From the Narrow Desert: ROTA

Showing posts with label ROTA. Show all posts

Sunday, September 20, 2020

Life and Vita, Square and Compass, ROTA

Trigger warning: Mormon temple symbolism discussed (but no covenants of secrecy violated). Also, I use the word Mormon. Mormon, Mormon, Mormon!

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Some years ago I wrote a post (qv) about the marks on the breasts of the Garment of the Holy Priesthood, which officially represent the Masonic square and compass but in fact look like the letters L and V. I proposed the hypothesis (which I still stand by) that the resemblance was deliberate and that, in addition to the Masonic meaning, the breast marks stood for Lux and Veritas -- a Latin translation, current in Joseph Smith's New England, of the biblical Hebrew terms Urim and Thummim. (The Urim and Thummim were worn in the breastplate of the high priest, just as the breasts are pricked with the square and compass in a Masonic initiation.) In that post I mentioned in passing one of my earlier fancies about the meaning of the L and the V.

The fact is, the Garment marks don’t look like a square and a compass (though one can see the resemblance once it has been explained). They look like the letters L and V. As an uninitiated teenager, I always thought of them as standing for the words life and vita. (The words came from Vita Adae et Evae, a pseudepigraphical work I had read in translation as Life of Adam and Eve. I knew that the Mormon temple ritual dealt with the life of Adam and Eve, so I suppose that’s why I made the connection.)

I should emphasize that I "thought of them as" standing for life and vita -- not that I ever believed that they might in fact stand for those words. When I was a toddler and still somewhat uncertain as to which shoe went on which foot, my parents resorted to writing a big R in sharpie on the sole of one sneaker and an L on the other -- and so every time I put on my shoes I thought to myself "Roar, lions!" (or, if I happened to pick up the left shoe first, "Lions, roar!"). Of course I knew that the letters in fact stood for right and left, but that knowledge did nothing to break the fanciful association with lions roaring. In much the same way, every time I was on laundry duty and had to fold my parents' temple Garments, I always thought to myself "Life, vita" even though the letters obviously couldn't actually mean that. I mean, what would be the point of representing the same word twice, in two different languages?

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The other day I happened to be searching archive.org for a particular, somewhat obscure Tarot-related text from the last century and eventually, way leading on to way as it does, found myself looking at the frontispiece of a certain Liber Θ, which appears to be some sort of Crowley-inspired revision of Golden Dawn material (it claims to be "a traditional instruction of the R.R. et A.C., revised and expanded"). This is the diagram I saw.

Life in the upper left, Vita in the upper right (okay, L·I·F·E· and V·I·T·A·; these Crowleyans and their magickal puncktuation!) -- corresponding precisely to the L and V on the Garment, which I had fancifully so interpreted in my teens. (The L is over the wearer's right breast, but is on the left to someone looking at the garment from the outside.)

Notice also that the word life is accompanied by the letter T, with right angles suggesting a square; and vita by a letter A so stylized as to suggest the Masonic compass, which is always open at an angle of 60 degrees. (Though this sort of thing of course varies from font to font, the letter A more usually has an angle of approximately 36 degrees, forming a golden rather than an equilateral triangle, as can be seen in the word VITA itself.)

This T and A are part of the word TARO/ROTA, to be read clockwise -- a motif, originating in Éliphas Lévi's interpretation of Guillaume Postel, on which I have posted quite a bit. This diagram offers yet another possible orientation of those four letters.

The choice to write it as TAPO -- with a Greek P rather than a Latin R -- is a strange one, since the Greek version of TARO/ROTA properly uses Ω rather than O. We thus have the reverse of the version used in the Basilique Saint-Sernin de Toulouse, which has a Latin R with a Greek Ω. (Even the Greek word βίος is written in Latin characters here -- inadvertently calling to mind a Basic Input/Output System! -- making the use of the Greek P even stranger.) At any rate, this anomalous spelling is fortuitous in the present context, since the two remaining marks on the Garment are the "navel mark" and the "knee mark" (the latter being esoterically located at the mouth). The letter O suggests the navel, both visually and by way of the Greek ὀμφαλός. P is ambiguous; as a Greek letter, it derives from the Semitic ר, meaning "head"; as a Latin letter, it comes from פ, "mouth."

Tuesday, October 15, 2019

A rationale for Waite's orientation of ROTA

Yes, yet another post (see the others) on this very minor bit of Tarot iconography.

In a past post (qv), I wrote that "of the four possible orientations of the ROTA, the only one I can't think of any good reason for is the one actually used by Lévi and Waite, with T at the top!" Now a possible rationale for it has occurred to me.

Notice that the wheel is apparently turning counterclockwise: the snake on the left is descending, and the cynocephalus on the right is ascending. So the letters ROTA correspond, respectively, to the low point, the descent, the high point, and the ascent. Lévi had already identified the A and O of ROTA as corresponding to alpha and omega -- representing the beginning and the end. It seemed to me that the T and R ought to correspond to some similarly fundamental opposition, but nothing came to mind until today. T and R correspond to the Hebrew words tov (טוֹב, "good") and ra (רַע "bad/evil"). Obviously, the top of the wheel represents good fortune; and the bottom, bad fortune. One starts at the bottom, rises (alpha, the beginning), reaches the top, and then falls (omega, the end).

Friday, October 11, 2019

Oswald Wirth's version of ROTA

(For context, see my past posts on the Wheel of Fortune Tarot card.)

I found this diagram near the beginning of Oswald Wirth's Le Tarot, des Imagiers du Moyen Age.

Éliphas Lévi, who was the first to introduce into Tarot iconography a wheel marked with letters ambiguously reading either ROTA or TARO, always put T at the top of the wheel. Wirth's diagram is the first example I have found of someone adopting Lévi's idea but changing the orientation of the letters. (In my post on the orientation of ROTA, I spoke favorably of this orientation, with A at the top, because it corresponds with the orientation of the Tarot suits used by both Lévi and Strieber, but still consider R at the top to be the correct orientation.)

Arranging the 22 Major Arcana, rather than the four Minor suits, around the wheel is a little strange, 22 not being divisible by four, but it is central to Wirth's system. Each card is considered to be related to those horizontally and vertically (not diametrically) opposite it on the wheel, as shown in this diagram, also from Wirth.

I haven't yet read and assimilated Wirth's commentary on these proposed mappings, but at first glance the system seems just slightly off. My initial reaction is that I would rotate the cards clockwise 8.18 degrees, so that the horizontal axis lined up perfectly with 0 and 11.

My proposed modification of Wirth's schema

The resulting mappings seem much more intuitively correct -- although, as I say, I have not yet looked in any detail either at Wirth's system or at my proposed alternative.

Tuesday, May 28, 2019

The orientation of ROTA

I found this diagram in Éliphas Lévi's Rituel de la Haute Magie, included apropos of nothing, and with no caption or explanation given.

I don't feel like searching through Agrippa or whoever for the meaning of the various sigils around the edge of the picture, but the main theme is a familiar one: the wheel with ROTA/TARO written around its circumference, a symbol created by Guillaume Postel and much used by Lévi. The four suits of the Tarot also figure in the diagram. The wand (on the right) has the form of a double-headed Wenchang pen, as seen in the Rider-Waite deck, apparently yet another instance of Lévi's influence on Waite. The sword and cup are easily identifiable, and I suppose that the suit of coins is, as in Waite, represented by the "pentacle" -- which, as Lévi uses the word, need not take the form of a five-pointed star. (To break the connection with the numerical prefix penta-, Lévi prefers the nonstandard spelling pantacle, an innovation later followed by Aleister Crowley, with whom it is now primarily associated.)

What caught my attention was the apparent mismatch between the four suits and the four letters. The letter O is paired with the sword, but it resembles a coin. A sword has the form of a cross and should therefore be paired with T. The A used here by Lévi, like the one that appears on the Rider-Waite Wheel of Fortune card, has a flat or rounded top rather than a pointed one, so that when it is turned upside down it looks like a cross-section of a cup with some liquid in it. That leaves the letter R to be paired with the wand, which it does not particularly resemble. However, Spanish and Italian versions of that suit -- a heavy-headed club or mace, not a wand -- do suggest the Greek letter P, and the Sicilian asso di mazze even bears a certain resemblance to an R.

In an arrangement independently arrived at by Whitley Strieber in his book The Path, Lévi puts the cup at the bottom, the coin/pentacle at the top, the sword on the left, and the wand/club on the right. If we rotate our ROTA 90 degrees to the right, the upside-down A (which resembles a cup) will be lined up with the cup, and the O with the coin. Unfortunately, the sword has to be switched with the wand to make those correspondences work.

However, if we rotate the wheel again, so that the A is at the top, we can keep the Lévi/Strieber orientation of the suits. O works for the cup since it is round, and A (which in this case should be written in the usual angular fashion) matches the pentacle. Another word for a pentagram is pentalpha because it consists of five letter A's in different orientations. This mapping also means that the word ROTA gives the suits in their conventional order: wands, cups, swords, pentacles.

All that having been said, I still find that the orientation I prefer is the one with R at the top, matching both the Chrismon of Saint Ambrose (discussed in relation to the Wheel of Fortune here) and the cruciform halo of Christ in the Basilique Saint-Sernin de Toulouse (discussed in relation to the World card here).

(Note that the Christ carving shown is actually a modern one by Jonathan Pageau, based on the original in Toulouse. I chose it because the three letters are more clearly legible than they are in available photos of the original carving. Note also that the letter that looks like W is actually a lowercase omega, corresponding to O.)

In fact, of the four possible orientations of the ROTA, the only one I can't think of any good reason for is the one actually used by Lévi and Waite, with T at the top!

Tuesday, April 9, 2019

The Wheel of Fortune: Rider-Waite

For the most part, Waite's version of the Wheel of Fortune is a synthesis of two of Lévi's designs. The disc itself is copied very closely from the Sanctum Regnum, while the creatures around its circumference are based on those in the Clef. Waite says as much in his Pictorial Key to the Tarot: "In this symbol I have again followed the reconstruction of Éliphas Lévi, who has furnished several variants. [. . .] I have, however, presented Typhon in his serpent form."

While the Wheel of Fortune is traditionally represented as either standing in the ground or mounted on a post, Waite has it floating in the sky -- a choice which presumably reflects Lévi's association of it with the wheels of Ezekiel. Rather than an actual wheel with hub, spokes, and rim, it has become a solid disc marked with lines suggesting those features. For the most part, the disc is identical to the one portrayed in the Sanctum Regnum, but there are a few changes. The physics terms have been removed, as have the 24 red "paw-prints" accompanying the letters of the Tetragrammaton. (Of these, Lévi's Transcendental Magic says that to "these four-and-twenty signs, crowned with a triple flower of light, must be referred the twenty-four thrones of heaven and the twenty-four crowned elders in the Apocalypse.") The letters TARO have been moved onto the disc itself, replacing the images of the four living creatures, and the latter have been moved to the four corners of the card and rearranged so as to correspond to the fixed signs of the zodiac rather than to the vision of Ezekiel. Each of the living creatures is holding (and perhaps reading?) a book -- an iconographic convention that normally indicates that the creatures are being used as symbols of the four evangelists, Matthew (the man), Mark (the lion), Luke (the ox), and John (the eagle).

A further oddity is the Hebrew letter yodh -- the first letter of the Tetragrammaton, located at 1:30 on the wheel -- which at first glance appears to have been rotated 90 degrees from its proper orientation. If you try to correct this error by rotating it, though, you will find that it is impossible -- that what we have is actually a rotated mirror image of the Hebrew letter.

I find it hard to believe that Waite could have made such an error. These Golden Dawn types were completely obsessed with the Tetragrammaton, and the letter yodh was a particular favorite of Waite's; a sort of "yodh confetti" appears as a decorative motif on several of his cards (the Aces of Cups and Swords, and the Moon). I suppose this sort of error is easier to make when a word is being written around the circumference of a circle rather than horizontally, and we must also keep in mind that the card was actually drawn by Pamela Colman Smith rather than by Waite himself, but I still find it surprising -- particularly given that they had Lévi's picture, with its correctly oriented yodh, to copy from. If the modification was deliberate, Waite must have meant something by it, but I can't imagine what. (This anomalous yodh has been preserved, whether deliberately or through ignorance of Hebrew, in some other Rider-Waite-based decks, such as the Hanson-Roberts, BOTA, etc.)

Hebrew is read from right to left, a fact which occultists have considered significant. (For example Jean-Baptiste Alliette, the first known professional Tarot reader, is better known as "Etteilla" -- that being the "kabbalistic," i.e. right-to-left, reading of his name.) If we start at yodh and read from right to left -- that is, counterclockwise around the disc -- we will find the Tetragrammaton interspersed with the letters TORA in that order. I am not aware of Lévi's ever having mentioned TORA as another possible reading of ROTA/TARO, but Waite was certainly aware of it. On his High Priestess card, the priestess holds a scroll labeled TORA -- or perhaps it is the more conventional spelling, Torah; the part of the scroll where the final h would be written is hidden inside the folds of the priestess's gown. Waite's decision to hide or omit the h shows that he intended to link the Torah with the Wheel and the Tarot -- and, via the staurogram, with the Cross. I am reminded of the Bible Wheel created (but no longer endorsed) by Richard Amiel McGough; it involves "rolling up" the 66 books of the Protestant Bible like a scroll, creating a wheel-shaped diagram which McGough links with cruciform halos of the type worn by the Saint-Sernin Christ. The word torah means "law," which is also the meaning of dharma; I have already pointed out the Wheel of Fortune's similarity to the Dharma Wheel of Buddhism.

A deck of cards is like a codex, which is like a scroll, which is like a wheel, the spokes of which are like a cross -- all these things can be linked. The question is whether all this linkage has any coherent meaning, and specifically whether it has anything to do with the original Wheel of Fortune concept. We shall return to this question later.

Turning now to the three creatures positioned around the wheel, we find that they are based on Lévi's but differ in important ways. The sphinx is blue as in the Tarot de Marseille and wears an Egyptian headdress as in the Clef, but it has no wings, and it appears to have its tail between its legs like a beaten dog. Like its Marseille counterpart, and unlike Lévi's version, it holds its sword in its left hand and appears to be almost cradling it rather than wielding it -- presumably because it is after all a sphinx and lacks opposable thumbs. Strangest of all, Waite's sphinx is holding the sword by the blade rather than by the hilt! The sword is in the "hands" of a creature completely incapable of using a sword -- a strong indication that Waite does not see the sphinx as some idealized depiction of a fully realized Man.

The creature on the bottom right side of the wheel corresponds to Lévi's Hermanubis -- a conflation of the Greek Hermes and the Egyptian Anubis, bearing the caduceus of the former and having the dog's head of the latter. Waite's version has no caduceus and thus cannot be clearly identified as Herm-anubis as opposed to common-or-garden Anubis. He is completely naked, even though both Anubis and Hermanubis -- and even the dog of the Marseille card -- are always depicted with clothing; and is red, even though Anubis's characteristic color is black. (I assume the blue sphinx, yellow snake, and red cynocephalus comprise a color scheme corresponding to some alchemical folderol or other, but who knows.) The position of this creature is also very strange. Rather than grasping or climbing the wheel, as those in his place generally do, he has his back to it and is somehow adhering to it in defiance of gravity. He is also so positioned as to occupy two of the traditional stations of the Wheel simultaneously: the bottom (sum sine regno) and the rising position (regnabo). Anubis as the god of embalming and mummification, and as psychopomp (whence the identification with Hermes), is connected both with death and with the hope of resurrection

The snake is also defying gravity, barely even touching the wheel. Waite explicitly tells us that it is "Typhon in his serpent form," so it is presumably based on the Proteus/Typhon figure labeled "hyle" in the Clef. Typhon did not really have a "serpent form"; like his mate Echidna, he was only part serpentine, and is generally portrayed as a winged giant with snake-like legs. Waite has perhaps confused him with Python, with whom he is associated (but not identified) in the Homeric hymns. The choice of a serpent for the descending creature perhaps reflects biblical symbolism. Typhon made war on Zeus and was cast down into Tartarus -- like "that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which . . . was cast out into the earth" after losing the "war in heaven" described in Revelation 12. Waite's comments in the Pictorial Key suggests that all three of the creatures around the wheel are supposed to be examples of "Egyptian symbolism," so he must have had in mind the longstanding tradition identifying Typhon with the Egyptian god Set -- but Set was never portrayed as even partly serpentine. If the snake is an Egyptian symbol, I would naturally identify it as Apep. While Set is considered to be the Egyptian Typhon, and while Set and Apep are definitely distinct characters, it would perhaps not be too much of a stretch to think of Apep as "Typhon in his serpent form." Apep is appropriate for the descending position on the wheel because he is the quintessential defeated monster. The Egyptians never portrayed him except as being defeated by Ra or Set or one of the other deities, out of a superstitious fear than any other portrayal would give power to Apep.

Overall, I have to admit that my first impression of the Rider-Waite version of this card is that Waite made rather a mess of things, presenting a congeries of symbols with no organic connection with one another. But perhaps a bit of randomness is appropriate enough for a card representing Fortune.

Sunday, April 7, 2019

The staurogram, the eight-spoked wheel, and the Wheel of Fortune

In my recent post on Éliphas Lévi's influence on the Wheel of Fortune Tarot card, I discuss the staurogram, consisting of the Greek letters TAPΩ, its probable influence on the image of Christ seen in the Basilique Saint-Sernin de Toulouse, and its incorporation by Lévi into his eight-spoked "Wheel of Ezekiel."

Since writing that post, I have discovered the Chrismon of Saint Ambrose (engraved on one of the walls of Milan Cathedral), which combines the staurogram (TP) and Labarum (XP) into a single glyph, resembling an eight-spoked wheel.

The eight-spoked wheel was itself an early Christian symbol, representing, like the better known "Jesus fish," the Greek word ΙΧΘΥΣ ("fish"), used as an acronym for Ἰησο��ς Χριστὸς Θεοῦ Υἱὸς Σωτήρ ("Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior").

This confirms me in my opinion that, given that Lévi wanted to incorporate a Latinized staurogram into his Wheel of Fortune, where it could be read either as ROTA or as TAROT, he really should have put R at the top of the wheel rather than T. But the real question is whether Lévi had any business identifying Christ and the cross with the Wheel of Fortune in the first place. The Wheel is a symbol of futility and meaninglessness, of endless repetition, of rising only to fall again. What has any of that to do with Christ?

In his comments on the Chrismon of Saint Ambrose in La bolla di Maria (available in Italian here; see p. 15), Pietro Mazzucchelli connects the eight spokes of the Chrismon with the eight Beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount. We can find an exact analogue in the Buddhist Dharmachakra -- an eight-spoked wheel representing the Noble Eightfold Path that leads to enlightenment.

This wheel is a basic Buddhist symbol -- so much so that, in countries where Nazicentrism has rendered the swastika unacceptable, it has become the standard iconic representation of Buddhism, taking its place alongside such icons as the cross, the crescent, and the star of David.

The strange thing is that the wheel, in the form of the Bhavachakra or Wheel of Life, is also the standard Buddhist symbol of samsara -- the endless, meaningless cycle of birth, death, and rebirth from which Buddhism is meant to save us. Can we see in Lévi's conceit a Christianization of the same concept -- the transformation of a symbol of futility and nihilism into a symbol of salvation from the same? In the cross itself, a symbol of death has become a symbol of victory over death; could the Wheel be an extension of the same idea?

A wheel (when not mounted on a fixed stand, as it sometimes is in the Tarot) represents the transformation of cyclical repetition into forward, linear motion. As the wheels of a chariot turn, the chariot itself moves forward.

Friday, April 5, 2019

The Wheel of Fortune: Éliphas Lévi

While Éliphas Lévi did not create a Tarot deck, His influence on the Rider-Waite version of the Wheel of Fortune card is so substantial that he deserves a post of his own.

In Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie (published 1854-56, translated by Waite in 1896 under the title Transcendental Magic), Lévi makes the connection between the words tarot and rota (Latin for "wheel," as in rota fortunae) and associates them with the Tetragrammaton:

The incommunicable axiom [on which the Great Magical Arcanum depends] is enclosed kabalistically in the four letters of the Tetragram, arranged in the following manner: In the letters of the words AZOTH and INRI written kabalistically; and in the monogram of Christ as embroidered on the Labarum, which the Kabalist Postel interprets by the word ROTA, whence the adepts have formed their Taro or Tarot, by the repetition of the first letter, thus indicating the circle, and suggesting that the word is read backwards (Transcendental Magic, Book 1, pp. 19-20).

The above text is accompanied by the following illustration:

In the center we can see the Tetragrammaton -- God's name in Hebrew, usually rendered Jehovah or Yahweh in English -- flanked by INRI (for Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum, "Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews") and by a variant of the Labarum made up of the Greek letters TAPΩ, corresponding to the Latin TARO. (I don't know where we are supposed to see the word AZOTH.)

The Labarum of Constantine properly consists of the Greek letters XP (the first two letters of Χριστός, "Christ"), often accompanied by A and Ω ("Alpha and Omega" being a title applied to Christ in the book of Revelation). Lévi's variant, with T instead of X, can hardly be called "the monogram of Christ," but it turns out to be a genuine Christian symbol, known as the staurogram because it was originally used to abbreviate the Greek word σταυρός, "cross" -- shortened to στρός, with the T and P written as a ligature. Like the XP ligature of the Labarum, the TP ligature was later often accompanied by A and Ω. The image below was found on a Catholic website having nothing to do with Lévi or the Tarot.

With only a single T, this gives us taro -- the root vegetable, not the card game. This is where Lévi is, as he indicates, indebted to Guillaume Postel, who in his Key of Things Kept Secret from the Foundation of the World described a complicated symbol which involved writing the word ROTA (and HOMO, and DEUS, and various other things) around the circumference of a circle. Lévi noticed that when ROTA is thus written, one could just as well begin with the T as the R and read TARO, after which we would arrive again at the T, giving us TAROT. (Despite what Lévi implies, Postel himself did not connect his ROTA with either the staurogram or the Tarot. See details here.)

Incidentally, the staurogram, with A on the left, Ω on the right, and P at the top, sheds some light on something that has perplexed me for a long time: the letters on the cruciform halo of the Maiestas Domini image at the Basilique Saint-Sernin de Toulouse (a sculpture I discuss extensively in my post on the World card). Cruciform halos generally bear the letters Ὁ ὬΝ ("the existing one"), but this one -- uniquely, so far as I know, and I've looked at a lot of Maiestas Domini images -- bears the letters A, Ω, and R -- a strange mixture of the Greek and Latin alphabets.

Letters enlarged for clarity

Now I assume that the halo is based on the staurogram, with the cross itself representing T. The P has been Latinized as R, but the Ω has not; its significance is that it is the last letter of the alphabet ("Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end"), so changing it to O is out of the question. It is interesting that this particular Maiestas Domini, which I consider to have been uniquely influential in the development of the Tarot, should (also uniquely) include the letters TARΩ in its design.

Lévi's La clef des grands mystères contains this representation of the Wheel of Fortune.

Aleister Crowley's English translation of the Clef adds a note describing the figure thus:

It is a type of the Wheel of Fortune. The wheel itself is erected on a wooden post, and has a crank affixed to the hub. There is no image of Fortuna to turn it. The base of the post is held by a blunt double crescent on the ground, rounded horns slightly up and in parallel like a hot-dog bun. Two nosed serpents issue from the base, cross once and arch toward the post just below the wheel. The wheel is double, having an outer and an inner ring with eight spokes running through both rims. The spokes have a circular expansion with central hole inside and a bit short of the inner rim. These spokes appear to be riveted to the inner rim. At the top of the wheel is the Nemesis seated on a platform as a sphinx with a sword: head cloth, stern male face and woman’s breasts, winged. The sword is hilt to wheel and up to left. 'ARCHEE' is written over the wing to the left. Rising on the right of the wheel is a Hermanubis or variation of Serapis: Dog’s head, human body, carries a caduceus half hidden behind head and wheel, legs before wheel. 'AZOTH' is written above the head of this figure. A demon reminiscent of Proteus descends the wheel on the left. His head is bearded and horned, his legs are tentacular and finned. He carries a trident below. 'HYLE' is written below his head.

Hyle of course means "matter," while Archée (Archeus) and Azoth are alchemical terms. Archée is defined at this site (in French) as "the immaterial principle of organic life, different from the intelligent soul" -- in other words, something like what is normally called an "astral body." Azoth, which normally refers to the element mercury, is used by Lévi to refer to "the Universal Magical Agent" or "Universal Medicine,"which he explains as follows: "The Azoth or Universal Medicine is, for the soul, supreme reason and absolute justice; for the mind, it is mathematical and practical truth; for the body it is the quintessence, which is a combination of gold and light. In the superior or spiritual world, it is the First Matter of the Great Work, the source of the enthusiasm and activity of the alchemist. In the intermediate or mental world, it is intelligence and industry. In the inferior or material world, it is physical labor." In other words, it can be just about anything, and the precise nature of its relationship to matter and to Archeus is unclear.

It terms of its apparent influence on Waite, the important things to notice about this image are: (1) the striped Egyptian headdress on the sphinx, replacing the traditional crown; (2) the dog-headed man Hermanubis, replacing the dog; and (3) in place of the monkey, a bearded demon with "tentacular" legs, connected by Crowley with Proteus but equally resembling traditional representations of Typhon.

Waite was influenced even more directly by the treatment of the Wheel in The Magical Ritual of the Sanctum Regnum, "translated from the MSS of Éliphaz Lévi and edited by W. Wynn Westcott, M.B., Magus of the Rosicrucian Society of England" and published after Lévi's death, in 1896. It features illustrations which are "facsimile copies of Lévi's own drawings," and there are notes in Westcott's own voice at the end of each chapter. The illustration we are interested in is this one, accompanying a chapter which is called "The Wheel of Fortune" but actually discusses only the "Wheel of Ezekiel."

Again we have an eight-spoked wheel, and the word ROTA/TARO is written along its circumference, interspersed with cursive writing not notable for its legibility. (Reading clockwise from the top, I believe it reads "T électricité A chaleur R magnétisme O lumière" -- meaning, as I suppose is fairly obvious, "electricity, heat, magnetism, light." It is not clear what these terms, borrowed from physics, have to do with anything.)

I would have rotated the word 180 degrees, with R at the top, O on the right, T at the bottom, and A on the left -- corresponding to the orientation of the staurogram and of the Saint-Sernin sculpture. This orientation would also make ROTA the most natural reading, with TARO as a hidden second meaning, rather than the reverse. Furthermore, the letter A, turned so that its point is to the left, exactly resembles the Phoenician aleph -- which means "ox" and thus corresponds to the ox which occupies that position on the Wheel.

The design also features the four letters of the Tetragrammaton and the four living creatures of Ezekiel. (The living creatures are arranged according to the vision of Ezekiel and the camp of Israel, rather than in the astrological arrangement commonly used in the World card. See details here.) The other characters on the Wheel are alchemical symbols, three of which represent the tria prima of Paracelsus: sulfur, mercury, and salt.

These are the three primes, but the Wheel design calls for a fourth -- so Lévi, for reasons I do not pretend to understand, chose the astrological sign for Aquarius, sometimes used in alchemy to represent water, though an inverted triangle is more usual. I am also unsure as to why the sulfur glyph has been rotated 90 degrees but the one for salt has not.

Westcott's notes, appended to Lévi's text on the Wheel of Ezekiel, describe the card in question as follows: "The Tarot Trump marked 10 is named the Wheel of Fortune; the card shows a wheel supported on two upright beams. Hermanubis stands on one side, and Typhon on the other; above is the Sphynx holding a sword in its Lion's jaws. [. . .] This key is figured by Lévi in his Clef des grands mystères, page 117."

Although he references the illustration in the Clef, reproduced above, Westcott's description differs in several particulars from the published version of that illustration. He describes the wheel being supported on two beams rather than one, says the figures on the sides are standing beside the wheel rather than clinging to it, and has the sphinx holding a sword in its jaws rather than its hand. (This last is particularly strange, since human-headed sphinxes don't generally have lion's jaws! He must have meant to write "claws.") He also identifies the Hyle figure as Typhon rather than Proteus, an identification Waite would later follow.