Tuesday, May 28, 2019

The orientation of ROTA

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


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

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


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


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


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


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

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

No comments:

Annunciation rescheduled to coincide with eclipse

I just saw this on Ann Barnhardt's blog : March 25th is the fixed date of the great Feast of the Annunciation… BUT since March 25th fall...