More on Joan and Claire

As discussed in my June 6 post "What's the connection between Joan and Claire?" William Wright now believes that the beings I have interacted with under the names of Joan and Claire are in fact one and the same, an identification I have been somewhat hesitant to accept.

Well, why not ask Claire herself to mettre les choses au clair, so to speak? Yesterday, June 7, I had some free time, so I prepared for a read and said, "Okay, Claire, you've got one shot to convince me. One card. Make it count." I shuffled and cut the deck while repeating in my mind, "Joan and Claire: Are they the same or different? The same or different?" I put a single card face down in front of me and returned the rest of the deck to its ark.

When I read, it's my habit to try to engage whatever psychic faculties I may possess by trying to visualize the face of each card before I turn it over. Fairly often I am able to do this successfully: A mental image of a particular card comes to mind, and when I turn over the card in front of me, that's what it is. Sometimes a different image comes to mind, which doesn't match what's on the card but sheds light on how to interpret it. Or sometimes, of course, I just get random noise, or nothing.

When I tried to visualize this card, I got a fairly hazy image of a large metal chalice. The image was not at all detailed, and I couldn't even be sure what metal it was, but my impression was that it was supposed to be the Holy Grail. Unsurprisingly, my guess was that the card was going to be the Ace of Cups. Though this visual impression was fairly weak, it was accompanied by a much stronger and clearer aural impression: a piano playing the first three notes of a C major scale: do re mi. This seemed potentially relevant to my question, since some years ago an online friend had pointed out that Domrémy, the birthplace of Joan of Arc (now called Domrémy-la-Pucelle in her honor), is pronounced almost exactly as do re mi, the only difference being the nasalization of the first vowel.

I turned the card over. It was the Knight of Wands:

The first thing I noticed was that this was not a "new" card but one I had drawn before. This was only my fifth reading with this deck, and I rarely use more than three cards per reading, so this was the first time the same card had come up a second time. That in itself suggests an answer of "same" rather than "different" to the question I had posed. What's more, the first time I had drawn this card -- which was on June 2, in my very first reading with the deck -- it had been about Claire. My brief notes for that first reading are as follows:

2024 June 2 Sunday

First read with consecrated RWS, acquired on Joan's Day.

1. Who is CdL? 2. What is her role in my life? 3. Who am I to her?

1. Nine of Cups - very pleased, granter of wishes, full of joy

2. Knight of Wands - call to adventure, risk, Ahuric action, and yes fun

3. Four of Swords - sleeper, calm knight, deep and slow

CdL is of course Claire de Lune. I've usually written her surname as Delune -- one word, capital D -- but for whatever reason I'd abbreviated it as CdL in my notes that day.

So the Knight of Swords has already been associated with Claire. If I can see anything in it that unambiguously indicates Joan, then I'll have my answer.

Because of the do re mi impression I'd had before turning over the card, I tried to see if there was any possible way do re mi was encoded in the image. I couldn't find anything. I thought of different ways do re mi might be expressed -- C D E, for example. (Even though I don't have anything like perfect pitch, my impression had been clear that it was the beginning of a C major scale I had heard.) I noticed that the abbreviation I had used in my notes, CdL, was frustratingly close to this, but of course there is no such musical note as L.

But wait. If there were a musical note called L, which note would it be? Well, imagine if after G you just kept going instead of starting over at A. L would then be an octave above E, and would thus also be mi:

So, in a fairly straightforward way, CdL = do re mi.

Coming back to the image on the card itself, its an armored person on horseback, and in my opinion the face is even sexually ambiguous and could be seen as that of a woman. So that matches Joan in a general way. And the yellow leaves on the horse's bridle bear a certain resemblance to fleurs-de-lis. The suit of Wands has been seen as symbolizing the peasant class, so the Knight of Wands is someone from a peasant background raised to knightly status, like Joan.

Then I realized that the wooden staff resembles a stake, and that the Knight looks as if he is on fire.Those aren't actually flames on his helmet, though, but feathers -- just as a bird reportedly rose from the flames when Joan was burned. Then I noticed the black lizards printed on the Knight's outer garment -- which, I know from reading Waite, are not actually lizards but salamanders, representing the element of Fire. Wait, didn't I post something about salamanders recently, and wasn't it about Joan?

I put salamanders in the search box on this blog, and a single post came up: "The arrow through the window," dated June 2, 2024. It was an unfinished draft, last edited in 2021, but I'd decided to publish it on that day -- the same day I did that first reading and drew the Knight of Wands. The post does indeed deal with Joan, and it also mentions that story about a bird flying up out of the flames. Keep in mind the title of the post, with its reference to a window.

My attention next turned to the horse on the card. Did Joan ride a brown horse? She's often shown on a white horse in art.I ran a search for joan of arc's horse, and the very first result was "Stories of Joan of Arc at Orléans," from a site called Sacred Windows. It says her horse was "dark-coated," but I was more interested in what it had to say about her banner:

It was twelve feet long, silky white, and emblazoned with the names of Jesus and Mary – a warrior’s banner. It was mounted on a tall pole for all to see, the resolute declaration of a conquering hero, like David against Goliath: "You come against me with sword and spear and scimitar, but I come against you in the name of the Lord of hosts" (1 Samuel 17:45).

Thus did Joan of Arc ride into battle – holding high the banner, declaring her identity as a Christian soldier. Joan knew who she was, and announced it to her friends and enemies alike. Such a bold, bright, obstinate declaration of a warrior’s character must have struck mortal fear into the hearts of every foe, as the maiden, clad in armor and fire, rode onto the battlefield bringing war to their strongholds.

It specifically mentions the "tall pole" from which the banner flew, and that Joan held it high as she rode into battle. The card doesn't show a banner, but the Knight is holding up a pole. "Clad in armor and fire" also matches our Knight pretty exactly. 

After the reading, since piano music had come up in connection with Claire, I thought I'd listen to Clair de Lune, the piano piece by Debussy. I found it on the YouTube Music app on my phone, but it had to play an ad first. The ad began with footage of people fighting with lightsabers, and a voice said in English something like "You have the weapon of a Jedi, but you are not a Jedi yet," after which it switched to Chinese. I didn't quite catch the exact quote, nor had I processed what exactly was being advertised when, a few seconds later, the ad ended and Clair de Lune began playing.

It took me a second to remember why I associated lightsabers with Joan of Arc. Then I remembered: In my January 2021 post "Darkest hour," I relate dreaming the phrase épée d'Arc ("sword of Arc") and relating it to a Babylon Bee article about Trump having "the Darksaber," which I guess must be from one of those Star Wars sequels I've never watched. Dark and d'Arc are homophones, and épée and sabre are two different (but not very different) fencing weapons.  As it turns out, it's also this post that brings up how Domrémy sounds like do re mi.

It's been decades since I fenced, and I only ever did foil. and just after typing the above, I wanted to check whether I had remembered correctly how the three weapons differ. The first search result, "Foil, Epee or Sabre? Choose Your Weapon," had mugs for sale comparing the weapons to wands.

Besides the link to the Knight of Wands, "My wand chose me" is also a link back to my post about my first two encounters with Joan, called "Can you just choose a patron saint?" The first two comments there took issue with my title, saying, "It sounds like your Saint chose you."

I really wanted to see that lightsaber ad again and get the exact quote and the context, but no amount of Googling turned up anything, so I figured all I could do was keep playing songs on YouTube Music and hope it would come up again. It never did, but the music (which I let the algorithm choose) was remarkably synchy. The second song it played was "The Sound of Silence" by Simon and Garfunkel, which begins with these lines:

Hello, darkness, my old friend

I've come to talk with you again

Since I had just been thinking about the dark/d'Arc connection, this obviously caught my attention. Then the very next song was Emily Linge singing "Stand by Me," which begins thus:

When the night has come

And the land is dark

And the moon is the only light we'll see

Another dark reference, immediately followed by a reference to moonlight -- or, in French, clair de lune.

What's the connection between Joan and Claire?

In his May 30 post "'Naming' Joan (and 'Beware this one!')," William Wright proposes that the beings I know as Joan of Arc and Claire Delune are actually one and the same, and also the same as one of the beings he has been in contact with, one of "a group of laughing women" whom he thinks of as the Daughters of Asenath. It is strongly implied that this being may not actually have anything to do with the historical Joan of Arc even though "that is how she has allowed herself to be thought of for a few reasons." In his June 4 post "The French Connection" he refers to "Joan-Claire" as if the identity has been established.

As the person who has actually interacted with these two women, I'm still not quite sold on the idea, though I haven't ruled it out.

Basically, Joan and Claire just feel like very different presences. My first two encounters with Joan, on January 1, 2021 (see "Can you just choose a patron saint?") were absolutely overwhelming. The sense of goodness and purity was so intense that it left me trembling and in tears. I felt very much as if I'd literally been in the presence of a goddess. A year later ("Softly now"), she manifested again in a way that I wrote was "a good deal subtler" but "still unmistakably her." If William's theory is right, then I suppose that 2022 manifestation is the missing link between Joan in her glory and the much more approachable Claire.

Unlike Joan, Claire first appeared in a dream and only later in waking life. In her first appearance, on January 5, 2024 ("Rapunzel and the True Song of Wandering Aengus"), she didn't actually appear in visual form, but my impression was "of a blonde woman who looked as if she might burst into laughter at any moment." In that dream, although I understood that she wanted to be called Claire Delune, I knew that was not her real name, and she spoke English. Then on January 21 ("The Green Door finally closes"), I "heard" a mental voice that sounded like Claire's saying in French that the Rosary was "one of the keys." I guess this is a potential link to Joan, as she was speaking French and delivering a "Catholic" message. (I'm not sure whether the historical Joan would have known a form of the Rosary or not; the history there is a bit murky.) I didn't assume the voice was Joan, though; I assumed it was Claire. If the 2022 manifestation was "unmistakably her," the 2024 one was not. Of course, the 2022 manifestation came on the anniversary of the original two, and I was actively anticipating a repeat visit; the lack of that context in 2024 may have led to my misidentifying the voice. I don't think so, though. They're just different. With Claire, the dominant impression is exuberant playfulness, which is quite distinct from Joan's affect, and they're also just different in a directly experienced way, the way two different people have different faces and voices.

After I read William Wright's May 30 post, Claire reappeared (for the first time since January) and has done so almost every day since then. Usually this is just an intense feeling of presence with her particular "flavor" to it, but there have been a couple of verbal messages. As soon as I had read the sentence proposing that Claire was Joan, she chimed in with a French pun: "C'est clair : c'est Claire!" -- "This much is clear: It's Claire!" Then, on June 2, she said in English, "Consider the lilies." That's a line from the Sermon on the Mount, of course, but also a link to Joan, who bore a banner "whose field was sown with lilies" -- and also, more surprisingly, to Tim. Tim didn't appear under that name until November 2023 ("Well, that didn't take long"), but I quickly reached the conclusion that the anonymous man who visited Whitley Strieber in Toronto on June 6, 1998, was this same Tim ("'Tim' and The Key"). And what do you know, here I am posting this on June 6! In my 2022 post about Joan, I actually quoted this person I would later identify as Tim: "The most important thing that Christ said was 'be as the lilies of the field.' It is a message for the next millennium."

This, together with the recent sync in which Claire is Tim's assistant ("Tim, Claire, Diego"), makes me wonder if we need to reconsider William Wright's conclusion that Tim is basically the devil.

On May 30, as recounted in "Yeats, Joan, and Claire," I ended up, through a combination of hunch and serendipity, buying a secondhand Rider-Waite Tarot deck, something I would ordinarily never dream of doing. (I spent a couple of hours reconsecrating the whole deck, one card at a time, which seems to have worked. So far, no discernible influence from whoever the previous owner may have been.) In that post, the question of Yeats's possible influence on that deck came up, and I said he may have had a hand in the inclusion of roses and lilies on two of the cards: the Magician and the Ace of Pentacles. I posted a photo showing those two cards, plus the Ace of Swords, which resembles Joan's coat of arms:

As should be clear in that post, I was under the impression that those were the only two Rider-Waite cards to feature roses and lilies. That turns out to be incorrect.

This morning, since Claire seems to have had a hand in my acquiring this deck of cards, I decided to see what it had to say about her. Asking "What is Claire's role?" I drew the Hierophant. This is Waite's version of the Pope card, which he for some reason renamed while keeping the image essentially unchanged and even adding more papal symbolism!

At first this threw me for a loop. The Hierophant typically represents established authorities, formal education, codified religious doctrine, and so on -- quite out of keeping with the spirit of Claire. Then I noticed the crossed keys. This is a papal symbol, obviously, but one that does not appear on traditional Pope cards; Waite added it. It has also come up repeatedly here and on William's blog in various contexts. It definitely relates to Claire: In my first waking encounter with her, she said of the Rosary, "Yes, this is one of the keys" -- implying that there is a second key. In my May 30 post, I tentatively concluded that this very deck of cards was the second key.

Then I noticed the roses and lilies, on the vestments of the two monks in the foreground. Somehow I had never noticed that detail before. This, then, would be another card that potentially has Yeats's fingerprints on it.

Remarkably, in my February 7 post "What's the second key?" my thoughts on the two keys led me to the symbolism of roses and lilies:

I tried to think what attributes the other cross-key might have. One should be gold and the other silver, I guess, but that's not very helpful. Which is the Rosary, anyway, gold or silver? Maybe try a different tack. A rosary is literally a garland of roses, and lilies complement roses as silver complements gold. 

So I first thought the two keys might have something to do with roses and lilies, and then that one of the keys might be the Rider-Waite deck. Not until today did I discover that the Rider-Waite deck actually shows crossed keys juxtaposed with roses and lilies!

I still haven't worked all this out to my satisfaction, but for now my tentative conclusions are that Joan is literally Joan of Arc, that Claire is a different but allied being, and that Tim may end up being one of the good guys after all.

The seal of Melchizedek and lots of other things (syncfest)

Recent sync motifs have included the lemniscate (lazy-eight), two Ds, two doors, and doves. This reminded me that A. E. Waite, in his book The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, called the lemniscate floating above the head of his Magician

the mysterious sign of the Holy Spirit, the sign of life, like an endless cord, forming the figure 8 in a horizontal position. . . . With further reference to what I have called the sign of life and its connexion with the number 8, it may be remembered that Christian Gnosticism speaks of rebirth in Christ as a change "unto the Ogdoad." The mystic number is termed Jerusalem above, the Land flowing with Milk and Honey, the Holy Spirit and the Land of the Lord. According to Martinism, 8 is the number of Christ.

Waite's concept of the lemniscate as the "sign of the Holy Spirit" is adapted from Éliphas Lévi, who called it "the emblem of life and the universal spirit." In my 2018 post "The Rider-Waite Magician," I was unable to come up with any very straightforward connection between the lemniscate or number eight and the Holy Spirit. I cited Irenaeus saying that the Gnostics called Sophia both "Ogdoad" and "Holy Spirit," and I noted that Noah (one of the "eight souls saved by water") releases the dove in Genesis 8:8, but these are rather tenuous links. All in all, I was confused by Waite's choice of symbols and wrote "the universal sign of the Holy Spirit is the dove, and the question arises as to why Waite did not use it, preferring instead the serpent-like lemniscate."

Yesterday I found a much more direct link. In my December 2022 post "More weird student telepathy/coincidences," I mention discovering the symbol some Mormons call the "seal of Melchizedek," an eight-pointed star consisting of two interlocking squares. Such research as I did on it at that time led me to conclude that prior to Hugh Nibley's 1992 book Temple and Cosmos, "there's no tradition of associating the eight-pointed star with Melchizedek."

In the comments on my February 9 post "Hourglass and hexagram," I noticed this "seal of Melchizedek" figure in the background of Lorenzetti's allegory of Temperance with an hourglass. This led me to do a bit more searching on the symbol, which led me to Tim Barker's 2010 post "The Seal of Melchizedek." He found this in Henry Pelham Holmes Bromwell's Restorations of Masonic Geometry and Symbolry (1905), identifying a somewhat different eight-pointed star as the "signet of Melchizedek."

This is a unicursal octagram, standing in the same relation to the Mormon seal of Melchizedek as Aleister Crowley's unicursal hexagram to the Star of David. The accompanying text says it is "composed of lines continually reproduced to infinity" and is a symbol of God as "universal, infinite, and eternal." The symbol also incorporates eight hourglass-shapes, and we have already accepted the hourglass -- particularly when its two chambers take the form of Ds or deltas -- as a variant on the lemniscate and the double-D.

Then, with just a bit more poking around, I discovered that it has apparently always been extremely common for Orthodox icons of the Holy Ghost to take the form of a dove inside a figure almost identical to the Melchizedek star. Many, many such icons can easily be found online. Here, as one example, is the Holy Ghost as portrayed in a 15th-century Byzantine icon of the Holy Trinity.

There's no Melchizedek connection here, of course, but it does shed some light on Waite's use of the figure-eight as a stand-in for the dove, and on the current synchronistic link between the dove and the lemniscate. We've already linked the lemniscate with the hourglass, the hexagram, and the two squares of a digital-clock eight. The seal of Melchizedek, like the Star of David, includes eight triangles, and it is made up of two squares and thus encodes "4 + 4 = 8."

I discovered all this last night (February 17, in case it takes me more than a day to finish this post). Today (February 18), I went out to do some randonauting. I wanted to walk to my destination, and I wanted my starting point to be somewhere other than my home, so I decided to get some coffee, leave my motorcycle parked at the coffee shop, and walk from there. On my way to the coffee shop, I passed this -- a dove on a green door -- and stopped to take a photo:

Just to the right of the dove, it reads "white dove" in Chinese. The character for "white" is very similar to a digital-clock eight.

When I parked at the coffee shop, I noticed this on the scooter parked right next to me:

Notice the flourish on the M, which looks a lot like Euler's version of the infinity symbol -- a mirror-image lazy-S.

Later, Randonautica took me out in the sticks, where I found this:

Okay, seal of Melchizedek, you have my attention! Note that here they appear on a ladder-shaped structure. "More weird student telepathy/coincidences" began with the idea of the solfeggio scale as a ladder or staircase and ended with the seal of Melchizedek. Jacob's ladder ties in with Israel (Jacob's new name) and the Star of David (comprised of triangles pointing up and down); also with Beth-el, baetyls, and the namarudu. In the Fourth Gospel, Jesus (whose name is 888 in Greek numerals) identifies himself with Jacob's ladder: "angels ascending and descending upon the Son of Man."

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Going back to the coffee shop where I parked, it was the same one I visited in June of last year, when in my post "More 333 syncs" I noted its strange décor -- a wall decorated with photos of some writings of Aleister Crowley. Today something else caught my attention, too, so I took a photo that includes it all:

On the right is the wall of the stairwell, with two triangles forming an hourglass-like shape. One is pointing up, and the other down, confirming what I just wrote about the connection between the Star of David and Jacob's ladder.

On the left is the wall of the second floor, featuring some pages from Crowley's Equinox of the Gods and a Chinese translation of a quote from Victor Hugo: "L'esprit de l'homme a trois clefs qui ouvrent tout : le chiffre, la lettre, la note. Savoir, penser, rêver. Tout est là" ("The human spirit has three keys which open everything: the number, the letter, the [musical] note. To know, to think, to dream. Everything is here.") 

What's on the rest of that page from Equinox? Oh, just a dove in a vesica piscis.

And how does the author identify himself in the very first paragraph? 

For those who came in late, the double-D and the lemniscate entered the sync stream through a restaurant called D∞D (with a lemniscate for an ampersand), the street address of which is 666.

What about Hugo's three keys? The number, the letter, the note. Well, in the current sync stream, the number is clearly 8 and the letter is D. And the note? To ask the question is to answer it. I originally thought D∞D was supposed to be DOOD. A post I have already linked twice recounts how "one of my young students ran up to the stairs to the classroom, shouting, 'Do re me fa sol la ti do!' as he did so." What note begins with the letter D and is also the 8th note of the scale (the octave) and thus the only one to appear twice? DOOD is an anagram of do do, the beginning and end of the scale. It's also dodo, of course, an extinct member of the dove family.

There is a dodo in Alice in Wonderland, so this ties in with recent Lewis Carroll syncs, too.

Then I went out randonauting. I didn't encounter a mini T. rex this time, though I did see a little dinosaur in a ditch:

My February 12 post "What if Dot got in the Green Door?" featured photos from an old textbook called Journeys. One of the other things I found in that book, which I noticed at the time but didn't post, was this story about Al and Lop:

Al is an alligator, and Lop is a rabbit with a long tail. (An alligator bites it off in the end, which is why rabbits today have short tails.) In this picture, Lop crosses a river by running across the backs of swimming alligators. (Note that this is on pages 118 and 119. Today I found a monstrous reptile floating in water with the number 191.) This caught my attention because of something I wrote in my February 2021 post "Walking on water."

I've read a fair bit of kooky channeled material in my day, and one of these books -- I believe it was, ahem, Pleiadian Perspectives on Human Evolution by the late Amorah Quan Yin -- featured the arresting image of Jesus and Mary, during their sojourn in Egypt, crossing the Nile by walking across the backs of swimming crocodiles. Moses never did that! Neither, of course, did Jesus, but the image captures some of the inner meaning of walking on the sea.

Lop's feat reminded me of a virtually identical one attributed by an eccentric New Age writer to a famous Mother and Son. Today I saw this on my Randonautica route:

The brand name is 母子鱷魚, "Mother and Son Crocodiles." At the bottom of the sign it reads 玩水鞋, "shoes for playing in the water." Shoes, of course, are for walking, not swimming.

When I posted about Dot getting in the Green Door, I noted that Dot is short for Dorothy and posted a picture of Dorothy Gale knocking at the green gates of the Emerald City. So it is appropriate that one of the other things I found on today's ramble was a ruby slipper:

I also ran across a hexagram:

Then there was this:

It was the infinity-sign lemniscate that first caught me eye, but then I noticed lots of other things. There's a big T, as in Mr. T and T. rex; and a snowflake, which is a close cousin to the hexagram. There's snow in one corner and Sn-2 in the other -- a link to the old Tintin and Snow Snow syncs (alligators there, too). Note also the OPO, which will be relevant to what follows.

Then there's the word Megmilk -- reminding me that one of the meanings of double-D is "large breasts." Come to think of it, the lemniscate suggests a pair, and b00b belongs to the same family as d00d and n00b.

Four minutes later (going by the timestamps on my photos), I saw this:

What caught my eye here was the letter O, which is made up of an orange 6 and a purple 9. Then I noticed the hexagram visible on the polyhedron. Then I noticed that if you turn it upside down it reads do. Only one do, though, unlike the earlier syncs related to dood and dodo. Oh, wait, what's this?

The op photo and the oppo photo were taken seconds apart and have the same timestamp. This is just dood upside down and inside out.

Finally, I passed a liquor store that had a bunch of eights.

That's a total of five figure-eights in the shot. One of them is advertising unpasteurized beer that is only 18 days old, but the digit 1 is represented by a beer bottle, leaving 8 as the only numeral. The others are for eight-year-old Scotch. One company wanted to emphasize how fresh their drink is, while the other wanted to emphasize how old it is -- but they both chose the same number. Of course this ties in with 8 as a symbol of time and time travel.

Oh, one more thing. In my February 9 post "No B in Harley-Davidson," I mention seeing a "Keep smiling" sign at D&D (number 666) and another one at a barber shop that had a 666 license plate on the wall -- but I didn't get photos. Now I have:

Notes added:

Megmilk ties in with Waite's statement that the number eight represents the land flowing with milk and honey.

The alligator's name, Al, is a Crowley/666 link:

The above is from Equinox of the Gods. 

I'm being shadowed by a red turtle dove

One of these little guys has been stalking me for the past few days. The photo is from Wikipedia, not my own, because he's extremely camera shy. It's an appropriate photo anyway because it shows him the way I usually see him: running off with a look on his face that says, Oh, no! He's seen me again!

When I open the front door, I see him flying off. When I get on my motorcycle, he pops out from behind the front wheel and runs for it until he's clear to start flapping.. While I'm on the road, he'll swoop down and cross my path once or twice, all casual-like, but mostly stays out of sight. He stakes out the school all day while I'm there and is usually loitering nearby when I get off. I may be exaggerating slightly, but only slightly. This bird is suddenly everywhere. I've never fed him or done anything else to attract him, so I'm really not sure what his game is.

I can't really be sure it's the same bird every time, of course. Back in America, I used to recognize individual Carolina mourning doves by slight differences in their wing markings, but red turtles lack any obvious distinguishing characteristics. (I guess the black "collar" mark would be my best bet?) So it's possible that it's a different dove every time, and that I've attracted the attention of the whole species. Which would be weirder?

⁂

Birds generally mean something, of course, and I've naturally been wondering what this one means. Today my student's English magazine offered this interpretation.

"Doves are usually connected with peace." Yes, usually. Those are white doves, though, and red is universally the color of war. What could a red dove mean? Then I suddenly remembered that I had written about the red dove before, in my (very long) 2018 post "The Rider-Waite Magician," because a small red dove appears on the Magician's table on that card.

The front edge of the Magician’s table features a series of three carvings. The first appears to be ocean waves, the second is unrecognizable, and the third is a bird in flight. Comparing it with the bird on the Ace of Cups, which clearly represents the dove of the Holy Spirit, we see that they are almost identical in shape. The cup-shaped capital of the table leg just below the Magician’s bird reinforces the connection. While the dove on the Ace of Cups is white and flies downward, the Magician’s dove is red and flies upward.

This reminded me of something Valentin Tomberg had written in Meditations on the Tarot about the symbolism of prayers going up to God and blessings coming down. Not remembering that I had quoted that very passage in my 2018 post and just had to scroll down to find it, I instead brought up the Kindle app on my phone and searched for meditations. This is what came up.

Unsurprisingly, my Tomberg books came up as the first results -- but look what else it recommended: an edition of Marcus Aurelius with a red bird on the cover. Not a dove (it looks more like a red crow), but still!

I'm obviously being reminded of the need to pray -- I just went two days without praying the Rosary, the first such lapse since I began the habit, and this red dove -- who, besides having been identified in my own writings as a symbol of prayer back in 2018, also suggests the Rosary by his color -- is here to get me back on track. I open and close my prayer sessions with the Prayer to St. Michael, and that martial archangel is also well represented by the red dove. I suppose Marcus Aurelius, philosopher and commander-in-chief, who jotted down his Meditations in his spare moments at camp during a military campaign, is also a "red dove" kind of guy.

My reference above to "my" dove as simply a "red turtle" made me think of the famous line in the Song of Solomon about how "the voice of the turtle" (meaning the turtle dove) "is heard in our land" (2:12). (I've been reading the King James Bible since I was little, and it has never said anything other than "the voice of the turtle"; don't let those Mandela Effect people tell you any different.) Looking it up just now, I find that the chapter begins with "I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys" (2:1) -- in the Vulgate, "Ego flos campi, et lilium convallium." I quoted this, too, in my "Rider-Waite Magician" post, because Waite himself references it in his Pictorial Key to the Tarot, saying that the roses and lilies on the Magician card are "the flos campi and lilium convallium, changed into garden flowers, to shew the culture of aspiration." Commenting on this, I had written:

What did the rose of Sharon and the lily of the valleys mean to Waite? I could have sworn that they appeared in the Litany of the Blessed Virgin as symbolical titles of that personage, but that turns out to have been a hallucination of memory.

So there's another link to praying to Mary -- Mary as a rose no less -- and thus to the Rosary.

An even weirder sync came when I read the "voice of the turtle" verse itself and found what comes immediately after:

The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land; the fig tree putteth forth her green figs . . . (2:12-13).

This is the only reference to "green figs" in the entire Bible. I recently had my own experience with green figs behind the Green Door, as recorded in "Owl time, and cold noodles":

I saw that the wall was covered not only with leaves but with hundreds and hundreds of what were unmistakably figs -- still green, but quite large.

Well, it's . . .

. . . for me to wrap this post up and go pray the Rosary already. Since lilies have come up, too, why not give this a listen?

Out of the strong came forth sweetness.

Briton Rivière, Una and the Lion (1880)

In my last post (qv), I hypothesized that the Strength card of the Tarot de Marseille originated when a depiction of Samson -- long-haired, beardless, and labeled with the grammatically feminine title La Fortezza or La Force -- was misinterpreted as being a woman. (Something similar seems to have happened to no less a personage than Jesus Christ in the World card.)

Visconti-Sforza Tarot, Tübinger Hausbuch, P. Madenié Tarot

As can be seen above, the earliest surviving Tarot cards (painted by Bonifacio Bembo for the Visconti-Sforza family) used Hercules rather than Samson as a representation of the virtue of Fortitude. The hero's identity is made clear by his short hair and by the fact that he carries a club. (Hercules first stunned the Nemean lion with his club and then strangled it with his bare hands; when Samson killed his lion, though, "he had nothing in his hand.")

While depictions of Hercules and the Nemean lion typically show the hero using his club or else grappling with the beast after the fashion of a Greek wrestler, Samson is almost universally depicted holding the lion's jaws open. This may seem strange -- wouldn't you want to hold its jaws closed? -- but reflects the biblical language. While Hercules bludgeoned and strangled his adversary, Samson "rent him as he would have rent a kid" (Judges 14:6). Pictures like the one in the Tübinger Hausbuch show him preparing to tear the beast in two.

The woman in the Tarot de Marseille also holds the lion's jaws open with her hands -- a pose specific to Samson, for a specific biblical reason. For me, this is conclusive evidence confirming my earlier speculation. The Strength card of the TdM came into being as a corruption of what was originally a picture of Samson -- the mistake being facilitated by his long hair and by the strangely androgynous faces so common in medieval and Renaissance art.

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But when it comes to the development of the Tarot, the oldest cards are not always the truest, and a mistake is not always just a mistake. There is evolution at work here -- perhaps literal memetic evolution by natural selection (where only such mistakes as improve the card are preserved and copied), perhaps something more mysterious.

Hercules and the Nemean lion is just a standard hero-slays-monster story, with nothing particularly interesting about it. Vico, though, sees it is a symbolic representation of razing the forests of Nemea so that the land could be cultivated.

In the Samson story, this connection between killing the lion and providing food becomes more explicit, as Samson returns to the lion's carcass some time later and finds honey in it. This is the basis of his famous riddle:

Out of the eater came something to eat.
Out of the strong came something sweet.

I have quoted a version that rhymes -- it's a riddle, it has to rhyme! -- but the King James version says, "Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness" (Judges 14:14). The answer, discovered by his enemies through the treachery of his Philistine girlfriend, is "What is sweeter than honey? and what is stronger than a lion?" (v. 18).

The woman in the TdM image cannot be identified as any particular historical or mythological person, but I have illustrated this post with Briton Rivière's Una and the Lion -- a scene from Spenser -- because that is who she (anachronistically) reminds me of. Waite apparently thought likewise; his Strength card includes the Spenserian detail of the lion's licking Una's hand.

It fortuned out of the thickest wood
   A ramping Lyon rushed suddainly,
   Hunting full greedie after saluage blood;
   Soone as the royall virgin he did spy,
   With gaping mouth at her ran greedily,
   To haue attonce deuour'd her tender corse:
   But to the pray when as he drew more ny,
   His bloudie rage asswaged with remorse,
And with the sight amazd, forgat his furious forse.

In stead thereof he kist her wearie feet,
   And lickt her lilly hands with fawning tong,
   As he her wronged innocence did weet.
   O how can beautie maister the most strong,
   And simple truth subdue auenging wrong?
   Whose yeelded pride and proud submission,
   Still dreading death, when she had marked long,
   Her hart gan melt in great compassion,
And drizling teares did shed for pure affection.

And what is this but Samson's riddle completed? Out of the strong came forth sweetness, and out of the sweet came forth strength.

Samson and the Strength card

Rider-Waite Tarot

One of the deepest and most evocative cards in the Tarot is the trump called variously, Fortitude, Force, or Strength -- showing not some powerful warrior or strongman, but rather a peaceful, serene young woman gently and effortlessly controlling a lion.

As I say, an evocative image. Did it originate by mistake? By what I have taken to calling a Jungian slip?

Today I happened to be (virtually) flipping through the Tübinger Hausbuch, a German tome of the mid-15th century, full of medical, astrological, and geomantic lore, and lavishly illustrated. The picture below (left) caught my eye because of its striking similarity to the Strength card.

Tübinger Hausbuch (left); Pierre Madenié Tarot (right)

I have already noted the convention of depicting Samson holding a lion's jaws open and pointed out two examples from West Minster. The West Minster Samsons are, as is usual, bearded -- Nazarites didn't shave, right? -- but the Tübinger Hausbuch shows him beardless and with flowing golden locks, so that -- were it not for the familiarity of the image, and the helpful scroll in the background labeled "Samson der something-or-other," we just might mistake the Hebrew Hercules for a woman!

Could anyone actually make such a mistake in the Middle Ages, though? Surely the story of Samson, and the associated iconography, would be much too familiar to cause any such confusion.

But suppose we decided Samson was the perfect embodiment of the Classical virtue of fortitude and, instead of labeling his image Samson, wrote instead La Fortezza or La Force -- feminine nouns both. Then would a mistake become more plausible?

What's on the Magician's table?

1. The traditional Marseille layout

Tarot de Marseille decks stick very closely to the following layout for the Bateleur's table.

Based on Wilfried Houdouin's 2017 deck; color coding is my own

The details of each element below are taken from the Historical Tarots Gallery at the Tarot of Marseilles Heritage website. Upper row, from left to right: Pierre Madenié (1709), François Héri (1718), François Chosson (1736), Jean-Baptiste Madenié (1739), François Tourcaty (1745), and Rochus Schär (1750). Lower row: Claude Burdel (1751), Nicolas Conver (1760), Jacques Rochias (1782), Arnoux & Amphoux (1793), Suzanne Bernardin (1839), and Lequart (1890).

A: A cup with a round top, vertical sides, and a square bottom. There is very little variation in the shape. The main body of the cup is consistently yellow, and the mouth is most often red but sometimes other colors.

B: Another cup, with a different shape, wider at the top than at the bottom. It looks as if it may have a lid covering it. The color scheme is fairly consistent: yellow cup with a red mouth or lid.

C: It is not clear whether this object should be classified with the cups (A and B) or with the little round objects (D, E, and F). It is much smaller than the two cups but considerably larger than the little round things. While its basic shape is that of a circle divided into two parts, the concave curve of the dividing line suggests a very small, shallow cup, bowl, or dish. This object is most often the same color as the tabletop.

D: Three circular objects with the central one overlapping the one on the lower right (and sometimes the one on the left as well). So slavishly is this arrangement copied from deck to deck that when we see one with only two circles on this part of the table, it seems positively revolutionary! The objects are generally the color of the table. To me the layout suggests flat coins or discs rather than spherical objects. If they were balls, the lower right one (being in the foreground) would overlap the central one rather than vice versa. (On the other hand, the flat bottoms of cups A and B suggest an artist with little understanding of such things.) 

E: This element ranges from two circles side by side, to two overlapping circles, to a divided circle similar to C. The color is generally the same as the tabletop. The uncertainty as to whether this is one object or two suggests that the shapes were being copied blindly by cardmakers who did not know what they represented. My best guess is that the "original" form was a smaller circle in the northeast overlapping a larger one in the southwest, and that this was sometimes misunderstood as a single object due to the influence of the C object. As with the D objects, the direction of the overlap suggests flat rather than spherical objects.

F: Two more round items, vertically arranged. In most cases, they are touching so as to form a figure like an Arabic numeral 8, but in some decks there is a gap between them. Like the other round objects, they are generally the same color as the tabletop, but sometimes one of them is red.

G: A curved knife and its sheath, both generally the color of the table. The shape and orientation is consistent across decks. In one case the sheath has been transformed into a second knife. The knife has a very distinctive shape -- almost like a miniature scimitar with no cross-guard -- that makes me wonder what its purpose is. It certainly doesn't look much like a typical medieval pen knife, hunting knife, or dagger. The handle also seems much too small for the magician's hands, but perhaps that indicates nothing more than poor draftsmanship.

H: A bag, consistently light blue with a yellow mouth and strap. There are between one and three little round things at the mouth of the bag, which presumably represent some sort of latching mechanism. The bag is decorated with a tassel or something of that nature at the lower left corner. Sometimes one end of the strap appears to go behind the table rather than connecting to the bag.

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2. Marseille variants, new and old

We have been looking at some of the oldest and most traditional Marseille decks, mostly from the 18th century, but in modern times the most influential Tarot de Marseille by far has been the 1930 Grimaud deck designed by Paul Marteau. Marteau claimed to be restoring the Nicolas Conver deck (the canonical Tarot de Marseille) but in fact introduced many innovations. Most of these are changes in the color scheme, but some are more substantial. Here is what Marteau's Bateleur has on his table:

If we ignore the colors, this is in line with Conver and the other decks we have examined, with one exception: The F element, realized as two circles in every historical deck we have looked at, has become a pair of dice.

A more recent "restored" Tarot de Marseille, also claiming the mantle of Nicolas Conver, features dice as well. This is the Jodorowsky-Camoin deck of 1997.

Note that Jodorowsky and Camoin have added a third die between the knife and its sheath, and also that the sheath has been given a fantastic new shape in defiance of tradition.

Whence these dice? As far as I am aware, there is only one early deck that unambiguously features dice, but it is one of the earliest: Jean Noblet's deck of c. 1650. Noblet's Tarot is generally very close to the Tarot de Marseille in its iconography, but not so close as to be considered a full member of that tradition. Here is his Bateleur's table:

Notice that Noblet's C element -- realized in the standard Tarot de Marseille as a circle divided into two parts -- appears here as a third and smaller cup. This suggests that what was originally a small cup was distorted over time, by a process of repeated copying without understanding, into the indistinct round object that later became standard.

Isn't it highly probably that some of the other round things on the table in the traditional Tarot de Marseille are also distortions of what were originally distinct objects? Isn't it more likely that indistinctly printed dice would degenerate into circles than that circles would be misinterpreted as dice? Marteau, Jodorowsky, and Camoin seem to have thought so. Noblet has three horizontally arranged dice where the standard Tarot de Marseille has two vertically arranged circles (the F element). Marteau apparently split the difference, keeping just two elements vertically arranged but changing them to dice. Jodorowsky and Camoin put two dice in the same position as Marteau's and add a third between the knife and the sheath, as in Noblet.

Note also that Noblet's D element -- three circles -- is somewhat different. Rather than overlapping, the three circles are more spread out but are connected by two lines. It is not at all clear what sort of object this is intended to represent. The E element -- either two circles or a single divided circle -- is absent.

Also dating to around 1650 is Jacques Viéville's card. The detail below is shown in mirror image in order to facilitate comparison with the TdM.

Here, A is a square cup, B is a round one, and C is apparently a shallow bowl or dish. D is a single round object rather than three, and E is a sort of lozenge divided horizontally into two triangles. Where the F element would be (two circles in TdM, dice in Noblet), we have two rectangular objects, a large one divided in thirds, and a smaller one not so divided. What objects were intended by these abstract geometric shapes is anyone's guess. Despite the early date for this card, it had apparently already been through several generations of ignorant miscopying.

The lozenge shape in Viéville is perhaps historically related to the diagonal lines connecting the circles in Noblet.

A few other not-quite-standard representatives of the greater Marseille tradition also deserve our attention. The 1780 deck of Ignaz Krebs follows Noblet in some ways.

As in Noblet, the D element appears as three non-overlapping circles, and the E element is absent. Instead of Noblet's dice, though, we have between the knife and the sheath a single rectangle with six pip-marks on it. To me this is further confirmation that the "original" design featured dice, since one could imagine dice being incorrectly copied either as circles (as in the mainstream TdM) or as the domino-like object in Krebs.

Jean-Pierre Payen's 1713 deck (a TdM "Type I" deck, as opposed to the mainstream "Type II") has a fairly standard Bateleur (or, rather, "Branchus," that being the anomalous title given to this card) but is interesting because its D element (three round objects) looks more unambiguously like coins rather than balls.

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3. Magician's tables before the Tarot de Marseille

The earliest surviving Tarot cards are the Visconti-Sforza cards painted by Bonifacio Bembo. Bembo's magician has objects on his table similar to those in the TdM but not the same. There is a cup (only one), a knife (but no sheath), and two small round objects of uncertain identity.

The large white object which takes the place of the TdM Bateleur's bag has been variously interpreted, but, as I have explained elsewhere, I find Michael Pearce's case that it is a sea sponge to be completely convincing. Dr. Pearce found several pictures by Bembo depicting holy relics, among them the sponge on a stalk of hyssop which was used to give vinegar to the Crucified, and the sponge very closely resemble's the Magician's white object.

Three sponges (on hyssop stalks) by Bonifacio Bembo

This crucial discovery allows Pearce to reveal the true identity of Bembo's "magician": He is a scribe or writer. His "wand" is actually a reed pen (he holds it like a pen, and nibs are visible if you look closely), the knife is a pen knife, and the cup and other yellow objects are receptacles for ink. Sponges were used in the past for erasing and for cleaning pens; in support of this, Pearce shows an illustration from a 15th-century Decameron which depicts a writer with pen, pen knife, inkwell, and sponge.

The Cary sheet (c. 1550), a sheet of uncut Tarot cards from Milan, shows a broadly Marseille-like assortment of objects on the Magician's table, but the image is too unclear for them to be identified with any confidence. There are two long objects that may be a knife and a sheath, a total of six roundish things, and two cups on the table, with a third in the Magician's right hand. This syncs up pretty well with the Noblet card, which also has three cups, a knife and a sheath, and a total of six small objects (three dice and three round things).

While it is not a Tarot card, Hieronymus Bosch's 1502 painting The Conjurer should also be mentioned here, chiefly because of its similarity to the Cary sheet.

Bosch's Conjurer and the Cary sheet Magician wear similar headgear, and the Cary sheet may even show some sort of bag or basket dangling from the Magician's waist or wrist. In both depictions, the cups on the table are apparently inverted, narrow end up. Finally, and to me most evocatively, the roughly egg-shaped object at the northeast end of the table on the Cary sheet closely resembles the little frog at the west end of Bosch's table. (A second frog is emerging from the mouth of one of the spectators.)

See this post for more on echoes of Bosch in the Tarot.

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4. Wirth and Waite

No overview of the Magician's table would be complete without mentioning the modern, post-Marseille standard, which I believe originated with Oswald Wirth. Although I find it a bit gauche and uninteresting, I feel I ought to give it a few lines.

It's a pretty obvious move to associate the Magician's objects with the four suits of the Tarot. The Magician holds a wand, and on his table are cups, a knife suggesting the suit of Swords, and round objects that might be coins. Oswald Wirth made this explicit.

All the clutter has been eliminated, and there are now only three objects on the table: a cup (not the simple cups of the TdM Bateleur, but a chalice or goblet as in the suit of Cups), a full-size sword, and a giant "coin" the size of a Frisbee (clearly a symbolic representation of the suit of Coins, not an actual piece of currency). The wand in the Magician's hand has been enlarged considerably, too, making it more like the cudgels and scepters in the suit of Bastons than like an actual magician's wand.

A. E. Waite, in his hugely influential Rider-Waite deck, takes Wirth's idea a step further. Apparently wanting to include a large "wand" suggestive of the suit, but without making his Magician look like a baton-twirling drum major, he put two wands on his card: a small one in the Magician's hand, and a large cudgel on the table. (The giant coin is now a "pentacle," that being Waite's take on this suit.)

Waite lived before subways were common.

All in all, I greatly prefer the traditional Bateleur's evocative hodgepodge of gewgaws to the cut-and-dried symbolism of Wirth and Waite.