This led me to the question of whether any actual star in the heavens could be considered the Star of Chaos. Since chaos is a negative thing, I at first thought this should be a star of ill omen, perhaps Saturn, the Greater Malefic, which was previously associated with the Black Hole Sun. No sooner had I thought it than I knew it was impossible. Saturn represents constraints, limits, structure, solidity, stasis -- the polar opposite of chaos. This then led me to consider the polar opposite of Saturn: Jupiter.
Jupiter, as everyone knows, is Zeus.
The most fundamental character of Jupiter and Saturn in astrology is that they are centripetal and centrifugal, respectively. Jupiter is expansion and outward motion, while Saturn is contraction and inward motion (hence its association with the black hole). What better representation of outward, centrifugal motion than the Star of Chaos itself?
In the Tarot, the Jovian, centrifugal suit is that of Swords -- the principle of cutting, division, separation, and thus outward motion.
The Star of Chaos is a visually striking symbol, and I vividly remember the first time I saw it: in the 1980 D&D manual Deities & Demigods, where it is the backdrop for a portrait of a character whose title references one of the cards in the Tarot suit of Swords.
Swords is an entire suit, though, and Zeus would naturally be the King rather than the Knight. Which single Tarot card stands for chaos? The answer is uncontroversial. If you ask Google which tarot card represents chaos, the first 17 results all single out the same card: the Tower.
Arrowsmith's post "Syn-crow-nicity: Order out of Chaos," which begins by discussing Goldblum's starring role in Kaos, repeatedly references the Tower card and finds many allusions to it in the various movies in which Goldblum has appeared.
Tower is a modern name for that card. The Tarot de Marseille calls it the House of God, but the very oldest (Italian) documents to give names to the cards call it La Sagitta "the Arrow" (cf. again the Star of Chaos) or Il Fuoco, "Fire" -- indicating that the main subject of the card was not originally the tower itself but rather the lightning bolt that destroys it. Sagittarius, a Fire sign, is ruled by Jupiter and shares that planet's centrifugal nature. Central to the Sagittarian personality is supposed to be "a relentless drive for freedom," and one of Zeus's most important epithets in Athens was Eleutherios "giver of freedom." One positive interpretation of the usually negative Tower card is that the tower is a prison, and the lightning bolt is liberating its inmates. It is for this reason that the card is associated with the Mystery of the Resurrection.
The thunderbolt is of course the most important and iconic attribute of Zeus. Although Goldblum's character is very much a modern, "reimagined" Olympian, who dresses like a Russian gangster and expresses his godly wrath by saying things like, "I'm gonna wipe these fuckers off the face of the fucking earth," his image remains traditional in this one respect.
One nagging doubt I had regarding the Jupiter-chaos equation was that it seemed that Zeus in his role as kosmokrator ought to embody law rather than chaos. I went to the Wikipedia article on Zeus, did a word search for law, and unexpectedly found this:
The picture shows an Indo-Greek coin depicting Zeus with "the Wheel of Law, symbol of Buddhism." In Hindu usage (for example on the modern flag of India), the dharmachakra can have as many as 24 spokes. Within Buddhism, though, it is much more typical to show it with eight spokes, representing the Eightfold Noble Path. The post that introduced the Star of Chaos into the sync stream was "Ambrose and the eight-spoked wheel" -- so even deliberately searching for associations of Zeus with law led me directly back to the Symbol of Chaos.
The Ambrose featured in that post entered the sync stream by way of "Ambrosia." Nectar and ambrosia are the food and drink of the Olympian gods, chief among whom is Zeus.
My original post about the eight-spoked wheel of Ambrose was "The staurogram, the eight-spoked wheel, and the Wheel of Fortune," part of a series on the history behind the symbolism of the Wheel of Fortune card. In the hugely influential Golden Dawn system of astrological correspondences for the Tarot (followed by both Waite and Crowley, whose two systems dominate modern Tarot), the Wheel of Fortune is mapped to, you guessed it, Jupiter.
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