the heart-center of the other, allowing the energy of immortality to pass into him. (2)
Now compare the gestures of the two figures on the card to those on a Dionysian sarcophagus, from the Museum of Roman Art at the Diocletian Baths in Rome. Look to the far left of the panel. As in the card, the one on the left puts his hand on the heart of the one on the right. (3)
Here is a closer look at the pair, along with the same scene on another sarcophagus, at the same museum (be sure to click on this image to make it larger):
The museum commentary on this scene calls it a drunk Dionysus being helped by a satyr. I don't think so. It is at the end of a procession that will end in a sacrifice. The one at the end is the sacrifice, replaced in the cult by a goat.Why a goat? Dionysus was dressed as a goat-kid to hide him from Hera. It is also the animal that Dionysus turned himself into when fleeing the monster Typhon. It is his cult-animal. (4)
This Dionysian perspective, I think, deepens the Christian meaning of the scene on the card. The Book of Acts (8:14-17) talks about the "laying on of hands," so that the spirit of God infused in the original disciples would pass to the new converts. Here the one to be sacrificed, touching the heart center, is the one activating the energy of immortality so that it may pass to him. The type of sacrifice is that of Abraham and Isaac: Abraham does not know how, but by sacrificing his only child, he will somehow ensure that his descendants, the people of the covenant, will be as numerous as the stars in the sky.
Jesus does Abraham one better. In him, Isaac, Abraham and the ram are one. As self-sacrifice, he is the one sacrificing as well as the one sacrificed, and there is no substitution at the last moment. The same is true of Dionysus, as both the goat and the slayer of the goat, the Aigobolos, Goat-slayer. (5)
It is this self-sacrificial aspect of Dionysus that the Christians found so diabolically like that of their own god, but which made it easier for an Orphic to accept the new state religion of Christianity. In fact there is an amulet, to which Joseph Campbell called attention in his book Creative Mythology. It shows a figure on a cross, with seven stars and a crescent moon above him. Beneath the figure are the words "Orpheo Bakko," Orpheus - Bacchus. It asserts an identity between the hero of both cults, Christian and Orphic. (6)
Contrary to one recent account, The Jesus Mysteries, I do not believe that this image is an Orphic amulet. There are no myths about a crucified Dionysus or Orpheus, just a dismembered one. Crosses do appear on Dionysian sarcophagi, but no one hangs from them. Crosses also appear on 4th dynasty reliefs in Egypt, c. 2500 b.c.e; it is an easy sign to make, attaching to numerous interpretations, such as the four directions, or the unity of the four quadrants of a country. The amulet, it seems to me, is that of a Christian, probably a former Orphic, who respectfully sees a similarity between the two cults. That is how Campbell takes the amulet, and before him the historian who first wrote about it, Robert Eisler in Orpheus the Fisher, 1921. (7)
The god is also the one being sacrificed, the sacrificial goat. On the card, Daimonax has rightly called attention to the little tail coming out from behind the twin to our right, the one to be sacrificed. He says that this tail would have been recognized from the costumes worn in pageants still performed in the rural areas around Marseille. In Chosson, it is even highlighted in white. Camoin and Jodorowsky have made the tail even more obvious than it is in the originals, where it could almost be a fold in the skin. It is of course also the tail on the ram that allegedly substituted for Isaac at the last moment, when Abraham was already bringing down his sickle; and it is the tail of the paschal lamb that was sacrificed at Passover. (8)
We may recall this tail from the Devil card, on both the lower figures. In the Sun card, both even have the collars that earlier chained them to the Devil. The chains are gone. Humanity formerly in thrall to the devil is now free, even though the price of his freedom is physical death. From death will come life. There are more transformations to come. Daimonax points to the lines on the card that indicate that the two boys are standing at the edge of a marsh or lake. From the Greek travel writer Pausanias, he cites several possible settings. One is of course the springs of forgetting and remembering, from the Star card. There was also a marsh near Athens where Dionysian rites took place. But the most interesting possibility is the Alkyonian Lake near Argos, where Dionysus entered Hades and returned. It was so deep even the Roman emperors, who personally made attempts, could not find the bottom. Pausanias said he could not reveal the details of the ritual. Plutarch said a little more, in a sentence comparing Dionysus with Osiris: "The Argives too have a Bacchus by title the 'Bull-born;' and they call him up out of water by the sound of trumpets, casting into the deep pool as offerings to the 'Pylaochus.' " On another account, they cast it into a pit. That would have been more hygenic. (9)
What were these offerings? Probably the rite of sacrificing a ram or a goat was conducted there.This lake is probably the one Perseus was said to have thrown Dionysus after killing or rendering him unconscious in battle, the one that led to the Underworld. For Dionysus to return, it was necessary to give the Underworld a life in exchange. So the people sacrificed a ram or a goat, and instead of eating it cast it into the pool or pit. Then Dionysus could be with the people once more.
The arm positions are all the same here: the figure on the right extends his arm to the left-hand figure's midsection, and the figure on the right puts his or her arm on the other's shoulder. All conform to the pattern already established. But the most striking feature is that the earlier card, almost contemporary with the Bosch couple and the Schoen horoscope, has a grown man on the left and a grown woman on the right. Noblet in 1650 does the same. It is similar to the 1515 zodiac we looked at in relation to the figure on the Star card. Gemini is the sign on the lower far left (8):
With an adult male and an adult female, we could be back in Eden before the Fall, in a state of innocence. The wall is then the wall that separates the Garden from what is outside it, the world to which our first parents were expelled.
Starting with Chosson, however, the gender of the figure on the right changes to a male. Dodal and Conver also have two males.
Chosson and the card-makers after him are "correcting" the earlier tarot's "mistake" of having a man and a woman. They want an accurate correlation with Gemini. On star maps of the era, the Gemini were invariably portrayed as two boys. Since there is considerable variation among images, here are some examples from the time (9):
As you can see, all are males. Otherwise the portrayals are not at all the same. All except the later two portray Castor with a sickle; the later ones have him with a club. (Flamsteed's image, although published in 1729, actually goes back to at least 1689, when he purchased the map as a mural.) Pollux, on the other hand, is portrayed as weaponless in all but one of the images. In that one, Hevelius, Pollux has the club and Castor a flail. Otherwise, Pollux carries only a harp and an arrow, or perhaps in the Hyginus two cups with liquid between them. Why the clubs, sickle, flail, harp and perhaps cups, is not stated in any of the texts.
For a pair of siblings sired by the sun-god, one possibility the Judeo-Christian God himself. As the source of all life and light, God was often pictured as filling the sky with his radiance. Van Eyck pictured the Immaculate Conception as a sunbeam entering Mary's ear. His followers wore luminous halos. His son Jesus was represented as next to or in front of the sun, as Bosch's "Haywain," above, illustrates. (11)
If God is the Sun, who are his sons? For pairs, we have to look at marginal traditions within Judaism and Christianity. In a few accounts, Cain and Abel are interpreted not as children of Adam but of the demiurge and his helpers, satiating their lust upon carnal Eve. There are also Jesus and Lucifer, two angelic sons of God. And some held that Jesus and Judas were brothers. The animosity of one brother for the other in all these cases could well explain why the 15th-17th century engravers put one of the Gemini in the star maps with a sickle, while the other is peacefully playing a harp or pouring out libations. But how could that be what the card is about, one child playing with another and murdering him later? (12)
It could also be that the sun, besides bringing enlightenment, might also rain down punishment with its bullet-like rays. In accord with this interpretation is an engraving of Durer's, done arouind 1500, of the martyrdom of St. Catherine. In the background is a man shielding himself from those bullet-like rays, this time as God's anger.--whether at Cain for his murder, or at Adam and Eve for their disobedience, depending on the sex of the participants. (13)
References, Sun, Christian:
1. Gringonneur: Innes, The Tarot, p. 57. Rothschild: Kaplan Encyclopedia of Tarot, Vol. 1, p. 129. Also http://trionfi.com/0/j/d/bologna/. Spindle of Necessity: Plato, Republic X, at http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.11.x.html.
2. Diogenes and Alexander: story from Diogenes Laertius, 3rd century c.e., Lives of Eminent Philosophers, at http://classicpersuasion.org/pw/diogenes/dldiogenes.htm, referenced at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diogenes_of_Sinope.
3. Ecclesiastes: from Vitali, http://trionfi.com/0/i/c/19/v/, as is the St. Paul image and its application to the card.
4. Pollett, Vieville: http://it.geocities.com/a_pollett/cards69.htm. Black and white image: Kaplan, Encyclopedia of Tarot Vol 1, p. 125.
5. Bosch, Haywain, c. 1485-1490, detail of center panel. Full image at http://www.artchive.com/artchive/B/bosch/haywainc.jpg.html. Catelin Geoffrey: http://www.poker168.com/bwg/bwg_tl6.htm
6. Schoen horoscope: Ernst and Johanna Lehner, Astrology and Astronomy, p. 160
7. Sforza Castle card: http://www.tarotforum.net/showthread.php?t=62044.
8. Zodiac: Ernst and Johanna Lehner, Astrology and Astronomy, p. 87.
9. (a) http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic-art/657680/5649/. (b) Ernst and Johanna Lehner, Astrology and Astronomy, p. 101. (c) http://www.lindahall.org/services/digital/ebooks/bayer/bayer60.shtml. (d) http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/constellations/gemini.html. (e) http://www.lindahall.org/services/digital/ebooks/flamsteed1729/flamsteed28_29.shtml.
10. Mortal and immortal: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castor_and_Pollux.
11. Van Eyck: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annunciation_(van_Eyck,_Washington).
12. Cain and Abel: John C. Reeves, Heralds of that Good Realm: Syro-Mesopotamian Gnosis and Jewish ... - Google Books Result, p. 101. Jesus and Lucifer: Sen. Huckabee recently provoked some documentation about this doctrine in Mormonism, e.g. http://www.bibleonly.org/exp/17q.html, to the effect that Jesus and Lucifer are both "spirit sons" of Elohim. Judas as brother to Jesus: referred to in Matthew 13:55 and Mark 6:3, but assumed to be a different Judas than Judas Iscariat. There is also Judas "the twin." See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judas_Iscariot.
13. Image: detail of "The Martyrdom of St. Catherine," c. 1497-1498. Durer: Complete Engravings, Etchings, and Woodcuts, ed. Knappe, Plate 145.
References, Sun, Christian:
1. Gringonneur: Innes, The Tarot, p. 57. Rothschild: Kaplan Encyclopedia of Tarot, Vol. 1, p. 129. Also http://trionfi.com/0/j/d/bologna/. Spindle of Necessity: Plato, Republic X, at http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.11.x.html.
2. Diogenes and Alexander: story from Diogenes Laertius, 3rd century c.e., Lives of Eminent Philosophers, at http://classicpersuasion.org/pw/diogenes/dldiogenes.htm, referenced at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diogenes_of_Sinope.
3. Ecclesiastes: from Vitali, http://trionfi.com/0/i/c/19/v/, as is the St. Paul image and its application to the card.
4. Pollett, Vieville: http://it.geocities.com/a_pollett/cards69.htm. Black and white image: Kaplan, Encyclopedia of Tarot Vol 1, p. 125.
5. Bosch, Haywain, c. 1485-1490, detail of center panel. Full image at http://www.artchive.com/artchive/B/bosch/haywainc.jpg.html. Catelin Geoffrey: http://www.poker168.com/bwg/bwg_tl6.htm
6. Schoen horoscope: Ernst and Johanna Lehner, Astrology and Astronomy, p. 160
7. Sforza Castle card: http://www.tarotforum.net/showthread.php?t=62044.
8. Zodiac: Ernst and Johanna Lehner, Astrology and Astronomy, p. 87.
9. (a) http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic-art/657680/5649/. (b) Ernst and Johanna Lehner, Astrology and Astronomy, p. 101. (c) http://www.lindahall.org/services/digital/ebooks/bayer/bayer60.shtml. (d) http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/constellations/gemini.html. (e) http://www.lindahall.org/services/digital/ebooks/flamsteed1729/flamsteed28_29.shtml.
10. Mortal and immortal: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castor_and_Pollux.
11. Van Eyck: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annunciation_(van_Eyck,_Washington).
12. Cain and Abel: John C. Reeves, Heralds of that Good Realm: Syro-Mesopotamian Gnosis and Jewish ... - Google Books Result, p. 101. Jesus and Lucifer: Sen. Huckabee recently provoked some documentation about this doctrine in Mormonism, e.g. http://www.bibleonly.org/exp/17q.html, to the effect that Jesus and Lucifer are both "spirit sons" of Elohim. Judas as brother to Jesus: referred to in Matthew 13:55 and Mark 6:3, but assumed to be a different Judas than Judas Iscariat. There is also Judas "the twin." See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judas_Iscariot.
13. Image: detail of "The Martyrdom of St. Catherine," c. 1497-1498. Durer: Complete Engravings, Etchings, and Woodcuts, ed. Knappe, Plate 145.
Greco-Egyptian perspective: In the Egyptian perspective, the pairing of male with female under the sun is not all that mysterious. Just look at the Dendera circular zodiac. There, between Cancer and Taurus, the scarab and the bull, we see a man and a woman holding hands. (1)
According to Egyptologist Desroches-Noblecourt the pair are Shu and Tefnut, the first-born children of the Egyptian Sun God Ra, who generated them from himself. They are god and goddess of the upper and lower air, dry and moist. (Here I am struck by a parallel with the Gringonneur and Minchiate cards, with deep blue above the Sun and a reddish haze below it.) The world is created from their embrace; their children are Nut and Geb, heaven and earth. Isis, Osiris, Seth, and Nepthys, are the fourth generation. (2)
Here is the constellation again, drawn in isolation from the other constellations and with another version also at Dendera. (3)
According to Egyptologist Desroches-Noblecourt the pair are Shu and Tefnut, the first-born children of the Egyptian Sun God Ra, who generated them from himself. They are god and goddess of the upper and lower air, dry and moist. (Here I am struck by a parallel with the Gringonneur and Minchiate cards, with deep blue above the Sun and a reddish haze below it.) The world is created from their embrace; their children are Nut and Geb, heaven and earth. Isis, Osiris, Seth, and Nepthys, are the fourth generation. (2)
In relation to what is depicted on the tarot card, however, the Sun is the main character. In Egypt the flood peaks in the sign of Leo, governed by the sun. It is the sun, gathering up moisture from the seas so that Ethiopia can have torrential rain, that makes the flood possible; it is in his month that the flood occurs. (4)
The Sun is the source of all life. But pestilence also comes, bred in the standing water. In the Egyptian religion, the pestilence of the flood-season was attributed to the Lioness daughters of Ra, Sekhmet. The Sun giveth and the Sun taketh away. I do not know if the Renaissance knew about Sekhmet, but they did know about pestilence. If you look closely at the cards, you will see that they stand in a swampy place, where malaria-bearing mosquitoes breed. And the gesture the woman makes to the man could be one of commiseration rather than joy; the man may simply be looking to his wife for support and healing in this time of trouble. (5)
The rays between the couple and the sun on the card, present even in the Cary Sheet, take on a variety of meanings. They are water coming up from the sea. They are water coming down. They are tears at the fate of one of his children--not Shu, who is immortal, but children in the sense that we are all children of God. They are rays of heat, which combined with the water bring death. And they are rays of enlightenment, as in the conversion of St. Paul.
In 1672, as we have seen, the children on the tarot card change to two boys. The Egyptian-style cult of Serapis easily accommodates this shift. Osiris, whose spirit the Egyptians venerated in the Apis bull, is for their Greek conquerors Osir-Apis, or Serapis for short. This deity is not only lord of the dead, but has the face of Zeus, Poseidon's trident and a little sun and moon as well. (7)
Since Serapis is Zeus and sun-god both, Castor and Pollux come under his domain as his son and stepson. Always seen as the protectors of sailors, they now have Isis for a stepmother, and they help her in her new role as protector of the Greco-Egyptian ships that plied the Roman Mediterranean with grain and slaves. Later the Virgin Mary would take on the same function, including the ritual of bringing her effigy from her temple down to the sea, as that described by Apuleius in his account of the cult of Isis. (8)
And for Christianity, Castor, the immortal one of the pair, becomes a prefiguration of Christ, as Joachim Ringleben has argued. The basic text is Pindar's 10th Nemean Ode. Castor appeals to his father Zeus to make Pollux immortal, so that they will not be separated. Zeus can do so on one condition: that Pollux give up half his days as an immortal, so that both will be citizens of Hades half the time. In other words, it is like Christ becoming mortal and dying to save humanity from Hell. Similarly, some must die during the Nile flood, that the nation may live. It is not murder, from this perspective, simply the death that accompanies regenerated life. (9)
References, Sun, Egyptian:
1. Dendera zodiac: http://www.mazzaroth.com/V3DemoIntroduction.htm.
2. Shu and Tefnet: Desroches-Noblecourt, Le Fabuleux Heritage de l'Egypte.
3. Same as 2.
4. Sun and Nile: Plutarch, Isis and Osiris XXXVIII. Oiris as Sun: Isis and Osiris LII. Ethiopia: Isis and Osiris XXXIX. At http://thriceholy.net/Texts/Isis.html.
5. Sekhmet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sekhmet.1. Dendera zodiac: http://www.mazzaroth.com/V3DemoIntroduction.htm.
2. Shu and Tefnet: Desroches-Noblecourt, Le Fabuleux Heritage de l'Egypte.
3. Same as 2.
4. Sun and Nile: Plutarch, Isis and Osiris XXXVIII. Oiris as Sun: Isis and Osiris LII. Ethiopia: Isis and Osiris XXXIX. At http://thriceholy.net/Texts/Isis.html.
6.
7. Serapis: Plutarch Isis and Osiris XXVIII, XXIX, LII, LXII.
8. Witt, Isis in the Ancient World. Chapter XII, "The Procession to the Ship."
9. 10th Nemean Ode: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0162&query=head%3D%2339. Christianity: click on link at end of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castor_and_Pollux.
The Dionysian Sun: In looking at the Fool card, I cast the animal jumping on him as a goat, an animal sacred to Dionysus, and foretold its sacrifice at the end of the ritual. I gave an illustration from Cartari's Latin edition. In the chariot scenes for card 7, we could see a boy leading a goat in the background. Now let me show you two goat-sacrifice scenes. On the right, the same scene as in the Latin edition, but reworked for the 1647 edition. And on the left, from a Roman-era sarcophagus, the goat being set onto the block for sacrifice. It would appear that Cartari used such a scene as the model for the illustration. (1)
On the Marseille card, our initiates look at each other. One is the goat to be sacrificed, by the other, or (in Cartari) Dionysus' son Priapus. It is the addicted side of the personality, or the material nature of the Titans for the Orphics. But it is a willing sacrifice. The one to be sacrificed reaches to the heart-center of the other, allowing the energy of immortality to pass into him. (2)
Now compare the gestures of the two figures on the card to those on a Dionysian sarcophagus, from the Museum of Roman Art at the Diocletian Baths in Rome. Look to the far left of the panel. As in the card, the one on the left puts his hand on the heart of the one on the right. (3)
Here is a closer look at the pair, along with the same scene on another sarcophagus, at the same museum (be sure to click on this image to make it larger):
The museum commentary on this scene calls it a drunk Dionysus being helped by a satyr. I don't think so. It is at the end of a procession that will end in a sacrifice. The one at the end is the sacrifice, replaced in the cult by a goat.Why a goat? Dionysus was dressed as a goat-kid to hide him from Hera. It is also the animal that Dionysus turned himself into when fleeing the monster Typhon. It is his cult-animal. (4)
This Dionysian perspective, I think, deepens the Christian meaning of the scene on the card. The Book of Acts (8:14-17) talks about the "laying on of hands," so that the spirit of God infused in the original disciples would pass to the new converts. Here the one to be sacrificed, touching the heart center, is the one activating the energy of immortality so that it may pass to him. The type of sacrifice is that of Abraham and Isaac: Abraham does not know how, but by sacrificing his only child, he will somehow ensure that his descendants, the people of the covenant, will be as numerous as the stars in the sky.
Jesus does Abraham one better. In him, Isaac, Abraham and the ram are one. As self-sacrifice, he is the one sacrificing as well as the one sacrificed, and there is no substitution at the last moment. The same is true of Dionysus, as both the goat and the slayer of the goat, the Aigobolos, Goat-slayer. (5)
It is this self-sacrificial aspect of Dionysus that the Christians found so diabolically like that of their own god, but which made it easier for an Orphic to accept the new state religion of Christianity. In fact there is an amulet, to which Joseph Campbell called attention in his book Creative Mythology. It shows a figure on a cross, with seven stars and a crescent moon above him. Beneath the figure are the words "Orpheo Bakko," Orpheus - Bacchus. It asserts an identity between the hero of both cults, Christian and Orphic. (6)
Contrary to one recent account, The Jesus Mysteries, I do not believe that this image is an Orphic amulet. There are no myths about a crucified Dionysus or Orpheus, just a dismembered one. Crosses do appear on Dionysian sarcophagi, but no one hangs from them. Crosses also appear on 4th dynasty reliefs in Egypt, c. 2500 b.c.e; it is an easy sign to make, attaching to numerous interpretations, such as the four directions, or the unity of the four quadrants of a country. The amulet, it seems to me, is that of a Christian, probably a former Orphic, who respectfully sees a similarity between the two cults. That is how Campbell takes the amulet, and before him the historian who first wrote about it, Robert Eisler in Orpheus the Fisher, 1921. (7)
The god is also the one being sacrificed, the sacrificial goat. On the card, Daimonax has rightly called attention to the little tail coming out from behind the twin to our right, the one to be sacrificed. He says that this tail would have been recognized from the costumes worn in pageants still performed in the rural areas around Marseille. In Chosson, it is even highlighted in white. Camoin and Jodorowsky have made the tail even more obvious than it is in the originals, where it could almost be a fold in the skin. It is of course also the tail on the ram that allegedly substituted for Isaac at the last moment, when Abraham was already bringing down his sickle; and it is the tail of the paschal lamb that was sacrificed at Passover. (8)
We may recall this tail from the Devil card, on both the lower figures. In the Sun card, both even have the collars that earlier chained them to the Devil. The chains are gone. Humanity formerly in thrall to the devil is now free, even though the price of his freedom is physical death. From death will come life. There are more transformations to come. Daimonax points to the lines on the card that indicate that the two boys are standing at the edge of a marsh or lake. From the Greek travel writer Pausanias, he cites several possible settings. One is of course the springs of forgetting and remembering, from the Star card. There was also a marsh near Athens where Dionysian rites took place. But the most interesting possibility is the Alkyonian Lake near Argos, where Dionysus entered Hades and returned. It was so deep even the Roman emperors, who personally made attempts, could not find the bottom. Pausanias said he could not reveal the details of the ritual. Plutarch said a little more, in a sentence comparing Dionysus with Osiris: "The Argives too have a Bacchus by title the 'Bull-born;' and they call him up out of water by the sound of trumpets, casting into the deep pool as offerings to the 'Pylaochus.' " On another account, they cast it into a pit. That would have been more hygenic. (9)
What were these offerings? Probably the rite of sacrificing a ram or a goat was conducted there.This lake is probably the one Perseus was said to have thrown Dionysus after killing or rendering him unconscious in battle, the one that led to the Underworld. For Dionysus to return, it was necessary to give the Underworld a life in exchange. So the people sacrificed a ram or a goat, and instead of eating it cast it into the pool or pit. Then Dionysus could be with the people once more.
On the card, there are pools of water all around. In Conver, to make it clearer, the one doing the sacrifice stands on high ground. In the sacrifice, one's throat, the center of words and ego, is slit, and the initiate is submerged in the mire.
There is a wall in back of the two figures on the tarot card. It perhaps originally provided an enclosure for the woman with the spindle. By Vieville in 1650 it had lost that function. Yet the cards with the male twins wanted to keep the wall. Why? In the context of sacrifice, there is another reference. In Rome, the Dioscuri, the Twins, were identified with Romulus and Remus, mythic founders of the city. Romulus built a wall around the highest hill, to protect its citadel, and ordered that anyone who passed over it should be killed. Remus objected that the wall was too trivial an obstacle, and demonstrated his point by jumping it. He was immediately killed, according to the official account, by a soldier who took his orders too literally. (10)
There is a wall in back of the two figures on the tarot card. It perhaps originally provided an enclosure for the woman with the spindle. By Vieville in 1650 it had lost that function. Yet the cards with the male twins wanted to keep the wall. Why? In the context of sacrifice, there is another reference. In Rome, the Dioscuri, the Twins, were identified with Romulus and Remus, mythic founders of the city. Romulus built a wall around the highest hill, to protect its citadel, and ordered that anyone who passed over it should be killed. Remus objected that the wall was too trivial an obstacle, and demonstrated his point by jumping it. He was immediately killed, according to the official account, by a soldier who took his orders too literally. (10)
That is the official version. Historians point out that in the archaic days before the Romans could read and write, when people built defensive walls, they also made human sacrifices to make sure the gods would be on the side of the builders. We don't know how long such practices continued, of course, once it was against the law. Skeletons have been found in the foundations of fortress walls and guardhouses. The ancient wall of Rome may also have been found, although as far as I know, no skeletons. So perhaps the legend is the modified memory of the sacrifice of one brother by another for the sake of the future city. (11)
But how could the card-makers have known such a thing in the 17th century? We have already seen what the image of the Gemini was in the 15th century, an image that continued in more ore less the same form. Here is the 1603 one again:
There is that same sickle in the hand of Castor as in the hand of Priapus in Cartari, about to slaughter the goat. The other has his harp and what looks like an arrow. Castor, the slayer, is the Mortal, Pollux, the slain, the immortal. This is an allusion to something, conspicuous by its lack of comment in the accompanying texts. If not Rome, if not one of the Biblical pairs, then something equally morbid--and sublime. The mortal is about to slaughter the immortal, as in the case of Jesus and the goat-slaughter, so that the immortal one may rise again. And by identifying with the immortal, mortals without number achieve the same.
In Plutarch, after a time on the dark side of the Moon the souls of the deceased either returned to earth for another incarnation or assembled on the sunny side of the moon, for their journey to the sun. Did their lunar bodies burn up and get replaced with solar bodies? In any case, they are being called to God. (12)
References, Dionysian, Sun.
1. goat: Daimonax at http://www.bacchos.org/tarothtm/0et9mathermite2.html. Cartari: p. 251.
2. Flornoy, Pelinerage des Bateleurs, p. 213.
3. 1st image, Daimonax, at http://www.bacchos.org/tarothtm/0et9mathermite2.html. 2nd and 3rd images by G. Dall'Orto, at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Dionysus.
4.Goat-kid and Hera: Pseudo-Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 3.29-30 at http://www.theoi.com/Olympios/Dionysos.html. Goat and Typhon: http://www.theoi.com/Gigante/Typhoeus.html.
5. Aigobolos: Pausanias, Description of Greece 9. 8. 2, at http://www.theoi.com/Cult/DionysosCult2.html.
6. Joseph Campbell, Creative Mythology: p. 24.
7. Jesus Mysteries: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jesus_Mysteries. Christian, Eisler: Campbell p. 24 and 681.
8. tail: Daimonax, at http://www.bacchos.org/tarothtm/15et16diablemaisondieu.html.
9. Daimonax: http://www.bacchos.org/tarothtm/15et16diablemaisondieu.html. Lake: Pausanias, Description of Greece 2.37.5, at http://www.theoi.com/Cult/DionysosCult.html. Plutarch: Isis and Osiris XXXV, at http://thriceholy.net/Texts/Isis.html. I cannot remember where I read the part about the ram and the pit.
10. Romulus and Remus: http://www.timelessmyths.com/classical/rome.html.
11. Wall: http://www.archaeology.org/0707/abstracts/rome.html. Also T.D. Wiseman, Remus, a Roman Myth.
12. Plutarch: On the Apparent Face in the Orb of the Moon XXX, at http://thriceholy.net/Texts/Moon.html.
The alchemical Sun. O"Neill says that the setting of the tarot Sun card is a walled garden, suggesting the Garden of Eden and a return to lost innocence. Gardens are indeed in alchemical sequences, but not usually either the beginning or the end. Nor is it clear that the setting in the early Sun cards is a garden. It is, at least on one side, an enclosed space, and there seem to be puddles of water. The alchemical vessel was also an enclosed space, probably with water or other liquid at the bottom.
Another theme that O'Neill finds is that of the child, apparently the rebirth of Sol as the Philosopher's Stone. That is indeed a theme near the end of some alchemical sequences. I am struck by the final two cards of the Philosophia Reformata, which have a child in 19 and a King or Emperor arising from a grave in the 20th. These are quite parallel to the 19th and 20th trump.The sun itself appears in the 18th emblem in the Reformata sequence, about to be eaten by the Green Lion (not shown).
The image of children playing in alchemy corresponds to the stage of multiplicatio in alchemy, when the Stone has the power to convert other things to more of itself, the Stone or elixir. Sometimes this stage is represented by a couple, and sometimes by playing children. The 20th (out of 22) image of the Splendor Solis has both (below left), while the sun appears in th 22nd.
Similarly, some Sun cards have children, some a male-female pair.
In the 1628 Anatomia Auri (below), a red rose takes the place of the sun. For the preceding stage, which I showed in relation to the Moon card, there is a white rose. The stage after the red rose has both the King and the Queen; above them are both a red and a white rose.
In general, it is striking that images of the Sun, children, or a male/female pair appear towards the end of both alchemical and tarot sequences.
In one version of the alchemical process, "Fermentatio in Elixir" was followed immediately by the "Multiplicatio"--in two types, virtue and quantity. At the top of the tree, where the ascended Jesus would typically be in medieval religious versions, was the finished elixir.
Continually in a state of union with itself, the androgynous substance can produce any number of children. And Christ's sacrifice on the Cross is the expiation for all, as indicated by the Rosarium's pelican, opening its heart to feed its children.
The Pythagorean and Kabbalist Sun. For the Pythagoreans, 19 = 9. We are in the region above the fixed stars, where the choirs of angels sing. It is the region of the triumph over fate, just below the highest level of all, that of the Decad.
In Kabbalah, we are at the 2nd sefira. It, too, is just below the highest level on the Tree of Life. It is the number of Chochmah and Sophia, but the Christian Kabbalists identified it with Christ. Pico says,knowing that the 2nd sefira is Wisdom:
But how could the card-makers have known such a thing in the 17th century? We have already seen what the image of the Gemini was in the 15th century, an image that continued in more ore less the same form. Here is the 1603 one again:
There is that same sickle in the hand of Castor as in the hand of Priapus in Cartari, about to slaughter the goat. The other has his harp and what looks like an arrow. Castor, the slayer, is the Mortal, Pollux, the slain, the immortal. This is an allusion to something, conspicuous by its lack of comment in the accompanying texts. If not Rome, if not one of the Biblical pairs, then something equally morbid--and sublime. The mortal is about to slaughter the immortal, as in the case of Jesus and the goat-slaughter, so that the immortal one may rise again. And by identifying with the immortal, mortals without number achieve the same.
In Plutarch, after a time on the dark side of the Moon the souls of the deceased either returned to earth for another incarnation or assembled on the sunny side of the moon, for their journey to the sun. Did their lunar bodies burn up and get replaced with solar bodies? In any case, they are being called to God. (12)
References, Dionysian, Sun.
1. goat: Daimonax at http://www.bacchos.org/tarothtm/0et9mathermite2.html. Cartari: p. 251.
2. Flornoy, Pelinerage des Bateleurs, p. 213.
3. 1st image, Daimonax, at http://www.bacchos.org/tarothtm/0et9mathermite2.html. 2nd and 3rd images by G. Dall'Orto, at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Dionysus.
4.Goat-kid and Hera: Pseudo-Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 3.29-30 at http://www.theoi.com/Olympios/Dionysos.html. Goat and Typhon: http://www.theoi.com/Gigante/Typhoeus.html.
5. Aigobolos: Pausanias, Description of Greece 9. 8. 2, at http://www.theoi.com/Cult/DionysosCult2.html.
6. Joseph Campbell, Creative Mythology: p. 24.
7. Jesus Mysteries: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jesus_Mysteries. Christian, Eisler: Campbell p. 24 and 681.
8. tail: Daimonax, at http://www.bacchos.org/tarothtm/15et16diablemaisondieu.html.
9. Daimonax: http://www.bacchos.org/tarothtm/15et16diablemaisondieu.html. Lake: Pausanias, Description of Greece 2.37.5, at http://www.theoi.com/Cult/DionysosCult.html. Plutarch: Isis and Osiris XXXV, at http://thriceholy.net/Texts/Isis.html. I cannot remember where I read the part about the ram and the pit.
10. Romulus and Remus: http://www.timelessmyths.com/classical/rome.html.
11. Wall: http://www.archaeology.org/0707/abstracts/rome.html. Also T.D. Wiseman, Remus, a Roman Myth.
12. Plutarch: On the Apparent Face in the Orb of the Moon XXX, at http://thriceholy.net/Texts/Moon.html.
The alchemical Sun. O"Neill says that the setting of the tarot Sun card is a walled garden, suggesting the Garden of Eden and a return to lost innocence. Gardens are indeed in alchemical sequences, but not usually either the beginning or the end. Nor is it clear that the setting in the early Sun cards is a garden. It is, at least on one side, an enclosed space, and there seem to be puddles of water. The alchemical vessel was also an enclosed space, probably with water or other liquid at the bottom.
Another theme that O'Neill finds is that of the child, apparently the rebirth of Sol as the Philosopher's Stone. That is indeed a theme near the end of some alchemical sequences. I am struck by the final two cards of the Philosophia Reformata, which have a child in 19 and a King or Emperor arising from a grave in the 20th. These are quite parallel to the 19th and 20th trump.The sun itself appears in the 18th emblem in the Reformata sequence, about to be eaten by the Green Lion (not shown).
The image of children playing in alchemy corresponds to the stage of multiplicatio in alchemy, when the Stone has the power to convert other things to more of itself, the Stone or elixir. Sometimes this stage is represented by a couple, and sometimes by playing children. The 20th (out of 22) image of the Splendor Solis has both (below left), while the sun appears in th 22nd.
Similarly, some Sun cards have children, some a male-female pair.
In the 1628 Anatomia Auri (below), a red rose takes the place of the sun. For the preceding stage, which I showed in relation to the Moon card, there is a white rose. The stage after the red rose has both the King and the Queen; above them are both a red and a white rose.
In general, it is striking that images of the Sun, children, or a male/female pair appear towards the end of both alchemical and tarot sequences.
In one version of the alchemical process, "Fermentatio in Elixir" was followed immediately by the "Multiplicatio"--in two types, virtue and quantity. At the top of the tree, where the ascended Jesus would typically be in medieval religious versions, was the finished elixir.
Continually in a state of union with itself, the androgynous substance can produce any number of children. And Christ's sacrifice on the Cross is the expiation for all, as indicated by the Rosarium's pelican, opening its heart to feed its children.
The Pythagorean and Kabbalist Sun. For the Pythagoreans, 19 = 9. We are in the region above the fixed stars, where the choirs of angels sing. It is the region of the triumph over fate, just below the highest level of all, that of the Decad.
In Kabbalah, we are at the 2nd sefira. It, too, is just below the highest level on the Tree of Life. It is the number of Chochmah and Sophia, but the Christian Kabbalists identified it with Christ. Pico says,knowing that the 2nd sefira is Wisdom:
Jesus...is...God the Son of God and the Wisdom (sapientiam) of the father (11>7).And Reuchlin:
It is written: "You have made all things in wisdom" (Oia in sapientia fecisti). In this way the first influx becomes the second Sephira, because the end of generation is the Son (qu terminus gnationis est filus). (Art of the Kabbalah p. 288)A man and a woman on the card, would then signify the union of Christ with Malkuth/Binah, symbolized by the Sun and the Moon. It is the union of sponsus and sponsa, God and Israel or Christ and his Church.
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