Sunday, November 6, 2016

Star

 This post started November 2016, mostly written December 2018, completed December 2022.

1. The early Italian cards

In the earliest known surviving partial deck, that of the Cary-Yale (also called the Visconti and Modrone), there is no surviving Star card, nor a Moon or a Sun. Whether any of the celestials were in that deck is unclear. It is also not part of the “first artist” cards of the Visconti-Sforza (also called the Pierpont-Morgan-Bergamo and the Colleoni-Bagliati). The Star does appear as one of six cards in a later style added to that deck, but whether they replaced missing or damaged earlier cards on the same subject is unknown: two of the others are the Moon and the Sun. It is possible that the iconography of all three derives from the cards of the theological virtues, which appeared in the Cary-Yale but are not part of the Visconti-Sforza. Only in the minchiate deck, an expanded 40 trump deck used in Florence and elsewhere, are there these three virtues. There, the virtues missing from the tarot (including Prudence) follow directly after the cards for the Devil and the Tower, in the position where the celestials appear in all known tarot orders.

My hypothesis is that the commissioner of the Visconti-Sforza designs for these cards, whenever they were initiated, decided to switch to the three celestials, while at the same time keeping some visual similarities to the Cary-Yale theological virtues, to help players identify the right place in the sequence for the new card.

In the minchiate of later times, the order is different from that of St. Paul’s faith, hope, and charity (1 Cor. 13:13). Hope comes first, then faith, then charity. If the celestials parallel the theologicals, the Star corresponds to Hope. Where this order originated is unclear, but already "before 1422," according to the editors of a recent exhibition catalog of the Florentine artist Giovanni del Ponte, the virtues appeared in this order, in a tomb relief (below) attributed to him (they appeared in other orders then as well).[1]

 

First, let us look at the two cards together (left, Cary-Yale, on the website of the Beinecke Library of Yale University; center, the Visconti-Sforza, at the Carrera Gallery in Bergamo, Italy). There is a heavenly body emitting light at the top right of the Hope card, close to where the star is in the Star card. The major difference is that the lady is kneeling in the one, standing and reaching out in the other. In that regard the Visconti-Sforza card is like Giotto's portrayal of Hope in his series of virtues at the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua (left). But instead of a heavenly body, Giotto has a crown, which is the more usual way in which that virtue was shown.[2]

 When we look at the Moon and Sun cards, there are also visual similarities to Faith and Charity. For the moon, a standing lady holding something up with her right hand – the moon, or a communion cup – and lower down with her left – an odd-shaped rope or a staff. The Sun and Charity both have an infant and a round object. Probably the round objects are also both red, the sun in the one and a round torch in the other, if it is like the minchiate version (not shown).

Some of the symbolism seems to carry over as well. In Christianity, the hope of humanity is signaled by the Star of Bethlehem, and Christ is also described as the “bright and morning star” (Rev. 22:16) of the end-times. Faith is the virtue needed when times are dark. And Charity, i.e., gifts given without expectation of return, appears in the form of the Sun’s unfailing light and energy.

What we see on many of the early Star cards looks very much like the Star of Bethlehem. [3] In the d'Este card, ca. 1483 (online at the website of its current owner, the Beinecke Library), two men in robes look up at a star. One is pointing up at it, the other, holding a book, pointing in a more horizontal direction. It is as though they are reading from the star or stars which way to go. In another card, probably from Bologna a little later, from an uncut sheet now in the Rothschild collection of the Louvre, the men wear crowns, and there is a cross on a globe at the left, just where the man had been pointing in the previous card.[4] They are surely the Three Kings of the Bible, "following yonder star," as the Christmas carol has it. One has a crown, and one or two have a  "Phyrgian cap" identifying him as a follower of Mithras, or at least someone from where that cult was thought to have been practiced, from Asia Minor to Persia.

A similar message is in the Minchiate Star card (far right). My example is from the 18th century, but the design is probably 17th century, probably Florence. The minchiate Hope card (near right) is an example of the standard image, kneeling and praying like the Cary-Yale virtue, but to a crown rather than a heavenly body, symbolizing the King of Kings. On the minchiate Star card, we see a man on horseback holding some device in front of him, with a star overhead. Monsignor Bonifatio Vannozzi observed of the minchiate in 1613, complaining of the use of sacred images in a card game, "There are likewise the Magi guided by the star."[5]

An unusual example has a very different image but is consistent with this interpretation. Since it bears the number XVI, it must be in a deck from Ferrara or Venice, where the Starwas 16th in the sequence. Beneath the star is a naked male (near right); since the card is cut off, we don’t know what is at the bottom. It strikes me that the pose on the card is similar to that of Michelangelo's David (far right), at that time recently completed and very famous. As the savior of Israel against the Philistines he is a prefiguration of Christ, who was even declared “of the house of David.” The six-pointed star he holds – they were usually eight - is the Jewish “star of David.” I am not sure what to make of the red tree. The lopped off part might be a dig at Judaism, or perhaps indicate the death of Jesus; the splendid growth on the other side of the trunk would then symbolize the Christ of the resurrection and second coming.

From the same region, as can be told from the number 16 at the bottom, is a card with a naked female, this time associated with a ship (near right). It is from a deck now in Rouen, donated to the museum there by a man named Leber. It shows a naked goddess in the sea with ships. The nakedness would associate her with Venus, the main goddess so displayed. Of course, Venus was born of sea foam; but the blessing and safeguarding of ships was her business, too, as Venus Pontia [of the sea] Euploia [safe voyage].[6] However, what are we to make of the staff she is holding? Could it be a wrapped version of the branch held by Isis, as seen in an engraving found in Cartari’s Images of the Gods of the Ancients, 1581? Isis was associated with ships, too, as we see there. There was a famous scene in Book 11 the Metamorphosis of Apuleius, 2nd century, in which the protagonist Lucius witnesses a procession to the sea by the devotees of Isis to bless a new ship. This book was one of the first books in Italy to be printed, in 1469. And while Isis was not typically shown naked, there is an Egyptian star-goddess that appears on a Roman-era relief on a temple close to the Nile. It would be assumed to be Isis. The Leber card's Inclitum Sydus, i.e. "Notable Star," could apply to either .

That Venus is a star is clear enough, as long as the planets are considered stars (as they are with the word astro, as opposed to stella). But what does Isis have to do with a star? The connection is found in Plutarch’s Isis and Osiris. Plutarch said that for the Egyptian priests, her soul after death became the star the Greeks called Sirius and the dog star (it was in the constellation Canis Major, big dog), which the Egyptians called Sothis. This star, Plutarch said, was also called "Isis's water carrier," or, in another translation, "bringer of water."[7]The context implies that this was because it rose in the east at dawn at the time of year just before the annual Nile flood.
 
Roman-era coins showed a star-crowned lady riding a dog, a clear reference to the star in question (example at right).[8] The sistrum in her right hand connects her to Isis. Observe also her staff, similar to that in the Leber card. They could identify her from Plutarch's account, brought to Italy from Greece in the early to mid-15th century and well known by the beginning of the 16th century.


Among the early cards, probably from Milan but possibly France, there is that of the ca. 1500 Cary Sheet (above left), which like many images on this sheet is a forerunner of the famous Tarot de Marseille designs. Here it appears to be a boy, as opposed to the clearly female Tarot de Marseille figure, although the atypically long hair and feminine face give it a certain ambiguity. It would seem to be the constellation and zodiacal sign of Aquarius, which is Greek for "water bearer," similar to Plutarch's epithet for Isis. Compare it to the Aquarius in minchiate (above center: that deck included in its cards all 12 signs of the zodiac), the same in an Italian book of hours of around 1475 (above right), and that in a 1496 zodiac (at right), three examples out of many showing someone pouring out liquid from at least one of two jars.[9]
 
That it is a sign of the zodiac would seem to be part of a plan for all the celestials, perhaps evolving over time. At least one of the other two celestials on the Cary Sheet, the Moon (far right below), also corresponds to the sign of Cancer, which often showed a lobster or crayfish instead of a crab, as in the 1496 zodiac above. The third celestial, the Sun (second from right), is cut off, so that we can't tell if there are two children or just one; but its first known TdM-style descendant, a ca. 1600 card found stuffed in a wall of the Sforza Castle in Milan (second from left, reproduced from Stuart Kaplan, Encyclopedia of Tarot, vol. 2), certainly is an example of Gemini, which sometimes showed two people of opposite sex, as again in the 1496 zodiac and also in the minchiate version at far left below.


In contrast to the two jugs of the card, Johannes Bayer’s Uranometria of 1603 is typical of Aquarius's standard portrayal at that time and after, with only one jug. Also of interest is that he lists with it a series of mythical individuals associated with the constellation  (at right, from a printing later in the century which I can no longer find on the Internet). [10] The first is Deucalion; he and his wife were the only people to survive the great flood, in the Greek version of that story. Ganymede was the cup-bearer of the gods. Aristaeus taught the Greeks of Ceos how to defend against the pestilence that occurred during the rising of the Dog Star: it was necessary to sacrifice to it as well as to "rain-making Zeus." That connects him with both Isis and rain. Cecops, the last mentioned by Bayer, was a man above the waist and a serpent below: he really belongs with Capricorn.[11] The common denominator among most of these is survival in the form of renewal in virtue of pouring liquids, even against the prospect of old age in the case of Ganymede. Or perhaps not guaranteed survival - even the gods had to be in Olympus to drink their nectar periodically - but the hope of survival.  

Although two jugs are not exceptional, we might wonder why anyone would have thought to include two in this period. There are other peculiarities about the particular Aquarius in the Cary Sheet card.  Why is he dumping his liquid into a body of water, as opposed to the land, where it could nourish the crops? And why the two fish, whose fins can be seen sticking up from the water?

 If he is Ganymede, he might have two cups to indicate the two foods of immortality, nectar and ambrosia - although in that case we have to ask, why is he dumping them into the water? About fish, the answer is probably that the next constellation is Pisces, which has fish. If so, there would be water there, too, perhaps poured there by Aquarius, which in Bayer's version flows away from him out of sight. If two jugs, then two fish.

Another puzzle is the star on the Cary Sheet figure's shoulder (at left). Aquarius was a constellation, not just one star. Perhaps one star was enough to indicate constellation status, but I do not know of other examples. There is also the feminine appearance, even if the breasts do not bulge quite enough to demonstrate that gender. The Leber card, let us recall, had a feminine deity. Moreover, we see a rather similar bearer of jugs in a famous fresco of ca. 1527 Mantua, also feminine (I will discuss this fresco in more detail later). So we might wonder if there was an association between the star on the shoulder and Venus, who was typically shown nude. The other four small stars would correspond to the other four planets then known, excluding the sun and moon. The two streams might correspond to the two Platonic aspects of Venus. Physical love with "Common Aphrodite" (Aphrodite Pandemos) of Plato's Symposium, and  spiritual or intellectual love with his "Heavenly Aphrodite" (Aphrodite Ourania).[12] There are also the evident connections between Isis and the star Sirius. After all, "water-carrier" was Plutarch's term for Sothis, whom the Greeks called Isis. Moreover, there is the big star over the figure's head. 

In the case of Venus, the two fish could be Venus again plus Cupid, who in Greek myth jumped into the Euphrates River (although all the other gods who fled went to Egypt) and changed into fish to escape the monster Typhon. This story is related by the writer known to the Renaissance as Hyginus. In another variation, Ovid identified the constellation Pisces as the horses ridden by Venus and Cupid, which changed to fish in the river.[13]

For Isis, I will turn to Court de Gebelin, whose 1781 essay on the Egyptian origin of the tarot is today better known than anything else in his eight-volume series called Le Monde Primitif (The Primitive World).

2. De Gebelin on the Star card.

By the time the image got to Paris in ca. 1650, the water-carrier had become a masculine-looking lady, gradually becoming more feminine over time. At right are first, Noblet of ca. 1650, Dodal of ca. 1700-1715 (both as restored by Flornoy, online), and Conver of 1760 (unrestored, in an early 19th century print online in Gallica). You will notice that Dodal adds the bird and alters the positions of the two trees. 

De Gebelin of course identified the star as Sirius, the Dog-Star, - the Canicule in his term - and the lady beneath as Isis. His account is worth discussing in full. Immediately after discussing the Moon card, he begins:[14]

Here we have before our eyes a Tableau no less allegorical, and absolutely Egyptian. It is entitled The Star. We see in it, in effect, a shining Star, around which are seven smaller others. The bottom of the Tableau is occupied by a woman bending down upon one knee who holds two vases upside-down, from which flow two Rivers.  To one side of the woman is a butterfly upon a flower.

This is very pure Egyptianism.

Here he refers to the water coming out of the two vases as “rivers,” two of them, and not merely streams. He might be thinking of the two main branches of the Nile, the White Nile and the Blue Nile.  Plutarch does not mention these two branches, but they were well known to Europeans even in the 15th century.  The White Nile carried nutrients in the clay silt it brought with it, but had a relatively low flow all year. The Blue Nile brought water from the highlands of Ethiopia and swelled into a torrent during its summer rains. As Plutarch describes, it was by means of that extra water that the Nile flood happened, spreading nutrients on the fields and allowing the water to be trapped in near-by reservoirs.

In the view of French Egyptologist Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt, it was because of these two branches, each providing a critical element for Egyptian well-being, that Egyptian river gods were portrayed emptying the contents of two jugs.[15] Not only that, but when the Greek rulers of Egypt built a Temple of Hathor in line with their syncretic mix of Egyptian images and Greek ideas, they used precisely that image for their constellation of Aquarius, as we can see at right. Next to him (or her: it is a male body with one female breast) are even two fishes, big and small. 

This zodiac was made famous by drawings made of it on Napoleon’s expedition, but it surely was already known to Europeans before then, because it was in a small chapel on the roof and right next to the Nile.I would not be surprised if the image had not already influenced the fashion in Europe of giving the male Aquarius two vessels, which is documented from around 1390-1510. 1390 is only a century after the Mamluk rulers of Egypt opened up their country to foreign trade (see online "Who Were the Mamluks?" by James Waterson, uploaded from the journal History Today of 2004; search for "trade").

I will discuss the “butterfly” later. De Gebelin continues:[16]

This Star, par excellence, is the Canicule of Sirius, the Star which rises when the Sun is in the sign of Cancer, which terminates the preceding Tableau [XVIII-Moon] & which this Star immediately follows here.

Of course, this information is in Plutarch, available long before de Gebelin’s time. He is confused about the Moon card, thinking it comes before the Star, but it makes no difference: the star was held to rise at the beginning of Cancer.

De Gebelin continues:[17]

The seven Stars that encircle her, & that seem to pay court to her, are the Planets; she is in some sense their Queen, because she firmly fixes in this instant the commencement of the year; they appear to come to receive their orders for regulating their course under her.

And a little later:[18]

And because the year likewise opens by the rising of this Star, one [the Egyptians] called it SOTH-IS, overture of the year, & it is under this name that it was consecrated to Isis.

That the stars would be the seven planets is a logical assumption, even if two of them do not exactly twinkle. Many others have thought the same In French, the word astre (although not planète) applies to anything celestial. That it rules the other stars comes from Horapollo, Hieroglyphica 1:3, a text known in the West since 1419, when it was brought to Florence, became immensely popular, and was printed in 1505:[19]

And among them Isis is a star, called Sothis by the Egyptians, 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 in the year is going to happen

That it “appears to rule over the other stars” is perhaps because it is the brightest of them – excluding the planets, especially Venus. However, it should be noted that according to Horapollo, the hieroglyph for this star is not a star, but rather “a woman" (1, 3)  The picture of a star, he says, denotes "the cosmic God, fate, or the number five" (1, 13), or again, "a god," but also twilight, night, and a man's soul (2, 1).[20] In Christianity, let us recall, it denoted Christ, by way of the Star of Bethlehem and the "bright and morning star" of Revelation.

De Gebelin goes on (my amendations to Karlin's translation are in brackets):[21]

The Lady who is below, & keenly attentive in this moment in spilling water from her vases, is the Queen of Heaven, ISIS, to the beneficence of which [whom] one [i.e., the Egyptians – MH] attributed the inundations of the Nile, which commence at the rising of the Canicule; thus this rising was to announce the inundation. It is for this reason that the Canicule was consecrated to Isis, that it was her symbol par excellence.

To understand this, we should know what he said about the drops between the earth and moon on the Moon card, that they are the “tears of Isis,” according to a story reported by the Greek travel writer Pausanias.[22] This is quite correct. So it is her grief over the loss of Osiris that causes the inundation.

Also of relevance is what Horapollo says in Hieroglyphica 1:21:[23]

To symbolize the rising of the Nile, which the Egyptians call Noun, sometimes they draw a lion, sometimes three water jars, sometimes water gushing forth over heaven and earth.

On the card there are only two water jars, but that is a fine point; they are certainly gushing forth.

De Gebelin ends by remarking on the butterfly:[24]

Finally, the Flower and the BUTTERFLY that it bears, were the emblem of regeneration and resurrection; they indicated at the same time that by the favor of the kindness of Isis, of the rising of the Canicule, the Countrysides of Egypt, which were absolutely naked, would be covered over in new crops [or harvests].

Like the sign of Aquarius itself, therefore, the Star card in all its features symbolizes regeneration; not at that precise time, however, but as the effect of the inundation to come, of which it is merely the herald.

Anyone who looks at a card of that time, or even the drawing done of it in his book (at right), will see that it is not a butterfly on a flower, but a bird on a tree. However, it may come to the same thing, symbolically, depending on the bird. The best-known bird associated with Egypt was that which the Greeks called the Phoenix, described by numerous Greek and Latin authors. Here is the Roman poet Claudian, describing its death and rebirth:[25]

Then, realizing that his span of life is at an end and in preparation for a renewal of his splendor, he gathers dry herbs from the sun-warmed hills, and making an interwoven heap of the branches of the precious tree of Saba he builds that pyre which shall be at once his tomb and his cradle.
On this he takes his seat and as he grows weaker greets the Sun with his sweet voice; offering up prayers and supplications he begs that those fires will give him renewal of strength. Phoebus [Apollon or Helios the Sun], on seeing him afar, checks his reins and staying his course consoles his loving child with these words: “Thou who art about to leave thy years behind upon yon pyre, who, by this pretense of death, art destined to rediscover life; thou whose decease means but the renewal of existence and who by self-destruction regainest thy lost youth, receive back thy life, quit the body that must die, and by a change of form come forth more beauteous than ever.”
So speaks he, and shaking his head casts one of his golden hairs and smites willing Phoenix with its life-giving effulgence. Now, to ensure his rebirth, he suffers himself to be burned and in his eagerness to be born again meets death with joy. Stricken with the heavenly flame the fragrant pile catches fire and burns the aged body.
It is not said where all this happens, but the reborn Phoenix takes the ashes of the old to the city of Heliopolis on the banks of the Nile. On the card, we can easily imagine him singing to the sun on the other, eastern side of the card, just rising and out of view, the fire not yet lit.

There is also Horapollo, relating the bird to the flood:[26]

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 which nothing in the universe is greater. For the sun is above all things and looks down upon all things.

Also, after relating that the bird lives for 500 years before returning to Egypt to die, he adds:[27]

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. 

This relationship to the sun is aptly captured in the frontispiece a 1600 French translation of the Hypnerotomachia, an allegorical novel filled with symbolic engravings first published in Venice in 1499.[28] The bird looks like an eagle, but that is in accord with its description by Herodotus “He is most like an eagle in shape and size." What makes it a Phoenix is that there is a tube stretching down from his tree to a fire at the bottom of the page, as though the bird were on top of an alchemical apparatus. [29]

There are other possibilities for the bird on the card—a stork, for example, which in European legend was the bird that brought babies from heaven. That would explain the rather large mouth, as would a pelican, which in alchemy was held to open its veins so that the young could gain nourishment by sucking its blood. It was therefore a symbol of Christ, who died that others might live. Or no particular bird. But most likely the bird is there to reinforce symbolically the overall allegory.

Of course none of this shows that the tarot is from Egypt. It may well be that the card makers fashioned their cards precisely so as to refer to these texts, all of wide availability by the 17th century. It is simply a recasting of Aquarius (which is how de Mellet still refers to the card[30]) as Isis, the Egyptian water carrier. That this was already realized in preceding centuries is suggested by an alchemical illustration of 1618, where Isis brings her bucket to put out the fire of Typhon;[31] you will recall that “fire” was an early name for the preceding card in the series, the Tower.


3. The TdM card in relation to Greek, Latin, and Italian authors.

It may well be that the change from a male to a female Aquarius had nothing to do with Egypt. To start with, there is a fresco cycle done in Mantua, midway between Milan and Ferrara, by the artist Giulio Romano in 1527-1528. He covered the walls and ceiling of one room of the Palazzo Te with frescoes on the theme of Cupid and Psyche. In one corner of its centerpiece, the "Banquet of the Gods,” there are two figures, each with two jars, water gushing out of them (at right). One pair of streams falls on the ground, trickling down further, the other into a body of water. [32]

Tarot historian Andrea Vitali relates this particular scene to a work called The Cave of the Nymphs, by the 2nd-century Neoplatonic philosopher Porphyry.[33] An allegorical interpretation of a passage in Homer's Odyssey,  it had been translated in Romano’s time. Inside this cave, says Porphyry, water nymphs fashion bodies for souls. In one wall are two doorways, one leading to Heaven and the other to earth.

The mural does not correspond precisely to Homer's imagery. There is no hint of doorways; what we see instead are a water nymph and her aged father, each with two jars overflowing with water. But it is possible that the water of one set leads to heaven and of the other to earth. The old man’s stream is feeding a large body of water on the same level as the gods elsewhere in the mural, while the other trickles down, extending beyond the bottom of the painting. 

A story related bv the Roman-era travel writer Pausanias speaks of a certain oracle in Greece where a person wishing to know something not normally given to mortals could undergo a certain ordeal. First, he is purified with baths and other things. I will quote the passage in full:

He is led by the priests, not at once to the oracle, but to certain springs. Here he must drink what is called the water of forgetfulness, in order that he forget everything he has hitherto thought of. Then he drinks from another water, the water of Memory, that he may remember what he sees below. [34]

They then thrust him into a hole under which is a cave, where he must remain in total darkness for three days. Then:

 they ask of him, when seated there, all he has seen or learned. After gaining this information they then entrust him to his relatives. These lift him, paralyzed with terror and unconscious both of himself and of his surroundings, and carry him to the building where he lodged before with Tykhe (Fortune) and the Daimon Agathon (Good Spirit). Afterwards, however, he will recover all his faculties, and the power to laugh will return to him.[35]

Jane Harrison gives a good argument for this being a Dionysian initiation.[36] In any case, in 16th-17th century Europe it would have been part of the lore about "ancient mysteries.” Pausanias also describes what a certain Timarchos reported seeing at another sacred spring: “a vision of heaven and hell, after the fashion of a Platonic myth. His guide instructed him as to the meanings of things and how the soul shakes off the body." [37]

In Greek myth, forgetting was associated with the River Lethe, which souls drank of in Hades before returning to the surface in a new incarnation.[38] Similarly, in the mural, we see the water on the ground trickling down out of view; it could be the start of a river.

In ancient literature, Mnemosyne is characterized as a goddess, the mother of the muses. Her identification with a spring is rare. Yet the opposition between Mnemosyne and Lethe is clear enough. The Orphic hymns so beloved by Ficino invoke Mnemosyne's aid against Lethe:[39]

Come, blessed power, thy mystic's mem'ry wake
To holy rites, and Lethe's fetters break.

Given this opposition, if one is described in watery terms, it would be natural to describe the other that way as well. In the 19th century, a Roman-era Orphic gold tablet was found with words on it referring to “the lake of Mnemosyne.”[40] While it is possible that Romano knew of some such reference to such a lake, the large body of water behind the old man also resembles the width of the river at the point where it flows past Mantua, forming a natural defensive boundary on its north side.

In the time of the early tarot, two other streams of forgetting and remembering were also very much in the popular consciousness. Even after more than a hundred years, Dante's Divine Comedy was still the masterpiece of the hour, and. with the invention of the printing press, more people could read it. At the very highest part of purgatory, Dante sees two streams next to each other. He asks a woman who is picking flowers about it. She explains: [41]

The water which thou seest springs not from vein.
Restored by vapour that the cold condenses,
Like to a stream that gains or loses breath;
But issues from a fountain safe and certain,
Which by the will of God as much regains
As it discharges, open on two sides.
Upon this side with virtue it descends,
Which takes away all memory of sin;
On that, of every good deed done restores it.
Here Lethe, as upon the other side
Eunoe, it is called; and worketh not
If first on either side it be not tasted.
This every other savour doth transcend.
The object is to drink a little from Lethe to forget your sins, and then Memory, which he calls by the strange name Eunoe, to remember your good deeds. It is a purification of the mind before entering Paradise. There are two little dots over the last e in Eunoe, indicating that it is a separate syllable. Dante did not make up the word: Eunoe is the name of a nymph, said in some accounts to be the mother of Hecuba, queen of Troy at the time of the Trojan War.[42] The word is compounded of eu, good, and nous, mind: awareness of good, in other words. It fits the context.

Dante is beguiled by a nymph swimming in the Lethe, and when he is close enough she dunks his head in it, so that he swallows a little. Beatrice notices immediately that Dante's memory is slipping! She herself leads him to the Eunoe. After drinking, he tells the reader: [43]

From the most holy water I returned
Regenerate, in the manner of new trees
That are renewed with a new foliage,
Pure and disposed to mount unto the stars.

With that the Purgatorio, ends, and he is ready for the Paradiso and a full awareness of the good there. In this way the Divine Comedy is the Christian literary equivalent of an initiation into a mystery cult. His example also gives the card-makers permission to put the two pagan streams in the tarot.

On the tarot card, there are only the two jars, corresponding to the image of Aquarius then popular, i.e. one for each spring. One, on this interpretation, would go to the lake or river of Memory, the immortals, and Dante's Paradise. The other would the River Lethe and return one to our world (or, in Christianity, keeps one in Purgatory, without any forgetting of one’s bad deeds). On the cards as in the Romano fresco, one side goes into a large body of water while the other falls on the ground. They are equivalent to the two doors in Porphyry’s On the Cave of the Nymphs.

Another consideration, more speculative, is in regard to some verses written on gold leaf found in the 19th and 20th centuries, in some tombs in Italy and Greece.[44] On each is the instruction to say "I am a child of Earth and Starry Heaven" when the soul of the deceased arrives at two springs. That sentence is thought to be an Orphic password, letting the guardians know that the soul has been initiated and so is worthy of being with the gods.[45] There is also an instruction on which spring to ask for a drink from. Sometimes a cypress grows by one of them.[46] The instructions vary as to how to identify the right spring; but in every case it reminds the soul to ask for a drink from the spring that is further away. [47]  Scholars hypothesize that drinking from one was meant to enable one to join the gods, while with the other, one will go back to our world for a new incarnation. (13)

In one of the verses, the spring to choose is called Ennoia, meaning "forethought," and a word very close to Dante's Eunoia. Could Dante have known about one of the gold leaves already in his day, but not said anything because having it might be considered grave-robbing? He could not use the word "Ennoia" itself because in one of the heresies described by the Church Father Irenaeus, that was the name of the feminine aspect of God, like "Sophia" in the Old Testament (“Hochma” in Hebrew). It would not be advisable to use heretical language.[48]

In any event, the card has a strong Orphic-Dionysian level of meaning, about springs of forgetting and remembering. It calls us to forget our previous modes of being, perhaps in the sense of detaching ourselves from it, but then to remember our deeds in that state of being so that we can advance.

We may also recall the image that I have identified with Michelangelo’s David. After his child by Bathsheba is born dead. David considers it as his punishment for adultery with Bathsheba and his subsequent arranging to put her husband in a fatal battle situation. David first washes himself and then has himself anointed with oil, before asking God's forgiveness. These symbolically correspond to the two jugs, one for rinsing off the filth and the other for being in the presence of the divine.

This account also reminds me of the fourth and ninth steps in the 12-step programs. [49]In these two steps, those of "inventory" and "making amends," the addict, instead of seeking to forget by means of alcohol or drugs, now remembers his actions committed in the throes of addiction. Remembering the harm he has done to people, he scrupulously makes amends to them. It is his purification, his Pugatorio, toward the same end as in Dante, to get past that old self and into a new way of being.

What is not in the 12 steps, unfortunately, is remembering why one drank, what the divine purpose was for the soul, and when in his life one fulfilled it in other ways. Even our addictions are good deeds from a certain perspective, good deeds misguided, attempts to feel things once felt briefly but then lost, toward which no other means seems possible.

More generally, the card in this way of seeing it calls us to detach from the dominant modes of being in the world at this epoch. Instead, recover "the memory of the world," la memoire du monde, as Flornoy calls it, that which has been forgotten because it was convenient to forget.[50] Recover the old wisdom, the old mystery-schools, the old secrets. That is what the Renaissance was about, the rebirth of the old; it is what the alchemists, Kabbalists, and tarot card designers were about, too. It is what the writers on the tarot are doing today when they explore its origins and mythic associations. Then (if I may paraphrase another of Flornoy's figures of speech), perhaps we can add to the water of immortality without disturbing it.

The initiates are perhaps the two streams from the two jars, with two outcomes, one entering the lake of memory and the Eternals, the other the river of forgetfulness and the Eternal Round. Or perhaps the woman herself is Mnemosyne, pouring out two aspects of remembering, that which merges one's little consciousness with the Infinite and that which brings the Infinite into the world. These are also two aspects of hope depicted in the Minchiate Hope and Star cards: mortals briefly apprehending the Eternal One, with the promise of more, and the Eternal One briefly becoming incarnate, with the promise of return. 

4. Water vs. land, seven stars, the two trees, the bird

I have discussed the two streams in terms of falling on land vs. water in reference to the mural in Mantua. On the level of dogmatic Christianity, the same on the card could be an echo of Rev. 10:2, where an angel in John's vision "put his right foot on the sea and his left on the land." It would seem to indicate how the power of God is all-encompassing. But by its context it also suggests, for its large star, Christ of the Second Coming. Each of these cards after Death can be given an Apocalyptic interpretation

There is also Plutarch, who reports the ritual mixing of water (Osiris) with earth (Isis), to ensure the great mixing of the flood.[51] This water goes onto the land, to nourish the crops; the rest goes out to sea; hence water onto water. 

Some cards complement that interpretation by a difference in color between the two streams. On our right side is the White Nile, rich in nutrients, now a metaphor for the body as opposed to the spirit. The water is not muddy in most early versions of the Marseille, but is in the Chosson (at left), printed around 1736 - or at least flesh colored.[52] The color of the water may also have to do with the destination of the soul so “poured,” whether to go back to the earth in another incarnation (muddy or flesh-colored water returning to the earth in another body) or to a higher destination, based on its greater purity.

There are, of course, seven stars, as opposed to the five of the Cary Sheet. In Egypt, the seven stars would have been the "seven Hathors" or "seven fates" that set a child's destiny at the time of his or her birth.[53] I cannot find any reference to such “seven fates” in accounts known in Europe of the 16th and 17th centuries. However, Horapollo does say that one of the meanings of seven stars (when surrounded by two fingers) was "fate" (2, 29, Boas trans. p. 91). There was also, in the Bible, the seven good years and seven bad years of Pharaoh’s dream as interpreted by Joseph. It is again fate, but in the story transcended by wisdom from God – i.e., the big star. The image of seven stars also occurs in Revelation 1:16-20, where they are identified as the angels of the “seven churches of Asia.” Since this image is at the beginning of John's vision, what is suggested in the card is the beginning of the end times. Then at the end of Revelation, Christ is the “bright and morning star.”

Another Christian interpretation is from Canto XXIX of Dante's Purgatorio, in which Dante sees seven lighted candles, and then in Canto XXXII, seven nymphs, who accompany him to the two streams from which he must drink. These seven candles and seven nymphs are also a reference to the seven stars of Revelation 1:16, because the stars in Revelation are said to be in "candlesticks" (Rev 1:17, King James Version). [54]

What is comparable to the “seven fates” at a person’s birth in Egyptian myth is the natal horoscope of Greek astrology, thought to determine the fate, at least in general terms, of the individual with that horoscope. In some cases, it will not be a good fate. In that case, the big star, representing Christ, could serve to transcend fate in a person’s life

In the canonical Bible, however, the seven planets are not mentioned as having any influence on human affairs. I find only one suggestion of such influence, in the Book of Job, in only one version, the King James. God challenges Job, "Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion?" (Job 38:31)[55] The phrase "sweet influences" suggests influence on human affairs. But in the Vulgate, the Bible known in countries where the tarot was produced, there is no such suggestion. I give the Latin followed by the Douay-Rheims translation:[56]

Numquid conjungere valebis micantes stellas Pleiadas, aut gyrum Arcturi poteris dissipare?

Shalt thou be able to join together the shining stars the Pleiades, or canst thou stop the turning about of Arcturus?

Since there were seven stars in the Pleiades, that star cluster remains a possible reference for the seven stars on the card. Traditionally, it was so bright and easily identifiable that sailors readily used it for navigation, just as they could use Sirius.

Another possibility is the Hyades, another constellation of seven stars. The Vulgate translates one instance of the Hebrew word taken today to mean the Pleiades, as "Hyades" (Job 9:9).[57] Sometimes also reported as five, these nymphs were half-sisters to the Pleiades by the same father; they hid the young Dionysus from the vengeful Hera, and a thankful Zeus put them in the sky. [58] In the Bacchic rites, Dionysus was a savior god comparable to Christ: after the proper rites of initiation, a person was declared a Bacchus or an Ariadne, as though experiencing a new birth with a new name, and made immortal thereby. As a constellation, the Hyades (“rainy ones”) rose in November, the start of the rainy season in Greece, and so quite suitable as harbingers of rain at a different time of year from Aquarius.

There are also two trees, most distinct in Noblet (at left),  one tree, the fatter of the two, has leaves that are broad and point upwards; it looks to me like a Mediterranean fig (see illustration below). The fig, sacred to Dionysus, has fruit said to resemble both male and female genitalia.[59] The other tree, the narrower one, could be a white poplar. Poplars were sacred to Persephone and are associated, in her myths and those of other gods, with grief and regeneration. The nymph Leuce, who had been seduced or raped by her husband Hades, was turned into a white poplar in the Elysian Fields after her death, according to the Roman writer Servius.[60] Recall here that Hades and Persephone were assimilated to Dionysus/Liber and Ariadne/Libera in Roman mythology (see my post on the Popess). So the association between the poplar and these gods could be where the card-makers and their scholarly advisers got the idea for this tree, as Servius is mentioned often by Cartari.[61]

The tree could also be a cypress, because of the density of its branches (see photo above). Cypresses were sacred to Apollo, Hades and Artemis. Since Artemis was the goddess of childbirth and Hades the god of death, that tree suggests birth and death. The associations to Apollo are similar: he was born in a cypress grove, and a young man who died of love for Apollo was changed into a cypress. The cypress was well-known for its resistance to decay. [62]

If the star-woman’s location is Hades, that does not mean that we are still below the earth, in the devil’s realm. The Greeks and Romans had no Purgatory; but if people pass easily to the upper world of the Platonists and the Orphics, it is in the higher part of Hades, comparable to the top of the Mount of Purgatory in Dante’s Divine Comedy.  Similarly, in Plutarch’s allegory of the soul’s journey after death in his On the face that appears in the orb of the moon, Hades is in the “upper air” between the earth and the moon. In that place, after the lightning and frightful winds of the lower part:[63]

the good souls must in the gentlest part of the air, which they call "the meads of Hades," pass a certain set time sufficient to purge and blow away the pollutions contracted from the body as from an evil odour.​

We may imagine a kind of washing, or the burning away of impurities by heat. Then:

in the upper region, . . . the ether about the moon,​ they get from it both tension and strength, as edged instruments get a temper,​ for what laxness and diffuseness they still have is strengthened and becomes firm and translucent. In consequence they are nourished by any exhalation that reaches them, and Heraclitus was right in saying: "Souls employ the sense of smell in Hades.”

This tempering corresponds to the effect of the other stream, which perhaps is comparable to the cooling water into which a heated sword is plunged, tempering it so that it is both flexible and strong, and to the cooling stream into which Dante is dunked after the fires of Purgatory. It is what some attribute to the Temperance card. It may be compared also to the addition of the cold water of the blue Nile to the warm of the White.


5. Summary thus far.

A general interpretation is emerging from Christian and Greek sources, of the Star lady as offering purification and the readiness for ascent to the divine. That is what Dante's two streams suggest, tended over by the lady Mathilda, as well as the two drinks before and after the cave of Triphonus. But it can also go the other way, toward regeneration in the material realm. This is what the symbolism of the Nile flood also suggests – some of the water going to the land, and some to the sea - as well as Porphyry's "Cave of the Nymphs," with its two doors.

 

6. Etteilla and the occultists 
 
In Etteilla’s Third Cahier all we see is "It is loss," and an assignment to the second day of creation and the third element, air.[64] In the Second Cahier he says more: it is "expanse" (epanse), presumably meaning the firmament, created on the second day. He adds later in the same book, on pp. 94f:
Take the fourth page of the Book Thoth, 4. 8. 12. or the Deck of Cards named Tarots (of which the root is A Rosch, which signifies beginning (1), it is necessary to turn thus: Whoever does not have the beginning of the Science or the Doctrine, abuses himself in believing that he can understand the middle and the end;) the hieroglyph that the Ignorant have called The Star has always been the second day of Creation.
The Egyptians put on this page the animal, which is the figure triphibie, soul life and body, androgyne or male and female, and seen as neuter, keeping both sexes, and having in it the four elements and the three principles.
They also put the vegetable (2), which [p. 95] is also triphibie, soul from Nature, life from it and body, having the same three principles and four Elements, & in its neutrality giving root, trunk and branch, and from them leaves, flowers and fruits.
They have also traced on this page the mineral, placed between the heel and the knee of the other leg of the figure; this metal is also triphibie, having in it the three principles and the four Elements.

[Etteilla’s Footnotes]
(1) See the eighth volume of M. De Gebelin.
(2) From the tree which is in the fourth page of the Book of Thoth, most of the Card makers have removed the Butterfly that the Egyptians put there. At Strasbourg, it is not; at Bordeaux, they have put a Bird.

What is of interest here is his insistence that the figure is an androgyne, which is in line with the ambiguity of its gender on some early cards. Another point is the butterfly, which Etteilla inherited from Gebelin, but going a step further and claiming it to be original with the Egyptians. Actually, the butterfly was of no symbolic significance in Egypt, probably because none were native to the Nile Valley, as opposed to the mountains beyond.[65] That did not stop  Oswald Wirth from putting the butterfly on his version of the card, nor C. C. Zain and his "Brotherhood of Light," who even today reproduce that butterfly on its supposed Egyptian design (far right), complete with a pseudo-Egyptian letter on the bottom right. It is a perfectly good symbol of death and resurrection, but Greek rather than Egyptian.

Sixty years after Etteilla, Eliphas Levi, also in Paris, wrote about this card in three separate places. In the 17th chapter of Part I we read:[66] 

Hence upon the seventeenth page of the Tarot we find an admirable allegory a naked woman, typifying Truth, Nature, and Wisdom at one and the same time, turns two ewers towards the earth, and pours out fire and water upon it; above her head glitters the septenary, starred about an eight-pointed star, that of Venus, symbol of peace and love ; the plants of earth are flourishing around the woman, and on one of them the butterfly of Psyche has alighted ; this emblem of the soul is replaced in some copies of the sacred book by a bird, which is a more Egyptian and probably a more ancient symbol. In the modern Tarot the plate is entitled the Glittering Star; it is analogous to a number of Hermetic symbols, and is also in correspondence with the Blazing Star of Masonic initiates, which expresses most of the mysteries of Eosicrucian secret doctrine.

He is surely right about the bird fitting Egypt better as well as being older than the butterfly. This account of the lady’s pouring fire from one of the cups is the first I have seen with that detail, which corresponds to the “tempering” that Plutarch described.

Then in the 17th chapter of Part II, he states what we would expect:[67]

we find on the seventeenth leaf a magnificent and gracious emblem. A naked woman, a young and immortal maid, pours out upon the earth the juice of universal life from two ewers, one of gold and one of silver; hard by there is a flowering shrub, on which rests the butterfly of Psyche; above her shines an eight-pointed star with seven other stars around it. "I believe in eternal life!" Such is the final article of the Christian symbol, and this alone is a profession of faith.

Then he says that the card symbolizes "the burning star and eternal youth."[68]

Paul Christian did not follow his master in every respect, instead saying:[69]

E,P= 80 expresses in the divine world immortality. In the intellectual world the Inner Light that illuminates the Spirit. In the physical world, hope.
...
The girl symbolizes hope, which scatters its dew upon our saddest days. She is naked, to signify that hope remains with us when we have been bereft of everything. Above this figure the blazoning. eight-pointed star symbolizes 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.
More butterflies! Otherwise it is a traditional Christian message, consonant with my proposal that the card is a substitute for the Hope card. Again the seven stars represent Fate and the big star its ftranscendence.

Papus brings out the Christian message even more. He agrees that the card is about immortality, hope, and “the force that dispenses the essence of life, which gives it the means of perpetually renewing its creations after destruction.”[70] The girl is "the image of eternal youth."[71] She is the spirit of card 14 now pouring her liquid onto the ground, materiality, after “the fall of the Divine and the Human into the material:[72]

Here we find the symbol of immortality. The soul (ibis or butterfly) will survive the body, which is only a place of trial (the ephemeral flower). The courage to bear these trials will come from above (the stars).

"The fall is not irreparable," he adds." The Visible Universe contains the source of its Divinization in itself."[73] The ibis is of course the bird of Hermes; it has a characteristically long, thin beak, unlike on the TdM card he shows us.

Papus does not distinguish between the two fluids she pours. However, he does not that she is the same “genius of the sun” seen in the Temperance card, now brought to earth. In discussing that card, he said that the two cups contained the “fluid of life” and that what is produced is “a combination of active and passive fluids.”[74] This would seem to be the esotericist’s re- interpretation of the traditional wine and water, or hot and cold.

Oswald Wirth focuses on the stars. The seven small ones call us to our destiny, but also "encourage us and make us feel that we are not abandoned", since they watch over us.”[75] The two stars nearest the girl are especially important: one is Consciousness and Reason, the other Imagination and Feeling.

He compares the large star not only to Venus but to Ishtar, a warrior in the morning who "incites us into a Lucifer-like rebellion against the tyranny of ruling dogmas."[76] For this purpose, there is the golden vessel of "burning liquid to give life to the stagnant water”[77] (Levi’s “fire”). In the evening she summons him "to deserved rest, to expressions of tenderness and serene meditation. Is she not the revealer of the beauty of things?"[78] Thus we come to the liquid pouring out of the silver vessel, which waters the vegetation, and especially the rose fully blooming, "a symbol of all that embellishes earthly life, this flower is reflected in the pond, the reservoir of the vital fluids."[79] Wirth's butterfly is the soul, which lands on the flower "with the suave perfume of delicate feelings, which is lit up a refined intelligence which has managed to free itself from all coarseness."[80] Where spirit leads us is not so much out of this world but in it in a new way.

With also compares the girl to Eve, as the spirit made flesh, and to Isis in search of Osiris's buried body parts, the hidden wisdom buried among the superstitions bequeathed to us by history. Here the stars' obscure, dim light allows us to travel freely when asleep, guided by their influences. All we remember is what little is captured in dreams. Yet sometimes we find that an intractable problem when we go to sleep has a solution when we wake up.

A. E. Waite, like the other esotericists, says that the girl represents "eternal youth and beauty" and that the liquids are "the waters of life". He disagrees that it is about immortality, the inner light, and hope. Instead he says:[81]

For the majority of prepared minds, the figure will appear as the type of Truth unveiled, glorious in undying beauty, pouring on the waters of the soul some part and measure of her priceless possession. But she is in reality the Great Mother in the Kabalistic Sephira Binah, which is supernal Understanding, who communicates to the Sephiroth that are below in the measure that they can receive her influx.

It may be surprising that he identifies her with Binah, since the Golden Dawn identifies her with a path, but Binah as Understanding certainly fits his analysis.

Case is much like Waite. The card is about meditation, as the means by which truth from above may enter our being:[82]

The nude water-bearer is Isis-Urania. She represents truth, and the practice of meditation reveals truth to us without disguise, hence she is nude..  

The two vessels represent the two personal modes of consciousness. One falls into a pool, representing the impact of meditation upon the subconscious. The other divides into five streams, one for each of the senses, which meditation sharpens.[83] Neither he nor Waite color the two vases any differently – both are red for Case, golden for Waite. The seven stars represent the seven alchemical metals and the seven chakras of the human body.”[84] What is important about the bird is that it is the bird of Hermes; that and its red color remind us that meditation is begun by, and supervised by, the self-conscious aspect of human personality, Mercury or Hermes, pictured in Tarot as key 1, the Magician.[85]  He does picture it with a long, thin beak, as does Waite.

 

7. Jungian interpretations.

I cannot find in Jung’s writings anything about the image of someone pouring liquid from two jugs. He does write about Aquarius, and also about stars, birds, and trees.

His comments about Aquarius are in terms of the advent of the “Aquarian Age,” when the precession of the equinoxes makes it so that at the vernal equinox it is Aquarius that rises at dawn, as opposed to Pisces, which had that role for the previous two thousand years. He says almost nothing about Aquarius except in that connection, but presumably he accepts the conventional astrological interpretation: it is an air sign, hence thought, as opposed to Pisces and feeling. He does say that it is ruled by Saturn, the planet of limitation. What he emphasizes is that it is in contrast to its opposite sign, Leo, a fire sign. For him it is the time in which the problem of the opposites and their unification is posed and resolved. He says:[86]

If, as seems probable, the aeon of the fishes is ruled by the archetypal motif of the “hostile brothers,” then the approach of the next Platonic month, namely Aquarius, will constellate the problem of the union of opposites. It will then no longer be possible to write off evil as the mere privation of good; its real existence will have to be recognized. This problem can be solved neither by philosophy, nor by economics, nor by politics, but only by the individual human being, via his experience of the living spirit.

Aquarius is generally a humane and thought-imbued sign, but Jung did not see the transition as peaceful, presumably because of its opposite, Leo.[87]

Transitions between the aeons always seem to have been melancholy and despairing times, as for instance the collapse of the Old Kingdom in Egypt . . .  between Taurus and Aries, or the melancholy of the Augustinian age between Aries and Pisces. And now we are moving into Aquarius, of which the Sibylline Books say: Luciferi vires accendit Aquarius acres (Aquarius inflames the savage forces of Lucifer). And we are only at the beginning of this apocalyptic development!

By “savage forces” Jung probably has in mind the untamed lion of Leo. For Wirth Lucifer had a positive aspect, as the spirit of rebellion against sterile dogmas. Perhaps that is part of the mix for Jung as well. During the Piscean Age, The opposites were two fish in the sea of the unconscious, kept safely apart, but in the Aquarian Age they will come closer together and emerge into consciousness. Unfortunately he does not say much about why Aquarius leads him to this conclusion. In one place he notes that “The element air is assigned to it, and it is symbolized by an angel or a human being, as opposed to an animal. Here the spirit is meant to become subtle again, and man to become what he is.”[88] Air is higher than water, apparently, and the human higher than the fish.

Then there is the title of the card: “The Star.” For Jung stars are a symbol of a person’s unique individuality. Speaking of a patient who says, “then I knew that I could only pray to my star,” he comments:[89]

The star is a symbol of her uniqueness. As stars are unique units in the sky, so individuals are in a way stars, they are unique units.

But that does not mean that a particular star is identical with one’s conscious personality. The patient is praying to her star: so the star is outside her ego of consciousness.[90] He adds:

The star-symbol means the center of a mandala, and the meditation upon the Self or the meditation on the mandala is prayer; in many different religions that concentration upon a point outside of oneself, not identical with oneself, is called prayer. . . . There are enormous spaces of the psyche that lie beyond the conscious sphere. So the totality of all that is not the ego – the ego is merely one part that belongs to a totality – the sum-total is called the Self.  The center of that totality does not necessarily coincide with the ego-system, just as the center of our galaxy does not coincide with our sun.

Similarly, the stars above the star-lady’s head form a mandala, with one star in the center. The whole is the Self.

Jung’s most His most extended discussion of the star is in his discussion of Nietzsche’s “dancing star.” Nietzsche says, “It is time for man to plant the germ of his highest hope,” so that one day he will “give birth to a dancing star.”[91] Jung asks the seminar members what the star symbolizes here. A seminar member answers “Individuation,” and Jung replies “Yes, it would be a symbol of individuation, a symbol of the concentration of one living spark, the spark of fire that fell into creation, in the Gnostic myth.” [92]

In Nietzsche this star of individuation is the birth of the Uebermensch (over-man, man overcoming himself). Jung gives several quotes from Thus Spake Zarathustra:[93]

Therefore, Nietzsche says later on, speaking to man: “Art thou a new power and a new law, a first movement, a wheel that rolls out of itself? Canst thou force the stars that they turn round thyself?” Here we have that same symbolism, the rotation and also the star. Then again, later: ‘It is terrible being alone with the judge and the revenger of thine own law; thus a star is cast out into the empty space and into the icy breath of solitude.” That is also a symbol of individuation. Another reference to it is “But my brother, if thou wantest to be a star” – meaning the Superman. And again, speaking of individuation: “The ray of a star may shine in your life and your hope may be called: ‘I am. I give birth to the Superman.’”

Instead of something outside humanity, Christ, the star now is inside, a Nietzschian reinterpretation of Christ.

It is significant that the star is dancing. Jung amplifies this image with reference to the Shiva of many arms, all moving rapidly: “They form a corona around him like the emanating rays of a sun or a star.” It is the “extraordinary twinkling activity of the divine body.”[94]

In this regard the lady standing on one leg of the World card is perhaps just  such a “dancing star.” It is hard to believe that the lady on the Star card, so set in place, could be her predecessor. With her, the opposites are still apart, in two distinct jugs and streams. The lone large star above is the only indication of their unification, eight lighter rays alternating with eight darker ones (usually yellow vs. red, which usually means mind vs. instinctual energy), like Shiva’s arms but in a unity of opposites, standing in place while the other stars dance around it.

Jung finds similar symbolism in the 16th century medical experimenter and alchemist Paracelsus: his “star in man” is projected into the alchemist’s retort, the filius philosophorum “openly named the greatest and most victorious of all lights and set alongside Christ as the Savior and Preserver of the world!”[95] Jung remarks that the alchemist’s quest to take the place of the Creator turned into chemistry and the rest of modern science, “which unleashed the forces at work in the world today.”[96] It is again the theme of the Aquarian age, which, he will say later, has brought us the atom bomb. Man has indeed become God, but “whether the psyche has gained anything is another matter.”[97]

Nietzsche emphasizes that in order for the star to be planted in man, there must be chaos inside: “I tell you: one must still have chaos in one, to give birth a dancing star”[98]. I am reminded that the card just before is the Tower, with its stability-upsetting lightning-flash. For Nietzsche lightning is another image of the Uebermensch: “I want to teach men the sense of their existence, which is the Superman, the lightning out of the dark cloud – man.”[99] In the Star card the two hapless humans falling from the tower are still falling, but now as fluids capable of blending.

For the two trees, in his essay “The Philosophical Tree” he describes the “most common associations”:[100]

growth, life, unfolding of form in a physical or spiritual sense, growth from below upwards and from above downwards, the maternal aspect (protection, shade, shelter, nourishing fruits, source of life, solidity, permanence, firm-rootedness, but also being “rooted to the spot”), old age, personality, and finally death and rebirth.

It is also can be another symbol of individuation. Commenting on Nietzsche he says:[101]

Well, this germ of the highest hope is the star. Man should plant a germ, which would grow up in the form of a plant, and the plant would create a flower which would be the star. . . . Flowers have those star-like forms, symmetrical structures. So if man succeeds in planting that germ, it is as if he were pregnant with a twinkling star.

I am reminded of the star on the star-lady’s abdomen in Dodal’s card.

As for the bird:[102]

Birds are thoughts and the flight of thoughts. Generally it is fantasies and intuitive ideas that are represented thus. . . .. The eagle – synonymous with phoenix, vulture, raven – is a well-known alchemical symbol.  Even the lapis  . . . is often represented with wings, denoting intuition or spiritual (winged) potentiality.. . . In the last resort all these symbols depict the consciousness-transcending fact we call the self . . . Out of the egg – symbolized by the round cooking-vessel – will rise the eagle or phoenix, the liberated soul.”

For a more specific Jungian analysis of the card, I turn to Sallie Nichols in Jung and Tarot.

She entitles her chapter on the Star card "Ray of Hope." For her the nude girl is taking water out of the stream and pouring part of it back in and another part onto the earth. The earth is "the earth of individual human reality", while the body of water is "the living water of the collective unconscious." So it is the invigoration of individual consciousness, nourishing "whatever seeds lie dormant there."[103]

In relation to the card before it, the energy from the unconsciousness now is not directed at smashing the walls of a prison-like fortress. That has been accomplished; it is now a matter of reviving what has fallen to earth with the "living water," which is not only in the pool, but also in the stars above, so that in the card "a nature priestess initiates the task of discovering in the events of terrestrial existence a pattern corresponding to the heavenly design,” calling us to a task done in the humility of self-acceptance after the humiliation of the fall from the tower. [104]

The mandala pattern of the stars, pointing to the star in its center, is something for us to emulate. To connect to that center is an individual thing, a labor equivalent to the path of salvation, achieved in "contemplation and silent growth."[105] She is far from Nietzsche's encouragement of chaos as its precondition. For her, the bird and the trees are our model. The bird is the conjunction of heaven and earth as a living reality. The tree is rooted in the earth and takes in all the four elements, transforming them into its own individual expression of its nature in relation to its surroundings. Later she compares the four elements to the four Jungian functions: earth to sensation, water to emotion, air to thinking, and fire to intuition.

The trees also correspond to the two famous trees in Eden; in the psyche they might be "one which impels us to live life, and the other which motivates us to know life."[106] I am reminded of the fig and the cypress, the cypress the tree of quiet Apollonian contemplation, the fig of Dionysian energy. T In the Nietzchian ubermensch, the two tendencies balance each other. The two jugs represent the two aspects of libido, physical and spiritual, "one essence, but each is adapted to a different purpose."[107]

The stars are both personal and transpersonal. Stars are associated with guidance, she says; thus they "shed the wisdom of old knowledge onto current dilemmas."[108] So we have the systems of astrology, bringing eternal patterns to bear on a particular life, and the myth that the Demiurge assigned each person a star to which, if one lives justly, one returns at death. This is from Plato, Timaeus 41d, 42b[109]

And when He had compounded the whole He divided it into souls equal in number to the stars, and each several soul He assigned to one star . . .  And he that has lived his appointed time well shall return again to his abode in his native star . . .

The seven small stars are then archetypal patterns that have somehow adhered to us in our descent into material life, which the path of individuation may help us to become aware of. These are the "complexes" of depth psychology, represented by the energies of the seven planets. (Again, this is Platonism, that of the Poimandres, where the soul hopes in its journey upward to slough off these accretions.[110])

Unlike the Platonists, she sees these complexes in generally positive terms. But  they require an engagement of the ego with the transpersonal. “When the ego is immobilized, then intuitions can soar,“ she says.[111] What is poured is merely the accumulation of the raw material of growth. Pouring it – the fixation of the volatile - results in the heavenly coming to earth. Then:

As the dry soil at her feet becomes wet, it grows malleable like clay. From this new substance a new world can be shaped. - one more securely grounded in natural reality than the towering brick structure built by the intellect, which invited the lightning from on high."[112]

Besides bringing forth new potentialities from within the psyche, like seeds in the earth, the action of the Star Woman also affects the collective unconscious itself. "In the process of pouring, the waters have become aerated and purified."[113] I am reminded that Aquarius is an air sign, emphasizing thought more than feeling. Later she explains that[114]

significantly, she makes no effort direct the stream's course. She accepts the waters as they come, dealing only with those she is above to collect in her two small urns. But through her actions she affects a change, however small, in the character and quality of the stream. Jung's technique of active imagination affects the mainstream of the unconscious in a similar way.

Nichols observes that when archetypal figures enter our consciousness from the unconscious depths, “Sometimes they offer sound advice, sometimes they talk nonsense, and on occasion they can make diabolical suggestions."[115] So we have to engage these figures with challenges and questions. Only in a "spirited dialogue . . . where both find expression can we hope to resolve our problems and conflicts in a practical, human way."[116] Her purifying action brings out the water of feeling to the air of thought, to be tested in the earth of practical reality, in a circular process that never really ends. On the one hand there is energy and peace from the water and the stars; on the other hand, there is the conscious effort to take what one needs from the whole and by transforming our consciousness transforming the unconscious as well.

She selects one artwork to illustrate the theme of the card, Van Gogh's Starry Night (above, now in the Museum of Modern Art, New York), mostly to illustrate what the Star card is not. She says that its swirls indicate the chaos of “a sudden onrush of elemental contents from the deep unconscious” in which “no central star shines forth to hold the planets in their orbits.”[117] The cypress in the foreground “writhing in agony shoots flames into the sky,” merely part of the confusion and lack of form. She writes:[118]

In this chaotic canvas, the sole image of unity and harmony is in the upper right hand corner, where sun and moon are wedded together in a symbolic unity of opposites. But this image is not central; it seems distant and unattainable.  

It seems to me that there is more in the painting than this. The  stars shimmer with the auras that Jung imagines when he compares Nietzsche’s “dancing star” to the dancing Shiva. Above all, this sky is alive with energy, and yet there is more than one indication of unifying opposites: the two swirls in the center are reminiscent the famous Yin-Yang symbol, and of partners in a dance. At the same time one of the swirls dances with its partner on our right, like the double uroborus of the two of coins and the infinity signs over the heads of the Magician and Strength. The other stars do not have to be ordered around a center, if each represents an individuating consciousness: they contain their own centers.

She notices that the Star Woman seems sad.[119] The obvious parallel is with the dark cypress in van Gogh’s painting, in contrast to the tall but light and regular steeple on the church. Both are creatures of earth becoming one with the sky, but the peace and order of the steeple is that of lifelessness. Growth is a process of anguish and suffering, as we recast our situation not as punishment, just or unjust, but as "part of a meaningful design, a necessity, a challenge, and an opportunity."[120] In this way, after the Tower of Destruction, the hero is "bathed and soothed in the healing waters of the Star."[121] But van Gogh’s painting shows that it is not that easy. The Age of Aquarius is not a bed of roses, but a burst of godlike energy that takes time to become a unified whole.


[1] Giovanni dal Ponte: Protagonista dell’umanesimo tardogotico fiorentino (exhibition catalog), Florence 2016, p. 40, which identifies it as part of the funeral monument of Cardinal Pietro Corsini in Santa Maria del Fiore (cathedral), Florence.

[2] Goddess, see Wikipedia entry for "Spes." Giotto image: http://www.christusrex.org/www1/giotto/SV-spes.jpg. For the relationship to tarot-like playing cards, see my blog at http://rothschildcards.blogspot.com/.

[4] "Rothschild" image: Kaplan, Encyclopedia of Tarot Vol. 1, p. 129.

[5] Minchiate: My image source is http://www.endebrock.de/coll/pages/i31.html. The quotation is from Bonifatio Vannozzi, Della Suppellettile degli Avvertimenti Politici, Morali, et Christiani, [On the furnishings of warnings Political, Moral, and Christian], Vol. 3 (Bologna: Heredi di Giovanni Rossi, 1613), p. 617, in Google Books.

[6] https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-6239348, citing Vermeule and Brauer, Stone Sculptures, The Greek, Roman and Etruscan Collections of the Harvard University Art Museums, pp. 50-51.

[7] Isis as dog-star and Sothis: Plutarch, Isis and Osiris XXI, speaking of the Egyptians' beliefs about the gods:: "their souls shine in heaven as stars; and that of Isis so called by the Greeks the Dog-star, but by the Egyptians Sothis, 'Water-carrier.'" Then in Isis and Osiris XXXVIII: "Of the stars, they hold Sirius to be Isis’ Water-carrier." Both at https://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/plu/pte/pte04.htm. Another translation has, "the soul of Isis is called by the Greeks the Dog-star, but by the Egyptians Sothis," and "Of the stars the Egyptians think that the Dog-star is the star of Isis,​ because it is the bringer of water." Both at https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Moralia/Isis_and_Osiris*/B.html#T359d.

[8] Nile flood: Plutarch, Isis and Osiris XXXVIII-XXXIX. Coin from Witt, Isis in the Ancient World, 1971 ed. in Google Books, plate 64, "medallion of Faustina the younger" (p. 9), shown on p. 229.

[9] from Ernst and Johanna Lehner, Astrology and Astronomy.

[10] Johannes Bayer, Uranometria, 1603, at https://www.e-rara.ch/zut/doi/10.3931/e-rara-309.

[11] Information on the various mythological characters from Wikipedia on each one.

[13] Pseudo-Hyginus, Astronomica 2. 30. Pisces: Ovid, Fasti 2. 458 ff. Both at http://www.theoi.com/Olympios/AphroditeMyths.html.

[14] Court de Gebelin, “Concerning the Game of Tarots,” Karlin trans. (in his Rhapsodies of the Bizarre), p. 26, original (in Le Monde Primitif, vol. 8, 1781, in Gallica), p. 374

[15] Le Fabuleux Histoire de l’Egypte, 2012.

[16] Karlin trans., p. 26, original p. 374.

[18] Karlin trans., p. 27, original pp. 375.

[19] Boas trans., 1950, pp. 58-59, in archive.org.

[20] A woman: ibid., p. 58. God: ibid., pp. 66, 87.

[21] Karlin trans., p. 27, original p. 375.

[22] See my post on that card.

[23] Boas trans., 71.

[24] Karlin trans., p. 27, original p. 375

[26] Hieroglyphica, Boas trans. 1950, 61.

[27] Ibid.

[29] Herodotus, Histories 2. 73 (trans. Godley), quoted at https://www.theoi.com/Thaumasios/Phoinix.html.

[30] Karlin trans. (with de Gebelin), p. 51, original p. 397.

[31] De Rola, Golden Game, p. 63.

[32] My reproduction is from Sonia Cavicchioli, The Tale of Cupid and Psyche: An Illustrated History

[33] http://trionfi.com/0/i/c/17/v/. His reproduction of the scene is his Figure 7. The essay by Porphyry is at http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/porphyry_cave_of_nymphs_02_translation.htm

[34] Pausanias, Description of Greece 9.39.3 at http://www.theoi.com/Titan/TitanisMnemosyne.html.

[35] Ibid.

[36] Harrison, Prolegomena to the study of Greek Religion, p. 575. Accessible at Google Books.

[37] Pausanias of second note above.

[38] Numerous classical references to the River Lethe are at http://www.theoi.com/Khthonios/PotamosLethe.html

[41] Purgatorio XXVIII, 130ff. at http://www.online-literature.com/dante/purgatorio/28/. This and the following are cited in Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, at Google Books.

[46] Springs: Radcliffe G. Edmonds III, Myths of the Underworld Journey: Plato, Aristophanes, and the 'Orphic' Gold Tablets, p. 50, in Google Books. One commentator on the Star card, at http://www.cs.utk.edu/~mclennan/BA/PT/M16.html, says that the two trees are dark and white cypresses.

[47] Further away: Edmonds, p. 51.

[48] Ennoea: Harrison, Prolegomena, p. 584, in Google Books. Irenaeus: Refutation of all heresies, I.1.1, I.12,1, 1.12.3, I.23.2, I.23.5, I.29.1, I.29.2, I.30.1. At http://www.gnosis.org/library/advh1.htm

[50] Jean-Claude Flornoy, Pelerinage des Bateleurs, p. 190.

[51] Plutarch, Isis and Osiris, section XXXIX, at https://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/plu/pte/pte04.htm.

[52] The year on the Chosson's 2 of Coins is given as 1672, which may well be when the woodblocks were made, corresponding also to the "GS" on the Chariot card. But Chosson is not documented as a card maker until 1735; probably Chosson bought his predecessor's woodblocks.[52]

[57]Pseudo-Hyginus, Astronomica 2. 21, at  https://www.theoi.com/Olympios/DionysosMyths.html#Birth. See also the link there to the entry “Hyades.”

[60] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leuce_(mythology), referencing Graves' Greek Myths and Servius, Commentary on Virgil's Eclogues 7.61.

[61] John Mylryan, trans. and annotator, Cartari's Images of the ancient gods, the first Italian mythography, 2012, index.

[66] Transcendental Magic, its Doctrine and Ritual, A. E. Waite trans. of Dogme e Rituel de la Haute Magie, in archive.org, 143-144.

[67] Waite trans., p. 314.

[68] Waite trans., p. 368

[69] Paul Christian, History and Practice of Magic, trans. James Kirkup and Julian Shaw, 1910, p. 108, in archive.org

[70] Papus, Tarot of the Bohemians, Morton trans., p. 173, in archive.org

[71] Ibid., p. 172.

[72] Ibid.

[73] Ibid.

[74] Ibid., pp. 172 and 162.

[75] Oswald Wirth, Tarot of the Magicians (trans. of Tarot des Imagiers du Moyen-Age, 1927),  Weiser 1986, in archive.org, p. 131.

[76] Ibid., p. 133

[77] Ibid., p. 132.

[78] Ibid. p. 133.

[79] Ibid., p. 132.

[80] Ibid.

[81] Pictorial Key to the Tarot, 1911, https://www.sacred-texts.com/tarot/pkt/pktar17.htm.

[82] Tarot Fundamentals, 1936, Lesson 38, p. 2, in archive.org

[83] Ibid., p. 3

[84] Ibid., p.1.

[85] Ibid., p. 4

[87] Jung, Letters, vol. 2, pp. 229-230, quoted at https://jungiancenter.org/jungs-platonic-month-and-the-age-of-aquarius/.

[89] Jung, Visions: notes on the seminar given 1930-1934, 1158f, partially in Google Books.

[90] Ibid.

[91] Jung, Nietsche Seminar, abridged, p. 52.

[92] Ibid.

[93] Jung, Nietzsche Seminar, abridged, 53.

[94] Ibid.

[95] Collected Works, Vol. 13, 127, paragraph 163.

[96] Ibid.

[97] Ibid., 128.

[98] (Jung, Nietzsche seminar, abridged, p. 51.

[99] Jung, Nietzsche Seminar, abridged, p. 81.

[100] Jung, Collected Works, vol. 13, 272, para. 350.

[101] Jung, Nietzsche seminar, abridged, pp. 52-53.

[102] Jung, Collected works vol. 12, pp. 201-2, paragraphs 305-306.

[103] Nichols, Jung and Tarot, 295.

[104] Ibid., 296.

[105] Ibid., 297.

[106] Ibid., 298.

[107] Ibid., 299.

[108] Ibid.

[111] Nichols, Jung and Tarot, 304.

[112] Ibid., p. 305.

[113] Ibid., 306.

[114] Ibid., 307.

[115] Ibid., 308

[116] Ibid.

[117] Ibid., 302.

[118] Ibid.

[119] Ibid., 306

[120] Ibid., 310.

[121] Ibid., 311.

2 comments:

  1. Your research is phenomenal. It is a tremendous resource for me in my own studies.

    ReplyDelete