Life and Vita, Square and Compass, ROTA

Trigger warning: Mormon temple symbolism discussed (but no covenants of secrecy violated). Also, I use the word Mormon. Mormon, Mormon, Mormon!

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Some years ago I wrote a post (qv) about the marks on the breasts of the Garment of the Holy Priesthood, which officially represent the Masonic square and compass but in fact look like the letters L and V. I proposed the hypothesis (which I still stand by) that the resemblance was deliberate and that, in addition to the Masonic meaning, the breast marks stood for Lux and Veritas -- a Latin translation, current in Joseph Smith's New England, of the biblical Hebrew terms Urim and Thummim. (The Urim and Thummim were worn in the breastplate of the high priest, just as the breasts are pricked with the square and compass in a Masonic initiation.) In that post I mentioned in passing one of my earlier fancies about the meaning of the L and the V.

The fact is, the Garment marks don’t look like a square and a compass (though one can see the resemblance once it has been explained). They look like the letters L and V. As an uninitiated teenager, I always thought of them as standing for the words life and vita. (The words came from Vita Adae et Evae, a pseudepigraphical work I had read in translation as Life of Adam and Eve. I knew that the Mormon temple ritual dealt with the life of Adam and Eve, so I suppose that’s why I made the connection.)

I should emphasize that I "thought of them as" standing for life and vita -- not that I ever believed that they might in fact stand for those words. When I was a toddler and still somewhat uncertain as to which shoe went on which foot, my parents resorted to writing a big R in sharpie on the sole of one sneaker and an L on the other -- and so every time I put on my shoes I thought to myself "Roar, lions!" (or, if I happened to pick up the left shoe first, "Lions, roar!"). Of course I knew that the letters in fact stood for right and left, but that knowledge did nothing to break the fanciful association with lions roaring. In much the same way, every time I was on laundry duty and had to fold my parents' temple Garments, I always thought to myself "Life, vita" even though the letters obviously couldn't actually mean that. I mean, what would be the point of representing the same word twice, in two different languages?

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The other day I happened to be searching archive.org for a particular, somewhat obscure Tarot-related text from the last century and eventually, way leading on to way as it does, found myself looking at the frontispiece of a certain Liber Θ, which appears to be some sort of Crowley-inspired revision of Golden Dawn material (it claims to be "a traditional instruction of the R.R. et A.C., revised and expanded"). This is the diagram I saw.

Life in the upper left, Vita in the upper right (okay, L·I·F·E· and V·I·T·A·; these Crowleyans and their magickal puncktuation!) -- corresponding precisely to the L and V on the Garment, which I had fancifully so interpreted in my teens. (The L is over the wearer's right breast, but is on the left to someone looking at the garment from the outside.)

Notice also that the word life is accompanied by the letter T, with right angles suggesting a square; and vita by a letter A so stylized as to suggest the Masonic compass, which is always open at an angle of 60 degrees. (Though this sort of thing of course varies from font to font, the letter A more usually has an angle of approximately 36 degrees, forming a golden rather than an equilateral triangle, as can be seen in the word VITA itself.)

This T and A are part of the word TARO/ROTA, to be read clockwise -- a motif, originating in Éliphas Lévi's interpretation of Guillaume Postel, on which I have posted quite a bit. This diagram offers yet another possible orientation of those four letters.

The choice to write it as TAPO -- with a Greek P rather than a Latin R -- is a strange one, since the Greek version of TARO/ROTA properly uses Ω rather than O. We thus have the reverse of the version used in the Basilique Saint-Sernin de Toulouse, which has a Latin R with a Greek Ω. (Even the Greek word βίος is written in Latin characters here -- inadvertently calling to mind a Basic Input/Output System! -- making the use of the Greek P even stranger.) At any rate, this anomalous spelling is fortuitous in the present context, since the two remaining marks on the Garment are the "navel mark" and the "knee mark" (the latter being esoterically located at the mouth). The letter O suggests the navel, both visually and by way of the Greek ὀμφαλός. P is ambiguous; as a Greek letter, it derives from the Semitic ר, meaning "head"; as a Latin letter, it comes from פ, "mouth."