This post completed Nov. 19, 2017.
Christian conceived the 22 major arcana as initiatory teachings, part of an initiation; its other stages tested the candidate's will power, ability to overcome fear in the face of danger and temptation, and the discipline to maintain his bearings beyond the actual initiation (the women temptresses after he has been congratulated on his success). The framework could be expected to have influenced the 22 instructions themselves and normalized them as parts of the same process. What I want to do here is to look at the 22 in the context of the historical development of the tarot and in relationship to historical conceptions of Egyptian wisdom during this time period. Do the images historically suggest an Egyptian context, and if so, has Christian made that interpretation explicit, or has he altered it in fundamental ways? The same question can be posed to his successors Falconnier and Papus. Also, to the extent that Christian made alterations, are they improvements, either morally or historically, in what should be part of an Egyptian-oriented initiation experience?
For me this last is a difficult and complex question. For example, we might ask, at what age is this initiation supposed to take place? What a young person needs to know might be different from what an older person needs. Or perhaps not; perhaps it is just that certain steps are more important for a young person, and others for an older person, or else done in a different way. In Mozart's opera the candidates are young and unmarried. But not all who come to the tarot-reader are like that.
Another issue is the historical context. As I outlined in my previous post, Christian was writing at a time when France had recovered from the Napoleonic debacle and was the preeminent continental power in Europe. Under the leadership of Emperor Napoleon III, it was rapidly renovating Paris and expanding its banking and credit system so as to facilitate rapid industrial advances. At the same time it was expanding its territory in Europe and beyond. As part of a deal to force Austria out of Italy, it annexed the duchy of Savoy and the county of Nice. Likewise it was expanding the territory under its control around the world, especially in Africa, where Christian had first-hand experience as secretary to a commander of French forces.. It was as though the French Revolution had triumphed after all, and Napoleon I's losses to some extent recouped. Then came the debacle of the Franco-Prussian War, initiated by France but won easily by Prussia. France lost part of its industrial base to the newly created state of Germany, which was continuing to threaten French supremacy. Papus and Falconnier were writing in that new political context of French weakness. Did that affect their perception of the tarot as an initiatory teaching?
Similarly there are two main periods in Egypt: one when Egypt, due to its geographical isolation, was relatively free from foreign domination, and another when it was continuously occupied by foreign powers, Persia, then Greece, then Rome (and before Persia, the Hyksos, whom the Egyptians drove out). The Egypt of the pyramids and obelisks is one thing, and that of the Corpus Hermeticum and the Greco-Roman writings about Egypt quite another. What Europeans learned about Egypt was mainly from the Greeks and Romans; yet they presumed that these teachings had originated in Egypt itself.
We must also bear in mind our own historical situation. The 20th century was the bloodiest in history for European-based civilization, a condition that was also inflicted on the rest of the world both before and after the bloodbaths. European civilization's dominance is threatened now by the "emerging nations" of Asia, to which Africa and to some extent South America are slowly shifting their resources, away from Europe and North America. To that extent the European-based industrial nations are in the position of France vis a vis Germany at the end of the 19th century. The question of initiation becomes what do we need to know, and maybe to experience, to live honorably and morally in this present situation?
With these concerns in mind I approach the 22 teachings contained in the 22 frescoes that Christian imagines. It seems to me that the first four can be viewed as a unit, based on the summary he provides in L'Histoire immediately after his account of them separately (unaccountably absent from the English translation, retaining only the keywords, inserted at the beginning of each of the 22 teachings).. Here again are the first four.. I do not think these four steps are original with Christian, as I have read something similar in one of Singleton's notes to his translation of the Divine Comedy; but I have not had opportunity to search for it.)
The 1st is called the Magus, and symbolizes the Will.In other words, first one sets one's purpose, then one gains the available knowledge needed to guide one's action. Then one begins the action, and finally accomplishes it. This is a generalization of a process that applies to something as simple as opening a door or as complex as writing a book. In Christian's particular case, the goal seems to be no less than the attainment of immortality.
The 2nd is called the Portal of the Occult Sanctuary, and symbolizes the Knowledge [Fr. science also = Science] that must guide the Will.
The 3rd is called Isis-Urania, and symbolizes the Action that the will must manifest, united to the knowledge [Fr. science also = science].
The 4th is called the Cubic Stone, and symbolizes the Realization of human acts, the work accomplished.
It may be that these four steps are related to the four principles that Christian denoted by the letters I, N, R, and I again, which I quoted in my first post. For convenience here they are again.
1 ° JAMIN (1), symbolizes the active creative principle, and the manifestation of power which fertilizes substance [i.e. matter].The first I is the creative principle; that sounds similar to arcanum I, "the Will, principle of action". The N is matter, which receives the impulse; this corresponds to our human, embodied consciousness receiving the divine Ideas in the form of knowledge. The R is "the union of the two", spirit and matter; this corresponds to the stage of action .The second I is the creative principle again, on a higher level, and also the result of the union, i.e. "the created form". The latter corresponds to "the work accomplished". However by itself the accomplishment is not the creative principle again, which seems like another step. So the two (or three) sets of principles are not exactly parallel. But we will see how it works out in practice. It may be that the "realization" is also a "creative principle".
2 ° NAIN (N), symbolizes the passive principle, mold of all the forms that the substance assumes. [In Histoire he leaves out the last four words.]
3 ° IRON (R), symbolizes the eternal transformation of the modes of life. [In Histoire he says, "the union of these two principles and the perpetual transformation of created things.]
4 ° JAMIN (1), symbolizes again, by its return, the active creative principle to which the creative force emanating from it is constantly rising. [In L'Histoire, it is "...symbolizes again the divine creative principle, signifying that the creative force which is emanated from it ceaselessly returns to it and springs from it again", as published in the English translation.]
The sequence of these four hierograms expresses the idea contained in the DIVINE UNITY, and their circular evolution: INRI .. NRI ... NRI ... etc., represents the perpetual movement that creates the infinite of the possible.
The situation may or may not get convincingly resolved by Papus, whose four-letter word for God was not INRI but JHVH. The difference is that it is the second letter that repeats and not the first, so that to be consistent, the following level of meaning is based not on the "creative principle" in the first, but rather the reflex of that, the material on which the creative principle is to be imprinted. In that way, if the first member of the next series is the same as the last member of the preceding series, it can be the passive H as well as the active J
1. "The Magus [Magician, Bateleur, Bagatella]
For each card, starting with the Magus, I will show three versions: first, Falconnier/Wegener's, because it usually follows Christian's specifications the most closely (although not in the first card, I don't think), second Wirth's, done originally for Papus's 1889 book, although its most artistic rendition was in 1927, and third, the Waite/Smith, as the most familiar of the occult tarots that have some connection with Christian's ideas.
The 1st is called the Magus, and symbolizes the Will.
A-1 expresses in the divine world the absolute Being who contains and from whom flows the infinity of all possible things: in the intellectual world, Unity, the principle and synthesis of numbers; the Will, principle of action: in the physical world, Man, the highest of all living creatures, called upon to raise himself, by a perpetual expansion of his faculties, into the concentric spheres of the Absolute.This is all very uplifting, until you think about the state of the world since Christian's time. It is marked by periodic devastating clashes of will, each one claiming to be in the name of truth and justice, with no end in sight. Mastery over the physical world, which in the 19th century was really getting into gear, is now crushing that world under our collective boots, until it is starting to fight back in the increasing number of natural disasters. And to what extent are we to "promote good and prevent evil"? That covers a multitude of sins. It seems to me that the task of wisdom teachings, now as at many times in the past, is to reflect on the vanity of human pretensions, including that of knowing what is best for others.
Arcanum I is represented by the Magus, the type of the perfect man, in full possession of his physical and moral faculties. He is represented standing upright, in the attitude of will proceeding to action. He wears a white robe, image of purity. His belt is a serpent biting its tail: the symbol of eternity. His forehead is enclosed in a fillet of gold, signifying light; this expresses the continuum in which all created things revolve. The Magus holds in his right hand a golden sceptre, image of command, raised towards the heavens in a gesture of aspiration towards knowledge, wisdom and power; the index finger of the left hand points to the ground, signifying that the mission of the perfect man is to reign over the material world. This double gesture means that human will ought to be the earthly reflection of the divine will, promoting good and preventing evil.
Before the Magus on a cubic stone are placed a goblet, a sword and a shekel—a golden coin in whose centre a cross is engraved. The goblet signifies the mixture of passions contributing to happiness or misfortune, according to whether we are their masters or their slaves. The sword symbolises labour, the striving that overcomes obstacles and the tests that pain makes us undergo. The shekel is the image of aspirations fulfilled, works accomplished, the apex of power attained by perseverance and will-power. The cross, seal of the infinite with which the shekel is engraved, announces the future ascent of that power into the spheres of the future.
Falconnier's card is a bit muted compared with Christian's description, in that the Magician's arm is not raised upwar. It seems to me that Waite's card is closest to the spirit of Christian's account. It conveys by dramatic gestures the intensity of the Magus's will, next to which Wegener's hardly does Christian justice. Perhaps this difference is related to a greater optimism about human potentiality: Britain had not had the defeat experienced by France.
Here is a sample of Christian's language: "Masters...striving...apex of power. .perseverance and will-power". Where does all this emphasis on the will and power come from?
In Histoire he cites the authority of the Poimandres (using its old spelling of "Pymander"), part of the Corpus Hermeticum, which he attributes to the Egyptians' "lawgiver Hermes-Thoth" from before the time of the pharaohs. Christian says it is one of a few fragments not "destroyed in the Egypt revolutions", that is, when the military class instituted rule of the pharaoh instead of the Magi. He says that Hermes-Thoth teaches that (translation p. 57):
The man who triumphs over sensual temptations increases his mental faculties; God gives his measure of light in proportion to his merits, and progressively allows him to penetrate the most profound mysteries of life.Then, when when his body is given up to the realm of matter, his spirit is free to ascend through the "seven concentric circles that envelop the terrestrial system."
The Poimandres does indeed say these things, even if Christian's translation is rather free. But Christian seems to be going further than this. The Poimandres does not speak of gaining the power to "reign over the material world", as opposed to merely separating from it, nor of "overcoming obstacles to achieve "the apex of power".
Looking further into the Corpus, I find that Tractate XIII speaks of the soul's achieving "justice" by "expelling injustice". But here it one's own justice and injustice that are meant: "With injustice gone, my child, we have been made just (Copenhaver trans. p. 51). Making ourselves just is not the same as "promoting justice and preventing evil" without qualification, in the way, for example, that a ruler might, invade a neighboring country to remove its unjust tyrant, or a revolution might remove an unjust king. This text is drawing on Plato's concept of "justice in the soul" as opposed to "justice in the state", that is, the rule of reason over the passions.
In the not too distant past of 2nd Empire France is the memory of the French Revolution, and after that, Napoleon I's grand march across Europe, crossing frontier after frontier. Before that, Rousseau had talked about the "general will" and the state as properly a reflection of that will. The French revolution thus appears as "the will of the people". In Christian's day Napoleon III sought to legitimize his rule by means of plebiscites - only in the beginning, of course. His declaration of war against Prussia was also by the will of this "people", after which France sought revenge in World War I, and so on ad infinitum. Christian has spiritualized this image to some extent, but it is still directed outward, toward the physical world. Does it include conquering Algeria so as to bring French values to its people? Where does it stop? Without further limitations, Christian's "justice" could extend as far as "justice in the universe" or even "justice in the three worlds"!
Another thing that strikes me is that neither of these figures expresses the meaning of the card in the divine world, that of "the absolute Being who contains and from which flows the infinity of all possible things." Falconnier has a comet; but that is not "the infinity of all possible things", it merely "signifies that the true Mage is the messenger of God." Well, yes, many people say that they are the messenger of God. For me it is an indication that the person has an exalted image of himself or herself.
I should also mention the card's earliest title, as given in the sermons of an anonymous preacher, the Sermones de Ludo Cum Aliis (http://www.tarotpedia.com/wiki/Sermones_de_Ludo_Cum_Aliis). It was called "El Bagatella", with the comment "the lowest of all". "Bagatella" at that time had two main meanings; one designated a professional illusionist; the other meant "trifle". I suspect that part of the reason he was put first, i.e. lowest, had to do with the double meaning,.
Looking at the card, we see no up-down movement of the hands. Rather than energy, he expresses weariness. I don't think that relates to Egypt in particular, but it might have to do with God's weariness with humanity, as I will explain.
Even this early, the four suit objects are spread out on his table, but as objects in a magic show, not of magical power except in a make-believe sense. People like the tarot figure were commonly seen at fairs or on market day drumming up a crowd that will stay to listen to a pitch about the benefits of some patent medicine.
In ta very weak sense, the association to patent medicine connects him to Egypt. The Greek writer Diodorus Siculus. Diodorus says of a god he calls Apollo that he learned "medicine and divination." from his mother Isis (I.25.7, at http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Diodorus_Siculus/1A*.html). The god is obviously Horus. There is also the Hermetic work Asclepius, known in Latin translation throughout the Middle Ages. Asclepius was the Greek god of healing, son of Apollo.
As a magician, of course, he is directly associable to Thoth, Egyptian god of magic. That is why the ibis is on Falconnier's Magus's chair. The Renaissance understood this aspect of Thoth, whom the Greeks often called Hermes, clearly enough, not only as a god of magic but in the person of Hermes Trismegistus, supposed author of the Corpus Hemeticum, a work often referred to by ancient writers in Latin and thought but now newly arrived in Italy from Greece in the mid-15th century.
But Christian also says of this card that it denotes, on one level, "the absolute Being who contains and from whom flows the infinity of all possible things". Is there anything in this earliest example of the card to suggest that characterization?
I think there are two things: first, the wide-brimmed hat; second, the suit-objects on the table.
First the hat. Such elaborate headgear had been in fashion earlier, judging from Renaissance art of the 1420s and 1430s. Perhaps it was still worn on special occasions. By 1450 it was out of fashion, but it might have been suitable for a performer to wear in order to attract attention: rather like a tuxedo and top-hat in magic shows of the early to mid 20th century (and there is also the comic strip hero "Mandrake the Magician" (https://hubpages.com/literature/Mandrake-The-Magician-Comics-First-Superhero).
In the case of the PMB Bagatella, there a resemblance to the horns of a certain Egyptian goat-headed god named Khnum or ram-headed god named Amon or Amon-Re. It is hard to tell them apart. both had wavy horizontal horns, The one below looks like a goat to me, because of the little goatee beneath the chin.
At one time, I think, the circle between the vertical horns would have been painted red. If so, that would connect it not only with the PMB figure's hat but also that of the TdM version.
For
the significance of the ram or goat god, the Renaissance had Herodotus
as a source. About the god with the head of a ram he said (Histories II
42, at http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0126%3Abook%3D2&force=y; the comment in brackets is mine, from a footnote at that site):
The Thebans, and those who by the Theban example will not touch sheep, give the following reason for their ordinance: they say that Heracles [Herodotus' name for the god Shu, a footnote tells us] wanted very much to see Zeus and that Zeus did not want to be seen by him, but that finally, when Heracles prayed, Zeus contrived [4] to show himself displaying the head and wearing the fleece of a ram which he had flayed and beheaded. It is from this that the Egyptian images of Zeus have a ram's head; and in this, the Egyptians are imitated by the Ammonians, who are colonists from Egypt and Ethiopia and speak a language compounded of the tongues of both countries. [5] It was from this, I think, that the Ammonians got their name, too; for the Egyptians call Zeus “Amon”. The Thebans, then, consider rams sacred for this reason, and do not sacrifice them.
So in Egypt the king of the gods had the head of a ram. On the
other hand, in Lower Egypt, at the town of Mendes, it was goats that
were not sacrificed.
All that have a temple of Zeus of Thebes or are of the Theban district sacrifice goats, but will not touch sheep. [2] For no gods are worshiped by all Egyptians in common except Isis and Osiris, who they say is Dionysus; these are worshiped by all alike. Those who have a temple of Mendes or are of the Mendesian district sacrifice sheep, but will not touch goats.
By
inference, it is the goat-god that is worshiped there, to the same
effect. In other words, the original "goat of Mendes", as Eliphas Levi
described his famous picture resembling a Devil, is that pictured
above
Khnum here is obviously a creator-god, in particular the one who shapes the human body on his potter's wheel.
In the excerpts from otherwise lost ancient Hermetica contained in a work by the ancient anthologizer Strobaeus, there is one, Excerpt 23 in Scott's translation (vol. 1 p. 475), in which Hermes himself gets the job of forming the human body. Originally, the dialogue relates, the God of all gave the souls the job of forming bodies for themselves out of a mixture of water and earth, in which he had breathed in a certain life-giving spirit. Instead, they created all the various animals and set themselves up as creator-gods. The "god of all" wanted to punish the souls for their audacity, by imprisoning them in matter. He gave the job of fashioning the material organism to Hermes (Scott trans., vol. 1 pp. 473, 475):
"And I," said Hermes, "sought to find out what material I was to use, and I called upon the Sole Ruler, and he commanded the souls to hand over the residue of the mixture. But when I received it, I found that it was quite dried up. I therefore used much water for mixing with it; and when I had thereby renewed the liquid consistency of the stuff, I fashioned bodies out of it. And the work of my hands was fair to view, and I was glad when I looked on it. And I called on the Sole Ruler to inspect it, and he saw it, and was glad; and he gave the order that the souls should be embodied."The result of course was much wailing and weeping on the part of the souls thus imprisoned, but they could do nothing about it.
From this perspective, Khnum now drops out in favor of Hermes/Thoth as the potter god. It is also an example of how the Magician as Hermes combines the elements, or at least two of them.
Strobaeus' anthology of excerpts from Greek works was a another of those authors first known in the West during the 1400s. WorldCat shows him as an author in works published from 1521. According to Wikipedia the first full edition of the relevant portion (on "physics") was in 1575. While some excerpts were published in Latin translation in that century, I do not know when this part was translated. But by then there were many who could read Greek and translate for themselves what they found that was of interest to them.
Another set of images, at right above, is from the so-called "Bembine Tablet", a Roman-era piece of carved ivory that was acquired in 1527 by the famous Venetian humanist Pietro Bembo. From the date 1627 it is assumed that the piece had been taken as loot in the "Sack of Rome" by troops of Emperor Charles V in that year. So it might have been known by some in the Italian Renaissance before 1527. This one has a ram with the requisite horns plus various priests with those horns on their headpieces, which I think makes them devotees of the ram-headed god Amon
The crucial fact is that such images could have been known even in
the time and place of the first card, because it is where Ciriaco
d'Ancona spent his last days, the early 1450s. He was in Cremona, where and when the PMB was originally done. Ciriaco had visited Egypt three times, getting
as far as the Cairo area, sketching antiquities as he went. Upon his
return he shared what he had found with the rulers of the Italian
states, e.g. Leonello d'Este of Ferrara in 1449.
Francesco Sforza
and Bianca Maria Visconti, Duke and Duchess of Milan and commissioners
of the cards, were also there, escaping an outbreak of
plague in Milan; Ciriaco surely would have given his talk and
shown his sketches. By then he had written six volumes of illustrated commentaries about Greece
and Egypt . Most were later destroyed in a fire at Pesaro, where they had
been handed down to another Sforza who ruled that region. A few became
famous before that: a giraffe, for sure, and probably other African
animals, but nothing of Egyptian antiquities.
Modern Egyptology says that it was a ram-god that was worshiped at Mendes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banebdjedet).
So our inference, apparently shared by Levi and others, would be wrong
(but notice the similarity between "Benabjedet" and Levi's "Baphomet").
It was also the Ba soul of Osiris. But that would not have been known in the 19th century.
As for Amon, he became Amon-Ra (or Amun-Re), both the principal god and the main creator god of the Egyptian
pantheon for a long period, although only at Thebes by the time of
Herodotus. His temple in Libya was famous for a visit by Alexander the
Great, where the latter was declared "son of Amon".
The relief shown earlier of Khnum as potter-god creating a human is inside an auxiliary temple behind the main one at Dendera. On the outside of the large temple there are several figures with human heads and horizontal horns similar to those in the Bembine Tablet. On top below (with the blue sky on the side) is one example, next to an Isis or Hathor that some have said was meant to depict Cleopatra, the one who was the last pharaoh, albeit of purely Greek descent. Below it I give an interior relief that shows better what might have been there before someone, probably early Christians, chiseled on the
faces of the two people. This one has a child standing next to the woman
and suckling. It has been speculated that this is meant to be
Caesarion, Cleopatra's son by Julius Caesar. I do not know who the mature male would be in both scenes; perhaps it is Caesarion again, or possibly a brother of Cleopatra's. 
These would have been visible to anyone who cared to disembark and walk the short distance up to the temple. Here is what it looks like today, but I can't imagine that it was much different five centuries ago.
There could then be sketches or rubbings of whatever was accessible, to be sold to tourists. By the 17th century, the time of the PMB, I would expect that a few travelers had made the trip themselves and surely made sketches of what they saw. .
Even in the 15th century there were tourists to Egypt interested in the antiquities, although what took them there was trade. One such was Ciriaco d'Ancona, of particular interest because he did his own sketches of monuments he came to; he never got further up the Nile than the environs of Cairo, but that does not mean he could not have seen sketches done by others to meet what would have been by then a recognized demand: Ciriaco's trip to Cairo was his third to Egypt. Upon his
return he shared what he had found with the rulers of the Italian
states, e.g. Leonello d'Este of Ferrara in 1449. Since Francesco Sforza
and Bianca Maria Visconti, Duke and Duchess of Milan and commissioners
of the cards, were also there, escaping an outbreak of
plague in Milan, Ciriaco surely would have given his talk and
shown his sketches. Ciriaco wrote six volumes of illustrated commentaries about Greece
and Egypt (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciriaco_de%27_Pizzicolli). Most were later destroyed in a fire at Pesaro, where they had
been handed down to another Sforza who ruled that region. A few of the drawings became
famous before that: a giraffe, for sure, and probably other African
animals. Of his images of Egyptian monuments nothing remains.
Another refugee in Cremona at that time was one of the pre-eminent Italian scholars of Greek antiquity, Francesco Filelfo, who had copied many hitherto unknown classics while in diplomatic service in Constantinople, including some describing ancient Egypt. He, too, would have been interested in Ciriaco's sketches as well as being able to add important information to anyone designing a series of cards onallegorical subjects. I do not know if the passage in Herodotus was known to Filelfo. Looking
on WorldCat, I see that the earliest entry for Herodotus's book is one to comments on it made
by Lorenzo Valla, who died in 1457, in a manscript done sometime between 1458 and 1464 in
Rome. But if the image of the potter-god was known,
that would have been enough to interpret it as of a creator-god.
So from Herodotus's descriptions and images from Egypt of the creator-god with horizontal horns, it would have been possible to recognize his allegorical representation in a character with a broad-brimmed hat, who made things appear or disappear by saying a few words.
An identification with a creator-god would fit the objects on the table, which resemble the suit objects of batons, swords, cups, and coins. Such objects were related to the four humors and the four elements in
the 15th century, as the woodcut below indicates. The only one that is
different is water, which is related to a monk's rosary. But cups would
obviously fit that element, if the others were already in place.
While Christian does not present the four types of objects as the four elements. his commentary at least identifies four symbols in a way that relates at least three to the four suits: passion, struggle, and aspirations fulfilled. The fourth, represented by the cross on the shekel, is the future ascent to the divine. That may or may not correspond to Wands/Sticks. I like to think of the cross on the shekel as corresponding to the straw hat on the PMB Bagatella's table, which in turn resembles the covered communion cup of the Eucharist. But perhaps Wands will do as well, if in raising it he is indication the direction of his aspiration (and not that he is bringing down divine power).
If we were to imagine the Magus as a dealer in a card game, we might think of him as combining the elements (of play) in different ways for each player, some more favorably than others, rather like the potter-god who makes each human being slightly different from the others.
There is one additional way in which the PMB Magician could connect with a creator-god, and that is by way of the visual similarity between the face of the man on the card and that of Jesus in paintings by the workshop that produced it, that of Bonifacio Bembo in Cremona. The connection is between what the Corpus Hermeticum says about the "word" that "moved upon the waters" to the idea of Jesus, both as a miracle-worker on earth and as the logos of John 1:3, of whom it says, "All things were made by him, and without him was not any thing made that was made." Christian's pronouncements about the Magus are in line with that mode of thought.
The
next Magician card in the line that leads to the "Marseille" designs
and Christian is a sheet of uncut and unpainted woodblock cards. It is
not known
where it originated, but it is commonly thought to be either Milan or
France. The date is likewise unknown, but it is generally thought to be
around 1500, give or take a few years. This one, at right, has the
up-down positioning of the hands that the PMB image lacked. He is
holding but not pointing, so the gestures are ambiguous. But it is
enough to associate to the "make the below like the above" of the
Emerald Tablet. It also might have associated the Magician with Serapis,
whose cult was practiced in many places in Roman Italy. Probably by
then depictions such as the one at right were already known.The idea
here is that he rules by powers from both above and below, as indicated
by Pluto's three-headed dog, Cerberus the guard-dog of the underworld,
and Jupiter's eagle.
In
this depiction he is young and eager-looking, but it is not to ascend
the spheres, but rather to fool the crowd. He is an illusionist, like
Plato's demiurge. Plato explicitly compared the material world to a
conjurer's illusion. The below is still like the above, but it takes
removing the veils to see it. He is intent and focused, but not on
bringing down occult powers, or bringing himself to them, but rather on
doing the trick successfully. Politically, it is a different attitude,
not toward manifesting a firm will but in being skillful, including the
use of deception. Or both at once.
In the Cary Sheet, the positioning of the hands could be seen as "making the below
like the above", as the Emerald Tablet famously said, bringing the
powers from above down to the table, rather like the priest when the wine and
wafer became the blood and body of Christ. That last sense is even in
the PMB card, with its straw hat looking much like the cloth cover of a communion cup. There was also the Latin Asclepius, the only part of
the Corpus Hermeticum to survive in the West, which told of how the gods
of Egypt with the proper rituals would descend into their statues.
I include the the Waite Magician card for contrast. It fits Christian's description (below the images) but not the Cary Sheet card. The one exudes Will with a capital "W", i.e. the exertion of mental effort. The gesture of pointing down in Waite's magician is so intense that it
could be construed as trying to bring the power of the underworld under the
command of the Magus. Papus, for example, says (Waite trans. p. 106):
Man with one hand seeks for God in heaven, with the other he plunges below, to call up the demon to himself, and thus unites the divine and the diabolic in humanity.
There is nothing Hermetic (in the sense defined by the Corpus Hermeticum) about such an intent; the Corpus Hermeticum counsels union with the above, with the assistance of the good daemones, and separating from what is below. (The "daemones" in Greek are not necessarily diabolic (Fr. diabolique).)
Then
there are the odd shaped things on the back of the Cary Sheet
Magician's and Fool's backs, which look like three-tiered hats. (This is
in addition to the monkey on the Magician's back, which you can find if
you look closely.) his may have meant nothing to the average person
then, but educated people were reading in Ficino's translation the Greek
Corpus Hermeticum, a venerable body of writings alluded to by
Augustine and others but never actually seen in the West until it was
bought by Cosimo de' Medici and brought to Florence. The author was the
supposed "Hermes Trismegistus", i. e. "Thrice-Great". Nobody knows what
three greatnesses he had; it may have been like our "three cheers", just
for emphasis; on the other hand, the threefold distinction among God,
the intelligible world, and the sensible world if often repeated in the
Hermetic writings. And there it is, a three-tiered hat, or at least
bundle
of some sort. Both the Fool and the Magician lost this accoutrement very
quickly: if nothing else, it competes with the three-tiered crown on
the Pope and Popess.
It may be that Noblet's joke with the finger that normally holds the wand is to suggest the fertilizing power of the creator (as in Christian's "creative principle"). I do not think it is the result of a piece being broken off the woodcut, because the forefinger of an Italian King of Staves is cut the same way.
So the illusionist deftly does his trick, a marvel of pure illusion. His detractors called it Hocus-Pocus, a corruption of "Hoc est corpus", the magic words of the Eucharist, as pronounced by the priest of the Christian God.
The different ways of depicting and seeing the Magician suggest two ways in which Egypt could be in a card without that card having been part of an Egyptian sequence of images corresponding to the tarot sequence or some significant subset of it:
(1) First, where the card maker or commissioner knows something about Egypt that he wants expressed in a particular card, not necessarily the same thing but something analogous. For example.the commissioner sees a drawing of a god with horizontal horns, and it reminds him of the preposterous hats that were stylish ten or fifteen years earlier. Since he is commissioning a tarot deck, he asks that the producer put a wide-brimmed hat on one of the cards, perhaps an entertainer of some sort. Or a card maker looks at drawings of Egyptian reliefs for inspiration and incorporates something that catches his eye into a card. The resulting design proves popular and continues, even if nobody else knows the relationship with Egypt.
(2) The second way would be for someone to see ancient artifact with Egyptian or Egyptian-like features, or read about something Egyptian, and perceives a similarity between what he has seen or read and something in a tarot card. That is a perceived relationship even where there is no causal connection between the Egyptian thing and the making of the card. He shares his perception with his friends, perhaps while playing the game, and that way of seeing the card becomes popular, even if not written down.
Each of these ways of making the connection can lead to the other. If the card maker puts something in a card that is similar to something Egyptian, other people can then see it for themselves, either by the card maker or commissioner pointing it out, or on their own. And if people perceive something Egyptian in a card, that may lead to people buying more of that deck and the card makers' making the decks intentionally with that detail.It is possible that this happened with the wide-brimmed hat. It may have been a coincidence that the artist chose that hat, but once chosen it gets associated with the horizontal horns in the "Bembine Tablet" and also with the passage in Herodotus about ram and goat headed gods. Since both Amon and Khnum are creator gods (Amon more than Khnum), it fits an interpretation of the Magician on the card as a symbol of the Creator, who is somehow responsible for this "world of illusion", even if it is we, like the stage magician's audience, who see the illusion as reality. The idea of this world as illusion is not just Hindu; it is in Plato as well. It is the world of matter that Paul Christian enjoined us to free ourselves from.
To be sure, there have to be some limits. A personal fantasy is likely not to go anywhere, whether initiated by the producer or the consumer, except in relation to the fantasizer. It has to have some educational or spiritual purpose, of some benefit to more than one person, extending to persons unknown to one another. Something of a tradition has to be able to develop, based on a shared set of cultural understanding.
With these observations I will go on. Since I am interested in the sequence as a sequence and not just individual cards at random, I will proceed in order.
2. "The Portal of the Sanctuary" [High Priestess, Popess]
Here are the same three versions plus Christian's comments:
The 2nd is called the Portal of the Occult Sanctuary, and symbolizes the Knowledge [or Science] that must guide the Will.
B-2 expresses, in the divine world, the consciousness of the absolute Being who embraces the three periods of all manifestations: the past, the present and the future. In the intellectual world, the Binary, reflection of Unity; Knowledge, perception of visible and invisible things: in the physical world, Woman, the matrix of Man, who joins herself with him in a similar destiny.
Arcanum 2 is represented by a woman seated on the threshold of the temple of Isis, between two columns. The column on her right is red; this signifies purity of spirit. The column on her left is black, and represents the night of chaos, the impure spirit's captivity in the bonds of material things. The woman is crowned by a tiara surmounted by a crescent moon covered by a veil whose folds fall over her face. She wears on her breast the solar cross and carries on her knees an open book which she half-covers with her cloak. This symbolic figure personifies occult science waiting for the initiate on the threshold of the sanctuary of Isis to communicate to him nature's secrets. The solar cross [analogous with the Indian Lingam*] signifies the fecundation of matter by spirit; it expresses also, as the seal of the infinite, the fact that knowledge proceeds from God, and is, like its Source, without bounds. The veil enveloping the tiara and falling over the face means that truth hides itself from the sight of profane curiosity. The book half-hidden by the cloak signifies that the mysteries reveal themselves only in solitude to the wise man who wraps himself in the cloak of silent meditation.The footnote is by Christian, presumably commenting on Iamblichus. We are to assume, apparently, that Iamblichus was familiar with the symbolism then current in India.
If Arcanum 2 appears in your horoscope, knock resolutely on the door of the future and it will be opened unto you; but study long and carefully the path you are to tread. Turn your face towards the sun of Justice and the knowledge of what is true shall be given unto you. Speak to no one of your purpose, so that it may not be given over to the contradiction of men.
_________________
*The Lingam was the symbol of the union of the sexes. No thought of shame was connected with contemplation of the reproductive organs in the religious systems of antiquity; the monuments of Mithra, of Persian inspiration, are proof of this. The corruption of morals made it necessary later to relegate these symbols to the secret sanctuaries of initiation, but morals were not improved thereby.
You will have noticed that Falconnier has reversed the columns, so that the black one is on her right, a practice that the others seem to have followed, too. For purity, white will do as well as red. Even blue will work. As for the B and J, Levi had specified that of these two architects of Solomon's temple according to the Old Testament, Boaz represented matter and Jachin spirit. I do not know how old these assignments are.
A nice touch on Wirth's part is the difference between the two keys. One has a cross, while the other seems to be an ankh, the Egyptian symbol of life. Isis and her devotees are often shown holding such symbols. The reason there are two moons in the Falconnier is that one is on her tiara, while the other is the astrological sign associated with her. Notice also the similarity between the second Egyptian letter and the Hebrew letter Beth shown on Wirth's version.
The earliest known version of the card, then called the Popess, is a nun in her habit, wearing a papal crown. It is a variation on Giotto's "Faith" in Padua, a book substituting for Faith's scroll. This particular Popess, done for a deck custom-made for Francesco Sforza and Bianca Maria Visconti, duke and duchess of Milan, is not the legendary Pope Joan, who would have worn papal regalia, but rather either an allegorical figure for the Church or the Faith, or else a real Visconti relative, named Manfreda or Maifreda Visconti. This woman, leader of a small sect, had visions odeclaring her to be pope; she took them seriously and waited for the coming of the Holy Spirit, in the form of a deceased laywoman of her acquaintance who would rise from her grave. In 1300 she was betrayed to the Inquisition and burned at the stake. There is nothing particularly Egyptian about her, just heretical.
It is not known whether this was the first Popess card, or whether it already existed. If it had, it would probably have been as a joke (since there isn't supposed to be a Popess), to make a Pope/Popess pair complementing the Emperor and Empress.
Like the Pope's crown, the Popess's in the early Italian decks has a three-tiered crown. This of course could be seen as symbolizing "Trismegistus", even if it normally
represented the papacy. A similar crown was also sometimes given to the crowned Virgin in coronation paintings.Moreover, if we compare the Popess's face with that of Mary in the two Bembo paintings I showed in connection with the Magician card, we see that they are all rather similar. If Mary is being crowned by the Father at the same time as he is crowning Christ, it would seem that this would have been at the beginning for both of them, before Adam and Eve sinned; this interpretation is consistent with Mary's immaculacy, an issue of some concern at the Council of Florence in 1439. It is an assimilation to Mary as crowned Wisdom rather than the teenage girl to whom Gabriel speaks (although the latter interpretation is not excluded, since they are the same person.)
Christian did not specify a crown with tiers, probably feeling that the
association to the papacy would be stronger than that to Trismegistus.
Wegener's version (above left) seems modeled on some in the Bembine
Tablet (an example is the one on the far left). Waite has taken the crown of Isis (near left), from the same
source or any of the myriad of images reproducing authentic images from
Egypt. (The Bembine Tablet is c. 4th century Roman, engraved ivory, acquired in 1527 by the Venetian humanist Pietro Bembo.) Wirth gives her two tiers, but the gold on the crown appears on
three levels, if we count the moon at the top that Christian specified
as part of her image. It is smaller than I would have imagined.The crown's reduction to two levels appears first in Catelin Geoffroy of 1557 Lyon (second from left below) .probably so as to put her below the Pope in status. It probably also is to support the interpretation of her as a personification of the Church, which in canon law and in St. Thomas Aquinas was considered the Pope's wife and thus subordinate to her. Her book, construed as the teachings of the Church, would fit that interpretation.
Somebody who had seen a famous statue of Isis in Rome, taken from Hadrian's Villa, or the illustration inspired by it in Cartari's Images of the Ancient Gods might connect the two. Below are corresponding pictures of Isis (center) and her priestess (a statue in Sicily, left), and the 1647 edition of Cartari's Images of the Ancient Gods. My impression is that the illustrations in the 1647 were also in one earlier edition, around 1588.
It may be coincidence, of course, but is odd that these crossed belts were switched to be on the Popess and not the Pope
In ancient Egypt, the horns were originally Hathor's, and identified her as a cow-goddess. If there was a globe between the horns, it was usually painted red, the color of the sun. That sun is probably the circle with a dot in it in Cartari's design, the astrological symbol for the sun.
If there is a moon but no sun on the card, we have to bear in mind that we are dealing with Isis as known in the 15th-18th centuries, that is, in the eyes of Greco-Roman artists and writers. In the Roman period there are several references to Isis's association with the moon. Diodorus Siculus, besides explicitly identifying her with the moon (I.11.1, at http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Diodorus_Siculus/1A*.html), says "they put horns on her head because of the appearance she has to the eye when the moon is crescent shaped" (1.11.4). Similarly Plutarch: "the statues of Isis that bear horns are imitations of the crescent moon" (sect. 52 at http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/e/roman/texts/plutarch/moralia/isis_and_osiris*/c.html). Ovid, well known before the Greek writers since he wrote in Latin, says likewise, of Isis's appearance to an expectant mother in a dream (Metamorphoses, Book IX, tale of Iphis, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0029%3Abook%3D9%3Acard%3D666, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0028%3Abook%3D9%3Acard%3D666)
Inerant lunaria fronti
cornua cum spicis nitido flaventibus auro
et regale decus.
Isis had crescent horns upon her forehead,Ears of grain (literally, "golden spikes", but translators agree that grain is meant) is another attribute of Isis, which I will discuss in relation to the Empress.
and a bright garland made of golden grain
encircled her fair brow. It was a crown
of regal beauty.
Most memorably, the second century Latin writer Apuleius, in his Golden Ass, had his protagonist describe the moon as "the primal goddess of supreme sway" and ask this "Queen of Heaven" for guidance, after which Isis appears to him in a dream, saying that it is she who is "first among those in heaven", and telling him what he needs to know (Lindsey translation, pp. 235-237). It is she who calls hm to initiation into her rites. Another example closer in time to Christian is that of Athenaeus Kircher in Oedipus Aegyptus, 1652; in a drawing of Isis he identifies several features related to the moon (BB, L, and M at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kircher_oedipus_aegyptiacus_12_isis_mater_deorum.png).
Let me make it clear that I do not think that the three-tiered tiara on the early Popess cards was meant to be an association with Trismegistus, given that the Pope had such a crown. The identification of the card with Isis would have come later, as "Egyptomania" spread from a few humanists and courts to educated people generally.
It might have been as early as the Cary Sheet. It is from the time in
which the Pope was Alexander VI, the infamous Rodrigo Borgia. Rodrigo,
whose family crest had a bull on it, had his lineage traced back to
Osiris, whose reincarnation was the Apis Bull. He also decorated his
rooms at the Vatican with scenes from the Isis story. Robert O'Neill
noticed a similarity between a depiction of Isis there and what is
probably the Popess card of the Cary Sheet. On either side of Isis are Moses and Hermes Trismegistus, not shown. The similarity looks best when the image
is reversed, as at left; the woodcut would have been such a reversed image.
The connection between the tarot and Alexander would be that Milan's ruler Ludovico
Sforza paid the bribes
that got Alexander elected pope, and for a few years Cardinal
Ascanio Sforza, the duke's brother, was the Borgia pope's close confidant.In this case another association would have been to Pope Joan, because of the male acolyte at her feet. Part of the legend was that when she became Pope, God enflamed her with a passion for a young man, and her gender was exposed when she inadvertently gave birth during a procession. Such an association was made explicitly by the Ferrarese satirist Aretino in his book The Talking Cards (Le Carte Parlanti). At the same time, the similarity of Pinturuccio's Isis to Mary at the Annunciation, reading Isaiah's prediction of the Messiah, takes us to a triple parallel.
You will have noticed that none of the Priestesses until Christian have a veil; nor are they at the door of any sanctuary. Instead, starting with Noblet in the 1660s,there is a curtain behind her. This is either just something to keep the room warm, or there is something behind it. It is not hard to imagine a sanctuary, or at least hidden secrets, especially this early in the sequence, assuming it depicts some kind of initiation. The first to find a veil was de Gebelin in 1981, even though the picture he included with his essay showed none, unless it was totally transparent (see picture above).
Oddly enough, however, both sanctuary and veils are present in the program to Mozart's Magic Flute. That is strange. It could be explained as an elaboration of de Gebelin's veil and curtain, and the idea that the initiation is just beginning. I cannot imagine that the "threshold of the sanctuary" was the brainchild of Mozart and his friends, because that temple plays no role in the plot. Perhaps indeed there was some kind of interpretation of the tarot shared among Masons in certain places.
In any case, starting with Levi (High Magic, trans. Greer and Mikituk, pp. 304-305) she not only wears a veil but stands in front of the two columns of the Sanctuary, with its pillars. The relationship of the veil to Egypt is to the famous saying, "I am all that hath been, and is, and shall be; and my veil no mortal has hitherto raised," which Plutarch said was on a statue of Athena, identified by them with Isis, at Sais (Of Isis and Osiris IX, at http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/plu/pte/pte04.htm). In Greek, the word translated "veil" actually means "robe" and is so rendered in more recent translations (http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Moralia/Isis_and_Osiris*/A.html#T351f). Ficino had mistranslated the word as "veil". Either way, it promises to be lifted gradually over the course of the tarot sequence, until she stands naked at the end.
Christian's characterization of the card as signifying "the fecundation of matter with spirit" takes care of two common associations, of both a woman full of knowledge of spiritual things and the Virgin Mary accepting the fecundation of the Word in her body. The book is then "the secret of secrets", as a Renaissance alchemy book was called, perhaps including even the Bible in an esoteric interpretation.
3. "Celestial Isis" [Empress]
The 3rd is called Isis-Urania, and symbolizes the Action that the will must manifest, united to the knowledge [or science].
G-3 expresses, in the divine world, the supreme Power balanced by the eternally active Mind and by absolute Wisdom; in the intellectual world, the universal fecundity of the supreme Being; in the physical world, Nature in labour, the germination of the acts that are to spring from the Will.
Arcanum III is represented by a woman seated at the centre of a blazing sun; she is crowned by twelve stars and her feet rest on the moon. She is the personification of universal fecundity. The sun is the emblem of creative strength; the crown of stars symbolises, by the number 12, the houses or stations through which the sun travels year after year. This woman, celestial Isis or Nature, carries a sceptre surmounted by a globe: it is the sign of her perpetual activity over things born and unborn. On her other hand she bears an eagle, symbol of the heights to which spirit may soar. The moon beneath her feet signifies the weakness of matter and its domination by Spirit.
Remember, son of Earth, that to affirm what is true and to desire what is just is half-way towards creating those things; to deny them is to condemn oneself to destruction. If Arcanum III manifests itself among the signs of your horoscope, you may hope for success in your enterprises, provided that you know how to unite productive activity with the rectitude of spirit that makes your labours bear fruit.
Otherwise, the covering historically on the back of the Empress's chair looks like wings. Even in the Cary Sheet, the chair-covering takes that shape So if there is a "celestial Venus", there is a "celestial Isis". In Wirth's version (at right above), the wings are explicit.
The stars above her head, sun behind her, and moon at her feet come from Levi, who makes the allusions to the "woman clothed with the sun" of Rev. 12:1 explicit. These are unprecedented additions to previous imagery. How to Egyptianize the symbolism?
Christian astrologizes and philosophizes it: the 12 stars are the 12 houses of the horoscope; the Moon beneath her feet is "the weakness of matter and its domination by spirit"; the sun is the "emblem of creative strength". That conveys the idea of the card as the union of two principles, passive matter and active spirit, which is Egyptian in the sense in which the Corpus Hermeticum is Egyptian. But it does not convey the image of the woman of Revelation 12.
That woman is not hard to Egyptianize. In Rev. 12, she bears a child, whom a great dragon wishes to destroy. Given that she escapes, the probably would have had wings. It is the myth of the savior-prince, the one who will bring peace and justice. In the Book of Revelation it is Christ in his Second Coming. In Egypt it is Osiris's heir Horus, who will eventually vanquish the murderer and usurper Typhon/Seth.
The young savior, too, is on the card. It is the eagle, on her arm in Falconnier (following Christian), on the shield in Wirth. This eagle had always been present, at least in the Milan-based cards (below), even in the Cary-Yale (at left), by way of the shield, whose eagle represented the Holy Roman Empire. In the Empire, the Empress represented its future, the future Emperor. Without an heir, the Empress is not of much use. Hence fertility is an important part of the card, not just in nature, as Waite portrays her, but in society.
In the PMB version, this fertility is particularly indicated by her green gloves, which we also see on the Love card in that deck and all the Staves court cards.
Green, the color of spring, was a symbol of the self-renewing power of nature, expressed as well in the Empress's fertility. Green gloves or sleeves also appear on the PMB Love card and all the court figures in Batons (below, Love and the King, Queen, and Knight of Batons). In this vein Diodorus associated her with the Greek Demeter (I.13.5) and said it was she who "discovered the fruit of both wheat and barley" (I.14.1). Hence the "spikes of gold" on her head in Ovid's Metarmorposes, which I quoted in connection with the Popess. When Christian says, "She is the emblem of universal fecundity" (p. 20 of translation), he is thus echoing a long tradition about this card.
Waite very much continues this tradition.Nature is everywhere on his card, and reproduction is implied by the sign of Venus on the shield. But when Waite eliminated the bird and the sun he removed an important part of what the card was about, at least in its traditional imagery and in the Egyptianizing tradition and Levi's Christian Apocalyptic one. Without the sun and the bird, the stars then have only an astrological interpretation, and the card only shows us the "universal fecundity" of nature, which indeed is a beautiful thing, as far as it goes. But fecundity has a goal, namely the new being who will carry on or even restore the old.
Christian defines the card's significance in the divine world, one of his few statements connecting the cards with the sefiroth: The card
expresses in the divine world the supreme power balanced by the eternally active Mind and by absolute Wisdom.Here "the supreme power" would be the first sefira, which in his 1863 book he defined as "the supreme power". Since he defined the 2nd sefira as as "Perpetually Active Intelligence" and the third as "Absolute Wisdom", the card here expresses the equilibrium of all three sefiroth. This is the only card for which he does this. Papus seems to have developed this idea further in assigning the first ten sefiroth to the first ten cards in order and characterizing each member of a group of three cards (1-2-3, 4-5-6, etc.) in terms that include the other two.
In terms of the symbolism on the card, Papus not only kept the bird but it made it equal to the woman in significance. In the "divine world" the card represented the child Horus, and the two together were the equilibrium between card 1, the male (as Osiris), and card 2, the female (Isis). On the card, there is only the woman, now Isis, but she has on her lap the shield, with its eagle, representing the inheritor of the Empire, which is what Horus represented in the Osiris myth.
It is true that Horus, in all the literature about him, was associated with the falcon or hawk, not an eagle, but what is said about the Egyptian hawk was said about the eagle north of the Mediterranean. Here is Horapollo (in this context, Ares is Horus; I am not sure who Aphrodite is, perhaps Hathor or Isis):
When they wish to symbolize a god, or something sublime ..., or superiority, or victory, or Ares, or Aphrodite, they draw a hawk. A god, because the hawk is fecund or long-lived. And again, since it seems to exist as a symbol of the sun, beyond all other birds in the sharpness of its sight, because of the rays of its eyes. ...And since the sun is the lord of sight, they draw him sometimes in the shape of of a hawk. And sublime things, since the other birds, when they wish to fly upwards, proceed on a slant, it being impossible for them to rise directly. Only the hawk flies straight upwards. ...And superiority, because they seem to be superior to all the other birds. ...And victory, because this bird seems to conquer every other...Similarly the eagle, the "bird of Jove" (Lucan and many others), is called "king of birds" (Guillaume le Clerc, 13th century). Moreover (Anthony of Padua, 13th century, with the others at http://bestiary.ca/beasts/beast232.htm):
The eagle is so called from the acuteness of its sight, because she can behold the sun with unflinching eyes. Wherefore it is said concerning it in books of natural history, that she is of very sharp sight, and compels her young ones to look at the sun before they are fully fledged. To this end she strikes them and turns them towards the sun, and, if the eyes of any one of them water, she kills him, and pays attention to the others.The Hawk is the Egyptian equivalent of the eagle, very much Christian's soaring spirit. If the eagle can fly straight up, that would seem to suggest that he can look into the sun, the ability attributed to the eagle north of the Mediterranean. The "rays" in his eyes even make Horapollo's hawk a kind of little sun himself.
For Anthony the Sun is God, and the Eagles are the Saints
In the eagle the subtle intelligence of saints and their sublime contemplation is set forth; for they turn towards the aspect of the true Sun, to the light of wisdom, their young, that is, their works, in order that if any thing which becomes not their extraction should be concealed there, it may be brought to light by the splendour of the sun. For all iniquity is made manifest by the light. Whence, if they see that any work of theirs cannot rightly look at the sun, and is confounded by its rays and weeps, they immediately slay it...
On
Roman-era
coins Horus sits on Isis's lap (far right, from Witt, Isis in the Roman World
[Cornell: Ithaca NY, 1971] fig. 54). Besides coins, there were also
statues. In these the
infant is usually the Pharaoh, who embodies Horus himself,
but that is a fine point of modern Egyptology (the one at near right right is from
Witt's fig. 3). And besides both coins and statues, there were also, at least in temples on the banks of the Nile, reliefs chiseled in stone such as we see at Dendera (above, in the section on the Magician), of a goddess giving suck. I have no evidence that these coins, statues, or reliefs were
known in Western Europe before de Gebelin, but I would assume so, and
probably even in the15th century It seems logical to me that the shield's position and insignia, on the Empress's lap from the earliest Milan examples, as seen above (the series of Empress cards), were made deliberately so as to offer a comparison of the Empress to the Virgin Mary. The coins, statues, and reliefs would have given it another meaning, of equal validity to those who knew it.
Wegener's image, for the card the Falconnier called "Nature", looks more like a
vulture than Christian's eagle. These might derive from an emblem in
Ripa's Nova Iconologia, in which he depicted Nature as a naked woman holding a vulture. Ripa writes She is naked, to denote the Principle of Nature, that is active or Form, and passive or Matter. The turgid Breasts denote the Form, because it maintains created Things; the Vultur, a ravenous Fowl, the Matter; which being alter'd and moved by the Form, destroys all corruptible Bodies. (http://emblem.libraries.psu.edu/Ripa/Images/ripa056a.htm):So now we know what Isis Unveiled looks like! Ripa would have known that the vulture represented "mother" also from reading Horapollo's Hieroglyphica, in whose tradition he surely thought he was continuing. The idea that matter, since it is infinitely malleable by whatever form it is given, destructive of all corruptible bodies is an application of basic Platonic and Aristotelian doctrine about matter and form.
However fecundity and nature do not in themselves connect the card to Egypt. It is the bird that does that, whether eagle or hawk, the infant Horus.
For Christian this card is about action, the step that leads to accomplishment. He also calls it "the germination of the acts that are to spring from the Will", in other words, the sprouting of the seed. It is the beginning of the work in material form.
4. "The Cubic Stone"[Emperor]
The 4th is called the Cubic Stone, and symbolizes the Realization of human acts, the work accomplished.In Pythagorean theory 1 was the number for the point, 2 for the line (2 points needed to specify one), 3 for a plane figure (3 points at least), 4 a solid (4 points at least). So 4 is the number for the 3 dimensions of space, which extend in all directions--6 of them, if you divide them up by right angles: North, South, East, West, Up and Down. It is the same as the number of faces of a cube. Hence the card's title.
D-4 expresses, in the divine world, the perpetual hierarchical realisation of the virtues contained in the absolute Being: in the intellectual world, the realisation of the ideas of the contingent Being by the quadruple effort of the spirit: Affirmation, Negation, Discussion, Solution: in the physical world, the realisation of the actions directed by the knowledge of Truth, the love of Justice, the strength of the Will and the work of the Organs.
Arcanum IV is represented by a man wearing a helmet surmounted by a crown. He is seated on a cubical stone. His right hand holds a sceptre and his right leg is bent and rests on the other in the form of a cross. The cubic stone, image of the perfect solid, signifies the accomplishment of human labours. The crowned helmet is the emblem of the strength that conquers power. This dominating figure holds the sceptre of Isis, and the stone which serves him as a throne signifies conquered matter. The cross described by the position of his limbs symbolises the four elements and the expansion of human power in every direction.
Remember, son of Earth, that nothing can resist a firm will which has as its support the knowledge of the true and the just. The struggle to realise these things is more than a right, it is a duty. The man who triumphs in this struggle does no more than accomplish his mission here on earth; he who succumbs in his devotion to the cause acquires immortality. If Arcanum IV appears in your horoscope, it signifies that the realisation of your hopes depends on a being more powerful than yourself: seek and find him, and he will be your support.
Actually, every card of Wegener's up to now has had a more or less cubic stone; this is merely is the first one where the square sides relate to the number of the card. The image was surely prompted by actual depictions of Egyptian gods sitting on cubes, with small pictures of animals on the side facing the viewer. An example is in the Bembine Tablet, well publicized after de Gebelin commented on in 1781; the cat on Isis's seat accounts for the similar one on Falconnier's card. He says that the cat symbolizes that the Magus can see into the darkness of time.
Christian and Falconnier say that the cubic stone represents the
accomplishment of human labors. What is needed is a firm will: "Nothing
can resist a firm will", Christian affirms. Falconnier, living after the
defeat of the Franco-Prussian War, cannot say that. Given that France's
war against Prussia was a disaster, he would have had to say that the
Emperor should have firmly resisted his people's desire to go to war
against Bismarck, a war that the Emperor had doubts about. Instead,
Falconnier advises, "One who harms others harms oneself." That is worth saying, too.Christian makes no mention of any bird, but it is important. Falconnier put one on the man's chest; he says it is a dove symbolizing innocence. I would have expected an eagle, as on the preceding card and in the TdM and every preceding version in the Milan-France line.
In relation to this card, I think some things Horapollo says about the eagle and Plutarch on the hawk are relevant.( I have already quoted Horapollo in relation to the hawk.) On the eagle Horapollo says that its depiction signifies "a retired king who is without pity." That would be an alternative meaning of the card. Some emperors indeed would fit that description. On the hawk Plutarch says that it means sovereignty, good counsel, and is the bird sacred to Osiris.
The Emperor in the TdM is situated outdoors. In relation to Osiris, that would indicate first his invention of agriculture, including the use of animals, utilizing his wife's discovery of barley and wheat, and second his travels throughout the world to share this invention and so civilize the world, as Diodorus relates (I.17.1-2, http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Diodorus_Siculus/1A*.html). He takes an army but has no need to engage in "pitched battles", Diodorus says, because his reputation precedes him. Diodorus mentions only one incidence of violence: he slays Lycurgus, "king of the barbarians", for opposing his innovations.
Christian mentions a crown; that which we see on the card is not among those of the Bembine Tablet, but the one Wegener puts on his card is an authentically Egyptian one, that of Lower Egypt, of which an examples on Roman-era reliefs I will show in connection with the Lover card.
While there are no triangular skirts in the Bembine Tablet, and Christian doesn't mention them, they were common enough on Egyptian reliefs reproduced in Falconnier's time.
Before going on, I want to summarize the pattern thus far, in terms of Christian's "INRI".
5. "The Master of the Arcana" (Secrets) [Hierophant, Pope]
Here is Wegener's realization of this card, with Christian's commentary
.
The 5th is called the Master of the Arcana, and symbolizes the Inspiration which man receives from the occult Powers.
E-5 expresses, in the divine world, the universal Law, regulating the infinite manifestations of the Being in the unity of substance: in the intellectual world, Religion, the relationship of the Absolute to the relative Being, the Infinite to the Finite: in the physical world, inspiration; the test of man by liberty of action in the closed circle of the universal law.I think the best translation of "heureux ou malheureux" in this context is "fortunate or unfortunate", as the French can take that meaning as well as the published translation's "happy or unhappy". At the end, the published translation has "Meditate, and it will tell you what they say." The French is "recueille-toi, et elle te repondra." "Elle" is "it", not "they", meaning one's conscience.
Arcanum V is represented by the image of the Hierophant (Master of the Sacred Mysteries). This prince of occult doctrine is seated between the two columns of the sanctuary. He is leaning on a cross with three horizontals and describes with the index finger of his right hand the sign of silence on his breast. At his feet two men have prostrated themselves, one clothed in red, the other in black. The Hierophant represents the Genius of good intentions and the spirit of conscience; his gesture invites to meditation, to listen to the voice of the heavens in the silence of the passions and instincts of the flesh. The column on his right symbolises the divine law; the one on the left signifies freedom to obey or disobey. The triple cross is the emblem of God pervading the three worlds in order to produce in them all the manifestations of life. The two men, one red, the other black, represent the genii of Light and of Darkness, both of whom obey the Master of the Arcana.
Remember, son of Earth, that before saying a man is happy or unhappy you must know to what use he puts his will, for all men create their lives in the image of their works. The genius of Good is on your right, Evil on your left: their voices can only be heard by your conscience. Collect yourself, and it will respond to you.
It ia all a matter of receptivity, as Christian tells it. It is the invitation to "listen to the voice of the heavens in the silence of the passions", to notice both voices and the one of conscience, each of the three corresponding to one of the figures on the card.
You will have noticed that there are two astrological symbols; Falconnier has extended to the major arcana Christian's practice, in the number cards, of adding a planet to the zodiacal signs. In this case the principle would seem to be to moderate the force of Aries by the love of Venus. Probably that is from Levi's innovation of associating cards with sefiroth; the 4th is "mercy" or "love".
In this card the columns are the same color, and it is the people at the bottom of the card who are dressed in opposing colors. To say that the cross represents the three worlds, meaning the three worlds of the Corpus Hermeticum, is to say that it signifies the same as "Trismegistus".
Until de Gebelin in 1781, of course, the figure on the card was called the Pope. He may have been there so as to illustrate the Pope's superior authority to that of the Emperor; in the game, the higher numbered card took the lower, of the same suit (and the majors, or triumphs, if they could be played, beat the other suits).
In the earliest Florentine deck, the "Charles VI", he was given a domed crown, which was the pope's crown before it was replaced bythe three-tiered one in the 14th century. In that case, it was others who associated Hermes Trismegistus with that crown, in the pavement of Siena Cathedral. It might also have associated him with Osiris, as in the Roman bust at right.
In the 1558h century Catelin Geoffroy and the early 17th century Anonymous Parisian, the Pope card got the three-barred cross to go with the three-tiered crown (at left below). Of course there was a standard Christian interpretation of both, but then again, it was also Trismegistus. In the later 17th century French cards (at right below, Noblet and Vieville), however, the three-barred cross was replaced by the bishop's crozier, or else a staff with a ball and flag on it (left and middle, second below. Under Louis XIV tarot was dying out n Paris. Perhaps the other staffs were thought to give less offense.
In the 18th century TdM (above right, Madenie) the Pope got the three-barred staff back again, albeit by then the tarot was not produced in Paris any longer, but in southern and eastern France. While it was still a papal symbol, there is again "Trismegistus" association for those who might want to see Egyptian-based imagery.
6. "The Two Roads" [Lover, Lovers, Love]
The 6th is called the Two Roads, and symbolizes the Ordeal [or Test], to which all Will is subject in the presence of Good and Evil.
U/V-6 expresses in the divine world the knowledge of Good and Evil: in the intellectual world, the balance of Necessity and Liberty: in the physical world, the antagonism of natural forces, the chain of cause and effect.The allegory of the "two roads" is not found in Egypt; its source is Xenophon, in Plato's time. However the sentiment is readily found in the Corpus Hermeticum; I have already given quotations from the Poimandres.
Arcanum VI is represented by a man standing motionless at a crossroads. His eyes are fixed upon the earth, his arms crossed on his breast. Two women, one on his right, one on his left, stand each with a hand on his shoulder, pointing out to him one of the two roads. The woman on his right has a fillet of gold around her forehead: she personifies virtue. The one on the left is crowned with vine-leaves and represents the temptations of vice. Above and behind this group the genius of Justice, borne on a nimbus of blazing light, is drawing his bow and directs the arrow of punishment at Vice. The whole scene expresses the struggle between the passions and conscience.
Remember, son of Earth, that for the ordinary man vice has a greater attraction than virtue. If Arcanum VI appears in your horoscope, take care to keep your resolutions. Obstacles bar the road to happiness; contrary influences hover around you; your will vacillates between opposing sides. In all things indecision is more fatal than the wrong choice. Advance or retreat, but never hesitate; remember that a chain of flowers is more difficult to break than a chain of iron.
There is no chance that the card was designed originally with that story in mind, because in 15th and 16th century Italy, the card only had one female figure and one male figure, with Cupid overhead, or in one case several couples and several cupids. The card is free to be of Isis and Osiris again, this time as lovers.
But
a problem still remains: was there a winged god of love in Egypt?
Actually, there was, in the Roman period. It was Horus the Child,
identified by the Greeks with their Eros. And as Horus, he also had the
wings of a hawk. He is the son of Isis by Osiris after she had
resurrected him. He was characteristically shown with his lips to the
mouth. Cartari showed him that way, with wings similar to Cupid's; at
left is the illustration in the edition of 1647 (p. 198), below which I
give Cartari's explanation.Since the parents aren't shown here as Isis and Osiris directly but as Greek equivalents, I give another from Cartari that at least has Isis and Serapis. Serapis was the Greco-Egyptian version of Osiris, created as a deity that both Greeks and Egyptians could worship.
When
a third person is added below Cupid, there is no reason to insist that
it is the "two roads". It is his mother, perhaps, or the priestess of
card 2, ready to marry them.
I found two Ptolemaic-era Egyptian images that are so similar to the Falconnier/Wegener image that I
strongly suspect at least one of them inspired the card. One, from the Ptolemaic-era temple at Edfu, shows a pharaoh being stroked by two beautiful maidens,
just as on the card. It is actually an allegorical depiction of the
unity under one pharaoh of two lands, Upper and Lower Egypt. We know
this from the headdresses: Upper Egypt (centered in Thebes) on the right
and Lower Egypt (centered in Memphis)
on the left.
Another Egyptian image, a sculpture now in the Cairo Museum (above left), is one said to be of the coronation of Rameses III, between the gods Horus and Seth (called Typhon by the Greeks); the crown is that of Upper Egypt. The point is not to kill the passions, as they are a major source of the soul's energy, but to direct them in the right way. The choice of one to lead the other is what is required, as we will see in the next card.
7. "The Chariot of Osiris" [Chariot]
We come to the Chariot card, which de Gebelin, Levi, and Christian all considered "Osiris Triumphant". Levi made an Egyptian reference clear by having the chariot pulled by two sphinxes instead of two horses. Here I think it may be of interest to include not only Falconnier but also Levi before him and Wirth and Waite afterwards.:
The 7th is called the Chariot of Osiris, and symbolizes Victory, that is to say the choice of Good, which is the fruit of truth and justice.
Z-7 expresses in the divine world the Septenary, the domination of Spirit over Nature: in the intellectual world, the Priesthood and the Empire: in the physical world, the submission of the elements and the forces of matter to the Intelligence and to the labours of Man.
Arcanum VII is represented by a war-chariot, square in shape, surmounted by a starred baldaquin upheld by four columns. In this chariot an armed conqueror advances carrying a sceptre and a sword in his hands. He is crowned with a fillet of gold ornamented at five points by three pentagrammes or golden stars. The square chariot symbolises the work accomplished by the will which has overcome all obstacles. The four columns supporting the starry canopy represent the four elements conquered by the Master of the sceptre and the sword. On the square representing the front of the chariot is drawn a sphere upheld by two outstretched wings, sign of the limitless exaltation of human power in the infinity of space and time. The crown of gold on the conqueror's head signifies the possession of intellectual illumination which gives light to all the arcana of Fortune [changed from "Chance"]. The three stars which decorate it at [with/] five points symbolise Power balanced by Mind and Wisdom. Three squares are engraved on the breast-plate: they signify rectitude of Judgment, Will and Action which gives the Power of which the breast-plate is the emblem. The lifted sword is the sign of victory. The sceptre, crowned by a triangle, symbol of the Spirit, by a square, symbol of Matter, and by a circle, symbol of Eternity, signifies the perpetual domination of the Mind over the forces of Nature. Two sphinxes, one white, the other black, are harnessed to the chariot. The former symbolises Good, the latter Evil—the one conquered, the other vanquished—both having become the servants of the Magus who has triumphed over his ordeals.This is a veritable orgy of symbolism. When Christian speaks of "Power balanced by Mind and Wisdom" I I get the picture of Tifereth on the Tree of Life being fed from above by Kether (Power), Mind (Hochmah) and Wisdom (Binah). This concept would seem to be original with Christian but preserved by those who follow him, in that both have three stars on the crown. The four columns and four sides of the chariot are of course retained by all. Falconnier has replaced Christian's lingam, emblem of power, with a winged disc, a very Egyptian symbol; the others use both emblems. Christian changed the number of stars on the man's front from 5 to 3. With followed suit, and perhaps also Waite, although I am not sure.
Remember, son of the Earth, that the empire of the world belongs to those who possess a sovereign Mind, that is to say, the light which illuminates the mysteries of life. By overcoming your obstacles you will overthrow your enemies, and all your wishes shall be realised, if you go towards the future with courage reinforced by the consciousness of doing right.
As a whole and unless it is further qualified, Christian has presented a decidedly this-worldly view of the card. It presumes that the person knows what "doing right" consists of in "the empire of the world". This is not only a focus away from the detachment sought by the Corpus Hermeticum, but presumes to judge what is right for others as well as oneself. To the extent that others affect one's own welfare, it is important to consider what may be an injustice inflicted upon one. However it is also necessary to consider the other's point of view and their rights as well. The Poimandres does speak of subduing the passions in order that one may ascend the spheres. But this is not the same as "overthrowing your enemies". Applied to the world, this is a dangerous instruction. Applied to the individual, it is a valid symbol of the developing ego, defining itself in confrontation with the world around it.
However this is modern psychology. Is there anything actually Egyptian that fits the card? T
Given that the card reflects a triumph of a masculine sort, a passage from Diodorus Siculus comes to mind. Osiris, having successfully civilized the world by means of his invention of agriculture, to the benefit and gratitude of all, enjoys a triumphant return:
On his return to Egypt he brought with him the very greatest presents from every quarter and by reason of the magnitude of his benefactions received the gift of immortality with the approval of all men and honour equal to that offered to the gods of heaven.Unlike similar travels of Alexander, promoting Greek methods of agriculture, and Julius Caesar, promoting Roman law and technology, Diodorus does not present Osiris as embarking on conquests:
Osiris was not warlike, nor did he have to organize pitched battles or engagements, since every people received him as a god because of his benefactions.Diodorus does, however, mention one instance of violence:
In Thrace he slew Lycurgus, the king of the barbarians, who opposed his undertakingOsiris left one of his own men there, to supervise the agricultural innovations. Diodorus does not say whether this man also ruled over Thrace.
There is one pictorial detail in all four cards that is specific to Egypt, of course, namely the sphinxes; Putting sphinxes in front of the chariot is Levi's innovation; all the cards before him have horses. I have never seen any Egyptian images where sphinxes are shown pulling chariots; I think nonetheless that there is something Egyptian, or at least Greco-Egyptian, in Levi's depictiopn.
Colors were important in Egypt.
Plutarch said that Osiris was black, Horus white, and Typhon red. If so,
one horse could stand for Horus and the other for Typhon. Then the
charioteer could be Osiris, who in the story trained Horus and advised
him in his battles against his uncle Typhon. It is eerily like the
ghost of Hamlet's father advising Hamlet on the overthrow of Hamlet's
uncle. But it won't do, given the meaning of "black" in Christian
Europe, to color the charioteer black, the color of evil.Osiris's color doesn't matter; it is the sphinxes that count. Levi colored one of them black and the other white. That says that one is evil and the other good (which he did say explicitly). But red doesn't have quite the same symbolism. Red is the color of the sun; it represents energy and disorder as opposed to calmness and order. It also represents a drive to power, incuding usurpation of power by whatever means, even unethically. Like Hamlet's uncle, Typhon murders Osiris, not once but twice (thanks to Isis's power of resurrection). That makes his energy evil. Yet it is energy all the same, which should be harnessed for good.
In Plato's Phaedrus, the charioteer, by means of the whip and the bit in the "swarthy" horse's mouth, trains the unruly horse to follow the orderly horse, whose strength alone is not sufficient (vividly illusrated in the 16th century medallion above). In Plutarch's account of the Isis/Osiris myth, Horus (the elder) has physical power as well as guidance from Osiris, who doe not seem to take part physical. It is the combination of the two, Osiris and Horus (not to mention Isis behind the scenes), that defeats Typhon.
Levi said explicitly that the black sphinx's head turns toward the white sphinx; thus he seems to have been cognizant of the importance of that detail. However neither Christian and Falconnier say anything about that detail. As a result, the image drawn by Wegener has them both looking ahead. Waite (far right) missed the point, too. Wirth (2nd from right) was truer to Levi, although in a somewhat hesitant way.
In any case, we have completed the second set of four, of the INRI. The active principle of the Emperor has his spiritual "reflex" or reflection in the High Priest, together now with the negative aspect of creation as a separate force in the soul. It is a move upward from the physical to the spiritual and from external action to internal reception. Then comes the "action" in response to the "receptive" stance of hearing good, evil, and one's conscience, namely, the choice between the two roads, in which neither is yet chosen, but in which conscience has the deciding vote. Finally evil is mastered in the victory of the Chariot.The Charioteer is the Emperor on the level of soul.
8. "Themis" [Justice]
Below are the three versions of this card, which only Christian designates "Themis", the Greek word for Ma'at, Egyptian goddess of truth, justice, and right order. Waite's, of course, is his number 11. The Golden Dawn switched Strength
and Justice in the order because in the Sefer Yetzirah the 8th letter is
assigned to Leo and the 11th to Libra. It is a matter of which one
wants to honor more, the vagaries of the Hebrew alphabet or the
traditional order of the tarot, since at least 1557. I am not sure
either is worth much, but of the two I would pick the tarot, perhaps
with some consideration for what came before, but not disregard for it.
(Yes, it is true that in the Florentine order Strength was 8th; but in
that order a large number of other cards do not correspond at all to
that of the Golden Dawn.) 
The 8th is called Themis, and symbolizes Equilibrium, by analogy with the scales which are the attribute of justice.
H-8 expresses in the divine world absolute Justice; in the intellectual world Attraction and Repulsion: in the physical world the relative, fallible and narrow Justice which is man's. Arcanum VIII is represented by a woman seated on a throne wearing a crown armed with spear-points: she holds in her right hand an upward-pointing sword and in the left a pair of scales. It is the ancient symbol of Justice weighing in the balance the deeds of men, and as a counterweight opposing evil with the sword of expiation. Justice, which proceeds from God, is the stabilising reaction which restores order, the equilibrium between right and duty. The sword is here .a sign of protection for the righteous and of warning for the sinful. The eyes of Justice are covered with a bandage to show that she weighs and strikes without taking into account the conventional differences established by men.
Remember, son of Earth, that to be victorious and to overcome your obstacles is only a part of the human task. If you would wish to accomplish it entirely, you must establish a balance between the forces you set in motion. Every action produces its reaction, and the Will must foresee the onslaught of contrary forces in time to lessen or check it. All future things hang in the balance between Good and Evil. The Mind that cannot find equilibrium resembles a sun in eclipse.
What is unusual here, compared to what before, is the emphasis on attaining equilibrium or balance. That interpretation became standard after Christian, but was unheard of before. That justice is about restoring a balance between right and duty is unusual: if someone has a right to have or do something, then it is not justice to punish the person for having or doing the thing in question.
He must have in mind someone taking advantage of their right to something in a way that conflicts with a duty, for example a duty not to harm someone by evicting them for non-payment of rent. This plays out in the next paragraph. He is challenging the principle, "To the victor belongs the spoils." Every action produces a counter-action, which must be taken into account, either by lessening it or "checking" it, which I presume means taking measures against it. So for example one might find the person work, or else arrange for sufficient police protection to discourage counter-action.
This issue is not anything discussed in Tractate XIII of the Corpus Hermeticum, or any classical text about Egypt that I know of. In Plutarch's On Isis and Osiris, for example, does not say anything about what Osiris should have done to prevent retaliation from Typhon for Osiris's having sex with Typhon's wife, or what justice demanded in that situation. On the contrary, the assumption is that Typhon is simply evil. There is no moralizing about Typhon's justification, namely that Osiris had slept with Seth's wife Nepthys, other than saying that Nepthys had assumed the shape of Isis, thus deceiving Osiris (even though she apparently was in Nepthys's territory, the desert). That is a power not otherwise seen in Plutarch's account of the myth.
Of the three occultist cards shown at the beginning of this section, I find the Falconnier/Wegener the most attractive. It is also the only one that attempts to relate the card to the equivalent in ancient Egypt, namely the goddess Ma'at, who was frequently represented with long outstretched wings, as in the middle below. I would think such such depictions would have been known by the 17th century when Noblet did his card, but I have no verification.
For this reason they call the first of the Muses at Hermopolis Isis as well as Justice: for she is wise, as I have said,11 and discloses the divine mysteries to those who truly and justly have the name of "bearers of the sacred vessels" and "wearers of the sacred robes."Diodorus says of Isis that "Isis also established laws, they say, in accordance with which the people regularly dispense justice to one another" (Library of History I.14.3). She also governed Egypt in Osiris's absence (I.17.3). If so, Isis is again the second personage in a set of 3; just as she was 2 to Osiris's 1 in Papus's account of those cards, she is now card 8 to Osiris's 7. One might wonder if the "inspiration" that the "Master of the Arcana" represents was Isis's, too.
9. "The Veiled Lamp" [Hermit, Old Man, Hunchback]
Both Wirth and Waite have things going on not in Falconnier. I want to focus, as usual, just on Christian and Falconnier. Christian's comments follow.
The 9th is called the Veiled Lamp, and symbolizes the Prudence which maintains the balance.
TH-9 expresses in the divine world absolute Wisdom: in the intellectual world Prudence, the governor of the Will: in the physical world circumspection, guide to Action.
Arcanum 9 is represented by an old man who walks leaning on a stick and holding in front of him a lighted lantern half-hidden by his cloak. This old man personifies experience acquired in the labours of life. The lighted lantern signifies the light of the mind which should illuminate the past, the present and the future. The cloak that half conceals it signifies discretion. The stick symbolises the support given by prudence to the man who does not reveal his purpose.Again, this is about matters in the world as opposed to one's own soul. Prudence is not a virtue with which the Corpus Hermeticum is much concerned, and when it is, it is in relation to the afterlife (Tractate II, p. 12 of Copenhaver translation), warning about the afterlife consequences of going childless.
Remember, son of Earth, that Prudence is the armour of the Wise. Circumspection allows him to avoid reefs or pitfalls and to be forewarned of treachery. Take it for your guide in all your actions, even in the smallest things. Nothing lacks importance: a pebble may overturn the chariot in which the master of the world is riding. Remember that if Speech is silver, Silence is golden
Diodous, in his account of Osiris myth, does mention one other god in relation to prudence in political affairs, namely Hermes, i.e. Thoth (http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Diodorus_Siculus/1A*.html):
Now after Osiris had established the affairs of Egypt and turned the supreme power over to Isis his wife, they say that he placed Hermes at her side as counsellor because his prudence raised him above the king's other friends.So an identification with Thoth, or perhaps, since Thoth is immortal and Hermes typically presented as a young man, with Hermes Trismegistus as an old sage.
In the early cards, as I have said, this figure carried an hourglass instead of a lantern. It is about remembering the brevity of life. At some point in the first half of the 16th it changed to a lantern, because an old card found in Milan at the beginning of the 20th century, dated by Thierry Depaulis to c.1500 (center), still has an hourglass (like the PMB 1450s, left), but the Catelin Geoffoy 1557 ( right) has a lantern. To me the lantern-carrier suggests the Greek Cynic philosopher Diogenes looking for an honest man. Diogenes had been featured on a 15th centuy Sun card in Ferrara. But there is an Egyptian reference just as valid, if less well known. In Apuleius's Golden Ass, the protagonist, still in the form of donkey, attends a procession of Isis-worshipers, on the advice of Isis in a dream. The first priest is described as holding a lamp up high. Apuleius does not give the reason. I would guess that in the context of a procession, he is either a Diogenes or he is indicating that there is a light beyond the sort provided by the sun. Below are four French cards, starting with the Vieville, 1650s or 1660s, on the far left.
There
are other plausible references, such as our old friend
Hermes Trismegistus. The Hermit could easily be identified with at least
a follower
of his. On the c. 1500 card with the hourglass (middle above), a
three-tiered parcel like the one on the Cary Sheet Magician and Fool
appears on the man's back. Also, "Hermit" suggests "Hermes", even if in
French the normal spelling is "Ermite", and the words aren't related.
Some 18th
century versions of the TdM, of which I give here Conver's, 1761,
spelled the word "Hermite". While this is an acceptable variant of "Ermite", the name change also suggests a play on "Hermetique". Not
long before (1672 or 1730s) the Chosson had had "l'Ermite".
In
the Chosson and Conver, a rising or setting sun can be seen in the
folds of the Hermit's robe. That suggests an inner light within and only
half-revealed, like the veiled lamp. Since the sun is a symbol of God,
it suggests a relationship to the divine. That is indeed a Hermetic sentiment befitting Trismegistus.
10. "The Sphinx" [Wheel of Fortune]
The 10th is called the Sphinx, and it marks the Fortune, happy or unhappy, which accompanies all life.
J, Y—10 expresses in the divine world the active principle that animates all beings: in the intellectual world ruling Authority: in the physical world good or evil Fortune.
Arcanum X is represented by a wheel suspended by its axle between two columns. On the right Hermanubis, the Spirit of God, strives to climb to the top of the wheel. On the left Typhon, the Spirit of Evil, is cast down. The Sphinx, balanced on the top of this wheel, holds a sword in its lion's paws. It personifies Destiny ever ready to strike left or right; according to the direction in which it turns the wheel the humblest rises and the highest is cast down.Remember, son of Earth, that ability depends on the will; if your will is to be accomplished, you must be daring; and to dare successfully you must be able to keep silence until the moment comes for action. To possess Knowledge and Power, the will must be patient; to remain on the heights of life—if you succeed in attaining them—you must first have learned to plumb with steady gaze vast depths.
In a way the sense is that the virtuous will be rewarded and the proud punished, and that it all depends on your will. The goal of attaining or remaining on the "heights of life" suggests a material context, as if addressed to a political figure. In that context, keeping silent until the moment of action is good in some circumstances, and with some people, but not others. Likewise sometimes daring is good, sometimes not, depending on how much there is to lose. Since we often don't dare when there is in fact little to lose of any importance and much to gain, it is worth reminding us to consider daring. On the other hand, a leader's decision to go to war is a different matter, which could cost thousands or millions of lives.
The obese figure with the crocodile head on the left lower wide of Falconnier/Wegener's version, meant to be the evil Typhon, is the Egyptian goddess Taweret/Tawaret, a female hippopotamus with a crocodile head. In Egyptian religion she was a protector goddess particularly in childbirth. An association with Typhon, however, is possible given what Plutarch says in Of Isis and Osiris, which I have put next to the images below:
As though confirming the assignment of the animal to evil, in the Dendera zodiac it is one of the polar constellations, perhaps substituting for Draco, Latin for a snake or dragon, or else for the Big Bear (Ursa Major). The former is an obvious symbol of evil, especially if a dragon; the latter was in fact identified with Typhon in Plutarch's account of the Egyptian religion (On Isis and Osiris 21, at http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Moralia/Isis_and_Osiris*/B.html). My second image is taken from a reproduction on that zodiac with the probable original colors restored. When we get to card 15, I will show more of the Dendera ceiling, where it is in the middle with the images of the zodiac around it. I suspect that it was the male of the species that was a symbol of disorder and chaos, leaving the female to protect the vulnerable ones of the species.
Yet in replacing the ass with a sphinx, a connection is drawn, for those who knew their Plutarch, to a passage in which he discusses Isis's sistrum, the cone-shaped rattle that she and her priestess carry (section 63 at http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Moralia/Isis_and_Osiris*/D.html):
The upper part of the sistrum is circular and its circumference contains the four things that are shaken; for that part of the world which undergoes reproduction and destruction is contained underneath the orb of the moon, and all things in it are subjected to motion and to change through the four elements: fire, earth, water, and air. At the top of the circumference of the sistrum they construct the figure of a cat with a human face, and at the bottom, below the things that are shaken, the face of Isis on one side, and on the other the face of Nephthys. By these faces they symbolize birth and death, for these are the changes and movements of the elements; and by the cat they symbolize the moon because of the varied colouring, nocturnal activity, and fecundity of the animal. ... By the human features of the cat is indicated the intelligence and the reason that guides the changes of the moon.Nephthys was sometimes called "End" (Plutarch sect. 59), because she was identified with that part of the land that borders the sea (sect. 38), the sea being her husband Typhon (sect. 33). And of course the moon is, by its changeableness, a perennial symbol of the changing tides of fate.
In this case the card makers did not try to suggest Isis on one side and Nephthys on the other. They simply left the two animals, since the Wheel pertains to embodied existence. The one going up was before the peak in achievement, the one going down after. At the bottom was earth, in accord with the biblical "dust to dust" motif.
The meaning is still that of reversals in fortune. Its position in the sequence, next to the Hermit and Strength, as it always is in the Lombard/TdM order, suggests the need to anticipate reversals in fortune (Prudence) and also the need to be strong in the face of adversity (Strength).
The figure on the top, the Sphinx, was not considered in a favorable light until Levi, who saw it as the possessor of the secrets of the universe, the riddle of existence, for which the Magus would be privy to the necessary answers. In the context of the Oedipus myth, it did not have such a significance. To have thought one had solved the riddle of the Sphinx was merely to have fallen into hybris, Greek for overweening pride. It was a trap, in other words, as shown by his prize, namely marriage to his mother, the very thing he had sought to avoid above all else. It is when one had thought you had things figured out that the greatest danger arose. That outcome is rather quickly shown in the cards that follow, starting with 12. It was then that the real initiation started.
We are now at the end of the third series of four, which is also the beginning of the fourth. The master over his passions acts in society to achieve justice there, as the "right order" of Themis, i.e. the mastering of passions in society, the restraint of the appetites by reason and the re-adjustment of the victory to correct its one-sidedness. This is the creation of laws and their enforcement in practice, applicable to the victors as much as the vanquished, done according to the principle of Justice, as an archetype received from above. Even the passions get their due, but only that.
The union of victory with justice is then prudence, i.e. acting in the present with the knowledge of the past and an eye to the future, as a famous adage had it. This future, in the scope of prudence, includes even the soul after death. The result is a new spark of energy by all the parts of society and the soul, which introduces a new element, namely spirit, the urge toward the divine, which is the Hermetic impulse. In the TdM, this is indicated by the sun whose outline and rays are seen in the folds of the Hermit's robe. It becomes primary in the Wheel as Christian interprets it, where the just soul moves upward toward the riddle of existence, of a person's past (crawling on all fours), present (walking unaided0, and future (the Hermit with his staff), which the Sphinx represents, and of which Oedipus's answer gives a glimmer.
I cannot say that I am repeating Papus here. By this time he has abandoned the formula he started with and has replaced it with something else, namely how each card has advanced beyond the corresponding card in the preceding series of three and is succeeded by that of the following series, according to the formula Creation (Chariot), Preservation (Wheel), Destruction (Death). In Christian's formulation, however, the Wheel does not merely preserve, nor is death merely destruction.
The only difference I can see is that in Wirth she is opening the lion's mouth, while in the other two she is closing it. Here is Christian:
The 11th is called the Tamed Lion, and symbolizes the Strength to which every man is called so as to conquer by the development of his intellectual and moral faculties.
C, K-20 expresses in the divine world the Principle of all strength, spiritual or material: in the intellectual world moral Force: in the physical world organic Force.
Arcanum XI is represented by the image of a young girl who with her bare hands is closing, without effort, the jaws of a lion. It is the emblem of that strength which is communicated by faith in oneself and by innocency of life.
Remember, son of Earth, that deeds necessitate faith in your ability to accomplish them. Proceed with faith: all obstacles are phantoms. In order to become strong, silence must be imposed on the weaknesses of the heart; your duty must be studied, for it is the rule of righteousness. Practise justice as if you loved it.Justice comes in awkwardly, but it is worth inserting because Strength is to be used in the service of Justice. "All obstacles are phantoms" is a rather dangerous thing to say, if the result is by a purely random procedure such as the year of one's birth and the numbers that one's name adds up to by a certainn method. Better advice would be to point to facts of the situation that typically have not taken into consideraton.
Although this card featured a lady holding a column in some versions, the TdM depiction, a lady with her fingers in a lion's mouth, goes all the way back to the first extant deck, the Cary-Yale(below, 2nd from left), continuing in the TdM (Noblet 1660s and Conver 1761). Before that time it was used on Chartres Cathedral (far left). The image is most likely based on stories of Christians who befriended lions by taking thorns from their mouths.
That the Christian interpretation, in terms of one of the four cardinal virtues, does not stop us from seeking an Egyptian interpretation. There are many lions in Egyptian art, but none I know of have a lady's fingers in its mouth. But association with a god allows the worshiper to partake of its virtue. The lion gives her strength and courage, and he admires.her for it.Horapollo said (Boas trans. 56-5)
...when they wish to symbolize spiritedness, they draw a lion. For this animal has a large head. And it has fiery eyes, and its forehead is spherical, and its mane radiates from about it, in imitation of the sun.In the latter sense, she could be taming the Nile by means of artificial lakes, ponds, and canals to take the excess water.
...To indicate strength, they draw the forequarters of a lion, because these parts of his body are the strongest.
...To indicate that one is wide awake and on guard, they draw the head of a lion...
...To symbolize fear they use the same sign...
...To symbolize the rising of the Nile, ...they draw a lion ...since when the sun enters Leo, it produces a great rise in the Nile.
I can think of another interpretation, specific to the Isis/Osiris story. The lion is a solar animal, by its color, its supreme strength, and its encircling mane. It can stand for the king of the Egyptian gods, the sun god named, in Plutarch's version, Ra, with his priest as the high priest. Such an association occurs in Mozart's Magic Flute, with a Solar king's chariot pulled by lions. In Plutarch's story the council of the gods supports Horus's claim to be Osiris's successor only after Horus has beaten Typhon many times, and then only thanks to Hermes' persuasion (section XIX at http://thriceholy.net/Texts/Isis.html). But Thoth/Hermes was Isis's father, according to Plutarch. We have to ask: what made Thoth so persuasive? One possibility is that Ra, for his purposes, needed Typhon to remain alive. So when Horus brings Typhon to Isis for execution, and Isis lets Typhon free (previous ref.), when she could easily have chopped his head off, that might be part of an understanding with Ra. If so, it is indirectly Isis who tames Ra.
The Pyramid texts say that Isis won over Ra by learning his secret name, or acquiring some of his spittle, i.e. being in a position to use his own power against him (http://www.touregypt.net/ISIS.HTM). I do not know how that would have been known in the 15th-18th centuries, but perhaps some Greek or Latin source mentioned it. In any case Plutarch, who was known, makes it clear that Isis did let Typhon go, and that afterwards the council finally supported Horus's claim to be king of all Egypt.
The figure-8 shaped hat did not originate with Wirth and in more mystical form, Waite. It is already in Conver of 1761, and before that Chosson and Heri. It creates a parallel with the Magician, of course. She, too, is one of that breed. That makes her Isis again, as the most prominent Egyptian lady magician. The figure 8, like the circle, is a uroborus and so a symbol of eternity. 8 is the day of baptism, when the soul makes its covenant with God, who is the infinite, a meaning the 8 laid on its side acquired, starting in 1655 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinity).
The hat has the same figure 8 construction as in the case of the Magician, and to the same effect. Her Strength is something received from above, from the infinite, of which the figure 8 on its side had recently been adopted as its symbol, the strength that it was considered that the martyrs received from God so as to remain stalwart. After the creative impulse upward of the Wheel, there is the passive receptivity of divine strength, for the union of the two in the next card.
12. "The Sacrifice" [Hanged Man]
The 12th is called the Sacrifice, and symbolizes violent death.
L—.30 expresses in the divine world the revelation of the Law: in the intellectual world the teaching of Duty: in the physical world Sacrifice.
Arcanum XII is represented by a man hung by one foot from a gallows which rests on two trees each of which has six branches cut from the trunk. The hands of this man are tied behind his back, and the bend of his arms forms the base of an inverted triangle the summit of which is his head. It is the sign of violent death encountered by tragic accident or in expiation of some crime, and accepted in a spirit of heroic devotion to Truth and Justice. The twelve lopped branches signify the extinction of life, the destruction of the twelve houses of the Horoscope. The inverted triangle symbolises catastrophe.
Remember, son of Earth, that devotion is a divine law from which none may have dispensation; but expect nothing, only ingratitude, from men. Let your heart be always ready to tender its account to the Eternal; for if Arcanum XII appears in your horoscope, violent death will lie in wait for you on your path through life. But if the world makes an attempt upon your earthly life, do not die without accepting with resignation the will of God and without pardoning your enemies; for whoever does not forgive shall be condemned, beyond this life, to an eternal solitude.
The Hanged Man is here clearly a heroic figure, not the traitor of the traditional imagery. The number 12 also suggests the 12 disciples, for which Jesus makes the 13th, the victim whose sacrifice is the salvation of humanity. Hence the halo around the man's head in Waite's version,an apparent allusion to Jesus's "Forgive them, father" on the cross. Christian does not mention the coins that Falconnier's design has put in, falling from his pockets, which suggests betrayal for money and in particular Judas. Judas betrayed Jesus, and Jesus, in the eyes of the Sinhadren, betrayed the religion of his birth, Judaism.
The
Hanged Man, although an image thoroughly medieval in origin, can be fit into the Osiris myth with some
imagination. Michael Poe in his summary of the alleged French
archeological report,
suggested that
the lopped branches on the two poles on either side could be the
equivalent of Typhon's hacking off Osiris's body parts. A problem is
that the earliest known Hanged Man card, that of the PMB (far left
below), did not have such lopped off branches. The next
earliest, that of the Charles VI done in Florence, does have them, and I count 12, not count the forks that
support
the center piece or two other notches in the upper pole. But Osiris's body was hacked into 14 pieces (Of Is. 18) or even 26, according to Diodorus. Noblet had 11 notches on the sides, which corresponds to the number of apostles minus Judas, who would be the Hanged Man. Later versions had 12, which might make
Jesus the 13th. Christian's attempt to make the lopped branches fit into an allegory of violent death, saying that the 12 astrological houses are shown extinguished, comes rather out of nowhere. The extinction of the houses suggests the end of the universe, or perhaps ascent past the stars, as ,much as the death of a particular person. Death is in fact one of the houses.
What
are we to make of the Hanged Man
himself? Jesus (traitor to Judaism,) or Judas (with
the money bags) of course comes to mind. There is also Muzio Attendola, father of the duke for whom the deck with the first Hanged Man was made (far left above), Francesco Sforza. Anti-pope John in Rome put up "Hanged Man" posters on all 12 bridges in Rome when Muzio left John's service and went over to the other side. On the card there is an indentation beneath his head, of the kind that would be made for a seed in the ground. Muzio's defection helped resolve the schism in the Church in favor of the Avignon faction, and he went on to be the founder of the formidable Sforza dynasty, from the nickname that his men gave him, for his fearlessness and quick-wittedness in difficult skirmishes.
In the context of the other
cards so far, I would suggest Osiris' slow, isolated death in the
coffin
floating
down the Nile, similar psychologically if not pictorially. Typhon
tricked him because, simply, Osiris had betrayed his trust by having sex
with Typhon's wife (even if he did so, as the myth affirms, unknowingly, due to Nepthys' ability to assume Isis's shape). Typhon could tell by the flowers that bloomed in
the desert, thanks to watery Osiris. Typhon himself was sterile, just as
nothing grows in the desert. Yet Nephthys was pregnant with Anubis.
In
that way,
too, Christian's meanings of "violent death" fits the card nicely.
"Sacrifice" fits as well, as Osiris's atonement for his betrayal of Typhon. But that idea
probably comes from a different source, that of Jesus's sacrifice,
surrounded by disciples all of whom will be martyred.There is also
Judas's sacrifice, as in Kazanzakis' Last Temptation of Christ;
it would be a terrible sacrifice to bring it about that your master will
die so that humanity may live. But I suppose that interpretation would
be considered heretical.
Voluntary sacrifice of one's life is a more drastic way of committing oneself to the future than that indicted by the upward turn on the Wheel, since it involves the total abandonment of one's life on earth. It can only be done by uniting that upward movement with Sterngth from a divine source. It is this impulse toward the divine that is accomplished in the next card.
13. "The Scythe" [Death]
The 13th is called the Scythe, and symbolizes the Transformation of man, that is, the passage to future life by natural death.
M-40 expresses in the divine world the perpetual movement of creation, destruction and renewal: in the intellectual world the ascent of the Spirit into the divine spheres: in the physical world death, that is, the transformation of human nature on reaching the end of its organic period.
Arcanum XIII is represented by a skeleton scything heads in a meadow; out of the ground on all sides appear men's hands and feet as the scythe pursues its deadly task. It is the emblem of destruction and perpetual rebirth of all forms of Being in the domain of Time.
Remember, son of Earth, that earthly things last only a brief space, and that the highest are cut down like the grass in the fields. The dissolution of your visible organs will come sooner than you expect; but do not fear death, for death is only birth into another life. The universe ceaselessly reabsorbs all that is her own and has not been spiritualised. But the freeing of material instincts by the voluntary adherence of the soul to the laws of universal movement constitutes in us the creation of a second man, the celestial man, and is the beginning of our immortality.
The
Death card is the earliest of the 22 on which I see what is fairly clearly
Egyptian influence, as early as the Cary-Yale, the oldest extant deck. It is not what de Gebelin said, that a skeleton
means Egypt because they used to carry one through dining halls, to
remind people that their days were numbered. Egypt has no monopoly on the association of death with
skeletons. But it is not just a skeleton: there is is flesh on those ribs, of a sort. In the "Charles VI: and
other earl cards (see below) there is also flesh on the arms and legs.
Mummies did preserve the flesh in an embalmed form. The other thing is
the white ribbon extending from the head, flapping in the breeze.
Egyptian mummies were wrapped in strips of cloth. That was not true of
the "winding sheets" of Western Europe, which were more like sheets of
cloth; alternatively, a garment of plain cloth was used. Ribbons do not
fly off hats in paintings of Death in
this period. Nor is it a banderole, or small banner, as these usually
had
writing or insignia of some kind on them. Egyptian mummies were imported into Western Europe from Egypt due to a belief that their material had healing properties. Wikipedia writes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mummy):
In the Middle Ages, based on a mistranslation from the Arabic term for bitumen, it was thought that mummies possessed healing properties. As a result, it became common practice to grind Egyptian mummies into a powder to be sold and used as medicine.I suspect that the belief that alchemy originated in Egypt added to this idea. If mummification ensured a person's immortality perhaps it contained the mysterious "elixir", or universal medicine. I do not know when this practice started, but in the 15th century conditions were particularly favorable for trade with Egypt. There were numerous mummies near Cairo at the Saqqara burial grounds, and the Muslim inhabitants would have had no qualms about selling them. Mummification was the Egyptian way of ensuring immortality for the individual soul, which returned to the body regularly; Muslims either didn't have this belief or didn't care about the souls of their pagan ancestors.
After the 15th century, the ribbon disappears from the card. It was a detail that the less cultivated artisans of cheap woodblocks saw no need to include. What does remain, some of the time, are the people being mowed down by his scythe.
With
the TdM, starting in a tentative way in Noblet, 1660s, and then more
obviously in the next century, there is a change. Grass in the shape of
hands grows up, become real hands and feet in the later one. I include
the Cary-Yale card for comparison.One stimulus for the change might have been the alchemical illustration below, again from Maier, showing Isis viewing Osiris's body parts after they have been chopped apart by Typhon/Seth. The front scene is Osiris trying out a casket that his brother made and finding that it fits perfectly. Typhon
closes the lid, seals it, and sends it floating down
the Nile (Plutarch Of Is., 13). It could also imply that after some suitable magic, performed
in the back right, he was put back together again, which indeed is what
Isis does in the story. The caption for the engraving says: "By
treachery, Typhon slays Osiris and scatters his limbs abroad, but
majestic Isis reassembles them" (de Rola, The Golden Game p. 103; the image, from Atalanta Fugiens,
is on p. 93). So it is not only death, but rebirth, as the hands
reaching up from under the ground suggest. Christian called the card
"Transformation". I suspect that such a notion was already there. The
next card in the sequence, the angel pouring from one jug to
another, suggests the Eucharist, a ritual of transformation and rebirth.In the sequence, it is the ascent of the soul to a new level, that in which it is separated from the body altogether. It is now this separated spirit that will receive further nurturance from the divine.
14. "The Solar Angel" [Temperance]
The 14th is called the Solar Angel, and symbolizes the Initiative of man through will, knowledge and action combined.
N—50 expresses in the divine world the perpetual movement of life: in the intellectual world the combination of the ideas that create morality: in the physical world the combination of the forces of Nature. Arcanum XIV is represented by the Spirit of the Sun holding two urns and pouring from the one into the other the vital sap of life. It is the symbol of the combinations which are ceaselessly produced in all parts of Nature. Son of Earth, take stock of your strength, not in order to retreat before the works of your hand but in order to wear away obstacles, as water falling drop by drop wears away the hardest stone.Christian gives us an original idea here, that of the Temperance angel as combining elements in new ways, both in the ground as matter and in the spirit. The sun is the visible symbol of God. It is here that the initiation proper begins. "Wearing away obstacles" is an alternative to the confrontaton with enemies of earlier arcana.
A nice touch by Wirth is how he uses the contrast between red and blue. The two sphinxes of the Chariot card are red and blue, for instance, a contrast he keeps up between the two sides of many of the cards. It is something that existed in the TdM as well, although not emphasizing a contrast on opposite sides of the card. All the clothes of all the humans on these cards, even the World-lady's sash, have red and blue as their dominant colors. It is a trend that started with four of the six "second artist" cards of the PMB: the four clothed human figures, for Temperance, Srength, Star, and Moon, all wear primarily red and blue.
There is a statue of the pharaoh, in this case Rameses III, standing between Typhon and Horus, both putting one hand on the pharaoh while with the other they hold an Ankh, symbol of life. Both gods touch the pharaoh. The pharaoh receives from both gods, getting both the calm ordering principles of Horus and the energy and power of Typhon/Seth, to keep a united Egypt happy and secure.
In the Isis myth in Plutarch, when Horus brings Typhon to her for execution, she merely sets him free. She protects both Typhon and Horus. A mixture of both good and evil are necessary, Plutarch taught, and Christian as well. Good is not good unless it resists evil. At the same time, we do not always succeed. Our failings keep us humble.
The figure on the card, unlike these Egyptian gods, was invariably female. That is because all personified virtues were female, at least the ones ending in -a and of grammatically feminine gender. By the 17th century she was also winged, unlike the other two virtues. That may be because she had a special position: Temperance, St. Thomas taught, was the guide to all the virtues, since they are means between extremes. However after death the soul is really beyond such a call to moderation. It is more the transformative power of this angel, like Jesus's transformation of water into wine, that is involved, in this case the exchange of a material body for a body of light, so to speak, an immortal body of spirit.
15. "Typhon" [Devil]
Here I add on the left Levi's Baphomet, which influenced Wirth and Waite but not Falconnier/Wegener.
The 15th is called Typhon, and symbolizes Fate, which. strikes us with unexpected blows.
X-60 expresses in the divine world predestination: in the intellectual world Mystery: in the physical world the Unforeseen, Fatality.The "solve" and "coagule" are from alchemy, the two fundamental action of dissolution, the transformation from solid to liquid, and coagulation, which is the reverse.
Arcanum XV is represented by Typhon, the spirit of catastrophes, who rises out of a flaming abyss and brandishes a torch above the heads of two men chained at his feet. It is the image of Fatality which bursts into certain lives like the eruption of a volcano, and overwhelms great as well as small, strong and weak, the cleverest and the least perceptive, in its equal disaster.
Whoever you may be, son of Earth, contemplate the ancient oaks that defy the lightning, but which the lightning strikes after having avoided them for more than a century. Cease to believe in your wisdom and your strength, if God has not granted that you may receive the key to the mysteries that make a prisoner of Fate.
The earliest Devil cards had horns, pitchforks, and faces on their torsos, even breasts. The later of the two TdM styles (Conver 1760 is at far right above) finally added a torch. But what is Egyptian about any of these?
In 1618 Michael Maier put out an illustrated alchemy book with a figure marked "Typhon" on the title page. It has a torch, breasts, and perhaps a face on the torso. It is not the Christian Devil, but perhaps these were enough, especially given the torch, to associate the Tarot torch-bearer with the evil principle in Plutarch's Isis and Osiris, Osiris's evil brother "Typhon", known elsewhere as Seth, even before de Gebelin made the identification. (I owe the spotting of the association between the card and Typhon to Adam Forrest.) The title is "Secret of Secrets, Greco-Egyptian Heiroglyphics". It is of interest that Maier locates these secrets in Greek Egypt.
For the Devil card another influence might have been via the knowledge that people were conducted
through secret initiation rituals in the dark, as testified about Dionysian mystery-initiations by Livy in his History of Rome. One Isaiac altar from
Rome has on one side a priest carrying a torch, suggesting something at night or underground (Witt fig. 50; that it is Isaiac is established by an image of the Apis
bull, with crescent horns, on another side). On the other hand, it might simply have been a symbol of the search for light and merely been part of a procession even in the daytime.But it may have been an account of an Isiaic ritual that put the Devil in the cards in the first place. In the Golden Ass, Lucius recounts at the end how in his initition he "trod the gates of Proserpine"--in other words, the entrance to Hades, normally reserved for the dead--and "approached the gods below and the gods above" and "at midnight saw the sun shining in all his glory" (Lindsay trans. p. 249). Who is the Devil but the "god below" in Christianity? And then after two night-time cards, the Star and the Moon, comes the Sun in all its glory. This whole part of the sequence suggests Egyptian mysteries.
Here again is the Dendera zodiac, with the hippopotamus god in the center portion. It seems to me that its being in the center signifies its sacredness; it is there with the thighbone of a bull, in other words, the thigh of Osiris in the form of the Apis bull.
How is this card the union of the previous two? That is not an easy question. It would seem that by acquiring an immortal body through the sacrament of the Eucharist, one would have been free of the Devil. All I can think of is that card 14 was also the freeing of Typhon in the soul, so that he can rule over the devilish deeds that are part of one's history and are not erased by death. Without further purification, they are still there to be revealed at the Judgment, in the heart that is weighed against Themis's feather. Typhon is the one bringing charges against Osiris, adultery among others; he is the force pushing the scales down when the heart is weighed at Judgment. He also is the one who brings charges against the dead that plague the living; not only is Anubis, son of Osiris by Nepthys, illegitimate, but so is Horus, conceived after Osiris has died..For the truth to be known, the charges must be examined. Card 13 is the darkness of the tomb. Card 14 is the Angel of Light, on the side of good. Card 15 is not just the angel of darkness, because he also sheds light on the black spots in the hearts of sinners. Maier's giving Typhon a torch isperhaps for just that reason, heating in order to bring out impurities, for their later removal. Perhaps the torch that the TdM 2 card gives him, in place of his pitchfork, is just for that purpose: to bring the evil in the soul to the surface.
16. "The Lightning-Struck Tower" [Maison-Dieu, Fire, Lightning]
The 16th is called the Lightning-Struck Tower, and symbolizes Ruin in every aspect which this idea presents.
O-70 expresses in the divine world the punishment of pride: in the intellectual world the downfall of the Spirit that attempts to discover the mystery of God: in the physical world reversals of fortune.This card reflects a further bit of a bit of imagery having to do with crowns, at least in one early example. .I cannot tell the precise shape of Rameses' crown in the statue of him with Horus and Seth (see Temperance card, above), but the most familiar Egyptian crown to Western eyes would have been the white crown of Upper Egypt, with or without its red accompaniment, for Lower Egypt, or the ostrich feathers on the sides, the crown of Osiris (again, shown in connection with the Temperance card). Without the feathers, it is the white crown of Upper Egypt. I am interested in the shape, which would have been known from statues and reliefs by the 17th century.
Arcanum XVI is represented by a tower struck by lightning. A crowned and an uncrowned man are thrown down from its heights with the ruins of the battlements. It is the symbol of material forces that can crush great and small alike. It is also the emblem of rivalries which only end in ruin for all concerned; of frustrated plans, of hopes that fade away, of abortive enterprises, ruined ambitions and catastrophic deaths.
Remember, son of Earth, that the ordeals of misfortune, accepted with resignation to the supreme Will of the All-Powerful, are the steps in a predestined progress for which you will be eternally rewarded. Suffering is working in order to free yourself from the bonds of material things; it is the putting-on of robes of Immortality.
It strikes me that the Noblet Tower card (middle above) manages to sneak in a few of those tapered crowns of Upper Egypt (as on the one on the exterior wall at Dendera, but minus the part that makes it a combned Upper Egypt/Lower Egypt crown). Two of the falling globes, the two set against the green grass, resemble those crowns, as though they had been dislodged as they fell. The man on the right, moreover, has a yellow band around his head, also a typical Egyptian accoutrement, which would have held something above the forehead, such as the head of a cobra. The crowns emphasize that the theme is the "fall of princes." I include the Dodal version (near left) to show that within a few decades the motif was largely abandoned.
There is a story in Herodotus (Histories 3.27 to 3. 75) that fits the scene on the card, about Cambysis, who conquered Egypt for Persia. In Egypt one of Cambyses' first acts was to kill the Apis bull, a terrible act of sacrilege. Cambyses became mad as a result. He had a dream in which his brother Smerdis was sitting on the throne; so he had his officer Prexaspes go to Persia and slay the brother (3.30), as well as committing other mad atrocities. Hearing that an imposter calling himself Smerdis was ruling in Babylon, they left Egypt. On the way, Cambyses accidently wounded himself with his sword in the thigh, in the same place he had slain the Apis bull. Like the bull, Cambyses died of the infection (3.64). So he would be the man on the ground on the card. Prexaspes, once back, found hat he was now being required to commit further dishonorable acts, or be exposed. He called the people together, confessed his crimes from the highest tower in the city, and jumped to his death (3.75). The only thing that doesn't fit the card is the water on the bottom. The card maker might have thought it had to be on the Nile. Or perhaps he didn't think they needed to die.
17. "The Star of the Magi" [Star]
The 17th is called the Star of the Magi, and symbolizes the Hope which leads to salvation through faith.
P-80 expresses in the divine world Immortality: in the intellectual world the Inner Light that illuminates the Spirit: in the physical world Hope. Arcanum XVII is represented by a blazing star with eight rays surrounded by seven other stars hovering over a naked girl who pours over the barren earth the waters of universal Life that flow from two goblets, one gold, the other silver. Beside her, a butterfly is alighting on a rose. This girl is the emblem of Hope which scatters its dew upon our saddest days. She is naked, in order to signify that Hope remains with us when we have been bereft of everything. Above this figure the blazing, eight-pointed star symbolises the apocalypse of Destinies enclosed by seven seals which are the seven planets, represented by the seven other stars. The butterfly is the sign of resurrection beyond the grave.The Star card is fairly easy to connect with Egypt, even without actual antiquities from ancient Egypt. Its connection with Isis is well documented in the Greek literature about Egypt. Court de Gebelin was the first to point out the relationship in print, but the connection is even in Horapollo, known decades before the first known mention of tarot. Here is what he says about how the year is represented in hieroglyphs (Boas trans., p. 44f):
Remember, son of Earth, that Hope is the sister of Faith. Abandon your passions and your errors and study the mysteries of true Knowledge, and their key shall be given unto you. Then shall a ray of the divine Light shine from the occult Sanctuary to dispel the darkness of the future and show you the path to happiness. Whatever happens in your life, never break the flowers of Hope, and you will gather the fruit.
And among them Isis is a star, called Sothis by the Egyptians, by the Greeks the Dog-Star, which appears to rule over the other stars. Now greater, now less, as it rises, and now brighter, now dimmer. And according to the rising of this star, we note how everything during the year is going to happen. Wherefore it is not unreasonable to call the year Isis.The new year in fact began with Sothis, on June 21. On the Dendera astronomical ceiling there is a large pole indicating the time of the year when Sothis first appeared on the eastern horizon.
Isis's relationship to this special star heralding the Nile flood is also in Plutarch and Diodorus. Plutarch says (On Isis and Osiris 21, at http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Moralia/Isis_and_Osiris*/B.html):
...the soul of Isis is called by the Greeks the Dog-star, but by the Egyptians Sothis...And also, in section 38:
Of the stars the Egyptians think that the Dog-star is the star of Isis because it is the bringer of water.By "bringer of water" he of course means the Nile flood. Here we might recall Michael Maier's frontispiece with Typhon, Isis and Osiris. Isis has a bucket, presumably full of water to douse Typhon's flame.
Diodorus makes the same identification to the dog-star as Plutarch, saying that Isis's tomb bore an inscription that read in part "I am she who riseth in the star that is in the Constellation of the Dog" (I.27.4, at http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Diodorus_Siculus/1A*.html).
This connection to Isis can be seen in Roman coins: In this role she was called "Isis Sothis" and appeared as such on Roman coins such as the ones at left, riding a dog, meaning the dog-star according to R. F. Witt's Isis in the Roman World (Cornell: Ithaca NY 1971). These pictures are his figures 63 and 64. I think there is a star above her head on one of them. What lettering that remains is definitely Roman rather than Greek.
On Roman-era reliefs in Egypt there was a nude young
woman with a star over her head. That surely would have been associated
with the Star card and with either Isis or, as a separate goddess, Sothis.
Isis and Sothis are both feminine figures in Plutarch and Diodorus. Aquarius was traditionally male. However, the first time the tarot has an Aquarius-like person holding jugs pouring out water, on the Cary Sheet (above left), there is nothing definitively female about it. Later, of course, it is clearly a woman (as in the Chosson at right).
Looking on Pinterest (https://www.pinterest.com/pin/320529698462363868/?lp=true), I only saw three Aquariuses with two jugs, and they were all from about the same time period, late 15th to early 16th century In addition, there is Aquarius in the minchiate deck, verified from the 17th century. But since the term "minchiate" referring to a card game is found even in 1460, and either it or the alternative term "germini" at regular intervals thereafter, I would expect that the image goes back almost that far. All of these examples are of sexually ambiguous figures, most likely feminine-looking males, comaprable to the Cary Sheet.
At this point we have to wonder: why are there two streams, when Greco-Roman zodiacs invariably, outside of Egypt, had a man with one jug? I suspect it is because the life-giving power of the Nile is the result of both of its branches, the White Nile and the Blue Nile. The White Nile brings nutrients, but its relatively constant flow does not bring them to the crops except during the summer rains in Ethiopia, when water comes as a torrent from the highlands. This is a phenomenon discussed by Plutarch, and also by Horapollo, who not only mentions these rains as the cause of the flood (Boas p. 57) but says that the flood was depicted by three water jugs:
To symbolize the rising of the Nile, ... sometimes they draw...three great water-jars. ... And the three water-jars, no more nor less, since the rise of the Nile, according to them, takes place in three ways. One they attribute to the land of Egypt, for it produces water. And another is the ocean, for water is borne into Egypt by the ocean at the time of the rise. The third is rain-storms, which are produced in the southern parts of Ethiopia, at the time of the rising of the Nile.I have never seen any Egyptian image with three jugs. It seems to me that the Greeks would have known that the ocean, i.e. the Mediterranean Sea, did not contribute to the Nile flood, because it is sea water, unusable by fresh water plants; moreover the level of the sea would not have risen in the summer. Also, they would have known about both main branches of the Nile upstream. The convention of water-jugs remains, but is two instead of three.
The two sources of the Nile also explain why there is a high hill or mountain on one side of the Cary Sheet card and a much lower hill on the other side; one is the Ethiopian highlands, the other relatively flat. Finally, it also explains one other detail on many of the TdM cards, namely, that one of the jugs has brown water coming from it, while the other is clear (as in the Chosson at right above). Either that, or one jug is poured on the land and the other in a large body of water. It is again the White Nile and the Blue Nile.
Also characteristic of Egypt is that in the Cary Sheet image there are 5 planets rather than 7. On the Dendera zodiac, the 5 planets are all depicted in a similar way, as men with staffs. The moon, however, is represented as a circle. In general, the 5 planets were not identified as gods with specific individual characters, unlike in Greece and Babylonia. It is true that one of the 5 is on the jug-person's shoulder. That might identify the person as Venus, the deity most often shown naked with no further characteristic. Even that is Egyptian, in the sense that decans are Egypt's contribution to Greek astrology: Sothis was associated with the first decan of Cancer, the planet for which is Venus. The association to Sothis is not given in the Astrolabium planum of Johann Engel; but it is given in Christian's list of decans and surely would have been known in late 15th century Italy one way or another, because the rising of the "Dog Star" was the beginning of the Egyptian year; the associated goddess was the most publicized star-daemon of them all.
Here we should recall also that Christian's interpretation of the Star card is as hope, not an irrelevant consideration after the ruin of card 16. How far back does that go? If you look at the PMB Star card in relation to the Cary-Yale Hope card, they are fairly similar. Moreover, the subject of the minchiate Star card is precisely that of a Magus following, with the help of some instrument, a star overhead. It is likely the star over Bethlehem, where the hope of humanity has just been born. 
It is similar in other early non-Milanese tarot decks, notably the "d'Este" deck, made for one of the dukes of Ferrara to commemorate his wedding, as indicated by Estensi and Aragonese heraldics; there were two such weddings, but it is probably the one in 1486 as opposed to the one in 1445. There is also the Star card of the Rothschild Sheet, probably of early 16th century Bologna. When Christian says that the meaning is
"Hope" and its name is "The Star of the Magi", he is in the same tradition.
His images owe nothing to any of these three traditions (early Milan,
minchiate, Ferrarese, and Bolognese); these cards were most
likely unknown to him. Yet the ideas behind them seem somehow to have survived among card-players and surfaced in his titles and
interpretations. The rising of Sothis was to the ancient
Egyptians the practical hope of the flood--which didn't always come.
The Judeo-Christian tradition spiritualized that hope, even if its Magi
came from "the East" rather than Egypt, which was west.
In addition, Isis, like the Virgin Mary later, was particular associated with providing hope in hopeless situations. For example Ovid, in the Metamorphoses, has Isis say to the pregnant woman of whom I spoke in relation to arcanum II (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0029%3Abook%3D9%3Acard%3D666, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0028%3Abook%3D9%3Acard%3D666).
Dea sum auxiliaris opemque,exorata fero, nec te coluisse quererisingratum numen.
I am the goddess who brings helpto all who call upon me; and you shall
never complain of me—that you adored
a thankless deity.
The situation is that if this woman is delivered of a girl, her husband wants it killed. She is advised to raise it as a boy and not to worry. At her wedding (to another woman, of course), it turns out, Isis changes Iphis's sex. The situation is similar to that of Lucius in Apuleius's novel, who prays to Isis to be delivered from his animal form; Isis answers in a dream and later changes him to his original form.
Besides hope, the difference between the two streams, one dirty from the
lowland and the other clear and from the highlands, is also ripe for
allegorization: it is the combination of strength of spirit (higher)
plus
strength of body (lower). Or
the brown side could represent the washing away of sin,
and the other an anointing in oil symbolizing the abundance of
spiritual life. I do not know whether such symbolism is Egyptian; it is
certainly Greek (Odysseus preparing to battle the suitors) and Jewish
(David preparing to ask God's forgiveness for having Bathsheba's husband
killed).There is a 16th century Ferrarese card, part of an uncut sheet now in the Budapest Museum of Fine Art, reproduced in Stuart Kaplan's Encyclopedia of Tarot, vol.. 2 p. 274, quite reminiscent of
Michelangelo's David in its pose.
One 16th century Star card shows a lady in the sea holding a spindle, with a ship in the background and the words inclitum sydus,
illustrious star. The spindle, as Cartari explains, associates her with
the fates, whose thread control birth and length of life. The Cartari
1647 illustration already shown has her holding a ship; she was the
protector of sailors, a role also given to Venus and the Virgin Mary.
Some Roman coins in Witt's book, with Roman lettering, also show Isis
with a ship (see the third coin of three above, and one at the end of the section on the World card). While the lady's nakedness tends
to associate her with Venus, these religions all co-opted
one another, as was known at the time the cards were made.
For a bird that did have symbolic value in relation to what was already on the card, however, we need look no further than the phoenix, said to return to Egypt, the place of its birth, at the end of its natural life. Having built its nest in a tree, it lifts its wings to greet the rising sun, just before the nest bursts into flame and turns it to ashes. Then a new Phoenix, or the old one renewed, will be born from those ashes.
A famous frontispiece, of Paris 1603, is much like the card, except for the tube at the bottom, which leads to a fire. In this illustration the phoenix has an elchemical dimension. It is easy enough to leave out on the card; some phoenix illustrations did not even show it on a nest..
Horapollo says about the phoenix (Boas trans., p. 61):
When they wish to depict the soul delaying here a long time, or a flood, they draw the phoenix. ...A flood, since the phoenix is the symbol of the sun, than whch nothing in the universe is greater. For the sun is above all things and looks down upon all things. .Also, ater relating that the bird lives for 500 years before returning to Egypt to die, he adds (same page)
...whatever the Egyptians do in the case of the other sacred animals, the same do they feel obliged to do for the phoenix. For it is said by the Egyptians beyond all other birds to cherish the sun, wherefore the Nile overflows for them because of the warmth of this god, concerning which we have spoken a little above.Apparently the sun is what somehow brings the water of the flood, since it always occurs in the summer. And the phoenix, in virtue of its relationship to the sun, is also a symbol of the flood.
In Christianity the phoenix became a symbol of the resurrection. St. Ambrose (340-397) wrote of it (https://archive.org/stream/fathersofthechur027571mbp/fathersofthechur027571mbp_djvu.txt)
When the phoenix realizes that he is coming to the end of his life, he build himself a casket of incense, myrrh, and other aromatic plants, into which he enters and dies when his time has come. From the moisture proceeding from his flesh he comes to life again... By the very act of his resurrection the phoenix furnishes us a lesson by setting before us the very emblem of our own resurrectionwithout the aid or precedent or reason.Another source, the medieval Physiologus, compares the phoenix to Christ (here). These characterizations fit well with the theme of the card as rebirth, just as the fields are reborn from the Nile flood.
Modern Egyptology has determined, from the Pyramid Texts, that for the Egyptians traditionally the corresponding bird was the Bennu, an aspect of the creator god, the ba soul of Osiris, symbol of rebirth, and other things (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bennu). Probably the phoenix of the Greek accounts derived from that tradition. It may even be that the bird on the card derives from the hieroglyph of the Bennu, as seen on Egyptian monuments, according to Wikipedia even on a tree, the willow symbolic of Osiris. But before the decipherment of hieroglyphs and access to the Pyramid texts, Europeans would have been seen it as a phoenix,
The upshot is that when de Gebelin called the subject of the card the Dog-Star, there is some merit to what he said. The Dog-Star, as Sirius was known to the Greeks, was Sothis to the Egyptians, according to Plutarch identified as both Isis herself and "Isis's water-carrier". Likewise when Christian called it the Star of the Magi and said it signified Hope, he was again continuing an earlier tradition. Even the butterfly on the tree, Christian's replacement for the bird (following Etteilla, following de Gebelin's text, though not his illustration), continues this tradition, as that which emerges from the crysalis of the caterpillar's death.
As the second of the fifth group of three, this card continues the purification process initiated by card 16, but this time by means of gentle rain rather than the fire of lightning, Isis's healing after Osiris's incisions..
18. "The Twilight" [Moon]
The 18th is called Twilight, and symbolizes the Deceptions that teach us our weakness.
TS—80 expresses in the divine world the abysses of the Infinite: in the intellectual world the darkness that cloaks the Spirit when it submits itself to the power of the instincts: in the physical world, deceptions and hidden enemies.
Arcanum XVIII is represented by a field that a half-clouded moon illuminates with a vague twilight. A tower stands on each side of a path that disappears into a barren landscape. In front of one of these two towers a dog is crouching: in front of the other, a dog is baying at the moon: between them is a crab. These towers symbolise the false security which does not foresee hidden perils.
Remember, son of Earth, that whosoever dares to confront the unknown faces death. The, hostile spirits, symbolised by one dog, wait in ambush; the servile spirits, symbolised by the other, conceal their treacheries with base flattery; and the idle spirits, symbolised by the crab, will pass by without the slightest concern for disaster. Observe, listen----and learn to keep your own counsel.There is something out of place about the card, given this interpretation. If there has been a ruin, then the submission to the instincts, or the treachery and ambushes from others, have already happened. The card should have gone between Typhon and the Lightning-Struck Tower. However from the perspective of the Nile flood, it belongs right where it is.
Like the Star and the Sun, thr early Moon card has a zodiacal sign on it, the crustacean, as well as a body of water. The crustacean is the sign of Cancer, not only governed by the Moon but also representing most of July, the peak of the Nile flood, as de Gebelin pointed out. This design goes back to the Cary Sheet, c. 1500, and it is there that one can see, or see if one wishes, more signs of Egypt. Temples typically were
Christian characterized the card as symbolizing deception, a connotation it has had every since Christian. There is only one way I can connect that idea to Egypt, and that is if it is assumed that the killing of Osiris by enticing him into a casket (if it fit, he would get it as a present) occurred at the height of the flood, so that it would be difficult to retrieve owing to the force of the water. But I cannot find any documentation of such a strategy.
What the card shows is the dragon with its treasure, and so the fight to get it; if there is any deception, it may be that the dragon looks worse than it actually is, once it is faced. The Egyptian tamed the torrent and got its treasure by diverting it into canals and an artificial lake. That may be the same as that mentioned by Diodorus called Acherousia, where the dead are ferried to the other side and their bodies put in vaults, near a temple of Hecate (I.96.7-9, http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/e/roman/texts/diodorus_siculus)
When
dogs were added to the card (at right, Noblet 1660s, Chosson c. 1672-1734), another association to the Isis/Osiris
myth was added as well. Diodorus's account of the murder of Osiris
omits the casket and contains only the episode in which Typhon surprises
Osiris, hacks him to pieces and buries the body aprts in isolated
spots. Dogs help Isis in her search and protect her from wild animals (http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/e/roman/texts/diodorus_siculus/1d*.html).De Gebelin commented on the drops that appear to fall from the moon on this card. He says (http://priory-of-sion.com/biblios/links/gebelin.pdf):
Pausanias teaches us in his description of Phocide, that according to the Egyptians, it was the tears of Isis which flooded each year the waters of the Nile and which thus rendered fertile the fields of Egypt. The historians of that country also speak about a drop or tear, which falls from the Moon at the time when the water of the Nile must grow bigger.
I have no reference for his second citation, but that of Pausanias is correct, at 10.32.18 of Description of Greece (http://www.theoi.com/Text/Pausanias10C.html).
De Gebelin also comments on the dogs, saying
Clement, himself was Egyptian, since he was of Alexandria and who consequently knew what he was talking about, assures us in his Tapestries that the Egyptians represented the Tropics under the figure of two dogs, which, similar to gatekeepers or faithful guards, kept the Sun and the Moon from going to the Poles.
This again is correct. The work he calls "Tapestries" is usually known these days as the "Stromates". Here is Clement (http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/02105.htm, find "dogs"):
For the dogs are symbols of the two hemispheres, which, as it were, go round and keep watch... And some will have it that by the dogs are meant the tropics, which guard and watch the sun’s passage to the south and north.
Of course the dogs can be interpreted in several other ways, since they often bay at the moon.
De Gebelin adds that the two towers are "the two famous pillars of Hercules, beyond which these two large luminaries never pass". I cannot find any classical source for this reference, but it does seem to be part of the lore of "Egyptian" Masonry, which de Gebelin seems congenial to; it has the same meaning as the dogs. A quotation from Albert Pike, a 19th century American Mason, posted on the Internet at https://pikequotes.wordpress.com/2015/05/25/the-two-columns-jachin-and-boaz-are-cancer-and-capricorn-the-two-gates-of-heaven-and-the-two-pillars-of-hercules/ has it that
These Egyptian associations (that is, associations thought of as Egyptian) to the Moon card are somewhat at variance with what Christian says about their being associated with deceptions and treacheries. It is a time of grief, as indicated by the drops from the moon, and also that in which Isis is in need of concealment while she searches for Osiris's body, which the dim light of the moon would provide. The dogs are protectors of the Sun and Moon, hence of Osiris and Isis. The only treachery and deception would be the event that caused the grief and need for concealment. Perhaps the crayfish could be associated with that, as holding the divine substance, comparable to the hidden remains of Osiris.
In terms of the Nile flood, this card represents the height of the flood, in which the water is not just the rain from above but has the power of a thunder-bolt rushing over the land. Yet with dikes and canals to guide the water into resevoirs, it can be kept from being harmful. Such were the feats of ancient engineering that in the 15th century were being dreamed of again (e.g. by the architect Filerete in his plans for MIlan) and in later centuries were being accomplished. In this context the dogs, as guards against the flood's going too far one way or the other, would be the structures that made this taming of the waters possible. .
The Solstices, Cancer and Capricorn, the two Gates of Heaven, are the two pillars of Hercules, beyond which he, the Sun, never journeyed: and they still appear in our Lodges, as the two great columns, Jachin and Boaz, and also as the two parallel lines that bound the circle, with a point in the centre, emblem of the Sun, between the two tropics of Cancer and Capricorn.While none too clear as it stands, the general meaning is that the pillars of Hercules serve the same function as the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, boundaries of the sun's inclination in the sky at the time of the solstices. Somehow, as seen from somewhere, their peaks marked two points in the sky in the south and the north. If so, the towers on the card do the same for the moon, de Gebelin reasoned. Towers mark boundaries. The dogs then warn when the moon or sun gets close.
These Egyptian associations (that is, associations thought of as Egyptian) to the Moon card are somewhat at variance with what Christian says about their being associated with deceptions and treacheries. It is a time of grief, as indicated by the drops from the moon, and also that in which Isis is in need of concealment while she searches for Osiris's body, which the dim light of the moon would provide. The dogs are protectors of the Sun and Moon, hence of Osiris and Isis. The only treachery and deception would be the event that caused the grief and need for concealment. Perhaps the crayfish could be associated with that, as holding the divine substance, comparable to the hidden remains of Osiris.
In terms of the Nile flood, this card represents the height of the flood, in which the water is not just the rain from above but has the power of a thunder-bolt rushing over the land. Yet with dikes and canals to guide the water into resevoirs, it can be kept from being harmful. Such were the feats of ancient engineering that in the 15th century were being dreamed of again (e.g. by the architect Filerete in his plans for MIlan) and in later centuries were being accomplished. In this context the dogs, as guards against the flood's going too far one way or the other, would be the structures that made this taming of the waters possible. .
19. "The Blazing Light" [Sun]
The 19th is called the Resplendent Light, and symbolizes earthly happiness [published translation and DDD erroneously consider "earthly" as capitalized and highlighted].
Q—100 expresses in the divine world the supreme Heaven: in the intellectual world sacred Truth: in the physical world peaceful Happiness.So we have the happy couple on Franconnier's card. Christian had specified a pair of children. Probably after seeing the adults on the Dendera zodiac, Falconnier changed it.
Arcanum XIX is represented by a radiant sun shining on two small children, images of innocence, who hold each other's hands in the midst of a circle of flowers. It is the symbol of happiness promised by the simple life and by moderation in all one's desires.
Remember, son of Earth, that the light of the Mysteries flows dangerously in the service of the Will. It illuminates those who know how to use it; it strikes down those who are ignorant of its power or who abuse it
If the Star card represents the beginning of the Flood, and the Moon card its height, then the Sun card shows the aftermath. On some TdM cards, there are pools of water on the ground. The Sun is beating down and taking the water back into the air. De Gebelin had referred to the drops emanating from the Sun as the "tears of Isis", citing the Roman-era Greek travel writer Pausanius. I think that originally they were probably just solar rays; however another reference to Egypt certainly wouldn't have harmed a demand for Egyptian-based cards.
As
it happens, Falconnier was not the first to put a loving couple on the
Sun card. We see them in the minchiate (the expanded tarot from
Florence), far right. It is still Gemini-related, because that deck has
cards for all twelve zodiacal signs, and the one for Gemini has a couple, now naked,
holding hands. These cards are 17th or 18th century, but all versions
have this same features; so they probably go back quite far in its
history.The same is true for the early TdM, at least to the extent that a man and a woman with their hands around and near each other are on the card in a couple of early decks. One is from the "Sforza Castle" group. These cards, from various decks, were found in a wall in the castle during some remodeling, apparently used as filler. Since the nnumber is on the card, it is later than the Cary Sheet of c. 1500, which didn't have numbers. It is similar to that in the earliest TdM style complete deck, that of Noblet in the 1660s.
I am not sure why the scene on the two cards to our left appears sad, at least on the face of the woman. The flood, in leaving behind pools of water, would surely have been a breeding ground for mosquitoes and hence of malaria epidemics, which would have resulted in flood-related deaths. If so, that would be an Egyptian explanation for the sad expressions.
The only suggestion of Egypt in the 15th century and earlier zodiacs is in the 1485 zodiac I showed in my previous post, with pyramids in the background. If the Egyptian version of the Greek zodiac was known in Europe before Napoleon, then of course there is a connection to Egypt, which had many male-female pairs of gods.
And third the Twins, especially as the quadrilleThat is in northern France, where spring comes late. It is earlier in northern Italy. All the medieval examples in which Gemini is connected with lovers are French. Yet somehow Gemini and the Sun card are lovers in minchiate, from Florence. Could there be the influence of Dendera, given the other suggestions of that site? I don't know what to think.
Of gentle-fierce Cupid makes of the male and female
One truly perfect body, the fruits grow twins,
And suddenly we see flower and grain harvests
The TdM quickly abandoned the male-female pair and switched to male-male, in fact in every post-Noblet TdM deck known (above, it is the two on the right, Chosson, 1673-1734 and Conver 1761). In that case there are connections to Egypt as well.
First, notice how the green ground with a puddle or two has been changed to a blue ground with a mound here and there. It seems to me that this might indicate a change in regard to the state of the flood in the time of Leo, governed by the Sun, in Egypt. Formerly it was thought to peak in July and recede in August, leaving only a few puddles. But by Chosson's time it was realized that the flood was even greater in August than in July, hence the necessity to stand on high ground.
There is also something else, which seems to me on firmer ground. The Sun card is just before the Last Judgment, and after a rather dark card, the Moon, with its dogs, towers, and monstrous lobster. The Sun card could be expected to have something to do with salvation, the defeat of the Devil, or in Egypt Typhon, the banishment of darkness. In fact in the Isis cult the two twins Castor and Pollux, the "Dioscuri" ("sons of Zeus") did have such a role. They were the protectors of sailors and in that role were associated with Isis, who had the same role. They were savior-figures, in other words. They are shown together with Isis and Serapis on a Roman relief (below Witt fig. 33). I don't know when it was found, but that role was already indicated in literature about them.
There is also a tradition, starting very early in Milan, in which there is no association to the Gemini at all. In the PMB, whose original cards were of the 1450s, the Sun card is by a different artist in a later style, although still 15th century. It has a nude boy grasping the sun (far left below). Also from around 1500 is, in the mass-produced deck represented by the Cary Sheet, a boy waving a flag under a sun. Only a partial image survived, the second image from the left. The orange portion on the third image from the left is an attempted reconstruction (from "Andy's Playing Cards" online). It probably developed into the c. 1650 Paris Vieville card at the far right. That card is the prototype for the standard Flemish pattern "knight on a leaping horse" described by van den Bosch in 1981 (compare at http://l-pollett.tripod.com/cards63.htm).
In relation to Egypt, the associations are to both Horus and Osiris. The association of the Sun with Horus is documented in Plutarch and Diodorus. Plutarch says (sect. 61, at http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Moralia/Isis_and_Osiris*/D.html):
...they record that in the so‑called books of Hermes it is written in regard to the sacred names that they call the power which is assigned to direct the revolution of the Sun Horus, but the Greeks call it Apollo...And Diodorus (http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Diodorus_Siculus/1A*.html):
Moreover, they say that the name Horus, when translated, is Apollo, and that, having been instructed by his mother Isis in both medicine and divination, he is now a benefactor of the race of men through his oracular responses and his healings.Likewise there is Herodotus (Rawlinson trans., vol. 2 p. 241, online), who wrote before the Ptolemies.:
They call Apollo, in their language, Horus.He says that Osiris is the same as the Greeks' Dionysus. That does not exclude Osiris's being the sun, however, because Dionysus had the epithet "the shining one" (Phanes). This is pointed out by Diodorus, who also notes a Greek poet Eumolpus who spoke of "Our Dionysus, shining like a star, /With fiery eye in ev'ry ray" (same web-page as earlier).
Diodorus in fact explicitly associates Osiris with the sun (same web-page). I cannot find a referent for the "he says" of the first line; I assume he means "the Egyptian", since earlier he spoke of "they say" to mean the Egyptians:
Now the men of Egypt, he says, when ages ago they came into existence, as they looked up at the firmament and were struck with both awe and wonder at the nature of the universe, conceived that two gods were both eternal and first, namely, the sun and the moon, whom they called respectively Osiris and Isis. For when the names are translated into Greek Osiris means "many-eyed," and properly so; for in shedding his rays in every direction he surveys with many eyes, as it were, all land and sea.The difference between Horus and Osiris seems to be that while Osiris is the sun itself, Horus is the god responsible for its movement.
Osiris as the sun was also part of Serapis, the deity created by the Ptolemies to sythesize Greek and Egyptian deities. The online Encyclopedia Britannica writes (https://www.britannica.com/topic/Serapis):
Serapis, also spelled Sarapis, Greco-Egyptian deity of the Sun first encountered at Memphis, where his cult was celebrated in association with that of the sacred Egyptian bull Apis (who was called Osorapis when deceased). He was thus originally a god of the underworld but was reintroduced as a new deity with many Hellenic aspects by Ptolemy I Soter (reigned 305–284 bce), who centred the worship of the deity at Alexandria.If Isis was the Moon and the material principle, then Osiris would have to be the Sun, whose light the moon reflected and whose pure forms were the origin of enformed matter. It is part of Platonic mythology, in which the Sun represented the form of the Good. Since
You will have noticed the rays or drops emanating from the sun in the Cary Sheet image. This seems to be the origin of similar drops on the Moon card. They could be interpreted again as the "tears of Isis", or perhaps as energy in the form of rays from Osiris to his son Horus. Or they are simply the rays Osiris is "shedding in every direction" by which, Diodorus says, he surveys the land.
If the Dioscuri are savior-gods, Horus is even more so, since Horus is the one who defeats Typhon and achieves recognition as king of all Egypt. In that case, the boy with the flag, or on the horse is Horus, waving the banner of Osiris and perhaps of victory: flag-waving is usually about fighting the enemy, as in a battle flag or a victory flag
The boy on a horse suggests the image in Revelation, after the woman of Rev. 12:1 bears her child, in which Christ appears as a "pale rider" of terrible aspect. It is again a savior figure. And about the boy with the flag, . It is a harbinger of salvation. That is the role of Horus in the Isis-Osiris story. The Sun is the image of God; and in the story it took the approval of Ra (another sun-god) for Horus to become pharaoh instead of Typhon.
In the Corpus Hermeticum, there is one, the "Definitions" of Tractate XVI (Copenhaver trans., pp. 58-61), that is straightforwardly a hymn to the sun, which it calls the center of the universe, around which the eight other spheres revolve (including the zodiac but not the earth), and which guides and gives light and energy to everything else. I suspect that the writer is using heliocentrism as a metaphor rather than as physical science. If so, it is a metaphor for a kind of sustainer-god of the universe, even a liberator, as it says (pp. 60-61):
Thus, if by way of the sun anyone has a ray shining upon him in his rational part (and the totality of those enlightened is few), the demons' effect on him is nullified. For none - neither demons nor gods - can do anything against a single ray of god.The Asclepius, especially important bccause it was already available during the Midle Ages in Latin, speaks of the sun's "divinity and holiness", adding ( p. 85):
The sun is indeed a second god, Asclepius, believe it, governing all things and shedding light on all that are in the world, ensouled and soulless.Again it is a metaphor for God, taking the place that Apuleius alotted for Isis.
So the soul is even closer to God, no longer the destructive purifier of card 16 but the bringer of light and warmth himself, reveled to the chosen ones.
20. "The Awakening of the Dead" [Judgment]
The 20th is called the Revival of the Dead, and symbolizes Renewal, which changes Good into Evil, or Evil into Good, in the series of trials imposed on every career.Horus,the eagle on the Empress's and Emperor's shields, the good horse of Osiris's victory chariot, is suggested once more, it seems to me, on the card of the Last Judgment, in a late change from the 17th to the 18th century (compare Noblet and Chosson). The card changed so that the head of the middle figure on the card suggests the "Wadjet eye", also known as the "eye of Horus". It was considered a magical aid to healing.
R-200 represents the passage from life on earth to the life of the future. A Spirit is blowing a trumpet over a half-open tomb. A man, a woman and a child, a collective symbol of the human trinity, are shown rising from this tomb. It is a sign of the change which is the end of all things, of Good as well as of Evil.
Remember, son of Earth, that fortune is variable, even when it appears most unshakeable. The ascent of the soul is the fruit of its successive ordeals. Hope in the time of suffering, but beware of prosperity. Do not fall asleep in laziness or forgetfulness. At a moment unknown to you the wheel of fortune will turn: you will be raised or cast down by the Sphinx.
Like card 5, the priest, this card is an exception to the principle that every third card, starting with 2 the priestess, is feminine. It, too marks a voice discerning good from evil, but this time directly from divine realms rather than within the soul.
21 [0]. "The Crocodile" [Fool]
The 21st is called the Crocodile, and symbolizes the Expiation of errors or voluntary faults.
S-300 represents the punishment following every error. You can see here a blind man carrying a full beggar's wallet about to collide with a broken obelisk, on which a crocodile is waiting with open jaws. This blind man is the symbol of he who makes himself the slave of material things. His wallet is packed with his errors and his faults. The broken obelisk represents the ruin of his works; the crocodile is the emblem of fate and the inevitable Expiation.
The crocodile is one of the two animals that Plutarch associated with Typhon (see my section on the Devil card). There is also, probably more to the point for the Falconnier/Wegener animal,. the Judgment scene in which the heart of the deceased is weighed against the feather of Ma'at. The monster Ammit, "the Devourer", was typically depicted with its jaws partly open waiting to devour the soul if the heart proved too heavy. It was shown with the head of a crocodile, the upper body of a lion, and the lower body of a hippopotamus, thus combining the three fiercest animals known to the Egyptians.That by the time of Levi and Christian the occultists were aware of this scene is shown in Christian's 1870 book. He writes (History of Magic pp. 123-124):
At the entrance to the judgment hall of Amentis [previously explained as the "lower region through which, according to Mystic theology, all souls must pass on leaving earth to enter new existence"] was a guardian monster named Oms, the hound of Typhon. This was a compound between crocodile, hippopotamus, and dog, whence the Greeks derived their Cerberus or dog with three heads. ... In the midst is a pair of scales in which the separately weighed good and bad action represented by weights given by Thoth, alleged first legislator of Egypt....Depending on the outcome of the weighing, and the judgment of "thirty-two judges", Christian says, souls went into "spheres of happiness determined by their types of merit", and guilty souls to "a sphere of expiation". It is in fact Thoth whom we see on the right, recording the result, the judges are at the top. However it does not seem to be good deeds and bad deeds being weighed, but rather the heart of the deceased against the feather of Ma'at. This is confirmed by E. Wallis Budge in his book Egyptian Religion,(London, 1889, pp. 127-129), who gave the number of judges as forty-two Those whose heart weighed more than Ma'at's feather were then devoured by the beast ("Ammut", the Devourer) (p. 143). Christian apparently did not go that far, preferring to attribute to the Egyptians a Hell or Purgatory.
22. "The Crown of the Magi" [World]
The 22nd is called the Crown of the Magi, and symbolizes the Reward for everyone who has fulfilled his mission on earth by reflecting some features of the image of God.Levi's vision of the card (far left above) is essentially that of the TdM, but with no ribbon covering sensitive areas of her body. Eliphas Levi called her "truth"; if so, unclad she is "naked truth". One suggestion has been that she represents Plato’s “World-Soul”, soul of the cosmos (see Andrea Vitali's essay here). In that case, the four evangelists would represent the four elements that make up the cosmos, and the figure in the middle its soul. In the Timaeus Plato imagined the body of the cosmos as a globe (33b), in the center of which he put its soul (34b), which then diffused throughout. The world-soul was the source of individual souls and therefore their destination after death as well. The relevance to Egypt is that according to Macrobius the World Soul was Isis (Satnrnalia 1, 20-21).
THIS, the supreme Arcanum of Magism, is represented by a garland of golden roses surrounding a star and placed in a circle around which are set at equal distances the heads of a man, a bull, a lion and an eagle. This is the sign with which the Magus decorates himself when he has reached the highest degree of initiation and has thus acquired a power limited only by his own intelligence and wisdom. Remember, son of Earth, that the empire of the World belongs to the empire of Light, whic is the throne reserved by God for sanctified Will. Happiness for the Magus is the fruit of the knowledge of Good and Evil; but God only allows it to be plucked by the man sufficienty master of himself to approach it without covetousness.
The end of the sequence, on this reading, would be a return to the source. In Egypt, after passing Osiris in the judgment hall, the successful soul was welcomed by Isis and Nepthys, as shown in the papyrus below.
this deity presides over and is king of the dead (being no other than the Hades and Pluto amongst the Greeks)In the same section Plutarch goes on to explain that he must not be supposed to be under the earth; rather:
where they [souls] are set free and migrate to the Formless, Invisible, Impassive, and Good, then this God becomes leader and king over them...In this context Isis in the myth corresponds to the soul in search of the deity, which will not rest til finding it. And she succeeds, for (sect. 26):
..she, together with Osiris, having been translated from the rank of good dæmons up to that of gods, by means of their virtue (as later was done with Hercules and Bacchus) receive, not inappropriately, the united honours of gods and of dæmons everywhere, both in the regions above earth, and in those under ground, possessing the supreme power, for they say that Serapis is no other than Pluto, and Isis Proserpine...This Serapis is of course the Ptolemai form of Osiris, uniting him with their own gods, including Hades and Zeus.
The
naked lady of the TdM (above left, Chosson), an innovation of
sometime in the 16th or 17th century,
is first seen on a card found in the Sforza Castle in Milan (middle below).
The figure there is somewhat ambiguous sexually, but seems more feminine than masculine.Visually it is not a bit like the Milanese card before it (at left), which shows two putti (naked children or child angels) holding up a bubble with a walled city in it, which is either the New Jerusalem or an idealized Milan. Yet the city's idealized character, or even as a plan for an actual city, gives it the meaning of life in a world to come.
For the four "beasts," on the card, one precedent is the "tarot of Mantegna" second version (near left), of around the 1480s. The title of the card, "Prima Causa," i.e. "First Cause", makes the other-worldly context of the four clear, as does the cosmos of concentric circles, with God at the circumference. It had been a standard way of framing Jesus or Mary in the Middle Ages, such as the ivory carving below, from the Benedictine abbey of Cluny, as was the "mandorla", i.e. almond shape, in which the figure was put. (The tarot card is the Chosson, of sometime between 1672 and 1734, in Marseille.)
Some decks after the Sforza Castle did try to masculinize the figure. Vieville's figure adds a halo, puts the baton in the figure's other hand, and makes it appear like a naked Jesus in a cape. Noblet's figure, with feminine breasts and a masculine body, has the baton in the right hand, and a cape corresponding better to that of the Sforza Castle figure. It also gives it a belt of leaves that looks present in the Sforza Castle card. The Chosson finally gives a clearly feminine appearance.
Other
predecessor cards have some elements of the TdM style but not many. The so-called "Charles VI" deck, c. 1470 Florence, has a woman in an octagonal halo standing on a representation of the world. A Bolognese
version, early 16th century, has a winged Mercury standing on a globe
with pictures of the four elements. In the TdM version, it could be said that Mercury has been
feminized and the four elements Christianized, with the almond shape replacing the circle.In some decks, starting in the 17th century, the World card showed a lady with a sail (below left). This is usually interpreted as "Good Fortune", which is certainly correct. But it was also how part of her Mediterranean-wide role as protector of sailors. In 4th century Roman Imperial coins she is shown in just such a pose (Witt p. 179 and figs. 60-63).
Here she is allegorically "good fortune" in general. That dimension comes out in Apuleius's Golden Ass, where in contrast to "blind fortune", which has buffeted the protagonist about rather badly, she is "good fortune", meaning not in a material sense, but in the sense that she can help him to rise above the power of fate.
Card 21 should have been an example of the union of the two previous, comparable to card 6 as a union of 4 and 5. In a way card 0 and card 21 are the two alternatives, together forming the union, , in the cosmos now instead of in the soul. The lady in the middle is none other than Wisdom herself, now unveiled.
12. The sequence as a whole
At the end of his presentation of the "22 frescoes" in a gallery beneath the Great Pyramid, Christian gives a summary statement of the whole course of initiation. I give the text first, then a scan of the page (in case I have made any errors).
By joining together the as meanings inherent in these symbols the whole may be resumed in the following terms as the synthesis of Magism: Human Will [I], illuminated by Knowledge [II] and manifested by Action [III,] creates Realisation [IV] of a power that it can use rightly or wrongly, according to its good or evil Inspiration [V], in the circle described for it by the laws of universal order. After having overcome the Ordeal [VI], which is imposed on it by divine Wisdom, it enters, after its Victory [VII], into possession of the work it has created and, retaining its Equilibrium [VIII] on the axis of Prudence [IX], it dominates the fluctuations of Fortune [X]. Man's Strength [X[], sanctified by Sacrifice [XII], which is the voluntary offering of himself on the altar of dedication and expiation, triumphs over Death; and his divine Transformation [XIII] raising him above and beyond
the tomb into the tranquil regions of an infinite progress, opposes the reality of an immortal Initiative [XIV] to the eternal falsehood of Fatality [XV]. The course of Timc is measured by its ruins; but, beyond each Ruin [XVI], we see the re-appearance of the dawn of Hope [XVII] or the Twilight of Disappointments [XVIII]. Man aspires ceaselessly to whatever is beyond him, and the sun of Happiness [XIX] rises for him only behind the tomb, after the Renewal [XX] of his being by the death that opens for him a higher sphere of will, intelligence and action. All will that lets itself be governed by bodily instincts is an abdication of liberty and condemns itself to the Expiation [0] of its error or its mis-take. On the other hand, all will that unites itself to God in order to demonstrate Truth and operate Justice enters, after this life, into participation with the divine Omnipotence over beings and things, the eternal Reward [XXI] of enfranchised spirits.
Here you will have noticed that everything from Death on is "above and beyond the tomb". Initiative, which in the fresco was given as the combinations of nature, is now the kick-start to an ascent through the spheres, beyond the reach of Fate. Card 16, the Lightning-Struck Tower, has become the ravages of time, which again, as readers of Petrarch already know, is defeated by Eternity, whose happiness again is now "beyond the tomb" and not even, as previously, in living a simple life--although surely the latter is not negated, merely unsaid.
Oddly enough, the sequence as he put it originally, in the course of the 22 frescoes and also in his 1863 book, reflects quite well the life of the person he seems to be addressing, namely Napoleon III. By means of a firm will, i.e. persistence despite initial setbacks, the Emperor did secure power for himself and triumph over his enemies (and while not renouncing the senses, for the most part did not let pleasure get in the way of business). He did build up his personal prestige with every passing year and expand the cause of self-determination of nations at least to Italy (but conveniently annexing the part next to France, assuming that they would prefer that course, and stationing troops to keep Rome under control of the pope). He did put himself in harm's way in the war he declared, lost in overconfidence, against Prussia and did suffer ruin of all political power as a result of that war. He did end up with such happiness as accrued from a simple but comfortable life in exile in England. His defeats would indeed have made the transition to life beyond the grave that much easier. His fate was like Oedipus's. In fact that is how Christian's own interpretations tend to lead, with himself as the Sphinx: someone following them might, with skill or luck, achieve some successes but eventually ruin, with only Eternity as consolation. Such is the course of the "will to power".
In a way, then, the initiation of the 22 frescoes is also life itself as initiation, although into what is not clear, unmless perhaps eternity. The turning point is at around card number 10, with the orientation changing from coming to terms with and mastering life to coming to terms with and mastering eternity, with the sphinx as the symbol of both. .
A remaining question is how well Christian's account corresponds with a reading of the sequence based on the material, mostly literary, available in preceding centuries about Egypt. In general, the correspondence is fairly good, especially if, in the first half of the cards "creative principle" is substituted for "power over", i.e. over the material world and over enemies besides oneself. In the second half the creative principle is outside the ego altogether; it is "merely" a matter of submitting to that principle.
For Christian it is a story on three levels, the divine, intellectual, and physical. In the Isis/Osiris myth, that distinction comes out particularly well in relation to the Nile flood, in perhaps even more than three. On the physical level it is the hoped-fore coming of the Nile flood. Allegorically it is Isis magically causing her insemination by Osiris. Astronomically it is the rise of Sothis followed by Cancer and Leo. It is the victory of Horus over Typhon, i.e. the hero against the dragon, but where the dragon is defeated but not killed. It is also the soul ascending through the spheres from Star to Moon to Sun and beyond. In such an ascent, admittedly, the Star should come after the Moon at least, if not also after the Sun; but this is a card game, and the players need something easy to remember, like the order of brightness.
Here are the connections I have found between the pre-de Gebelin and Egypt, i.e. details that would likely have been interpreted in an Egyptian manner by someone who wanted to do so and was knowledgeable about the Greek and Latin literature that defined what Egypt was in these centuries before a large European presence there. .
1. Magician: hat, in context of Dendera, Bembine Tablet, Herodotus, Hermetica (including Strobaeus); 3 level hat in Cary Sheet: Hermetica.
2. Priestess: crescent moon headdress: Ovid, Diodorus, Paiche tarot and to a lesser extent other TdM. Straps forming an X, introduced by Noblet: statues of Isis and her priestess. 3 tiered crownas Trismegistus: Hermetica. Curtain: Plutarch and Proclus (garment hiding her secrets). Merger with various goddesses: Apuleius, Ovid. As Wisdom: Plutarch.
3. Empress: eagle/hawk on the shield on her lap. Horapollo, Plutarch, coins, Dendera. Role in society: Diodurus, Plutarch. Merger with various goddesses: Apuleius, Ovid.
4. Emperor: eagle/hawk on the shield by his side, Horapollo, Plutarch. Role in society: Diodorus.
5. Pope: Crown: Hermetica, Diodorus, Siena Cathedral. 3 bars on staff: Hermetica.
6. Lover: women at side: Edfu. Winged child god with man and woman, Cartari, based on Plutarch.
7. Chariot: Horses: Plutarch, Diodorus. As comination of passions by reason, Hermetica. Sphinx: Clement of Alexandria.
8. Justice: as Isis, Plutarch, Diodorus, Ficino. Dress around Noblet's breasts: statue of Isis.
9. Hermit: spelling "Hermite" in Conver's tarot: Hermetica. Robe, Dendera. Hermes = prudence, Plutarch.
10. Wheel: allegory of generation and decay, Plutarch.
11. Strength: lion, Horapollo. .
12. Hanged Man: the enclosing and chopping up of Osiris, Plutarch, Diodorus.
13. Death: skeleton, Plutarch; body parts. Resurrection: Plutarch and Diodorus, supported by Maier. Mummies: general information.
14. Temperance: breasts in Dodal: Dendera etc. Opposing qualities: crowns and gods at Edfu etc. Isis as lawmaker to curb excessive behavior against others, Diodorus.
15. Devil: Hippo and crocodile, Plutarch. Breasts, torch, identification with Typhon: Maier.
16. Tower: crowns on figures in Noblet, Dendera etc. Story of Cambyses in Herodotus.
17. Star: star over woman: coins, Dendera, Plutarch, Horapollo. 5 stars, Dendera. Ships: Cartari. Venus, Apuleius, decanate information. Bird: Horapollo. 2 streams: Dendera, Horapollo, Plutarch.
18. Moon: crocodiles, temple, obelisks in Cary Sheet: general knowledge. Dogs: Plutarch, Clement. Isis as: Apuleius, Ovid, Diodorus.
19. Sun: man and woman, Dendera. Sun symbolism, Plutarch, Hermetica. Dioscuri: Roman relief, Plutarch. Boy on horse: Plutarch. Horus. Diodorus, Plutarch, Herodotus. Osiris: Diodorus, Herodotus.
20: Judgment: Osiris as lord of dead, Plutarch. Eye of Horus, Egyptian temples.
21. World: Isis as world soul, Macrobius. mistress of the dead: lady with sail, Roman coins, Apuleius (with ships and good fortune).
22. Fool:3 tiered hat in Cary Sheet, Hermetica. Christian's crocodile, papyrus image and Plutarch.
13-16, as journey through elements: Apuleius.
. Here some of the connections are stronger than others, in the sense of being more likely to have been included in the design on purpose by the designer of the card. Among the stronger I include the switching of the straps from Pope to Popess in Noblet, as well as, in the same deck, the reversion to a broad-brimmed hat for the Magician, the wings on his Justice, the Dendera-like robe on the Hermit card, and the grass that imitates hands on the Death card. Then in Chosson and the rest of that type, there is the addition of the torch to the Devil card, thus resembling a figure already called Typhon by Maier, the change from a king to a sphinx on the Wheel card, and the combination of hill and tonsure on the Judgment card. In the Cary Sheet Star card, the two-jugged ambiguously gendered water-pourer with two fish tails seems too much like the dendera zodiac's Aquarius to be coincidence.
These strong references to Egypt are then the foundation for the rest, which are ways of seeing the cards from an Egyptian perspective.
The result is a narrative of sorts, not dissimilar from that Christian tells.The main difference is in scene 18, where the Moon, dogs, and towers are not deceivers but helpers. The deceivers were earlier, in card 15. In the tarot since Christian, however, it is way of intepreting card 18 that has dominated.
First we have the divine mystery alone, containing all within himself, or else the teller of the tale, Hermes the Trismegistus (Fool, 0). There is then the formation of the world by Amen-Re, the speaking of the divine Word, later assimilated to Osiris, and the fashioning of bodies by Thoth (Magician, 1). Isis, daughter of Thoth, represents the power to receive the Word and its knowledge, which she transmits to her followers (Priestess, 2). Isis as queen of Egypt is lawgiver, ruler, and benefactor of humanity through teaching her knowledge of the nutrition and healing powers of plants, the written word, and above all as the mother of the liberator Horus (Empress, 3). Osiris as king is the bringer of civilization, in the form of cultivation of crops, use of animals and metals, and the institution of religion, spreading throughout the world, but without pity for those who persist in opposing him (Emperor, 4). Hermes is Osiris's chief priest and counselor, and transmitter of the oral word (Hierophant, 5). Then the joining of Isis and Osiris as such, the birth and maturation of Horus. and the conflict in the soul between good and evil (Lovers, 6). Then the triumphant return of Osiris from his travels, also the triumph of good in the soul (Chariot, 7). Then Isis as the winged goddess Themis, embodiment of Justice in the world (Justice, 8). Then Hermes as counselor of prudence and the revealed light (Hermit, 9). Then the knowledge that all living things in this world grow and decline (Wheel, 10). Strength is needed, and favor from a higher source (Strength, 11). Osiris is betrayed by Typhon and chopped into 14 pieces (Hanged Man, 12). Isis finds the pieces and brings him briefly to life (Death, 13). It is transformation by magic power of embalming, or water and blood, and of the sphere of water in the cosmos (Temperance, 13). In weakness one must endure tyranny, Typhon's rule over Egypt, but overcoming it is a source of virtue in the sphere of air, where demons rule (Devil, 15). There follows purification by fire, which topples usurping rulers and accomplices (Lightning-struck tower), and cleansing waters, which are also the water of new life, and of the Nile flood, born of Isis's tears and following the star of hope, Isis (Star, 17). It is through the light shining in the darkness, Isis again, and her dogs, that one finds the divine power hidden by Typhon, the regenerating body of Osiris, also the nutrients to be saved from the flood. (Moon, 18). Triumphant by the guidance of Osiris, Horus celebrates his victory, Isis reunites with Osiris, the flood is contained by engineering (the wall), and the soul attains the sun (Sun, 19). The Dioscuri as devotees of Isis and Osiris help humanity in times of distress. New life emerges from the land, and the just soul is found worthy (20, Judgment). The soul attains its goal of union with the gods and further revelations of the secrets of Isis (21, World and 0, Fool).
Yes
ReplyDeleteHi Michael, I have enjoyed reading some of your posts. I am glad to see that there is someone like you, who spend time researching the tarot in its connection with initiatic teachings. There are many interesting ideas in your explanations and few leads which I think are in the right direction although when it comes to interpreting ancient symbols and myths you seem a bit confused (don’t worry you are not the only one). Let’s put it this way, perhaps the all topic about a transmission of initiatic teachings through the tarot, is not as straight forwards as it might appear. I think that in order to shed some light on this issue, we have to decide first, what approach do we want to take towards the people (and you have mentioned some) who disseminated these teachings. Among those people I include both those who were behind the transmission of initiatic teachings in Europe - via the tarot and Alchemy/Astrology - and those others who preceded them and who are the sources of important writings on this theme (you mentioned Plato, Plutarch, Clement of Alexandria etc). Also, if we seek to discover, why someone like Christian or Levi connects the tarot with Egypt and with initiation, we have to first clear out our own ground, from prejudices about initiation itself. In antiquity (both in the West and the East) to complete the path of initiation meant also the achievement of human evolution. So perhaps it’s a bit more serious than what we think…just a bit. But if we take this approach things can change dramatically.
DeleteAs far as I have understood, initiates and their schools have their peculiar points of view. For instance, for them, knowledge is not a guess game (like you see in academia nowadays). Either you know or you don’t know! Initiation and the knowledge that it bestows is not vague intellectual speculation but a fact. In other words, we can’t assume that these people (including some of the tarot designers) were just casually taking symbols from here and there (i.e. Denderah zodiac)or picking random passages from classical sources so that they could formulate their card symbolism! They (the circles and schools in which they belonged) were trying to transmit precise doctrines with precise aims… but only to those who could follow them! If some initiatic teachings were transmitted through the tarot, those who were involved must have been themselves - to lesser or greater degree, initiates. Needless to say, this type of teaching will always remains veiled and what we see are only disconnected and scattered clues. Initiation is always synonym with secrecy. The neophyte admitted into an Egyptian temple (i.e. an initiatic school) will come out of it either as a full initiate or as a death body, that’s it. In Greece and Rome it is the same, those who violates the ‘silence’ of the sacred (and secret) precinct are killed on the spot. And how many people in the middle ages risked their lives to hide their teachings from the church? So, do we understand what we are talking about?? These are not individuals who go about without having a clue of what they are doing. If I belong to a real initiatic school/fraternity, I don’t need to have access to a museum or a library to learn Egyptian sacred lore. And it matter little if I am living in 12th century Florence or in 17th c. Marseille. Of course, this is what the modern scholar does, because he is walking in darkness, but not the initiate, who has a whole tradition a whole chain of transmission behind him.
ReplyDeleteShould we believe the scholars when they tell us that in a country like Egypt, in which there is almost no trace of war for 5000 years, they depicted their military campaigns on the facade of their sacred temples? I mean, most of the greatest philosophers of Greece (Plato, Pythagoras, Empedocles etc..)were initiated in those temples and people still talk about this non-sense. Are we sure that the Egyptian sacred symbolism explained by scholars has anything to do with the truth?? Or perhaps the pharaoh and his military campaign has to do with initiations and we will need to see the symbolism which surrounded him in a complete different light? Just to conclude, I think that it’s also pointless to start looking for Tarot clues in mundane and political events. Yes maybe some of the clues have to do with Napoleon. But do we really know who was Napoleon? Do you think that he was just a tourist, who fancied going around exotic places like Egypt ? Or perhaps the fact that he was seen by his troops in more than one battle-ground symultaneously is just another fairy tale. And do you know that there are still those who teach that Garibaldi in battles was always wearing a red shirt, so that he could hide blood stains. But they don’t tell you that he was the Grand master of Egyptian Freemasonry (and that was the esoteric symbol of his 99th degree). And what about HP Blavatsky, one of the greatest occultist and initiate of the 19th century, who was fighting in Italy along side him …what strange coincidences? Yes, we can add some politics into the mix but which kind of politics?. I could go on but this is not the point…and I apologise if I sound a bit patronising, I respect all those who are truly seekers of wisdom.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, Michael, thank you again for making this material available on the internet, I have really learned a lot…and not only about tarot! A final thought, I think that there are scattered clues but they have to be followed not by the head but by the heart (in which resides, as the Egyptian knew well, the mind which really knows)…Kindly AGOSTINO
Hidden in the symbolism of the seventy-eight site link that comprise a tarot card deck are secrets of the Universe, the evolution of humankind, the mythological and psychological archetypes of every human being, spiritual enlightenment, and so much more. More? Isn't that enough? Perhaps no one in their right mind wants to know this much information; after all, our lives are complicated enough. However, as an added bonus, tarot cards tell us our future, and who doesn't want to know that? Thus, the irony is two-fold. Associated with our wanting to know the future, the tarot deliciously entices us to feed, and we are satiated, albeit temporarily, all the while veiling our greater need to "know thyself," which is the perfect and eternal nourishment for our mind, body, and soul-spirit.
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