From the Narrow Desert

When the flaming lute-thronged angelic door is wide;

When an immortal passion breathes in mortal clay;

Our hearts endure the scourge, the plaited thorns, the way

Crowded with bitter faces, the wounds in palm and side,

The hyssop-heavy sponge, the flowers by Kidron stream:

We will bend down and loosen our hair over you,

That it may drop faint perfume, and be heavy with dew,

Lilies of death-pale hope, roses of passionate dream.

Paracelsus knew the mysteries of blood; he knew why the priests of Baal made incisions with knives in their flesh, and then brought down fire from heaven; . . . he knew how spilt blood cries for vengeance or mercy and fills the air with angels or demons.

I was exploring an old abandoned building and found in it a very large wooden rosary. Each bead was the size of a golf ball and had a single word engraved on it. I believe the words were those of the Lord’s Prayer. I found that the cross on the rosary was also a key which fit the lock of one of the doors in the old building. I left the rosary hanging from the keyhole, but an old priest came and told me not to, saying a key has no purpose if you just leave it in the keyhole.

And to the angel of the church in Philadelphia write; These things saith he that is holy, he that is true, he that hath the key of David, he that openeth, and no man shutteth; and shutteth, and no man openeth; I know thy works: behold, I have set before thee an open door, and no man can shut it: for thou hast a little strength, and hast kept my word, and hast not denied my name (Rev. 3:7-8).

Incidentally, Abraham von Franckenberg's illustration of Guillaume Postel's interpretation of the "key of David" would later influence Lévi significantly, particularly in his idea of writing the word ROTA/TARO around the rim of a wheel.

One of these little guys has been stalking me for the past few days. The photo is from Wikipedia, not my own, because he's extremely camera shy. It's an appropriate photo anyway because it shows him the way I usually see him: running off with a look on his face that says, Oh, no! He's seen me again!

The front edge of the Magician’s table features a series of three carvings. The first appears to be ocean waves, the second is unrecognizable, and the third is a bird in flight. Comparing it with the bird on the Ace of Cups, which clearly represents the dove of the Holy Spirit, we see that they are almost identical in shape. The cup-shaped capital of the table leg just below the Magician’s bird reinforces the connection. While the dove on the Ace of Cups is white and flies downward, the Magician’s dove is red and flies upward.

What did the rose of Sharon and the lily of the valleys mean to Waite? I could have sworn that they appeared in the Litany of the Blessed Virgin as symbolical titles of that personage, but that turns out to have been a hallucination of memory.

The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land; the fig tree putteth forth her green figs . . . (2:12-13).

I saw that the wall was covered not only with leaves but with hundreds and hundreds of what were unmistakably figs -- still green, but quite large.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. The traditional Marseille layout

Tarot de Marseille decks stick very closely to the following layout for the Bateleur's table.

Based on Wilfried Houdouin's 2017 deck; color coding is my own

The details of each element below are taken from the Historical Tarots Gallery at the Tarot of Marseilles Heritage website. Upper row, from left to right: Pierre Madenié (1709), François Héri (1718), François Chosson (1736), Jean-Baptiste Madenié (1739), François Tourcaty (1745), and Rochus Schär (1750). Lower row: Claude Burdel (1751), Nicolas Conver (1760), Jacques Rochias (1782), Arnoux & Amphoux (1793), Suzanne Bernardin (1839), and Lequart (1890).

A: A cup with a round top, vertical sides, and a square bottom. There is very little variation in the shape. The main body of the cup is consistently yellow, and the mouth is most often red but sometimes other colors.

B: Another cup, with a different shape, wider at the top than at the bottom. It looks as if it may have a lid covering it. The color scheme is fairly consistent: yellow cup with a red mouth or lid.

C: It is not clear whether this object should be classified with the cups (A and B) or with the little round objects (D, E, and F). It is much smaller than the two cups but considerably larger than the little round things. While its basic shape is that of a circle divided into two parts, the concave curve of the dividing line suggests a very small, shallow cup, bowl, or dish. This object is most often the same color as the tabletop.

D: Three circular objects with the central one overlapping the one on the lower right (and sometimes the one on the left as well). So slavishly is this arrangement copied from deck to deck that when we see one with only two circles on this part of the table, it seems positively revolutionary! The objects are generally the color of the table. To me the layout suggests flat coins or discs rather than spherical objects. If they were balls, the lower right one (being in the foreground) would overlap the central one rather than vice versa. (On the other hand, the flat bottoms of cups A and B suggest an artist with little understanding of such things.) 

E: This element ranges from two circles side by side, to two overlapping circles, to a divided circle similar to C. The color is generally the same as the tabletop. The uncertainty as to whether this is one object or two suggests that the shapes were being copied blindly by cardmakers who did not know what they represented. My best guess is that the "original" form was a smaller circle in the northeast overlapping a larger one in the southwest, and that this was sometimes misunderstood as a single object due to the influence of the C object. As with the D objects, the direction of the overlap suggests flat rather than spherical objects.

F: Two more round items, vertically arranged. In most cases, they are touching so as to form a figure like an Arabic numeral 8, but in some decks there is a gap between them. Like the other round objects, they are generally the same color as the tabletop, but sometimes one of them is red.

G: A curved knife and its sheath, both generally the color of the table. The shape and orientation is consistent across decks. In one case the sheath has been transformed into a second knife. The knife has a very distinctive shape -- almost like a miniature scimitar with no cross-guard -- that makes me wonder what its purpose is. It certainly doesn't look much like a typical medieval pen knife, hunting knife, or dagger. The handle also seems much too small for the magician's hands, but perhaps that indicates nothing more than poor draftsmanship.

H: A bag, consistently light blue with a yellow mouth and strap. There are between one and three little round things at the mouth of the bag, which presumably represent some sort of latching mechanism. The bag is decorated with a tassel or something of that nature at the lower left corner. Sometimes one end of the strap appears to go behind the table rather than connecting to the bag.

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2. Marseille variants, new and old

We have been looking at some of the oldest and most traditional Marseille decks, mostly from the 18th century, but in modern times the most influential Tarot de Marseille by far has been the 1930 Grimaud deck designed by Paul Marteau. Marteau claimed to be restoring the Nicolas Conver deck (the canonical Tarot de Marseille) but in fact introduced many innovations. Most of these are changes in the color scheme, but some are more substantial. Here is what Marteau's Bateleur has on his table:

If we ignore the colors, this is in line with Conver and the other decks we have examined, with one exception: The F element, realized as two circles in every historical deck we have looked at, has become a pair of dice.

A more recent "restored" Tarot de Marseille, also claiming the mantle of Nicolas Conver, features dice as well. This is the Jodorowsky-Camoin deck of 1997.

Note that Jodorowsky and Camoin have added a third die between the knife and its sheath, and also that the sheath has been given a fantastic new shape in defiance of tradition.

Whence these dice? As far as I am aware, there is only one early deck that unambiguously features dice, but it is one of the earliest: Jean Noblet's deck of c. 1650. Noblet's Tarot is generally very close to the Tarot de Marseille in its iconography, but not so close as to be considered a full member of that tradition. Here is his Bateleur's table:

Notice that Noblet's C element -- realized in the standard Tarot de Marseille as a circle divided into two parts -- appears here as a third and smaller cup. This suggests that what was originally a small cup was distorted over time, by a process of repeated copying without understanding, into the indistinct round object that later became standard.

Isn't it highly probably that some of the other round things on the table in the traditional Tarot de Marseille are also distortions of what were originally distinct objects? Isn't it more likely that indistinctly printed dice would degenerate into circles than that circles would be misinterpreted as dice? Marteau, Jodorowsky, and Camoin seem to have thought so. Noblet has three horizontally arranged dice where the standard Tarot de Marseille has two vertically arranged circles (the F element). Marteau apparently split the difference, keeping just two elements vertically arranged but changing them to dice. Jodorowsky and Camoin put two dice in the same position as Marteau's and add a third between the knife and the sheath, as in Noblet.

Note also that Noblet's D element -- three circles -- is somewhat different. Rather than overlapping, the three circles are more spread out but are connected by two lines. It is not at all clear what sort of object this is intended to represent. The E element -- either two circles or a single divided circle -- is absent.

Also dating to around 1650 is Jacques Viéville's card. The detail below is shown in mirror image in order to facilitate comparison with the TdM.

Here, A is a square cup, B is a round one, and C is apparently a shallow bowl or dish. D is a single round object rather than three, and E is a sort of lozenge divided horizontally into two triangles. Where the F element would be (two circles in TdM, dice in Noblet), we have two rectangular objects, a large one divided in thirds, and a smaller one not so divided. What objects were intended by these abstract geometric shapes is anyone's guess. Despite the early date for this card, it had apparently already been through several generations of ignorant miscopying.

The lozenge shape in Viéville is perhaps historically related to the diagonal lines connecting the circles in Noblet.

A few other not-quite-standard representatives of the greater Marseille tradition also deserve our attention. The 1780 deck of Ignaz Krebs follows Noblet in some ways.

As in Noblet, the D element appears as three non-overlapping circles, and the E element is absent. Instead of Noblet's dice, though, we have between the knife and the sheath a single rectangle with six pip-marks on it. To me this is further confirmation that the "original" design featured dice, since one could imagine dice being incorrectly copied either as circles (as in the mainstream TdM) or as the domino-like object in Krebs.

Jean-Pierre Payen's 1713 deck (a TdM "Type I" deck, as opposed to the mainstream "Type II") has a fairly standard Bateleur (or, rather, "Branchus," that being the anomalous title given to this card) but is interesting because its D element (three round objects) looks more unambiguously like coins rather than balls.

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3. Magician's tables before the Tarot de Marseille

The earliest surviving Tarot cards are the Visconti-Sforza cards painted by Bonifacio Bembo. Bembo's magician has objects on his table similar to those in the TdM but not the same. There is a cup (only one), a knife (but no sheath), and two small round objects of uncertain identity.

The large white object which takes the place of the TdM Bateleur's bag has been variously interpreted, but, as I have explained elsewhere, I find Michael Pearce's case that it is a sea sponge to be completely convincing. Dr. Pearce found several pictures by Bembo depicting holy relics, among them the sponge on a stalk of hyssop which was used to give vinegar to the Crucified, and the sponge very closely resemble's the Magician's white object.

Three sponges (on hyssop stalks) by Bonifacio Bembo

This crucial discovery allows Pearce to reveal the true identity of Bembo's "magician": He is a scribe or writer. His "wand" is actually a reed pen (he holds it like a pen, and nibs are visible if you look closely), the knife is a pen knife, and the cup and other yellow objects are receptacles for ink. Sponges were used in the past for erasing and for cleaning pens; in support of this, Pearce shows an illustration from a 15th-century Decameron which depicts a writer with pen, pen knife, inkwell, and sponge.

The Cary sheet (c. 1550), a sheet of uncut Tarot cards from Milan, shows a broadly Marseille-like assortment of objects on the Magician's table, but the image is too unclear for them to be identified with any confidence. There are two long objects that may be a knife and a sheath, a total of six roundish things, and two cups on the table, with a third in the Magician's right hand. This syncs up pretty well with the Noblet card, which also has three cups, a knife and a sheath, and a total of six small objects (three dice and three round things).

While it is not a Tarot card, Hieronymus Bosch's 1502 painting The Conjurer should also be mentioned here, chiefly because of its similarity to the Cary sheet.

Bosch's Conjurer and the Cary sheet Magician wear similar headgear, and the Cary sheet may even show some sort of bag or basket dangling from the Magician's waist or wrist. In both depictions, the cups on the table are apparently inverted, narrow end up. Finally, and to me most evocatively, the roughly egg-shaped object at the northeast end of the table on the Cary sheet closely resembles the little frog at the west end of Bosch's table. (A second frog is emerging from the mouth of one of the spectators.)

See this post for more on echoes of Bosch in the Tarot.

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4. Wirth and Waite

No overview of the Magician's table would be complete without mentioning the modern, post-Marseille standard, which I believe originated with Oswald Wirth. Although I find it a bit gauche and uninteresting, I feel I ought to give it a few lines.

It's a pretty obvious move to associate the Magician's objects with the four suits of the Tarot. The Magician holds a wand, and on his table are cups, a knife suggesting the suit of Swords, and round objects that might be coins. Oswald Wirth made this explicit.

All the clutter has been eliminated, and there are now only three objects on the table: a cup (not the simple cups of the TdM Bateleur, but a chalice or goblet as in the suit of Cups), a full-size sword, and a giant "coin" the size of a Frisbee (clearly a symbolic representation of the suit of Coins, not an actual piece of currency). The wand in the Magician's hand has been enlarged considerably, too, making it more like the cudgels and scepters in the suit of Bastons than like an actual magician's wand.

A. E. Waite, in his hugely influential Rider-Waite deck, takes Wirth's idea a step further. Apparently wanting to include a large "wand" suggestive of the suit, but without making his Magician look like a baton-twirling drum major, he put two wands on his card: a small one in the Magician's hand, and a large cudgel on the table. (The giant coin is now a "pentacle," that being Waite's take on this suit.)

Waite lived before subways were common.

All in all, I greatly prefer the traditional Bateleur's evocative hodgepodge of gewgaws to the cut-and-dried symbolism of Wirth and Waite.

In past posts I have mentioned the possibility of a relationship, whether direct or indirect, between Hieronymus Bosch's 1502 masterpiece The Conjurer (my favorite Bosch by a mile) and the Tarot de Marseille -- particularly the Magician and Wheel of Fortune cards.

In the process of collecting various early versions of the Magician card (qv), I noticed a few hints that that influence or relationship may extend beyond the limits of the Marseille tradition. (Only a handful of fragmentary Italian decks predate The Conjurer, so direct influence is not out of the question.)

The Cary Sheet (Milan, 1550)

The magician on the Cary Sheet (a partial set of uncut and unpainted cards sometimes considered to be the "missing link" between the Italian decks and the Tarot de Marseille) wears fez-like headgear suggestive of Bosch's conjurer, as opposed to the wide-brimmed hat typical of the TdM. Bosch, the Cary Sheet, and the TdM all agree in putting two cups on the magician's table -- but on the Cary Sheet the cups are apparently inverted (narrow side up) as in the Bosch painting, while the TdM has the cups upright. The long object situated between the two cups on the Cary Sheet is hard to identify with any confidence. The TdM would lead us to expect a second knife, or a knife sheath, but it could just as easily be a magic wand of the type that appears in the same position in the Bosch painting. And if we really want to push things, doesn't that vaguely egg-shaped object in the far right corner of the table on the Cary Sheet look more than a little like Bosch's little frog?

Tarot de Paris (1650)

It's impossible to tell what's on the magician's table in the Tarot de Paris, but there are other potential links to Bosch. The general layout of the picture is similar: The magician is on the right side of the table, with spectators on the left, and a wall behind them. As in the Bosch painting, a dog hides unobtrusively in the shadow of the table. There is also a monkey, an animal which many people have mistakenly believed to be depicted in the Bosch painting, hiding in the conjurer's basket. (In fact it is an owl.) If modern art historians have made that mistake, the makers of the Tarot de Paris could easily have done the same. Again, the magician is depicted with fez-like headgear.

Mitelli's Tarocchini (Bologna, 1664)

The "magician" of Mitelli's Tarocchini would appear to represent a clean break with Tarot tradition, dispensing altogether with the conventional table-covered-with-gewgaws theme -- but don't the dog, the hoop, and the little cluster of spectators come right out of Bosch?

Minchiate al Leone (Florence, 1790)

The Minchiate al Leone has a very strange Magician card. The familiar cups and balls are notably absent -- and who are those two people standing beside the magician? It would be a strange position for spectators; are they his assistants? At any rate, the vaguely tent-like objects in the center and in the left foreground corner of the table remind me of the equally mysterious object in the center of the table in Bosch.

I am indebted to Andy's Playing Cards for providing innumerable leads, and to Tarot of Marseilles Heritage for many of the images of cards from that tradition. If I've missed anything important, please inform me in the comments.

(Note: The image of the Oswald Wirth card I had originally posted was incorrect. I replaced it with the correct one on November 23, 2019. The "restored" Jean Dodal card was replaced with the original on November 25, 2019.)

Visconti-Sforza (Milan, 1451)

Ercole I d'Este (Ferrara, 1473)

The Cary Sheet (Milan, 1550)

Jacques Viéville (Paris, 1650)

Jean Noblet (Paris, 1650)

Tarot de Paris (Paris, 1650)

Mitelli's Tarocchini (Bologna, 1664)

Jean Dodal (Lyon, 1710)

Pierre Madenié (Dijon, 1709)

Jean-Pierre Payen (Avignon, 1713)

François Héri (Solothurn, 1718)

Minchiate Etruria (Florence, 1725)

François Chosson (Marseille, 1736)

Jean-Baptiste Madenié (Dijon, 1739)

François Tourcaty (Marseille, 1745)

Rochus Schär (Mümlisvil, 1750)

Claude Burdel (Fribourg, 1751)

Nicolas Conver (Marseille, 1760)

Ignaz Krebs (Fribourg, 1780)

Jacques Rochias (Neuchâtel, 1782)

Grand Etteilla (Paris, 1788)

Minchiate al Leone (Florence, 1790)

Arnoux & Amphoux (Marseille, 1793)

Bernardin Suzanne (Marseille, 1839)

Oswald With (Paris, 1899)

Lequart "Arnoult 1748" (Paris, 1890)

Rider-Waite (London, 1910)

Crowley's Thoth (1938-1943, pub. 1969)