Gryphon + Mock Turtle = Cherubim

Mock turtle soup is traditionally made with a calf's head, and so the Mock Turtle in Alice is portrayed as a turtle with the head, tail, and back hooves of a calf. Its companion, the Gryphon, is of course part lion and part eagle.

This comes very close to matching the four component creatures of the Cherubim. According to Ezekiel, the Cherubim had the faces of a man, a lion, an ox and an eagle. In John’s adaptation of this imagery in Revelation, the ox actually becomes a calf. In the Gryphon and the Mock Turtle, we have these same four -- except that the man is replaced with a turtle.This substitution is astrologically justified. The four creatures of the Cherubim represent the fixed signs of the zodiac -- Aquarius, Leo, Taurus, and Scorpio -- but the scorpion is replaced by the nearby constellation of Aquila, the Eagle. The man stands for Aquarius, and in Chinese astrology Aquarius belongs to the Black Tortoise. Thus, the turtle can stand in for Aquarius.

According to Ezekiel, the Cherubim had feet like "a calf's foot" and "the hands of a man." This maps perfectly to the Mock Turtle, whose "feet" are calf's hooves and whose "hands" are the flippers of a turtle (corresponding to Aquarius and thus to the man).

In Ezekiel, each Cherub looks the same, and each is a combination of all four creatures. In Revelation, there are four different Cherubim, each corresponding to only one of the four creatures. Lewis Carroll is intermediate between the two, having two different Cherubim, each combining two of the four creatures.

The World card of the Tarot follow's John's schema, with four distinct Cherubim, but notice how perfectly it corresponds to the illustration from Alice above: On the left, Aquarius and Taurus (the Mock Turtle); on the right, Scorpio and Leo (the Gryphon); in the center, a human female with her body turned toward the Gryphon but her face turned toward the Mock Turtle.

Just as the Eagle is above the Lion on the World card, the eagle parts of the Gryphon are above the lion parts. The Mock Turtle has calf parts at both the top and the bottom, with the turtle parts in the middle, so it doesn't map quite so perfectly.

A possible missing link in the evolution of the World (Tarot)

In last year's very long post "The Throne and the World," I attempted to trace the evolution of the final trump of the Tarot de Marseille -- from the biblical visions of Ezekiel and John, through the "Maiestas Domini" depictions of Christ, to the dancing woman of the Tarot. One of the most mysterious transitions in this development is from the male figures of God and Christ to the female dancer of the Tarot, and I speculated that the beardless, and thus sexually ambiguous, Christ of the Basilique Saint-Sernin de Toulouse (later echoed by Caravaggio in his Supper at Emmaus) may have played a important role.

Today a routine scan of the shelves of the small English-language section of the local used bookstore turned up an unexpected find: an unabridged republication of Joseph Halfpenny's 1795 book Gothic Ornament: Architectural Motifs from York Cathedral, which I of course snapped up without hesitation, as one never knows when such things might come in handy. Flipping through it at home later this evening, I was intrigued to discover this:

This is clearly a close cousin of the Maiestas Domini, with a central figure in an almond-shaped nimbus (mandorla), surrounded by four angelic beings -- humanoid angels in this case, rather than the Four Living Creatures of the Apocalypse. But unlike a Maiestas Domini -- and like the Tarot -- it shows an unambiguously female central figure, and one who is standing rather than seated on a throne. Halfpenny says that its subject is the Assumption of the Virgin Mary.

York Minster is of course a bit too far from Marseille for direct influence on the Tarot to be plausible, but it's given me a lead to follow. If, as seems likely, similar portrayals of the Assumption can be found in France or Italy, their relevance to the Tarot can be taken for granted.

Confirmation that the World card is based on the throne scene in Revelation

The earliest known list of the Tarot trumps comes from the anonymous Sermones de ludo cum aliis ("Discourses on a game played with others"), published in Venice in the late 15th century, probably by a Dominican monk. It follows the Ferrara-Venice ordering of the trumps, which differs in several respects from the now-standard Milan-Marseille ordering. The author includes brief parenthetical comments on some of the trumps, including the World.

The 21st item on the list is (modernizing the spelling) "Il mondo, cioè Dio Padre" -- "The world, that is to say, God the Father."

As detailed in my very long post The Throne and the World, the World card derives from "Christ in majesty" iconography, which in turn is based on the description of God the Father on his throne in Revelation 4-5. That this 15th century writer simply equates the World with God the Father is strong evidence for this connection. It also shows that that version of the World card is older than might otherwise be supposed. The oldest surviving World cards have very different images; for example, the Visconti-Sforza, shows the earth being supported by two winged putti -- an image completely unrelated to the Marseille card or to biblical throne scenes. The list in Sermones is evidence that the World as God was already established in 15th-century Italy and was not a Marseille innovation.