The Ace of Cups: A brief overview of its development

Pierpont Morgan-Bergamo, Cary-Yale, Marseille, Rider-Waite

The cards pictured above are representative of the different forms the Ace of Cups has taken over the years in Italy, France, and England. None is a straightforward representation of a cup.

⁂

The Pierpont Morgan-Bergamo card depicts a fountain. The main body of it resembles a goblet, but there is a column rising up from the center of this cup, supporting a head with two or more spouts from which water flows down into the cup, and this head is topped with a sculpture of a bird of some kind. This is certainly not the sort of thing that anyone could lift to his lips and drink from. If the lower basin were a bit wider, it would look like the sort of bronze fountain that might serve as a garden ornament; but perhaps the narrowness of the basin is simply an artifact of the shape of the card. The whole thing almost makes me think of a samovar, though of course no real samovar is designed like that.

⁂

The Cary-Yale and Marseille cards share the same basic design: a large goblet covered with a complicated structure resembling a castle or cathedral. I have not been able to find pictures of any real objects quite like the one depicted on these cards, but the Spanish chalice and monstrance shown below, both in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, come close.

Spanish chalice and monstrance (late 15th century)

The chalice, on the left, is apparently almost unique; at any rate, I have not been able to find any other example of a chalice with a cover at all similar to that seen on the Marseille Ace of Cups. (Chalices don't normally have covers at all; any object that looks like a covered chalice is likely a ciborium, for holding hosts.) The monstrance, on the right, is one of a large number of similar objects, and its resemblance to the object on the Ace of Cups is obvious. The rub, of course, is that it's not a cup and lacks any cup-like component. (The purpose of a monstrance is to display some holy item, in this case the Eucharistic host.) If we took the top part of the monstrance and used it as a cover for the chalice, then we'd have something almost exactly like the Marseille Ace of Cups. I have not been able to find any examples of such an object, but apparently there is such a thing as a combined chalice-monstrance, with the monstrance doing double duty as the cover for the chalice. The photo below shows such an object, though the style of the monstrance is quite different from that seen on the card.

I think we must conclude, then, that the version of the Ace of Cups seen in the Cary-Yale and Marseille decks is a chalice with a cover serving as a monstrance. Both cards clearly show windows in the sides of the object, allowing for the display of the host, and the yellow circles in some of the windows on the Marseille card were perhaps originally Communion wafers.

Despite the fact that the Cary-Yale and Marseille cards show what seems clearly to be a Eucharistic chalice, which should contain wine, both appear to contain water instead. A blue squiggle is visible in the window in the Cary-Yale card, and the Marseille card features what I take to be three gouts of blue water spurting out of the chalice portion of the object. As far as I know, while it is customary to add some water to the sacramental wine, a chalice would never normally be filled with water alone.

⁂

Waite, ever the eclectic, alludes to both the Pierpont Morgan-Bergamo and the Marseille cards. The basic Pierpont Morgan-Bergamo layout -- a cup-shaped fountain with a bird at the top -- is reinterpreted in light of the Eucharistic imagery of the Tarot de Marseille. What was a mere birdbath ornament on the Italian card is transformed by Waite into the dove of the Holy Ghost, descending toward the chalice with a consecrated host in its bill. This is fairly common iconography -- see the First Communion clipart below -- but it was a stroke of inspired genius on Waite's part to hit on it as a way of uniting the Italian fountain and the French monstrance in a single image.

Despite this very explicit Eucharistic imagery, though, it is still water, rather than wine or blood, that pours from the chalice. The water issues in four or five streams (five on the card, four in Waite's description in the Pictorial Key; it is unclear which is the error), the shape of which makes it clear that they come from a fountain and not simply from an overflowing cup.

A dove hovering over water calls to mind the baptism of Jesus, and it is perhaps not a coincidence that Jesus connected his baptism with drinking from a cup: "Can ye drink of the cup that I drink of, and be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?" (Mark 10:38). Another scriptural allusion would be to the "living water" of the Fourth Gospel: "But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life" (John 4:14).