B-B-B-B-B-yeah!
One way to avoid trademark infringement is the "Taiwanagram" method, where Mickey Mouse becomes Kicmey. Another, apparently, is changing random letters to B. These photos are of wall decorations at a barber shop in Hemei, Taiwan.
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| I love this car, but can you turn down the air-conditioning? |
But what do you do if the brand name already begins with B? No problem.
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| British luxury car after a little fender-bender |
1. The traditional Marseille layout
Tarot de Marseille decks stick very closely to the following layout for the Bateleur's table.
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| Based on Wilfried Houdouin's 2017 deck; color coding is my own |
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.
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| 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.)
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| 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.
On October 5, following a link sent to me by an email correspondent, I read a summary of President Russell M. Nelson's remarks at the recent General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormons), published on the Church's official website. Transcripts of his remarks were not yet available, and I do not watch videos, so this was at the time my only source. I was dismayed to see President Nelson quoted as saying that "any discrimination because of race is morally wrong and contrary to God's plan of happiness for His children."
Today I saw that transcripts were now available at the CJCLDS website, so I decided to read President Nelson's remarks in full. His only remarks about "racism" were in his Sunday morning talk "Let God Prevail":
Each of us has a divine potential because each is a child of God. Each is equal in His eyes. The implications of this truth are profound. Brothers and sisters, please listen carefully to what I am about to say. God does not love one race more than another. His doctrine on this matter is clear. He invites all to come unto Him, “black and white, bond and free, male and female.”
I assure you that your standing before God is not determined by the color of your skin. Favor or disfavor with God is dependent upon your devotion to God and His commandments and not the color of your skin.
I grieve that our Black brothers and sisters the world over are enduring the pains of racism and prejudice. Today I call upon our members everywhere to lead out in abandoning attitudes and actions of prejudice. I plead with you to promote respect for all of God’s children.
The question for each of us, regardless of race, is the same. Are you willing to let God prevail in your life? Are you willing to let God be the most important influence in your life? Will you allow His words, His commandments, and His covenants to influence what you do each day? Will you allow His voice to take priority over any other? Are you willing to let whatever He needs you to do take precedence over every other ambition? Are you willing to have your will swallowed up in His?
Conspicuous by its absence is the quote about discrimination being morally wrong. I did a double take and revisited the link to the summary, only to find that it had changed. Everything was the same except the parts about "racism" -- the subtitle and one paragraph, both of which had been completely rewritten. There is no retraction or indication that the article has been modified since it was first published.
This page is not archived by the Wayback Machine, but fortunately Google still has a cache of the original version.Since a Google cache link is obviously not going to be good for long, I reproduce the entire summary below, with the changes shown in strikethrough and red.
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President Nelson at October General Conference: Let God Prevail, Embrace the Future, Live ‘a New Normal’
Prophet reminds Latter-day Saints that racism is “morally wrong” and contrary to God’s plan of happiness and His purpose of the gathering "God does not love one race above another," President Nelson said
Moving forward, embracing the future with faith, seeing turbulent times as opportunities to thrive spiritually and choosing to let God prevail in our lives. Those were some of the key messages shared by President Russell M. Nelson during the 190th semiannual conference of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
While President Nelson expressed joy for the opportunity and ability to gather virtually for the conference, he also expressed sorrow to all those impacted by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, natural disasters and other hardships.
“Through it all our Heavenly Father and His Son, Jesus Christ, love us! They care for us!” he said. “They and Their holy angels are watching over us.”
President Nelson added that despite the current commotion in the world, we can look to the future with joy as we turn to our Savior Jesus Christ.
“Let us not spin our wheels in the memories of yesterday. The gathering of Israel moves forward. The Lord Jesus Christ directs the affairs of His Church, and it will achieve its divine objectives.”
Are You Willing to Let God Prevail in Your Life?
During the Sunday morning session of the conference, President Nelson taught about the gathering of Israel and how that is related to our willingness to let God be the most important influence in our lives.
“The only way to survive spiritually is to be determined to let God prevail in our lives, to learn to hear His voice and to use our energy to help gather Israel,” he said.
During the address, President Nelson reiterated that God loves all of his children and emphasized that racism in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints cannot be tolerated.
“Let me be clear, brothers and sisters, any discrimination because of race is morally wrong and contrary to God’s plan of happiness for His children. It is also contrary to His very purpose of the gathering.”
"I assure you that your standing before God is not determined by the color of your skin. Favor or disfavor with God is dependent upon your devotion to God and His commandments and not the color of your skin."
As President Nelson taught saints to see themselves participating in the gathering of God’s children taking place right now, he issued this prophetic invitation:
“As you study your scriptures during the next six months, I encourage you to make a list of all that the Lord has promised He will do for covenant Israel. ... Ponder these promises. Talk about them with your family and friends. Then live and watch for these promises to be fulfilled in your own life.”
Embrace the Future With Faith
Speaking during the women’s session to women and young women ages 11 and up, President Nelson expressed his love and appreciation for all they have done to be everyday heroes during these difficult circumstances. He also reminded them of the Lord’s promise that “if ye are prepared, ye shall not fear” (Doctrine and Covenants 38:30) and urged all to take steps to be more temporally, spiritually and emotionally prepared.
He shared three principles to consider:
President Nelson taught, “Our ultimate security comes as we yoke ourselves to Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ! Life without God is a life filled with fear. Life with God is a life filled with peace.”
Live ‘a New Normal’
In his concluding address on Sunday afternoon, President Nelson acknowledged in today’s world we often hear the term “new normal.” But he invited disciples of Jesus Christ to embrace “a new normal” that includes turning one’s heart to God, repenting daily, ministering to and serving others, keeping an eternal perspective and living each day to be better prepared to meet God.
President Nelson announced plans to build six new temples before he ended the conference with this blessing of peace:
“I bless you to be filled with the peace of the Lord Jesus Christ. His peace is beyond all mortal understanding. I bless you with an increased desire and ability to obey the laws of God.” He continued, “I promise that as you do, you will be showered with blessings, including greater courage, increased personal revelation, sweeter harmony in your homes and joy, even amid uncertainty.”
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What does this mean? Here are the possibilities:
1. Since transcripts were not yet available, the article was prepared from notes and the quotes were therefore not verbatim. This is implausible. The fake Nelson quote is not at all similar in wording to anything that he actually said, and the article is full of other direct quotes which were perfectly accurate and did not need to be modified.
2. The article was prepared using scripts President Nelson had written prior to delivering his talks. When the talks were actually delivered, he followed his script until he came to the part about "racism" -- when he was suddenly moved by the Spirit to say something other than what he had originally planned.
3. An accurate script or transcript of President Nelson's remarks was available at the time the summary was written, but some fifth-columnist in Church employ deliberately and dishonestly modified the part about "racism," hoping no one would notice. Eventually someone did notice, and the falsehood was quietly corrected.
4. The original quote was correct, and it is the new version -- and the published transcript of the talk, and the accompanying video -- that has been dishonestly modified. This sounds like crazy conspiracy-theory talk, but, incredibly, I cannot rule it out. Watch the video (as I finally did, my curiosity overcoming my videophobia for once), and you'll find that the camera cuts to a new angle just before the four paragraphs I have quoted above (about "racism"), and then again just after them, so the video could conceivably have been edited. I find this possibility implausible as well, because it would imply that Nelson himself was directly involved in the deception, and because it seems like an awful lot of work to go through to replace one antiracist statement with another, slightly different one.
To any of my readers who may have watched the Conference live, what do you remember President Nelson saying? Which quote is correct?
UPDATE: Several family members and acquaintances who watched the Conference live and took notes have confirmed that the currently available version of the talk is correct; so far, only one person remembers differently. Commenter MC has also confirmed the correctness of the current version by showing that people posted quotes from it -- but not from the deleted version -- on Twitter in real time. Possibility 4 can be considered disproven.
Saying that in 2020 is like saying, in the midst of an ongoing Communist revolution, "We categorically condemn all exploitation of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie."
Well, exploitation should be condemned. And sometimes the middle class does exploit the working class. But in context -- the context of a triumphant evil movement that defines everything, including everything good and true, as the exploitation of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie -- what you're really saying is "Shoot more kulaks." Or, to paraphrase somewhat, "Hail Satan."
So that's how it is. If you make a point of categorically condemning "racism," no matter how defensible the literal content of your statement may be, I'm going to see it as a declaration of allegiance to the god of this world. And I'm not going to be wrong.
So I saw someone wearing this T-shirt today: "Being emotionally manipulative isn't very puny rock of you." (The photo's not very clear because it was night and because I had to take it without being conspicuous, but I saw it very clearly and am sure I have transcribed it correctly.)
I really couldn't figure it out. I imagined a movie or TV program where Dwayne "the Rock" Johnson is magically shrunk down a tiny size, after which he is known as "the Puny Rock," and later when he does or says something emotionally manipulative, someone criticizes his behavior as being out of character.
Finally I Googled the sentence and found what I really should have guessed -- that the original version, of which this is a mutant knockoff, says "punk rock." The original was apparently popularized by a K-pop star who wore it once.
(By the way, if pop music from Korea is called K-pop, what do you call rap music from California?)
I think we're sisters and brothers not from the fact that we went through something together but from the fact that we noticed.
-- Whitley Strieber addressing fellow close-enounter witnesses in Communion
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The proprietor of the Junior Ganymede, who wishes to be known only as "G," reports the following eerie occurrence:
I ordered a large expensive rechargeable battery last week. It cost several hundred dollars. Monday it came, I found it left outside on our door step. The box was a little crumpled, was an unusual size, and had a sticker on the side proclaiming that it was a battery. I remember looking at the sticker and thinking, huh, I didn’t think they let you ship batteries through the mail, I thought the sellers would have claimed it as ‘parts’ or something.
I came inside and put the box down on a side table without opening it. I didn’t need it right away. Then it slipped my mind.
Yesterday morning I did need it. But it was not on the side table.
We convened as a family, prayed, and then looked everywhere. I even went outside to the garbage bin in case it had been thrown away by one of the kids during their clean-ups. After all, the box was a bit crumpled, though the battery had enough heft that I didn’t think any one could carelessly think the box was empty.
No luck.
We prayed again, and looked again.
No luck. I left to work.
When I came home the battery was sitting on my desk charging.
You found it, I said. The wife and kids were sitting nearby.
Instant chorus in reply–No, no, no, it was delivered.
An hour or two before I came home the doorbell rang. My wife opened it to find a delivery man out there with a box. He said it was a battery and she needed to sign for it since it was an expensive, fragile part; they had to be extra particular. He advised her to handle with care.
She opened it and put it on to charge.
I went and looked at the box. It was the exact same box I saw on Monday, complete with the slight crumpling and the battery sticker on the outside. I hefted the battery. It was the same heft as I recalled.
A commenter, who uses the handle Handle, adds his own, similar experience:
Something almost identical happened to me about a month ago, in my case, it was a book. I held the book in my hand and put it on the counter. I came back and in was gone. I asked my family about it, if they had moved it, but they hadn’t seen it. I described it in detail, pointed to where I put it, said, “I was holding it in my hand right here,” mentioned the unfortunate position of the barcode sticker on the cover, and they witnessed me spending half an hour searching for it in the usual, and some unusual places. No luck. I figured it would turn up eventually, and anyway, I’ve always got a big backlog stack to work through. The next day, I get a stuffed-to-bursting padded envelope in the mail, take it to the same counter, open it, and glitch-in-the-matrix level deja by, it was exactly the scene I remembered. Freaked out, I dropped the book on the counter and took a step back, and that was exactly the scene I remembered too. Barcode sticker in the unfortunate place and everything. I yell, “it’s the book!” Wife dismisses this entirely, “you’re crazy”, son takes my side, “it’s exactly like he said, and he asked us for it, and was looking for it.” He is freaked out too, but also Bill and Ted style, “whoaaa, duuude.” Wife presents a thorough and comprehensive counterargument, with facts, evidence, and logic, just kidding, she just repeats, “you’re crazy”. Eerie is right.
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This reminded me of something I had read. It took me a while to track down, since I had mis-remembered it as coming from a book by Stan Gooch. I finally found it in Rupert Sheldrake's book The Sense of Being Stared At. Having previously written about Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home, Sheldrake turns to examples of similar abilities in human beings.
In some cases the person's arrival was preceded by a kind of apparition, or phantasm, as the Victorian psychic researchers would have called it. For example, Ann Greenberg, of Silton, Saskatchewan, Canada, was on holiday with her husband in the family cabin by a lake. One night her husband went out in the boat, but a storm blew up and he did not return.
I was alone in the cabin and very worried so I stayed awake until about 2:00 A.M., when I fell asleep on the couch. Some time later I heard my husband walk up from the dock and cross the deck to the front door. He opened the door, walked over to the couch, leaned over, and put both hands on my shoulders. Then I woke up. It was daylight, but my husband wasn't there. I looked at the clock, which read 5:00 A.M. An hour later he pulled into our bay, safe and sound. He described how he had anchored in a sheltered bay and slept in the boat. He had woken up to a calm lake and decided he could make it back. Before setting out, he'd checked his watch, which read 5:00 A.M. The bay where he'd sheltered is about an hour away by boat from our cabin.
This hearing of sounds in advance is well know in northern Scandinavia, as I discussed in Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home. In Norway there is even a special name for the phenomenon, vardøger, which literally means "warning soul." Typically, someone at home hears a person walking or driving up to the house, coming in, and hanging up his coat. Yet nobody is there. Some ten to thirty minutes later the person really arrives to similar sounds. People get used to it. Housewives put the kettle on as the vardøger arrives, knowing that their husbands will arrive soon.
Professor Georg Hygen, of Oslo University, investigated dozens of recent cases, and published an entire book on this subject. He concluded that the phenomenon is essentially telepathic rather than precognitive. In other words, the vardøger is not so much a pre-echo of what will happen in the future, but is related to a person's intentions. For one thing, the sounds are not always identical to those heard in advance. A person might be heard going up to the bedroom, whereas when he arrives he goes into the kitchen. Moreover, the vardøger phenomenon can still occur when a person does not in fact arrive, having changed his mind.
The Hygen book referred to is Vardøger: Vårt paranormale nasjonalfenomen (1987); no English translation appears to be available.
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| 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.
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| 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.
