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?

Cards on the Magician's table?

In my recent post "What's on the Magician's table?" (qv), I mentioned the Marseille-style 1780 deck of Ignaz Krebs and said that it featured a "domino-like object" which I took to be a corruption of what was originally a die or pair of dice.

I don't know how it is that in a post about cards I failed to notice that what it really resembles is not a domino (which would be divided into two parts) but a playing card. I didn't make the connection until, searching for medieval pictures of gamblers to back up my hunch about a dice shaker, I found this picture.

The resemblance of the Krebs object to the cards in this picture is unmistakable, and, whether or not it originated as a miscopied die, I think we must conclude that for Krebs it was a playing card.

Does any other early Tarot have a card or cards on the Magician's table? The case is a tenuous one, but just maybe. Look at the strange parallelograms on the Jacques Viéville card and notice how closely they resemble parts of a deck of cards and a die.

But where's the rest of them? Is it plausible that Viéville would have accidentally printed only one of the three visible faces of the die and the deck of cards? Well, that sort of thing would hardly be unprecedented. Jean Noblet's Magician card, dating from about the same time as Viéville's, is also missing some elements that the block carver apparently just forgot to include. The two cards below are both from Joseph H. Peterson's Noblet facsimile deck. He included two versions of the Magician: an exact replica of the original (left) and a reconstruction restoring the three fingers and half of the wand that Noblet's printer somehow omitted.

Viéville's cards are crude in the extreme -- easily the ugliest Tarot I've ever seen -- and it would not be at all surprising to find that they featured similar careless omissions. At any rate, no other explanation of the parallelograms suggests itself. They certainly look more like sides of three-dimensional objects than like flat objects lying on a table.

One of the Magician's cups is a leather dice shaker.

One of the cups on the Magician's table in the Tarot de Marseille -- the one marked A below -- was originally a dice shaker, probably a leather one.

This emerged suddenly as an unarguable intuition after many hours spent picking over the details of the Magician's table in early Tarot decks. I don't expect my own intuitions to carry much weight with anyone else, though, so here is a bit of circumstantial evidence to back me up:

The cup has a strange square shape -- vertical sides, horizontal bottom -- unlike a normal cup. In the Viéville deck it is unambiguously rectangular in shape, including the mouth. Compare the strangely shaped "cup" in Viéville to the backgammon dice cups and the medieval British dice shaker below.

Leather is brown, a color not included in the standard 8-color palette of the Tarot de Marseille (an exception is the François Héri deck of 1718, which uses it only for the Hermit's habit). What color would be used for leather, then? Well, belts and shoes are normally made of leather, so that should give us a clue. Looking at the 12 decks in Historic Tarots gallery at the Tarot of Marseilles Heritage website, 8 out of 12 use the same color (yellow) for the Magician's belt, shoes, and cup; and each of these individual elements is yellow in 10 out of 12 decks.

Incidentally, this syncs up with the Pythagorean Tarot of John Opsopaus, which, without any pretense of restoring the original TdM, patterns the Magician after the December illustration in the Chronograph of 354 and puts a rectangular purgos, or ancient Greek dice-shaker, on the table. (The picture below is from the original card drawn by Opsopaus himself; the published version, done by another artist, has a round purgos.)

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.

The Emperor and the number 4

Jean-Pierre Payen, 1713

One of the distinctive characteristics of so-called Tarot de Marseille "Type I" decks ("Type II" being the standard Tarot) is that the fourth trump, the Emperor, has, in addition to the Roman numerals at the top of the card, an Arabic numeral 4 floating in front of his face. Only the Emperor has this; every other trump has only the standard Roman-numeral label at the top. The question is, why?

It is customary for Tarot commentators to see in the Emperor's crossed legs and the rough triangle formed by his head and arms, an allusion to the alchemical symbol for Sulfur, which is a cross surmounted by a triangle. However, one could just as easily see the Emperor's legs as forming an Arabic numeral 4 -- and this numeral is also very close to the astrological symbol for Jupiter.

The resemblance of the Emperor to the god Jupiter -- who also sits on a throne, holding a scepter, with an eagle at his side -- should be obvious.

1st-century Roman statue of Jupiter

Other representations of the number 4 can also be connected to Jupiter. Although the Tarot de Marseille consistently uses strictly additive Roman numerals (IIII, VIIII, XIIII, XVIIII), the standard Roman numeral for 4 is IV -- the first two letters of the name Jupiter (IVPPITER). It was to avoid taking the name of Jupiter in vain that many Roman sundials, although they used the subtractive IX for 9, opted for IIII instead of IV. (The Tarot de Marseille uses "IV" only in the names of the trumps Justice and Judgment, with which it would not be disrespectful to associate Jupiter.)

The Greek numeral for 4 is the letter Δ (cf. the triangle formed by the Emperor's upper body). This is also the initial of Διεύς, the ancient form of the name Zeus and cognate with the Latin deus (which, besides its primary meaning of "god," was used as an imperial title).

Finally, I note -- although it is almost certainly a meaningless coincidence -- that Nicolas Conver's 1760 deck, often considered to be the canonical Tarot de Marseille, gives this trump the anomalous name L'empereup. If IV suggests Jupiter, surely UP does as well. If UP represents Jupiter, then the full title of the Conver trump is nothing less than le M. Père Jupiter.

All in all, I find the links to Jupiter to be much stronger than the more traditional ones to alchemical Sulfur.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

The Fool's Wheel

The Fool's Wheel, as discussed in an earlier post, is one of four plausible alternatives to a schema of Tarot interpretation created by Oswald Wirth and called (by me, not him) the Lover's Wheel. The idea is to arrange the 22 Major Arcana in a circle and contrast each card with those horizontally and vertically opposite it. Wirth put's the Lover card at the top of the wheel, while I put the Fool there -- hence the names.

This is what the Fool's Wheel looks like. The numbers represent the trumps in their standard Marseille order (Justice is 8, Strength is 11). The Fool is represented by the number 0 as a matter of convenience, though in fact it is unnumbered.

As the colored lines show, the Fool's Wheel organizes the cards into five groups of four (the colored rectangles) and a single pair (the central axis). Let's look at each of these groups in turn, starting from the center and working our way out.

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Group 1: Strength and Weakness

These two cards both show a person interacting with a potentially dangerous animal. The Fool is being attacked by a dog (or, as some commentators would have it, a lynx), while the woman on the Strength card is holding open the jaws of a lion. While the Fool, being equipped with a stout walking stick, should be able to defend himself from a dog quite easily, it has apparently not occurred to him to do so. The woman on the Strength card, in contrast, effortlessly subdues a lion despite being entirely unarmed. The fact that she is holding its jaws open (not closed, as an alligator wrestler would do) shows that her power over the beast is more psychological than physical.

While the names Strength and La Force have become conventional in English and French, the original name of the 11th arcanum is La Fortezza -- that is, the classical virtue of Fortitude or courage. (Justice and Temperance are also among the Major Arcana; the apparent absence of the fourth virtue, Prudence, has been the subject of endless speculation among Tarot commentators.) Our Fool seems also to be displaying a courage of sorts -- or, rather, the vice-of-excess corresponding to that virtue in the Aristotelian system. He does not appear to be at all afraid of the dog, after all, but walks on with a smile on his face, as if unaware that he is being attacked.

The Fool, for his part, is called Il Matto or Le Mat -- as in the chess term échec et mat (Italian scacco matto) -- a word ultimately derived from Persian, where (despite the widespread, Arabic-influenced misconception that checkmate means "the king is dead") it means "stymied, stupefied, helpless." The Fool, then, represents the opposite of Strength, and his fearlessness is that of the dodo bird, not of the lion. "'Twas grace that taught my heart to fear, and grace my fear relieved": The woman of Strength enjoys both of these graces; the Fool, neither.

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Group 2: Chance and Destiny

Looking at the vertical oppositions first, it would be hard to find one more perfect than the Hanged Man and the World. Several old French decks write the Hanged Man's number as "IIX," suggesting that the card ought to be turned upside down. Doing so transforms the Hanged Man into a dancer in almost exactly the same posture as the one featured on the World Card. The Hanged Man's gallows,with its 12 lopped branches, is a stylized representation of the zodiac, as are the wreath and Four Living Creatures on the World card.

The Magician holding his wand over his table of gewgaws (including, in some decks, two or three dice) corresponds to the sword-wielding sphinx that presides over the Wheel of Fortune -- or perhaps to Fortuna (not portrayed in the Marseille version of the image), who controls the wheel. Images suggestive of both the Magician and the Wheel of Fortune appear together in Hiernoymus Bosch's painting The Conjurer. The Magician represents control, while those on the Wheel are at the mercy of events beyond their control.

Horizontally, the Magician and the World, as the first and last numbered trumps, make a natural contrast. Both figures hold a wand in the left hand. The Magician's infinity-sign hat is echoed in the similarly shaped ribbon that binds the wreath in (many versions of) the World.

Traditional representations of the Wheel of Fortune generally put four figures on the wheel, but the Tarot de Marseille follows Albrecht Dürer in bringing that number down to three, perhaps as much to avoid a too-cluttered composition as for any other reason. We can perhaps see in the upside-down Hanged Man the missing figure at the bottom of the wheel; he certainly seems to have suffered a "reversal" of fortune!

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Group 3: Last Things

Though it is called "The Judgement," the 20th trump actually depicts the resurrection of the dead. "Behold, I shew you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. . . . then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory" (1 Corinthians 15: 51-52, 54). What trump could with greater appropriateness be placed opposite Death? But there is affinity as well as opposition. The 13th trump, too, proclaims that "we shall all be changed," and Death's character as the Grim Reaper brings to mind the line "the harvest is the end of the world; and the reapers are the angels" (Matthew 13:39).

The other vertical pair, the Priestess and the Hermit, are both solitary, mystical characters, each bearing a sign of enlightenment (a book, a lantern). A curtain behind the Priestess makes her face visible only from certain angles; likewise, the Hermit's lantern is partially concealed by his mantle.

The open book on the Priestess's lap connects her to the idea of the Last Judgment: "And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened: and another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works" (Revelation 20:12).

The 9th and 13th arcana probably share a common origin, as I have discussed in my post on "The Reaper of Marseille." The name given to the Hermit in the oldest Italian decks is usually the Old Man, the Hunchback, or simply Time, and his lantern was originally an hourglass. This is the familiar figure of Father Time, whose other main attribute (thanks to the conflation of Chronos, or Time, with the harvest god Kronos, or Saturn) is the sickle or scythe, and to whom the Grim Reaper can perhaps also trace his lineage.

Starting with the Hermit and going clockwise, we find that these four trumps lay out in order Four Last Things (not entirely the same as the Four Last Things of tradition): old age, death, resurrection, and judgment (the last being represented by the Priestess and her book, rather than by the trump that bears that name).

I consider this to be the strongest foursome in this schema.

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Group 4: The Queens

The iconographic unity of three of these four cards is immediately apparent. Both the Empress and Justice depict a crowned woman seated on a throne, and the shapes of both thrones suggest the wings of the angel of Temperance. (In some decks, the Empress actually has wings.) The two ewers of Temperance echo the two pans of the scales of Justice.

The Sun, which is personified as male in most cultures, and which shines on the male twins Castor and Pollux, seems out of place in this group. However, sun goddesses are not unknown, nor is it uncommon to apply solar imagery to women ("Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon"). The Empress bears an eagle, a solar bird, and some post-Marseille decks portray her as the "woman clothed with the sun" of Revelation 12:1. The Sun, because it sees all and shines on all impartially, is often associated with justice; think, for example, of Utu/Shamash, or of Malachi's "sun of righteousness." The twins depicted on the Sun card also link it to the balanced duality of Temperance and Justice.

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Group 5: The Kings

The Moon and the Devil make a natural pair, both emphasizing illusion, unreality, and animality. The relationship of the Emperor to the Chariot, which also features a crowned man holding a scepter in his right hand, is similarly obvious.

The horizontal pairings are perhaps less obvious. Just as the Fool's Wheel matches the Empress with the Sun, it matches the Emperor with the Moon, reversing what are the more common associations in most cultures. (Thoth is a male moon good, but the Tarot Emperor is hardly a Thothly figure!). In Whitley Strieber's Tarot book, The Path, he sees the Emperor as ruling the path the left-hand path that leads to the Moon, representing "outer life" and a reduction of freedom, but acknowledges that this is a symbolically unusual choice ("Almost universally, the left hand path has been associated with women, darkness and the moon, while the right has been connected to men, light and the sun"). In this Strieber is presumably influenced by Gurdjieff and his idea that those human "slugs" who fail to develop proper souls are destined to become "food for the moon." Notice also the moon-like spaulders of the charioteer.

In the Devil we may see a caricature of the charioteer. His two captives are harnessed to the globe on which he stands, just as the two horses are harnessed to the Chariot, and he stands over them brandishing a cat o' nine tails.

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Group 6: The Transcendent

The two ewers being emptied in the Star correspond to the two people falling from the Tower; both the stars and the lightning bolt that destroys the Tower represent the ineluctable forces of the cosmos.

The Pope represents infallible authority, and the tonsured monks represent unquestioning obedience. In contrast, the Marseille version of Lover represents a free choice to be made (the Choice of Hercules) and the possibility of making the wrong choice. The Pope and Cupid represent, respectively, Roma and Amor -- each word being the reverse of the other.

The Star and the Pope both express the idea of humble submission -- whether to cosmic destiny or to papal authority.

The lightning bolt that destroys the Tower corresponds to the bolt of Cupid -- and in fact, the earliest name of the 16th trump is Sagitta -- the arrow.

All four trumps in this group represent something -- the "starry heavens above and the moral law within" (Kant), and the bolts of Zeus and Eros -- which transcends the personal and which enters our lives will we nill we and must be reckoned with.