The mystery of baschetti

Spellings vary . . .

I prefer the authentic Italian orthography.

Lots and lots of very young children mispronounce spaghetti by transposing the /s/ sound to the beginning of the second syllable. While Bil Keane renders this naively, by simply moving the letter s, giving us pasghetti, in fact every child I've known (including myself when I was very young), has pronounced it /bəˈskɛtɪ/ -- which in Italian spelling would be baschetti.

Why does the /p/ change into a /b/? Well, in fact it doesn't change at all -- but the rules of English phonetics mean that the same sound -- an unaspirated voiceless bilabial stop -- is heard as /p/ when it comes after /s/ but as /b/ when it begins a word. The so-called "voiced" (lenis) stops /b d g/ are actually voiceless in word-initial position, and are distinguishable from their "voiceless" (fortis) counterparts /p t k/ because the latter are aspirated. However, fortis stops lose their aspiration after /s/, so the distinction between the two is lost in that position. That's why disgust and discussed are homophones for most speakers, and why it's so easy to mishear Hendrix's "kiss the sky" as "kiss this guy." Sky is realized as [skaɪ], so when the /s/ is removed, it leaves guy [kaɪ] (not kie [kʰaɪ]). Thus, when the /s/ in spaghetti is moved, both the /p/ and the /g/ change their character, being heard as different phonemes in spite of not actually changing their sound. Hence baschetti.

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The question is, why do children only do this with the word spaghetti? It's common for children to simplify consonant clusters by simply omitting one of the consonants (as in myyo for smile), but spaghetti is the only word I'm aware of in which the /s/ is not omitted but transposed to a different part of the word. We might expect, by analogy with baschetti, that some children would pronounce spider as byster, for example, but they don't, as far as I know. Byder, yes; byster, no. Nor have I ever heard of a deskosaurus.

My best guess is that it has to do with spaghetti being stressed on the second syllable, and that the /s/ is being moved from an unstressed syllable to a stressed one. I can't think of any other common words where the first syllable is unstressed and begins with /s/ + a fortis stop, and the second syllable is stressed and begins with a lenis stop, which could explain why baschetti is the only one I've ever heard. Few little kids are likely to have words like stability and twenty-three skidoo in their vocabulary, so the hypothesis that they might pronounce them as daspility and twenny-fwee gistoo never gets to be tested.

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Update: Here are some stats on the relative frequency (measured in Google hits) of various spellings of this mispronunciation.

• pasghetti (32,900)
• pasgetti (21,700)
• bisgetti (20,700)
• pisgetti (17,800)
• pasketti (16,400)
• basghetti (14,000)
• basketti (9,260)
• bisghetti (8,660)
• basgetti (6,690)
• pisketti (4,240)

That's a total of 152,350 hits, which can be analyzed as follows.

• 61% begin with "p"; 39% begin with "b"
• 66% have "a" as the first vowel; 34% have "i"
• 44% have "g"; 36% have "gh"; 20% have "k"

The following spellings were not included in the analysis because most of the Google image search hits for them were not pictures of spaghetti. ("Pisghetti" arguably should have been included, since it mostly yielded pictures of a Curious George character called Chef Pisghetti, who is obviously named after the mispronounced pasta dish.)

• baschetti (252,000)
• bischetti (154,000)
• pisghetti (19,300)
• bisketti (17,800)
• paschetti (15,600)
• pischetti (2,790)

The Reaper of Marseille

At first glance, there appears to be little to say about L'Arcane sans nom; it's just the Grim Reaper, a standard-issue symbol of death. Actually, though, it differs from the familiar symbol in significant ways. Our modern Reaper is always shrouded in a hooded cloak of black, hiding everything from view except (usually) the skull face and the skeletal fingers that clutch the scythe. (I originally wrote "his" in the preceding sentence but we must remember that death is a feminine noun in all Romance languages and is personified as such; the Grim Reaper is La Faucheuse. Éliphas Lévi calls her "that old queen of the world who is on the march always and wearies never . . . the sordid mistress of our tearful valley.") The Reaper of Marseille is naked. The other striking difference is that, while we are accustomed to seeing the Reaper holding his (sorry, "her") scythe ominously, the Tarot card shows it actually being used to cut human beings to pieces.

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Where does the original Reaper symbol come from? The Bible compares death to sowing, not to reaping. "Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit" (John 12:24).

The earliest use of "reapers" in a death-like role is in the interpretation of the parable of the wheat and the tares (Matthew 13:36-43).

Then Jesus sent the multitude away, and went into the house: and his disciples came unto him, saying, "Declare unto us the parable of the tares of the field."

He answered and said unto them, "He that soweth the good seed is the Son of man; The field is the world; the good seed are the children of the kingdom; but the tares are the children of the wicked one; The enemy that sowed them is the devil; the harvest is the end of the world; and the reapers are the angels. As therefore the tares are gathered and burned in the fire; so shall it be in the end of this world. The Son of man shall send forth his angels, and they shall gather out of his kingdom all things that offend, and them which do iniquity; And shall cast them into a furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth. Then shall the righteous shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father. Who hath ears to hear, let him hear."

The theme "the reapers are the angels" is taken up again in Revelation 14:14-20, this time with much clearer reference to death.

And I looked, and behold a white cloud, and upon the cloud one sat like unto the Son of man, having on his head a golden crown, and in his hand a sharp sickle. 

And another angel came out of the temple, crying with a loud voice to him that sat on the cloud, "Thrust in thy sickle, and reap: for the time is come for thee to reap; for the harvest of the earth is ripe."

And he that sat on the cloud thrust in his sickle on the earth; and the earth was reaped. And another angel came out of the temple which is in heaven, he also having a sharp sickle.

And another angel came out from the altar, which had power over fire; and cried with a loud cry to him that had the sharp sickle, saying, "Thrust in thy sharp sickle, and gather the clusters of the vine of the earth; for her grapes are fully ripe." 

And the angel thrust in his sickle into the earth, and gathered the vine of the earth, and cast it into the great winepress of the wrath of God. And the winepress was trodden without the city, and blood came out of the winepress, even unto the horse bridles, by the space of a thousand and six hundred furlongs.

The blood coming out of the winepress makes it clear that "the vine of the earth" bears human "grapes" and that the reaping angel is killing them. Still, though, as in Matthew, "the harvest is the end of the world." The reaping angel is not a symbol of ordinary death, but of the mass slaughter preceding the second coming. The biblical sickle -- and, even more so, the larger scythe wielded by the Tarot and post-Tarot reapers -- is a tool for cutting a swath through a field, severing hundreds of individual stems with each swing. One never speaks of "mowing down" a single victim.

Also, in the Bible the reaping is done by angels, and even by the golden-crowned Son of Man sitting on a cloud -- not by animated skeletons.

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The animated skeletons (or nearly-skeletal corpses), which come to those Death has chosen and lead them away, are a familiar theme in medieval art -- the Danse Macabre or Totentanz -- but these personifications of death do not cut down their victims with scythes but rather take them by the arm and lead them away. They are rarely armed at all, and when they are, their weapon of choice is not necessarily the scythe. The Nameless Arcanum from the Visconti-Sforza deck has a skeleton with a longbow and arrow, for instance, striking from a distance like far-darting Apollo.

One theory is that both the change from angels to corpses and the introduction of the scythe occurred as a result of the Black Death, when corpses became a familiar sight and when people were indeed being "mown down" on a scale suggestive of the Apocalypse. By the time the plague had ended and regularly scheduled programming had been resumed, the image of Death as a scythe-wielding skeleton had become a permanent fixture of the popular imagination.

It has also been suggested that the Reaper's scythe originally belonged to Father Time -- who in turn got it from the harvest god Saturn, the conflation of Cronos/Saturn with the similarly named Chronos/Time having been a common error since antiquity. The identification may have been reinforced by the myth of Saturn devouring his own children, tying in with the image of time the devourer in Ovid:

Tempus edax rerum, tuque, invidiosa vetustas,
omnia destruitis vitiataque dentibus aevi
paulatim lenta consumitis omnia morte!

Thou glutton Time, and Age that envièth,
All things you wreck, and tear them with your teeth,
Consuming all, by slow degrees, in death.

Once the hybrid figure of Father Time has been created, bearing the hourglass of Chronos and the scythe of Cronos -- what can the latter implement be for if not to cut down those whose sand has run out? From that to the Grim Reaper is but a short step.

If the Reaper did in fact develop out of Father Time, it would make the Nameless Trump a close art-historical cousin to the Hermit, whose lantern was originally an hourglass and whose earliest names were Vecchio (Old Man) and Tempo (Time) -- a bit surprising given the stark contrast between that serene old man and this ghoulish hacker-to-bits!

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The image of the Reaper actually using her scythe -- and not only to kill but to dismember -- is, as far as I know, original to the Tarot and does not exist in pre-Tarot allegories of Death.

For me, the severed body parts that litter the ground are a key part of the meaning of this trump, and I have commented on them before, in relation to Marcus Aurelius's advice to aspiring nihilists Stoics to "look at the individual parts and move from analysis to indifference." Death is fundamentally a matter of severing connections, dissociating parts, de-composing -- which is why analysis can kill.

Four people in a meeting thinking about a Tyrannosaurus rex

The title pretty much says it all, I think.

I created this image (cobbled together from stock clipart, not my own draftsmanship) for my own inscrutable purposes and thought it had a certain charm that made it worth sharing.

Dice and the Tarot trumps: another approach

Having read my earlier posts on the subject (here and here), Kevin McCall has the following thoughts on mapping the Tarot trumps to rolls of the dice.

As far as the association of cards of the Major Arcana with dice rolls, it seems like another way into the system rather than an ordering of die rolls could be by considering the symbolism of the numbers 1 – 6 and then trying to associate each number and each pair with a card.  After reading about Pythagorean number symbolism and tarot symbolism, here are some of my thoughts (highly speculative):

I think the Air Hexactys is the best of the four, but perhaps with some modification:

We know the Magician is (1,1), Priestess is (1,2), World is (6,6) and Judgment is (5,6).  I think that 1 must mean magic or beginning, 2 female or passivity, 3 male or activity, 4 terrestrial but in a negative sense, 5 combining 2 and 3 as representing balance, and I think Opsopaus is right that 6 represents finality and the celestial.

In that case, the Magician (1,1) would be pure beginning
The Empress (2,2) would be pure feminine, and the Emperor (3,3) pure masculine.
Then, it makes sense that the Priestess is (1,2) for magic, feminine and then the Hierophant “should be” (1,3) for magic, masculine.  Then, the Lovers “should be” (2,3) for masculine and feminine coming together.

Justice “should be” (5,5) as complete balance.  The Chariot (3,5) combining activity, victory with balance and self-control.  The Hanged Man (1,6) at the apex of the pyramid makes sense because I think this card represents the midpoint and beginning (1) and ending (6) coming together.   Temperance should be (1,5) for wisdom combined with balance, i.e., good judgement.  Fortitude should be (2,5) for passive balance, resistance rather than the activity represented by the Chariot.

The Devil, Death, and the Tower should all have 4, since these are all cards with a negative connotation, i.e., “terrestrial” cards, with terrestrial in a pejorative sense.  Death as (4,4) as given in the Air Hexactys makes sense because if 4 represents change, time, corruption, then Death is of all the cards, most representative of this archetype.  I’m not as sure about the Devil and the Tower, but these could be (2,4) and (3,4) respectively, with the Devil being passive corruption, sin (in a “Luciferian” sense, as Steiner would put it) and the Tower combining a dramatic change (with 3 as activity) and 4 as change but in a destructive, harmful sense.  The Hermit as (1,4) can also make sense, in particular if Opsopaus’s version of the Hermit as Time is correct, in either case representing either beginning in an earthly sense, caused by time or a lonely search for wisdom in the world.

I think Opsopaus is right that the World, Sun, Moon, Star, Judgement, and Hanged Man are all celestial cards, so they should all have a six somewhere.  (3,6) for Sun makes sense because this would be masculine/celestial.  (2,6) for Star gives contemplative/celestial.  (4,6) for Moon would mean the moon is bridge between earthly and celestial.  And, the idea of the sublunary realm, with the sphere of the moon being the lowest heaven, the boundary between nature and the Heavens makes sense for this correspondence. 

We can view Judgement and Wheel of Fortune as a pair.  Judgement representing is perfectly fair and final judgement, while the Wheel of Fortune is arbitrary and fickle.  Fortune metes out rewards and punishments on earth, while Judgement does in Heaven.  Then, Fortune should be (4,5) corresponding to Judgement as (5,6).

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My comments:

McCall's approach here is similar to what I did in my post on the Tarot-astrology correspondences worked out by the Golden Dawn, which resulted in reordering the Justice and Strength cards. Before considering the accepted (Marseille) ordering of the Arcana and how to align it with the accepted (Sepher Yetzirah) ordering of the planets, signs, and elements, I looked at each card and considered what astrological correspondences, if any, seemed to make sense for it, irrespective of traditional ordering schemata. I could then evaluate the Golden Dawn mappings against these "natural" correspondences. Dice-Tarot mappings like those given by McCall here, based on qualitative considerations without taking into account the order of the trumps or the ranking of rolls, could play a similar role vis-à-vis the various systems I have been examining, helping to choose among the four Hexactyses (and, for that matter, among the various historical orderings of the trumps, of which the now-standard Marseille sequence is just one; Opsopaus's original Fire and Water Hexactyses were in fact applied to a variant of the Ferrara sequence).

Regarding the specific mappings proposed by McCall, I am in broad agreement with him as to the basic symbolic meaning of 1, 2, 3, and 6. However, the traditional meaning of 4 is rest, stability, stasis -- quite far from McCall's "change, time, corruption." (Interestingly, despite our near-opposite understandings of 4, we are agreed that it is appropriately mapped to Death -- which can be seen either as the ultimate change or as final rest.) I also have trouble accepting 5 as "complete balance"; For an odd number to represent balance is, well, odd. Five more often represents disruption, breakdown, crisis -- but also creativity, novelty, transcendence. Basically, it's something completely different being added to the stable arrangement represented by 4 and shaking things up.

By the way, while McCall thinks the symbolism of 2 and 3 as feminine and masculine means that 3-3 "should be" the Emperor, but I find the Triumphal Chariot even more appropriate. The charioteer is just as much a man as the emperor is, and I find the achieved status of the conquering hero to be far more archetypically masculine than the ascribed status of a passive throne-sitter.

I'll probably revisit this idea later and consider what numerical associations seem, irrespective of "ordering" considerations, most natural and appropriate to me.

My metal detector is with me all of the time.

As the attentive reader may have inferred from my frequent references to him in recent posts, I have been rereading John Opsopaus's Pythagorean Tarot. In the early days of the Web, Opsopaus's was one of the very first sites to deal in any detail with the Tarot, and so when a random hunch moved me to google altavista "tarot," Opsopaus's highly idiosyncratic hand-drawn versions, together with the formidably erudite commentary accompanying them, served as my introduction to the cards. Later the content of the site was published as a deck of cards with a 480-page handbook, which I eventually bought a decade or so later, more for old times' sake and as a gesture of appreciation than anything else. The cards themselves are not much to my taste, and that lack of rapport makes actually reading with them out of the question, but I do dip into the book and its parent website from time to time.

Today, while I was reading Opsopoaus's commentary on the sixth Arcanum -- called by him, in accordance with the pre-Marseille tradition of Italy, not "The Lover(s)" but simply "Love" -- a song suddenly came into my head which I hadn't listened to in years, one that was released in the same year that the original Pythagorean Tarot website was published: "Metal Detector" by They Might Be Giants.

The song is about a guy at the beach who is ignoring everything around him -- seashells, seagulls, volleyball games, "bathing beauty dolls" -- because he's completely focused on using his metal detector to find things underground. "I've got something to help you understand," he says, and "then everything on the top will just suddenly stop seeming interesting." And this is his whole life: "My metal detector is with me all of the time."

What made me think of that? Well, here's an excerpt of what Opsopaus has to say about Love:

This is no ordinary marriage, but an alchemical conjunction of brother and sister. Upon its consummation the masculine poles (consciousness, thought, intuition) will be destroyed, dissolved in the subconscious mother sea; this represents the dissolution that must precede the rejuvenation of the masculine elements. The divine child will consume the mother's substance while it grows in her womb, and she will die in birth, thus obliterating the feminine poles (unconsciousness, feeling, sensation). The child, however, will survive, and manifest a well-tempered balance of all oppositions, thus reincarnating both parents.

To paraphrase William Blake: Children of a future age, reading this indignant page, know that in a former time, Love, sweet Love, was thought a metaphor for some sort of abstract Jungian-alchemical rigmarole! The Tarot is, ultimately, a tool for examining and contemplating the human condition in all its various aspects. When such bedrock human realities as Love are being used as fodder for symbolical schemata, we seem to have entered Metal Detector land, where all natural, human meaning is nothing but a distraction from the real business of finding something shiny and inorganic under the surface.

Regular readers will of course be well aware that my metal detector is with me all of the time, too, and the main purpose of this post is to serve as a reminder to myself -- of what has real value, and what will in the end be cast to the moles and to the bats.

The linear ranking of dice rolls

Trying to judge the relative merits of the four possible systems (described here) for mapping dice rolls to Tarot trumps, I tried to find historical examples of the rolls of two or more dice being mapped to a linear series.

Remembering that John Opsopaus had mentioned (here) that "San Bernadino's sermon of 1243 draws an analogy between the 21 rolls of two dice and the 21 letters of the (medieval) Roman alphabet," I tried to track down the sermon in question (which turns out to be Contra Alearum Ludos, actually delivered in 1423 by St. Bernardino of Siena) to see in what order the rolls had been assigned to the letters of the alphabet. Opsopaus cites an article by M. G. Kendall (qv), which quotes Bernardino as follows: "Missale vero taxillum, esse volo: [. . .] in eius missali solum alphabetum, hoc est viginti una literae comprehendantur, ac totidem puncta in decio concludantur." Kendall translates the last bit as "just as that missal is composed of a single alphabet of twenty-one letters, so in the [game of] dice there are twenty-one throws," and comments, "The twenty-one possible throws are undoubtedly those with two dice." I find this interpretation unconvincing. Bernardino is comparing the missal to a single die (taxillum), and puncta obviously refers to the points on the die rather than to the number of possible throws of two dice. (Each face of a die is marked with a different number of points, from one to six, and 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 = 21). So, not only does Bernardino not list specific mappings from rolls to letters, but it seems unlikely to me that he had possible rolls of the dice in mind at all.

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I had a bit more luck with an article by Fritz Graf (qv) on Greek oracular texts used in astragalomancy (the rolling of four-sided "dice" -- actually tali, the knucklebones of animals, with sides numbered 1, 3, 4, and 6 --  as a form of divination). The standard method was to roll five tali (5d4, to use D&D terminology), for a total of 56 possible rolls, and the texts list these possible rolls as a numbered list. While we're more interested in the 21 possible rolls of 2d6, these astragalomantic texts are still useful as an indication of how the ancients put dice rolls in linear order.

The first thing to notice is that the rolls are ordered according to their total value. Any roll that totals 15, for example, "outranks" -- i.e., corresponds to a higher number on the list than -- any roll that totals 14. This is a point against the "Fire" and "Water" systems of Opsopaus, discussed here, which rank rolls according to the value of the highest or lowest die rather than the total.

Among rolls with the same total, the ranking system is not so clear. Here are the relevant data (the asterisk marks a lacuna in the text, incorrectly restored by Graf and corrected by myself):

• 11134 > 11116
• 11144 > 11333
• 11136 > 11334
• 11344* > 13333 > 11164
• 11444 > 11336 > 13334
• 11346 > 33333 > 11166 > 13344
• 13444 > 33334 > 11446 > 13336
• 14444 > 33344 > 13346 > 11366
• 33336 > 33444 > 13446 > 11466
• 33346 > 34444 > 14446 > 13366
• 11666 > 33446 > 13466 > 44444
• 33366 > 34446 > 14466
• 33466 > 44446 > 13666
• 34466 > 14666
• 44466 > 33666
• 16666 > 34666

I can't make head or tail of this and almost suspect that there is no system to be discovered, that rolls with the same total are listed in arbitrary order. Looking at the first line above, 11134 outranks 11116; eliminating the three aces that the two rolls have in common, we can infer that 3-4 outranks 1-6. This suggests the "Earth" system, where rolls with the same total are ranked according to the Low. (See this post for an explanation of the terminology.) However, in the next two lines we can see that 1-4-4 outranks 3-3-3, and 1-3-6 outranks 3-3-4, which is inconsistent with that system.

I'll spend a little more time looking at the list in Graf's paper to try and find some pattern to the rankings. At any rate, the focus on the Sum first seems to support either the Air or the Earth Hexactys, as opposed to the systems proposed by Opsopaus.

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Update: I went back through the astragalomantic oracle text and examined all the pairs of rolls that have the same total and three tali with the same value -- in other words, pairs of rolls that are identical except that one has 1-6 where the other has 3-4. There are 20 such pairs. For 15 of the pairs, 3-4 outranks 1-6.

• 111-34 > 111-16
• 114-34 > 114-16
• 116-34 > 116-16
• 144-34 > 144-16
• 333-34 > 333-16
• 334-34 > 334-16
• 136-34 > 136-16
• 344-34 > 344-16
• 146-34 > 146-16
• 336-34 > 336-16
• 444-34 > 444-16
• 346-34 > 346-16
• 446-34 > 446-16
• 366-34 > 366-16
• 466-34 > 466-16

For the remaining five, 1-6 outranks 3-4.

• 113-16 > 113-34
• 133-16 > 133-34
• 134-16 > 134-34
• 166-16 > 166-34
• 666-16 > 666-34

I can't for the life of me figure out what makes these five different. I've tried everything I can think of, including poker-style rankings (seeing if, for example, three of a kind always outranks two pair or vice versa), but there just doesn't seem to be any pattern. My tentative conclusion is that my initial impression was right, and that rolls with the same total are listed in arbitrary order.

The root trumps of the Air Hexactys

In the previous post, I discuss the idea that each of the 21 Tarot trumps originally corresponded to a particular roll of two dice and look at four possible systems of trump-dice mappings. Since John Opsopaus has already discovered two of them and dubbed them the Fire Hexactys and the Water Hexactys, I have used the other two classical elements to give corresponding names to the remaining two systems. Here I want to look in more detail at the system that seems to me to be both the most natural one: the Air Hexactys -- illustrated below using the Jodorowsky-Camoin version of the classical Tarot de Marseille trumps.

In the diagram above, the cards are laid out in 11 columns corresponding to the 11 possible values of a roll of two dice (from 2 to 12). Where two or more rolls have the same value, they are ranked according to the higher of the two numbers rolled. (Thus, for example, in the third column, the roll 1-3 outranks 2-2 and is placed above it in the diagram.)

The cards in the bottom row of the diagram correspond to the six doubles, from "snake eyes" on the left to double sixes on the right. These six trumps, then, indicate the basic meaning or character to be associated with each of the six faces of the dice; and the 15 remaining trumps represent combinations of these six basic elements.

For any trump in the diagram, following the two diagonal paths down to the bottom row will lead us to the two "root trumps" whose meanings it combines. Take, for example, the 8th trump, called Justice, corresponding to the roll 2-4. Following the diagonal path down and to the left leads us to 2-2, the Empress; following the other diagonal down and to the right leads us to 4-4, the trump with no name ("Death"). Justice, corresponding to a roll that combines 2 and 4, should represent some combination of the symbols and ideas found on the Empress and Death cards -- and such proves to be the case. Like the Empress, Justice depicts a woman seated on a high-backed throne, the shape of which is suggestive of a pair of wings; unlike the Empress, though, this woman is armed with a sword -- a deadly weapon corresponding to the Grim Reaper's scythe. In fact, it turns out that all three of the trumps that depict deadly weapons (the other two being the Lover and the Wheel of Fortune) are arranged in a diagonal line leading to Death. Likewise, all the trumps featuring crowned males are connected to the Chariot.

Many other such connections are evident.

The Hermit card depicts an old man carrying a lantern, and the dice connect it to the Magician and the Moon. The hermit is a wizardly figure -- another type of "magician" -- and his lantern indicates that he is traveling by night. The only person who ever carried a lantern by day was Diogenes the Cynic, known as "the Dog." Either way, the Moon card, with its night scene featuring dogs, is indicated.

The Wheel of Fortune is connected to the Chariot and Death. A chariot of course has wheels, and the charioteer wears a crown like the sphinx on the wheel. The sphinx's sword matches the Reaper's scythe, and in a broader sense both the Wheel and Death represent the ultimate futility of everything, and how people rise only to fall in the end.

The Tower -- which depicts a tower being destroyed and people falling to their deaths -- connects to Death and the Moon. The Moon card features towers.

Strength (a woman controlling a wild animal) connects to the Empress (a woman in control) and the Moon (wild animals).

The Pope has a crown and scepter (ferula) like the charioteer, and the two monks in front of him are in the same positions as the charioteer's horses. Like the empress (but unlike the charioteer and the emperor), he holds his scepter in his left hand.

The Hanged Man occupies a special position, at the apex of the triangle, and is linked to its two other corners, the Magician and the World. He is dressed in motley, as is the magician. His legs are in the same position as those of the dancer of the World, and like her he is surrounded by a stylized representation of the zodiac.

The ease with which these and other connections jump out at me from the diagram, suggests that the Air Hexactys constitutes a meaningful arrangement of the trumps and will repay further contemplation.