World

This post was first written in Dec. 2018, then expanded in Dec. 2022.

1. The early cards

 An anomaly about the World card is that while in the early lists from Lombardy and the Ferrara region it is the highest triumph (trump), in Florence and Bologna it is the second highest. Such reversals between adjacent cards is not uncommon between regions and even within one region, but in this case the meaning of the card may be affected, if the other is the Last Judgment, because that card signals precisely the end of this world and its replacement by the New Jerusalem. If the World is last, that would signify a world beyond Time, timeless in fact. On the other hand, if the Angel comes last, the World that is second to last might well not be one threatened by the imminent abolition of time.

The earliest reports of the order of triumphs in Florence are a Strambotto - a verse form - and some handwritten numbers on the so-called "Charles VI" cards. They both have the World as second to last, an order confirmed in the rules later reported for Bolognese tarocchini (which used a reduced deck of 62 cards, removing the 2s through 5s) and the Florentine minchiate (which used an expanded deck of 97 cards, with 19 more triumphs, 20 new ones minus the Popess).

 

The extant early Florentine and Bolognese cards are readily interpretable in such a placement, as a scene well before the Last Judgment, with no suggestion that time is about to end. From Florence we have, left, a card now in Catania, Sicily, and  the "Charles VI", now in Paris,  of about 1450 and 1460. In both, a lady on top holds accoutrements of authority in her hands, a scepter and a globe, above a circle with castles and hills. They are depicted much as described by Boccaccio in his Amorosa Visione (Robert Hollander, Timothy Hampton, and Margherita Frankel, 1986, p. 7, LL 36-42):

adorned by a crown more splendid
and fair than the sun, her comely
clothing seemed to me to be of violet hue.
Smiling, she had in her right hand
a royal sceptre, enclosed in her left
she held up a beautiful golden apple.

The Catania lady seems to have only a small gold band in her hair instead of a crown, while the Charles VI lady bears an octagonal halo. It may associate her with the three cardinal virtues, which are the only other figures of this set with octagonal halos, thereby making her Prudence. Or it may associate her with Fame, as that Triumph of Petrarch was illustrated with such a halo (at left below, part of a wedding chest panel by Pesellino, ca. 1450 Florence, now in the Gardner Museum of Boston). However, the lady does not have any particular attributes of either Prudence or Fame. Such halos were used to denote other allegorical subjects. See for example Giovanni Dal Ponte's Allegory of the Liberal Arts, on the website of the Museo del Prado, Madrid.

On the same wedding chest panel as the "Triumph of Fame" is Pesellino's "Triumph of Eternity" (at right above; in between, not shown is the "Triumph of Time"); there is a distinct similarity to these World cards.

 

A slightly later variation on the Florentine model is in the Rosenwald Sheet, from around 1500 (center); it has an angel of indeterminate sex, with an orb and a sword. Another variation on the same theme is the minchiate card (at right): a masculine angel holds an arrow in one hand and a crown in the other, with the four winds blowing on the globe below her. If one had any doubt as to what that circle/globe underneath was meant to be, we can see the word "Europe" on it and a reasonable facsimile of Africa and Scandinavia above and below. These winds are frequently found in the corners of maps at that time. If they can blow, it would seem to be in time, since beyond time there is no motion. The arrow might likewise represent "the arrow of time" and again motion, unless it implies the capture of time. The crown hints of something to come, the "Fama" declared on some minchiate Angel cards.

 

Bologna has the globe/orb of the World at the bottom and a male triumphator on top (left, from a sheet of around 1500). With its winged helmet, it might be Mercury, but Mars and other military figures also wore such helmets. Since it is holding a globe of the world (divided into three for the continents) with a cross on top, it could even be a very Mars-like Christ of the 2nd coming, in triumph against the Devil and his minions. The attributes of Mercury are clearer on the 17th century version of the card (center, online in Gallica), although the cross on the orb doesn't fit, since he is a pagan god. Both Mercury and Christ had the role of mediator between the realms of immortals and mortals, and the circle the figure stands on contains symbols of the four elements of our world of mortal humans. Mercury did not need the caduceus and winged shoes of his customary representation, as can be seen by a depiction of him by Raphael of around the same time as the early Bolognese card. This detail, with the cape of the card much in evidence, is from a fresco series in the Villa Farnesina in Rome on the theme of Cupid and Psyche; what is shown is Mercury's carrying of Psyche to Olympus near the end of the story, where she will be married to Cupid.

In Lombardy the early lists are later than those of Florence, around the 1540s. They show the World as last, immediately after the Angel of Judgment. But we may doubt whether this was always the case, because the lady on the earliest Lombard World card, of the 1440s (at far left), is rather similar to that of minchiate, except that her right hand holds a winged trumpet instead of an arrow. The trumpet is an attribute of Fame, by which one's deeds are trumpeted  rapidly around the world, aided by the its wings. The crown suggests a possible reward for famous deeds, namely rulership of some sort, symbolic or otherwise. Below her a mounted knight stands beside a lake, in a scene reminiscent of a topographical map where towns are indicated by castles.

Some have thought that this scene might relate to an episode in the life of Francesco Sforza, in which this mercenary military leader in service to Filippo rescued the forces of another Visconti such leader, one who escaped capture only by hiding in a boat crossing a river. Here we might recall that Petrarch's I Trionfi, which included Love and Chastity among its six subjects, ended with the triumphs of Fame, Time and Eternity. If the lady and the scene suggest Fame, the scene also has a mythic quality, in that the fisherman on the bank of the lake suggests the Fisher King of the Grail legend, and the knight Sir Parsifal, who alone among Arthur's knights was able to find the Grail Castle and thus win glory from that result.
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There is a later card associated with a later Lombard deck, the Visconti-Sforza, but what it depicts is at least as obscure as that of the earlier deck. It features a city on an island surrounded by what appears to be water. above two cherubs who point to it (below center). It is some sort of ideal or future existence, perhaps that of a future city in this world, perhaps a version of the Grail Castle, or the New Jerusalem. The architect Filarete had proposed such a plan for Milan in his Sforzinda, as seen below right (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sforzinda). Being on an island, a fortified version of Venice is also possible (The problem is that who commissioned this card and the other five in a similar style is unknown, except that it was someone between Milan and Venice around 1470.) That two winged putti are pointing to the city above them makes a heavenly city is most likely. If so, it could well be be a timeless New Jerusalem. 

Stuart Kaplan (Encyclopedia of Tarot, Vol. 2, p. 174) noted a similarity between the card and a "Grail Castle" situated in the middle of a circular zodiac (above left). But he does not give the date of this picture, nor anything about the context. Is it even a Grail Castle? It could simply be Jerusalem, considered the center of the cosmos in Jewish tradition and in some medieval and Renaissance maps. If the New Jerusalem, then such a shape would be fitting for the final card, as in the lists in Lombardy and the decks with numbers on them in France.

Some support for the World being next to last in Lombardy earlier is given by its placement in the adjoining region to the west, Piedmont. Francesco Piscina, writing there in 1565, has the card with a trumpeting angel last. He writes (trans. Caldwell, Depaulis and Ponzi, con gli occhi e con l'intelletto: Explaining the Tarot in Sixteenth Century Italy, 2019, p. 25):

the inventor. . . placed as last the image of Celestial Paradise, where blessed souls triumph. There he depicted an Angel that, singing and playing, rejoices in those that were made worthy of that most happy eternal rest firstly by the grace of God and by their own good deeds. ...

This card is clearly that later called the Judgment, then called the Angel, even though he interprets it as after the judgment, in Paradise. Then, about the card before, he writes (Ibid., my emphasis):

He [the inventor] considers that it is necessary to act well in order to gain the glory of Paradise, as taught by the Holy Evangelists. So, before the image of Paradise, he made a portrait of these four Evengelists, intended and signified by the four symbols, Angel, Ox, Eagle, and Lion.

That card of course is what we call the World, by 1565 apparently having the four "creatures" in the corners of the card. By 1565 the Piedmontese would have gotten tarots from France or Lombardy; such trade is documented by 1505, when a contract drawn up in Avignon stipulates the sending of tarot decks to a town in Piedmont (Thierry Depaulis, Le Tarot Révélé, 2013, p. 35). If so, the card probably showed the number 21 on it; even in the 20th century, Piedmontese players simply ignored that number and played as if it had the number 20 (Ibid., p. 36). This practice must have been borrowed from somewhere, since the game did not originate there. Lombardy is likelier than points south (Florence) and east (Bologna), both for geographical reasons and because the order that Piscina reports is otherwise identical to that of Lombardy. Bologna is favored by some because the Bolognese rule that the four papi have the same rank is also described by Piscina. However, this rule, too may have been followed early on in Lombardy, too. Given the unusual number of female court cards in the 1440s deck (knights and pages as well as queens in all suits), male/female equality in the imperials and papals is not out of the question.

Then Piscina adds one more detail about this card (Ibid.):

Now the author has placed the image of the world in the middle of these four Holy Evangelists, in order to teach us that the world cannot be without religion, whose precept has been written by these Holy Evangelists.

The editors' note to the edition I am quoting wonders whether the card in front of Piscana was similar to that of the early Tarot of Marseille image or was something hitherto unknown in a tarot deck. It seems to me that if there was a human figure, he would have said so, or at least used the Platonic term anima mundi (world soul), which was imagined in feminine terms. As it is, he just says mondo, which, like the word cosmos in Greek, could mean either the earth by itself or the whole universe. There is in fact a card that meets the latter meaning, namely, the Prima Causa of the so-called "Tarot of Mantegna" in its second version (ca. 1480s), however, what game was played with those sheets, if any, is unknown They are simply prints, not cards,

In the Ferrara area of 1460-1510, a preacher listed the 22 special cards as part of a sermon, the Sermo de Ludo, denouncing various games (see Andrea Vitali at http://www.associazioneletarot.it/page.aspx?id=780&lng=ENG); it has the World card last, number 21, and refers it as "El Mondo, cioe Dio, il Papa" (The world, that is, God the Father). With Justice second to last, that placement conforms to all the other lists and numbered decks of that area. "God the Father" corresponds in Christian terms to the Aristotelian "Prima Causa," First Cause.  

In what is pictured on the extant cards with that order (below), it is hard to tell whether it is this world or the next that is meant. The bottom part is invariably quite similar to that of the Florentine and Bolognese cards. The top part is either an orb-and-scepter holding cherub, as in the Este deck, ca. 1483 (at left below), or an angel putting protective hands around an orb containing the usual castles on hills (center). My best guess is that these cards suggests that our world is in the hands of Divine Providence. Given that the cherub on the Este card (at left below) suggests Cupid, both might represent God's love for the world, whether before or after the Last Judgment. The card is so similar to the Florentine/Bolognese conception that it remains mysterious why it would be last in Ferrara but elsewhere second to last.

A Parisian card from the early 17th century (at right above) seems to suggest again Divine Providence, or perhaps Fortune, now personified as a woman holding a sail to direct the world, which was often represented as a circle divided into three and surmounted by a cross (which here is more like the bejeweled hilt of a sword, but also, by their color, suggest stigmata). Fortune or Opportunity was sometimes depicted as a woman standing on a ball, to indicate how fleeting it was.

The practice of putting the four evangelists on the card, as described by Piscina, undoubtedly derives from the medieval practice of putting them in the corners of rectangular illuminations, usually of Christ, but in alchemy often with the Crowned Virgin. An example with Christ is at far right, ca. 1225 (Cod. Bruchsal 1, Bl. 1v, Badische Landesbibliothek, Karlsruhe). An example with the Virgin is the 15th century Buch der Heilige Dreifaltigkeit, Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, CGM. 598, f. 26r, near right (online at  https://opacplus.bsb-muenchen.de/title/BV022939359). The precise placement of the different "animals" varied, as these examples indicate. Both the Virgin and Christ were commonly enclosed in the lens shape known in Latin as a vesica piscis (fish bladder!) and in Italian as a mandorla (almond).

The astrologically inclined could also identify the four creatures in the corners with the four elements of ancient physics, by way of more or less corresponding zodiacal signs. The bull was readily associated with Taurus, whose element was earth, and the lion with Leo, a fire sign. If the angel was interpreted as Aquarius, the only human figure of the zodiac, its element would be air. The eagle was not part of the zodiac, but it could readily take what was left, water. A 19th century interpretation (Robert Taylor, Thirteen Astro-theological sermons, 1848, in archive.org) held that because of the odiousness of Scorpio, a water sign, the noble Eagle, next to it in the sky, took its place. But the assignment of water to the Eagle was before that, as we will see when looking at Etteilla.

At some point in the 16th century, in Lombardy or France, a human figure in a mandorla replaced the globe in the middle of the card (above left, card found in the Sforza Castle, Milan). The figure seems almost deliberately androgynous, and later cards sometimes presented it as male (Vieville, c. 1650 Paris), sometimes as female (Dodal 1708 Lyon), and sometimes a male torso with breasts (Noblet c. 1660 Paris). The later Marseille pattern had it clearly female (Chosson, printed c. 1734, below left; Conver 1761 woodcut printed c. 1850, center), although one late version made it more androgynous. This version was popularized by Paul Marteau starting around 1930 as the "ancient tarot of Marseille," although that particular face is no earlier than the late 19th century. 

One inspiration for making it female might have been Durer's woodcut (left below) of Urania, muse of astronomy; she could also be taken as the goddess of divine love, Aphrodite Urania (Heavenly Venus) and as the Platonic "world soul," the soul of the cosmos (taking advantage of the ambiguity of "Il Mondo" in Italian, between "the universe" and "the earth." The male would most likely be Christ.

For the figure in the center of an ellipse holding two sticks, another influence, besides Christ and the Virgin, might have been Roman-era Orphic medallions of Phanes, Greek for light-bearer, in Orphic mythology said to be the besexual child of Time and Necessity, who encircle him in the cosmic egg (https://www.theoi.com/Protogenos/Phanes.html, center above). There is also (left above) the lion-headed god Aion of Mithraism, of which examples were known in Italy and France. The serpent of the medallions becomes the sash draped over the figure on the card. He is the world-creator, whose body divides into Heaven and Earth and then, at his hand, into all things. 

In the Wisdom literature of the Hebrew Bible, there was also Wisdom, the feminine Sophia in Greek, who says she was "set up from everlasting" (Proverbs 8:23) and "was with him [the Lord] forming all things: and was delighted every day, playing before him at all times" (Prov. 8:30). In Christianity he corresponds to the Logos, by whom "all things were made," according to the John 1:3. The figure's nudity, save for the scarf, merely accentuates its divine status, a property frequently given to gods as opposed to humans, as for example in Titian's famous painting sometimes called Sacred and Profane Love, in which the human of the pair, allegedly the bride of the commissioner, is the one fully clothed.      

 

2. De Gebelin, Etteilla, and the Occultists

In 1781 Antoine Court de Gebelin shows to his satisfaction that the cards came from ancient Egypt. The four creatures now have an Egyptian origin, representing the four seasons of the year (Karlin trans., Rhapsodies of the Bizarre, p. 32, original p. 378):

The Eagle represents the Spring, when the birds reemerge.
The Lion, the Summer or the ardors of the Sun.
The Ox, the Autumn when we plow & when we sow.
The Young Man, the Winter when we come together in society.

He does not consider that Egypt, being so far south, might not have had four seasons; in fact it has only three. Eagles were never used in Egyptian art, nor did birds appear in spring: they had been there all winter. Yes, the Lion was associated with heat and the sun in Egypt. The ox is fair enough, since people planted after the annual summer flood. But winter, to the extent there was any, was a time for work; the big festivals were at the end of June, the beginning of the new year. In any case, the more immediate reason for the four animals is Christian tradition, no need to go back to Egypt.

As for the figure in the middle, de Gebelin says she is "the Goddess of Time, who "goes around like Time, in a circle that represents the revolutions of time, thus the egg into which all is released into Time" (Ibid.). He knew from the Orphica that Phanes was the bisexual child of Time and Necessity. There was also the Orphic hymn to Protogonos: "Mighty first-begotten [Protogonos], hear my pray'r, two-fold, egg-born, and wand'ring thro' the air, . . . Hence Phanes called" (https://www.theoi.com/Text/OrphicHymns1.html), which he could have connected with the Orphic medallion with its zodiac as an egg.  Orphism was Greek, of course, but the Greeks tended to attribute what they knew to the Egyptians. As far as the feminine form, that could be accounted for by the assimilation, since ancient times, of Chronos (Time) and Kronos (Saturn), from whose ripped-off testicles Heavenly Venus was born.

De Gebelin's collaborator the Comte de Mellet repeated the analysis in terms of the four seasons, but said that the goddess in the middle was Isis (Karlin trans. p. 50, original p. 396). That interpretation does not require much erudition, as she was well known to be the greatest goddess of the Egyptian world. He surely knew Isis's famous speech in Book 11 of Apuleius's Golden Ass, which begins (Kenny trans., p. 172, in archive.org): 

"I come, Lucius, moved by your entreaties, I, mother of the universe, mistress of all the elements, first-born of the ages, highest of the gods, queen of the shades, first of those who dwell in heaven, representing in one shape all gods and goddesses."

Etteilla said of this card in his 2nd Cahier (see the first post of my blog at http://etteillastrumps.blogspot.com/):

 No. 5. The fifth sheet bears the number 6 for its day of creation: God made Man in his image, being then, in regard to human physicality, in perfection; it bears for its Element the number 4, “Earth.”

Accordingly, both numbers are on his version of the card. It has the usual woman and creatures, but with the addition of pyramids in the oval, apparently to show the card's authenticity. I notice that the zodiacal assignments to the four animals are there. That these were part of the original design can be seen in the uncolored originals at https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b10545802x/f1.item.r=cartes%20de%20jeu.zoom. The 6th day of creation is when God created man and the quadrupeds, and earth is his 4th clement.

The upright keyword is "Voyage," which would have been suggested by "World," which Etteilla in his 3rd Cahier retains as the title for the card (see my blog on this work). The association may well not have been original with him, since the title "World" goes back as far as the first known list, and for anyone doing fortune-telling, voyages are the human way one travels the world. As for how the title "World" leads to a card about "man and quadrupeds," well, there are some on the card. Also,

Eliphas Levi says about the card. Giving it the number Tau, the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet, he says (Transcendental Magic, its Doctrine and Ritual, trans. Waite, p. 369, my correction in brackets, following Greer and Mikituk trans., p. 400):

The microcosm; the summary of everything in everything.
   Hieroglyph. Kether, or the Kabbalistic crown, between the four mysterious animals; in the middle of the crown is Truth holding a rod [original has baguette magique = magic wand] in each hand.

By the crown, I think he means the wreath. The human figure, the microcosm, is the macrocosm, i.e. the world, in miniature, just as Kether contains everything else in the sefiroth within itself, as its source. In his drawing of the card, in a later work, the "animals" and wreath are reduced, so that 12 circles with crosses inside them would fit, along with five other "hieroglyphs". That the woman is completely nude shows that the full Truth is at last revealed.

In another part of his book, Chapter 22 of Book I, he says of the card (Waite trans., p. 168, with the illustration Waite provides aat right):

This universal arcanum, the final and eternal secret of transcendent initiation, is represented in the Tarot by a naked girl, who touches the earth only by one foot, has a magnetic rod in each hand, and seems to be running in a crown held up by an angel, an eagle, a bull, and a lion. Fundamentally, the figure is analogous to the cherub of Jekeskiel, of which a representation is here given, and to the Indian symbol of Addhanari, which again is analogous to the ado-nai of Jekeskiel, who is vulgarly called Ezekiel.

Oddly enough, the 1861 French edition has an entirely different illustration, perhaps the "Indian symbol" referred to:

In the French illustration, three non-human creatures can be identified (an ox, a tiger, and a lion or bear on the dress) as well as objects resembling the four suit-objects. A similar drawing is in Kaplan's Encyclopedia of Tarot, vol. 1, p. 19 (1978), with a couple of differences. Most importantly, the breast on the right side is less pronounced, as though to suggest androgyny; Kaplan describes it as a union of Shiva with his "wife of many names" (p. 18). Another difference is that the objects are not quite the same: above, the "scepter" might be a trident, and the "cup" is probably a drum. It is still possible for the four suits to have been inspired by such an image, if they originated in India and then got changed to something more familiar in a different culture. 

Later in the book, Chapter 12 of Part 2, Levi elaborates on how the rod is "magnetic," but his meaning still is not very clear (Waite trans., p. 268, original p. 172):

 In the Italian Tarot this divinity has a rod in either hand; in the Besancon Tarot, the two wands are in one hand while the other is placed upon her thigh, both equally remarkable symbols of magnetic action, either alternate in its polarisation, or simultaneous by opposition and transmission.

Later we will see Wirth's further elaboration.

Levi's follower Paul Christian and those who created cards from his writings took the crown but could not fit the girl inside it. Christian does not mention her, For him it is a garland of golden roses inside of which is a star and on which are the heads of an ox, lion, eagle, and man. It is the only one of the 22 that he actually provides a drawing for.  Giving this arcanum the title "The Reward," he says that the garland is that worn by the Magus at this  highest stage, who has thus attained "a power limited only by his own intelligence and wisdom," concluding (trans. pp. 110-111):

Remember, son of earth, the empire of the World belongs to the empire of Light, which is the throne reserved by God for sanctified Will. Happiness for the Magus is the fruit of the knowledge of Good and Evil; but God only allows it to be plucked by the man sufficiently master of himself to approach it without covetousness. 

The "Recompense" that is his keyword is made clear in his summary (trans. p. 111-112), which includes all twenty-two titles and ends:

All will that unites itself to God in order to demonstrate Truth and operate Justice enters, after this life, into participation with the divine Omnipotence over beings and things, the Eternal Reward [XXI] of enfranchised spirits.

Christian's follower Edmond Billaudot, in the 1860s, decided upon a literal crown, as opposed to an abstract geometrical/arithmetical figure for Truth, but with Christian's title "Recompense" (at left below)  By the time of Falconnier, 1895 (center), real images of Egyptian women were available. So she could be portrayed playing an Egyptian stringed instrument, with roses above her even if the four creatures seem Egyptianate fantasy. Instead of the woman there is a kind of flying torpedo: I do not recognize the symbol. The colored version, with golden roses (right), is from the Brotherhood of Light, founded by C. C. Zain, with a somewhat more fanciful instrument. The Brotherhood's Hebrew letter Shin departs from Levi so as to give the last letter, Tau, to the Fool.

For Papus in Tarot of the Bohemians the card has meaning on three levels (for this arcanum, Christian strangely omitted them). First is the Absolute, which is to say God, whose name is spelled out by the four animals, each standing for a different letter of YHVH. They also relate to the four suits, in the order Scepters, Cups, Coins, Swords, and the four elements, in the order fire, water, earth, air. The second level is Nature, the Universe, which is the body of the Absolute. Third is the soul of the Absolute, that is, humanity in the form of Adam-Eve, represented by the figure inside the ellipse, who could be either that of the standard Tarot of Marseille or that designed by his collaborator Oswald Wirth.

 

For Wirth, inspired by Papus but writing his own book in 1927, the four creatures again represent the four elements, the four evangelists, and also the four bright stars, each in one of four cardinal points: Adelbaran or the Bull's eye, Regulus or the Lion's heart, Altair, or the light of the Eagle, and Formalhaut of the southern Fish which absorbs the water whicdh water-carrier pours out" (trans., p. 151). From this astronomical perspective the Eagle corresponds to air (thus colored blue), the Man to water, the Bull to earth, and the Lion to fire.

For him her dancing represents the state of the universe, in constant change; yet she herself is at rest. He compares her to the squirrel who spins his cage by his running yet remains in the same spot. In the crossing of her legs she reminds him of the Emperor; like him, she is the embodiment of alchemical Sulphur, in her case as "related to the central fire which burns without respite in its fixed abode (p. 150):

She is the corporal soul of the universe, the Vestal Virgin of the hearth of life whose fire burns in every person. 

She gets the energy of her "life-giving fire" by means of the two wands she holds in her left hand. The red tip of one picks up fiery energy from the universe, which would go out but for the blue tip, which picks up air. It then goes through her body and is transmitted to the red sash by her left hand.  

The result is that she represents the "Major Fortune" of the geomancers, thus much more than the "small amounts of ephemeral success of the "Minor Fortune" whose wheel is that of arcana 10, because "the wheel is no longer the circuit of individual life dominated by the Sphinx, it is fused with the orb of the World" (Ibid.). And to the wise man the world is unitary (Weiser trans., p. 151):

Everything becomes spirit in face of his spiritual view of life. The world appears to him like the miracle of the Single Thing of the Hermetists. By conceiving the radical Unity or oneness of what exists, we rise to Gnosis, the supreme reward for one who searches for the true.

Other rewards are suggested by the divinatory meanings, among which are "Re-integration," "Perfection,", "Sovereign spiritual power," "Complete success," and "Benefit drawn from collectivity" (p. 152).

A.E. Waite says of his version of the card, which restores the two wands:

It represents also the perfection and end of the Cosmos, the secret which is within it, the rapture of the universe when it understands itself in God. It is further the state of the soul in the consciousness of Divine Vision, reflected from the self-knowing spirit.  

Amplifying on "perfection and end of the Cosmos" he adds:

It has more than one message on the macrocosmic side and is, for example, the state of the restored world when the law of manifestation shall have been carried to the highest degree of natural perfection. But it is perhaps more especially a story of the past, referring to that day when all was declared to be good, when the morning stars sang together and all the Sons of God shouted for joy.

So it is also about the return to primal innocence, Etteilla's "sixth day of creation." Other than that, he finds ridiculous Christian's interpretation of the card as "the Magus at the highest state of initiation" and Papus's "absolute." Toward Levi, Waite says that Truth more properly applies to the 17th arcanum.

Paul Foster Case identifies this card with "cosmic consciousness", defined as the knowledge that the Self of each of us is identical with the Self of the cosmos. To know oneself is to know oneself as identical with the highest Self of others and with the soul of the whole universe. In this unity the ox is earth and also that which gives form. The lion is fire, in other words energy, formless in itself and needing earth to give it form.

A unique feature of Case's card is that the figure in the middle, whom he calls the World-Dancer and the Celestial Androgyne, holds spirals rather than wands. One turns to the right and the other to the left, so that they balance. They represent integration and disintegration, he says. The spiral, in particular what he calls "the logarithmic spiral," is the basic form of the universe, Case says, "the form of all forms". He gives spiral nebulae as an example. What suggests the masculine in this dancer, he says, is the relatively stronger legs. The face to me looks unambiguously feminine, as opposed to that of Paul Marteau's card and also to that in a version of Case's card done by someone else, which I put to the right of Case's.

The result for Case a state of power as well as knowledge:

The goal of the Great Work is to know the Self, but to know, as we mean it here, is not merely to witness, not merely t« be aware of something external, as when we say we "know” the various phenomena of our environment. The knowledge which completes the Great Work is identification with the Central Reality of the universe, and such knowledge is really the acme of practical power.

Thus the claims of the alchemists about the Philosopher's Stone are literally true for one who knows this "central reality", the means "for preserving their youth, expelling disease, preventing suffering, and providing themselves with all they require. Success in the Great Work so unites the personal self with the ONE IDENTITY that every detail of the personal existence is a conscious expression of the ALL POWER."


3. Jungian Interpretations

Jung did not address the symbolism of card explicitly, yet much in his perspective can be brought to bear.  For Sallie Nichols in Jung and Tarot, it is the unity and interplay of opposites within the card above all. First, there is the feeling of androgyny. Rather than pointing to the more androgynous face of the Marteau version, she notes the "slender hips and sturdy hips" (p. 349) that suggest an integration of masculine and feminine elements. The two wands, one negative and the other positive likewise suggest the "dynamic interplay of all opposites" as they move in relation to each other (Ibid.). The ellipse enclosing her likewise has two foci and is a product of both. It is both a protective temenos and, in its resemblance to the lips of the vagina: "She is contained within that sacred space where reality touches eternity" (p. 351).

What the dance does is to unite the immediate feeling of being in the world with the universal and transcendent:

Dance originated as a sacred act, a form of prayer, by which  man put himself in tune with all nature and with the gods. Through rhythmic dance, man bridged the gap between between mortal time and transcendental time and experienced himself as part of an ever-changing process. Through ritual dance, the shaman put himself in tune with the universe to restore the equilibrium of nature so that he could call forth needed rain or effect healings. Through ecstatic dance, the dervish leaped outside mortal time, matching his rhythm to the whirling stars. (p. 351)

Other cards depict a kind of dance, especially the Hanged Man. But:

Unlike the Hanged Man, who enacted the topsy-turvy jig of Fate's puppet, the dancer moves freely with one foot always touching the earth. Although she is in constant motion, she remains connected with the ground of her being.- golden and indestructible. (p. 352)

She quotes Maria-Louise von Franz (C. G. Jung, His Myth in our Time, 1975, p. 74, in archive.org):

The experience of the Self brings a feeling of standing on solid ground inside oneself, on a patch of inner eternity which even physical death cannot touch. (Nichols, p. 352)

That is another aspect of the dancer, a "patch of eternity." Here "eternity" may not mean "infinite duration," but rather "beyond time," in the sense of Petrarch's "Triumph of Eternity," which was the victory over time.

The paradox of experiencing the self is that it is both the expression of one's absolutely unique identity and of the universal. Jung says, "Experiencing the self means that you are always conscious of your own identity. Then you know that you can never be anything other than yourself and never be alienated from yourself" ("The Interpretation of Visions," Spring, 1962, p. 72).  It is a thoroughgoing separation from collective values as well as selfishness (self-centeredness, in another sense of "self"). At the same time it is an experience of communion with a "world of objects." She quotes Jung:

The widened consciousness is no longer that touchy, egotistical bundle of personal wishes, fears, hopes, ambitions which always has to be compensated and corrected by unconscious counter-tendencies; instead, it is a function of relationship to the world of objects, bringing the individual into absolute, binding and indissoluble communion with the world at large. (Jung, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, CW 7, par. 5.)

So on the card we see the human, the animal, the plant world, minerals, all parts of our being. Moreover, it is the individual who creates the narrative we call world history. Nichols quotes Jung: "The individual alone makes history" (Nichols p. 356: to be precise, what he says is, "The great events of world history are, at bottom, profoundly unimportant. In the last analysis, the essential thing is the life of the individual. This alone makes history, here alone do the great transformations first take place, and the whole future, the whole history of the world, ultimately spring as a gigantic summation from these hidden sources in individuals" [Collected Works vol. 10, par. 315, p. 149, in archive.org]. Those hidden sources are in another sense also whole worlds themselves, microcosms of the macrocosm, each reflecting, absorbing, and changing the other.")

The "hidden sources" also lose their individuality:

The deeper "layers" of the psyche lose their individual uniqueness as they retreat further and further into darkness. "Lower down" - that is to say, as they approach the autonomous  functional systems - they become increasingly collective  until they are universalized and extinguished in the body's materiality, i.e. in the chemical bodies. The body's carbon is simply carbon. Hence at bottom the psyche is simply "world." (Nichols p. 363, citing Jung, Psychological Reflections, p. 39. In archive.org, it is in Collected Works vol. 9i [Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious], p. 173, par. 291)

This world consists from one perspective of the dance of particles and waves all having only a tendency to exist, a certain probability, as Jung's patient the nuclear physicist Wolfgang Pauli detailed for him. The archetypes of the unconscious, inasmuch as they are part of the "autonomous functional systems," are part of that dance. But what we see in the World card, from the Marseille to the occultists, is not a world, a cosmos, as an object, or totality of objects, or totality of tendencies toward objectness, etc. What we see is a human form, and that is the other form that the archetypes take, in the self.

So we humans are both at once, matter and psyche (soul), and beneath both is the "psychoid layer of being" of the autonomous nervous system and, as we would put it today, one's DNA. (On the "psychoid layer" see Collected Works vol. 8, par. 368, pp. 176-177, in archive.org). And beyond that (quoted by Nichols, p. 364):

The common background of microphysics and depth psychology is as much physical as psychic, and therefore neither, but rather a third thing, a neutral nature which can at most be grasped in hints since in essence it is transcendental. (Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, par. 768, p. 538 in Google Books).)

This is the unus mundus of Gerhard Dorn, of which he says, "Of course there is little or no hope that the unitary Being can ever be conceived, since our powers of thought and language permit only of antinomian statements" (Ibid.). Physics has gone a little further in the antinomian direction since Jung, as expressed most memorably by Stephen Hawking (A Brief History of Time): the quantum level of being, so unlike that of ordinary reality, starts to unite with the immensity of space, with its black holes, dark matter, and rapid expansion from a single point. To the extent that our "psychoid" nature participates in these dichotomies, it participates in the unus mundus as a "third thing," neither physical nor mental, neither energy nor matter. To the extent that this is not a dichotomy but a quaternity (matter, energy, very big, very small), it is even a fifth thing beyond the four.

Here it seems to me that there is a difference between Jung and Case. Case asserts that reality is fundamentally mental. He also says that reality is fundamentally energy; so it follows that the unity of reality is in its being as mental energy. Jung sees mental energy and physical energy as distinct, at the level of our experience of them, as well as matter, so that none can be reduced to any other, or combination of others.   

Referring again to the temenos, Nichols again quotes Walt Whitman (p. 359):

I am an acme of things accomplished
And I am an enclosure of things to be.

There is a nice interplay of opposites here: things accomplished are for the most part visible, things to be are not. We both are and are not, so an interplay of opposites.This is another feature of the self, and of the divine; all opposites are of God, Jung says. By taking on the burden of matter, God incarnates himself within one.

If we are enclosures of what is to be, what does that say about the possibility of divination? Levi says that to the extent that the future can be predicted, the effect must already be implicit in the cause. In that sense, some intuitives can see one's future, or at least one's unconscious future tendencies, already in one's presentation before them. There is also the question of the reality of space and time. Is it part of the unus mundus, the unity that underlies everything, or the way in which beings organize their individual expressions within it? If the latter, then the closer we get to experiencing that unity from the side of psyche, the more the unexperiencability of the future falls away.

We come to the four creatures, who represent the four evangelists, witnesses to the incarnation of the divine and guides toward our own connection to it. Physically they represent the building blocks of the cosmos, elements out of which all things were said to derive. They, too, contain opposites: hot vs. cold, dry vs. wet - or, in the modern view, attraction vs. repulsion, centripetal vs. centrifugal, etc.  The dancer is in this regard the quintessence, which is somehow beyond the opposites, yet connected with them - or perhaps the whole in which they are a part, like the neutron, the atom, the solar system, the galaxy, or its system of galaxies, or the expanding universe with some contracting force not yet known.

An aspect of the four creatures that Nichols does not pursue is their relationship to the four suits and the four Jungian functions. We can imagine the animals forming a quaternity, that is, a pair of pairs, rational vs. irrational, which again divide into opposites, thinking vs. feeling and sensation vs. intuition. Their unity is in one way the card itself, whose meaning can be thought about, felt, observed, and intuited: the four functions in the corners then suggest a fifth in the center, who in shifting from side to side and up and down holds all four in her movement. 

Jung in fact did have a fifth function, which he called the transcendent function, that which unites the conscious with the unconscious in a context of discovering meaning and purpose (see Jung, "The Transcendent Function," Collected works, vol. 8, pp. 67-91). It involves a dialogue between one's conscious attitude and imagery that has come up from the unconscious, either in dreams or fantasy, interacting in what he would call "active imagination," to the enrichment of both, with the unconscious compensating for what is missing from consciousness. "It is a way of liberating oneself by one's own efforts and finding the courage to be oneself" (Ibid., p. 91). 

I do not know if Jung related this function to the other four, but I would think that to the extent that the dominant function is conscious and the subordinate largely unconscious, the interplay of opposites among the four functions can be one of conscious/unconscious in active dialogue. In that sense, the Marseille World card is a kind of picture of that interplay, the four functions in the corners and the fifth in the middle.

The individual is a unity of opposites in another sense, as Nichols quotes Jung, that of the "infinitesimal unit upon whom the world depends, and on whom, if we read the meaning of the Christian message right, even God seeks his goal" (The Undiscovered Self, p. 113 of 1958 ed., in archive.org).  She observes that Christ often appears in art as a symbol of the self, referred to in scripture as both Son of God and Son of Man (p. 356); it is God becoming Man. 

Closely related is the anima mundi, soul of the world, as the spark of divinity in matter. Nichols reminds us that the alchemists saw this Platonic concept as a force "that animated all bodies from the stars to the animals, plants, and elements on earth" (p. 357). She says, "It was the lifelong goal of the alchemists to liberate the anima mundi from her imprisonment in the prima materia of unconscious nature" (Ibid).  In one place Jung compares the anima mundi to the Pole Star, around which dreams and associations circumambulate. "The idea of the anima mundi coincides with the collective unconscious whose center is the self" (Psychology and Alchemy, vol. 12 of Collected Works, par. 265).

Thus, it seems to me, the Celestial Jerusalem card, or the sphere or spheres that gives the card its name, is replaced by the caped Christ-figure seen on other cards, welcoming us to his world, and ultimately the female-dominated androgynous form of a dancer: unadorned, individualized, imperfect and human in its history. 

The Pandora of 1588 illustrates the progression in a "Mirror figure [image?] of the Holy Trinity." Except for the shield, i is much like a 15th century illustration that I showed earlier. Jung writes of it (Mysterium Coniunctionis, vol. 14 of Collected Works, par. 238, p. 187 in archive.org):

Underneath the coronation scene is a kind of shield between the emblems of Matthew and Luke, on which is depicted the extraction of Mercurius from the prima materia. The extracted spirit appears in monstrous form: the head is surrounded by a halo, and reminds us of the traditional head of Christ, but the arms are snakes and the lower half of the body resembles a stylized fish tail. This is without doubt the anima mundi who has been freed from the shackles of matter, the filiius macrocosmi [son of the great world] or Mercurius-Anthropos, who, because of his double nature, is not only spiritual and physical but unites himself the morally highest and lowest. The illustration in Pandora points to the great secret which the alchemists dimly felt was implicit in the Assumption. The proverbial darkness of sublunary matter has always been associated with the "prince of this world", the devil. 

Extracted from the heart of matter, the anima mundi begins as a fish tailed monster; it is both good and evil but in other respects resembles the crucified Christ (see in this regard Edward Eddinger's comments on the image, uploaded at https://www.wisdomportal.com/Columba/Dove-Alchemy.html from his Mysterium Lectures, 1995, as in the psyche it is born in suffering. 

In another alchemical image discussed by Jung, the alchemists envisioned the anima mundi as a two-headed eagle emerging from an egg (at right). The enclosure formed by the ellipse around the World-lady resembles an egg in that sense. Jung comments:

In alchemy the egg stands for the chaos apprehended by the artifex, the prima materia containing the captive world-soul. Out of the egg - symbolized by the round cooking-vessel - will rise the eagle or phoenix, the liberated soul, which is ultimately identical with the Anthropos who was imprisoned in the embrace of Physis (fig. 98).

The Anthropos figures in the Poimandres, one of the most basic Hermetic texts, the first in the ancient Greek Corpus Hermeticum. Archetypal Man looks into the waters of Physis, falls in love with his own image there, and is trapped in matter's embrace. How to free the Anthropos was the Hermetic project. In the alchemical image, it is an eagle, and eagles have wings. So it can rise up, interact with itself, die, transform, and so on. It becomes (and perhaps always was) the Crowned Virgin, who makes the Trinity into a quaternity. On that level she was also envisioned as "the guide of mankind" who is herself "guided by God," as Nichols quotes Jung's caption in Psychology and Alchemy to an engraving by Johann-Theodor de Bry for Robert Fludd's Utriesque cosmi, 1617.

In this context we might see the captive anima mundi as the two little devils on the Devil card, with the Devil himself as the spirit of matter holding them down. They are freed by the lightning strike and purified by the Star, then pulled from the crayfish and the pool on the Moon card, to emerge in the Sun card still bearing traces of their shackles. These are released on the Judgment card by God's charity, and the two figures merge in the dancer of the World card, the purified anima mundi in heaven. It is a goal, not an achievement, Nichols reminds us, quoting Jung (here I give the original, in Collected Works volume 16, par. 400, pp. 199-200, which she shortened):

Complete redemption from the suffering of the world is and must remain an illusion. The symbolic prototype of Christ's earthly life ended, not in complacent bliss, but on the cross. (It is a remarkable fact that in their hedonistic aims materialism and a certain species of "joyful" Christianity join hands like brothers.) The goal is important only as an idea: the essential thing is the opus which leads to the goal: that is the goal of a lifetime. In its attainment "left and right" are united, and conscious and unconscious work in harmony.

The "left and right" is a quote from the apocryphal Acts of John, chapter 7, his footnote tells us: "When there is wisdom, the left and the right are in harmony: powers, principalities, archons, daemons." I will be citing another part of this work shortly.

In a sense this anima mundi, as goal and opus (work), was in the tarot even before she danced on one leg. She is the narrator's guide in Boccaccio's Amorosa Visione, seen on top of the World of the Charles VI deck; she is the Mercury of the Bolognese card - now the Anima Mercury, soul of Mercury (at left, from Thurneisser zum Thurn, Quinta Essentia, Leipzig: 1574); she is the Providence of the anonymous Parisian card, and the welcoming Christ of Vieville and the Sforza Castle card.

Here I am reminded of another passage in the Acts of John, its chapters 94-102. They relate that on the Mount of Olives before Jesus is arrested, he sings a hymn to prepare the disciples for what is to come, to which the disciples dance in a circle. The hymn proclaims that "To each and all it is given to dance" (also translated as "the whole on high is a dance"), where it is not only the disciples but the beings of heaven who dance, in time with the disciples in one great cosmic dance. Through the dance, moreover, one may both embrace suffering and transcend it: "If thou understoodest suffering, thou wouldst have nonsuffering."(or, "know how to suffer and thou wilt have nonsuffering"). The text is translated in various places, one of which is by Max Pulver, in The Mysteries: Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks, edited by Joseph Campbel and translated by Ralph Mannheim. 

The dance reminds Pulver of another song, or poem, by the German mystic Mechthild of Magdeburg (c.1207-c.1282). Between the 15th and late 19th century this text was relatively unknown; but it fits the card as an amplification of the alchemical Virgin. Mechthield imagines the Lord saying to her (Ibid., pp. 175-176):

Maiden, dance as deftly before me as my elect has danced before thee.

And the Virgin replies:

I would not dance, Lord, unless thou leadest me.
Wouldst thou that I spring mightily,
Then must thou sing for me.
Thus will I leap into love,
From love into knowledge,
From knowledge into joy,
From joy beyond all human senses.

Then we are in the realm of the divine Fool, as the God beyond number and concepts, a return to the divine source.