Many aspects of the Star card can be found in alchemy. O'Neill associates the young person holding the water jugs--a motif going back to the 15th century Cary Sheet--with the albedo, the whitening, a process of repeated washings. So we have illustrations of women pouring hot liquid into a washtub and drying the clothes afterwards: Maier's 1617 Atalanta Fugiens emblem III (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9a/Michael_Maier_Atalanta_Fugiens_Emblem_03.jpeg), for which the motto is "Go to the woman washing sheets, do thou likewise"; and Mylius's 1622 Philosophia Reformata emblem 22 (out of 28 in the series), shown below. However there are never two jugs.
O'Neill also refers us to the Splendor Solis; a lady with a star on her head is shown about to clean off a dark man (Emblem 8, which I reproduce from Transformation of the Psyche, p. 84). There are no jugs, just the lady and her star.
This perspective, seeing the card as about cleansing, is consistent with the ritual of washing and anointing as presented both in the Bible and in Homer's Odyssey. For examples from the Odyssey, see my post at http://www.tarotforum.net/showpost.php?p=1992464&postcount=67, where I also talk about the a possible pun from "LE TOILE" as the word is seen on some cards, to "LA TOILLE", meaning cloth, and "LA TOILETTE," washing. And there is also "LE TOULE," Marseille dialect for "spring," another place for washing, which the Conver title looks a lot like, especially in the mutilated form in which we have it.
Here I have just reproduced the bottoms of the cards (further down, you can see the wholes from which they are taken); there is no suggestion of "LE TOULE" in the Chosson; it is most evident in the 1760 Conver (middle image).
But my subject here is washing and anointing. not possible puns. I will give some biblical examples (the ones in Homer are similar). In a diatribe chastising Israel as a harlot, Ezekiel (16:9) counts being washed and anointed as one of the blessings that God has given his ungrateful people. Ezeikiel has God say: "And I washed thee with water, and cleansed away thy blood from thee and I anointed thee with oil." (Et lavi te aqua et emundavi sanguinem tuum ex te et unxi te oleo; at http://vulgate.org/ot/ezekiel_16.htm).
Similarly, Moses has Aaron and his sons washed, and then Aaron, as high priest, anointed (Lev. 8:6-12). In the New Testament, John the Baptist washes Jesus in the Jordan, while the Holy Spirit anoints him (Acts 10:38). Then at the end of Jesus's life, Mary Magdalene washes his feet with her tears and anoints them with oil (John 13:2).
Then there is King David. Upon hearing of the death of his newborn son, he first washes and then anoints himself, and finally breaks the fast he had been on in hopes of winning God's pardon (II Sam. 12:20):
Here is what is going on. David's first sin had been to have sex with Bathsheba and beget a child. His second was to have her husband killed in battle, so that David could marry the widow and claim the child. Appropriately, the figure on the Budapest card (16th century, below right, Kaplan Encylopedia of Tarot vol. 2)) looks down as though contrite. After the bath and anointing, David apparently is cleansed of guilt, because the next thing we hear is that Bathsheba is pregnant again, this time with Solomon (II Sam. 12:24).
On this Budapest Museum card, the young man, with a six-pointed star above him, is reminiscent of Michelangelo's David. During the 15th-16th centuries such a star was known as the "shield of David" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_of_David)--and a symbol of Christ's reputed ancestor. David is the prototypical "anointed one," (Psalm 89:20), the meaning of "Christos" in Greek. Perhaps our 16th century card player, in seeing the naked man on the card and the six-pointed star, would have thought of a popular statue recently completed in Florence. My guess is that the meaning is that washing was meant to purify one, while anointing made one holy.
Johann Mylius, among his roster of his famous predecessors, happens to include the poet Dante, who of course is not known to have been an alchemist. Here is the emblem, with the translation that De Rola gives . (Golden Game p. 151)
Some alchemical works show the two streams as part of the long sequence toward transformation. Here is emblem 50 of Maier's Atalanta Fugiens, which I have put to the right of the "Chosson" version of the card.
The first Water (fFirst Mercury or Dissolvent) liquefies and dissociates metals in wuh a way that they regain their natural, original popwer. ...The Frist Water (First Mercury) is the Edenic Ee, which has ra renovative power;; the generative power is the preserve of the Second Water. When both are united in the correct proportions, the philosophic Mercurya is obtained.Since one dissolves, the water in the emblem is shown passing through it by means of the hole it makes in the vessel. Since the other regenerates, people drink from it as if from a fountain of youth. Probably the first liquid is a powerful solvent and poison, while the second is water that has some sulfur salts in it, as at the fashionable mineral baths tht people went to at that time (and still do, in Europe).
But probably the closest alchemical emblem to our card is one from a Pandora which the website that has it identifies as 1550, now in Basel (http://herve.delboy.perso.sfr.fr/ripley_scrowle.html; I owe this reference to "Marco" on Tarot History Forum, http://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=647&start=20#p10502).
Besides the two streams--now hermetically sealed off to protect it from impurities (and the alchemist from it), we can see here seven small birds, corresponding to the seven small stars on the card, and an eighth large bird on the tree, corresponding not only to the large star but also to the card's bird on a tree.
Comparing the imagery of the card to other alchemical images, we can see this washing and anointing as the culmination of a long process. In Mylius's Anatomia auri,1628, near the end, six small stars appear with one large one, with the sun and moon above them. De Rola says that they symbolize "the seven Sublimations." In other contexts, as we have seen, there are eight such sublimations or perhaps even nine.
The sublimations are what occur when the Subject is put into a gaseous state. It condenses on the walls of the retort as tiny specks (first below), similar to the globules seen on the Maison-Dieu card, or it falls inside the retort like raindrops (second below). Here are two examples; in each case we see star imagery as part of the process. The first is from the Anatomia auri again. We have arleady looked at the first two images in connection with the Devil and the Tower. The third strikes me as comparable to the Star card, if only because of the three Stars within it.
The words mean "Ash of Ashes. Despite not these Vile Ashes, according to Fabicius. It is a new being risen from the ash pile made by the colored droplets on the Tower card.
Here is another version of the process, from Barchusen's Elementa chemiae, 1718. According to Fabricius (Alchemy p. 235), these are engraved versions of watercolorillustrations in the early 17th century "Crowne of Nature."
Here the stage corresponding to the Star card is a star with a sun and a moon inside it. From the stage of the washing/anointing, the subject proceeds to both of its aspects, one Lunar and the other Solar. The Lunar is concerned with cleansing from impurities, and the other to the ascent to the gods.
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There is another possible alchemical interpretation of the bird on the tree, which as we see was added rather late in the card's development
First, look at the frontispiece to the French translation of the Hypnerotomachia, which has a phoenix facing the sun with its wings outstretched.
The rest of the page puts the image into an alchemical context. Here I can do no better than to quote from Gerhart B. Ladner, Images and Ideas in the Middle Ages (in Google Books, but without many of the images)
Ladner explains that the phoenix signified the "mercurial" power of the spirit which the alchemist reached in the final and highest stage of his "work":The phoenix on the tree of life appears, for instance, in a late Renaissance pictorial synthesis of alchemistic renewal symbols: the frontispiece of Francois Beroalde de Verville's translation (published in the year 1600) of the famous allegorical novel Hynnoerotiomachia Polifili by Fra Francesco Colonna, O.P. (first published 1499), which in the sixteenth century had greatly influenced hieroglyphics and emblematics, but now was interpreted by Beroalde de Verville from the "stenographic", that is to say, esoteric point of view of alchemy. ...In Beroalde de Verville's image the fountain, the new sprig from the old trunk, the phoenix, the tree of life, and the other symbols of renewal are all connected by the curve of a strong branch which holds this symbolic universe together; the composition is supported furthermore by a vegetative background network formed by a ramifying myrtle tree, which we are told symbolizes the all-pervading power of love. (p. 759f)
Here is Ladner’s illustration, along with a close-up of the relevant detail....in such alchemistic imagery (cf. Fig. 16) the symbolism is no longer that of the Resurrection but of the "highest mercury"; the quasi-mystical matter-transforming and life-renewing core of alchemy (related, of course to ancient Hermetism).
Jesus was often put in a tree in a similar place, at its top. He is another symbol of regeneration and resurrection. So the bird in the tree, which would have been seen as a phoenix, is another symbol of the regeneration, from this alchemical perspective, which the washing and anointing by the two jugs symbolize.
The motif of a bird next to a a new shoot coming out of a cut-off tree appears elsewhere at that time. Here is another image, from 1633 (from Roberta Albrecht, The Virgin Mary as alchemical and Lullian Reference in Donne, p. 62, at Google Books):
The accompanying poem says:
This is from England, written in the shadow of Shakespeare's famous "The Turtle and the Phoenix," in which there was a similar linking of hearts in death (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Phoenix_and_the_Turtle):Behold how Death aymes [aims] with his mortal dart,
And wounds a Phoenix with a twin-like hart.[heart].
These are the harts [hearts] of Jesus and his Mother
So linkt [linked] in one, that one without the other
Is not entire...
After that there was John Donne's "Love's Alchemy." These poems may or may not be overtly alchemical, but they are very much in a culture which mined alchemy for poetical purposes suggesting transformation and renewal.So they lov'd, as love in twain
Had the essence but in one;
Two distincts, division none:
Number there in love was slain.
18. The Alchemical Moon
O'Neill calls the appearance of Luna in the sequence here the "lunar conjunction," explaining that it is expressed in the fighting of the dog and the bitch--or dog and wolf--as a copulation as well as an opposition. The dog and the wolf are not fighting on the card, and in any case the dogs are a late addition (16th century or alter). In the 15th century Cary Sheet, although some people claim to see two dogs, what I see are crocodiles, in a deliberately Egyptianate scene. Still, the red and gray canines might have been prompted by the alchemical dog and wolf. (Above are, from left to right, the Cary Sheet, the Noblet, and the 1761 Conver.)
In alchemy I find two instances of what O'Neill is talking about, in Maier's Atalanta Fugiens (below, second image) and in Lambsprinck's De lapido philosophica of 1625 (not shown but similar; see http://www.levity.com/alchemy/lambtext.html, Emblem V).
A nice touch here is the bird in the background flying into the sun (enlarged at left), as we might imagine the bird of card XVII doing.
Maier does not suggest that the interaction is particularly lunar; perhaps that comes from Lambspring, which says "The Body is mortified and rendered white..." That the two canines constitute a coniunctio I get from Fabricius (Alchemy p. 30).. The two animals are indeed described as male and female, and moreover the male appears to have an erection, dimly above but more obviously in Lambspring); and it is true that their antagonism results a mutual death and dissolution into one each other, as in the case of the coniunctio. Moreover, in the Atalanta, the emblem is in the right place in the sequence, corresponding very much to the place of the tarot Moon card.
The dog and the wolf fighting are perhaps an expression of what is sometimes called the "Lunar Conjunction", the two animals representing soul and spirit uniting through mutual dissolution. The outcome is then something higher than both, as the Atalanta says, claiming to be quoting Nicholas Flamel (de Rola p. 103, Golden Game;
The two I say being put together in the vessel of the sepulcher, doe bite one another cruelly...and finally killing one another, be stewed in their proper venome, which after their death, changeth them into living and permenent water; before whit time, they loose in their corruption and putrification, their firsdt natural formes, to take afterwards one onlely new, more noble, and better forme.What this higher form should be, is not shown in the emblem, unless it be the phoenix flying to the sun.
So I proceed on the assumption that the dog and wolf in the alchemical image corresponds to the two creatures on the Moon card, and that they are also probably a dog and a wolf. There is an old phrase, "between the dog and the wolf" meaning the latest and coldest part of the night. It fits here.
In alchemy the regenerative substance is what results from the blood and carcasses of the two animals mingling over time, after which both regenerate. Since the animals on the cards are not fighting, or even particularly noticing each other, I think that the Lunar Medicine comes about another way. If you look at the left-hand crocodile in the Cary Sheet card, there seems to be something in its jaws; I don't know about the other one. In the claws of the crayfish on the Conver card, there is clearly a diamond shaped object. That object may or may not be drawn on the Noblet; I think I see something in the left claw; and there are no wavy lines passing through that space on the car. And in the so-called "Chosson", of 1672 or later, on which the Conver is modeled, it is very hard to tell. Here are the relevant details:
O'Neill suggests that the crayfish in the water on the card represents a fetus in the womb, about to be born. That is another way of putting the outcome of the dogfight.. The jewel in the claws--an image for the Stone, s--is another. It is possible that the crayfish takes the place of the toad in Ripley's poem, when it turns white (see quotation below), as the animal associated with Luna astrologically. We do see the crayfish pictured with Luna in some illustrations--and on the other side of the page, Sol with a lion, for the same reason. (This is from the frontispiece to the Musaeum hermeticum, 1625, de Rola Golden Game p. 184. Higher up on the right, not shown here, Aquarius, symbolizing the element of water, pours from his one jug.).
On the Marseille-style Moon card, the colors on the droplets coming down suggest different planets that were identified with the different sublimations (see Philalethes' commentary on Ripley, http://www.levity.com/alchemy/rpvision.html): red for Mars, green for Venus, yellow for the sun. Similarly Ripley's Vision speaks of a multitude of colors--which we saw beginning with the Maison-Dieu--followed by a whitening and then immediately a reddening (http://www.levity.com/alchemy/rpvision.html):
Mylius's Anatomia auri of 1628, after the appearance of the three stars in the beaker, has a white Queen with a white rose on top, and after that a king with a red rose. That looks very much like the Moon followed by the Sun. The one with the Queen has the words "Whte medicine or white Elixir"; the other is "Red medicine or red Elixir." We have so far identified the White medicine": in alchemy, the result of the wolf and the dog killing each other, which in the tarot corresponds to the diamond in the jaws or claws of the water monster. It remains to see what the red medicine is, and how it is obtained....The Toad with Colours rare through every side was pierc'd;
And White appear'd when all the sundry hews were past:
Which after being tincted Ruddy, for evermore did last...
As for what the two together might mean, that issue will come up in relation to the Judgment card. for now I will confine myself to saying that after the Red stage comes the "Projection Augmentation," sometimes called "Multiplication," in which the Sun and the Moon beget much progeny.
19. The Alchemical Sun.
In alchemy the red Solar stage follows the white Lunar stage, as many works assert. I have already cited Ripley's "Vision." Another is in part 3 of the "Glory of the World ", atext Marco on Tarot History Forum steered me to.
The progression is the same in tarot. The blackness started in the Death card, continued in the Devil (underground), was washed in cards XVI and XVII, then became white, like the Moon, in XVIII and now red, like the Sun..ix. ARISTEUS, in his Second Table, says: Beat the body which I have made known to you into thin plates; pour thereon our salt water, i.e., water of life, and heat it with a gentle fire until its blackness disappears, and it becomes first white, and then red.
In many illustrations of the rubedo, just one person is shown, as in the one I showed in my last post (above middle), where a red rose tops the flask and a mature man, a king, stands within, corresponding to the Queen of the Albedo stage, who will join him in the Augmentatio.
In the tarot, however, when there is one person it is a male child, from the PMB forward. Below is first, the PMB, then the Cary Sheet fragment, the left half in a different color how the figure was probably completed (I get this from http://l-pollett.tripod.com/cards69.htm), and then the Vieville of c. 1650, which seems to follow a similar conception.(There can also be a woman with a spindle, and other odd images, but these are in different traditions, in which I have seen little alchemy.)
What do these children have to do with alchemy?
If you look at Ripley's Cantilena, an alchemical poem of around the same time as the PMB image (and perhaps written in Italy, where he lived 1457-1477, per Wikipedia), there is just such a child, called a "ruddy son." Here are verses 26-29 of an early translation (the original is in Latin), which I take from Jung's Mysterium Coniunctionis, pp. 316-317.
The transition from square to round is, according to Jung, the attaining of perfection, "i.e. the king has attained eternal youth and his body has become incorruptible" (paragraph 439, p. 316). The most relevant part is the last two lines of verse 28: "While from the Bed the Ruddy Son doth spring/To grasp the Joyful Scepter of a King" (De quo statim prodiit natus rubicundus/ Qui resumpsit regium scepturum Iaetabundus). Jung comments:Her time being come, the Child Conceiv'd before
Issues re-borne out of her Wombe once more;
And thereupon resumes a Kingly State
Posessing fully Heaven's Propitious Fate.
The Mother's Bed which erstwhile was a Square
Is shortly after made Orbicular.
And everywhere the Cover, likewise Round
With Luna's Lustre brightly did abound.
Then from a Square, the Bed a Globe is made,
And Purest Whiteness from the Blackest Shade;
While from the Bed the Ruddy Son doth spring
To grasp the Joyful Sceptre of a King.
Hence God unlock'd the Gates of Paradise
Rais'd him like Luna to th'Imperiall Place,
Sublim'd him to the Heavens, and that being done,
Crown'd him in Glory aequall with the Sun.
But from the language I have quoted, this is no docile infant in the lap of the Virgin Mary, but a lively, joyful child springing into action, much like the ones on the tarot cards.Vessel and content and the mother herself, who contains the father, become the son, who has risen up from "blackest shade" to the pure whiteness of Luna and attained his redness (rubedo) through the solifactio.(paragraph 441, p. 317)
Looking at Ripley's poem, I also see now the alchemical precedent for O'Neill's association of the crayfish of the Moon card to a fetus in its mother's womb. Some alchemical illustrations show a dragon in the retort. If a dragon, why not a giant crayfish? It is a misshapen thing of matter turned into a living, thriving boy.
To further complicate things, the later cards of the "Marseille" tradition, such as the "Chosson," Dodal (c. 1701), and the Conver (1761) have two boys.
The sad look and compassionate gesture are still there, but from a boy.
Looking for alchemical images of two males that conceivably might be twins, all I could find was one, in Maier's Atalanta Fugiens, of two Mercuries, one standing and one sitting, while the alchemist sits at his fire.
It seems to me that Hercules' throwing himself on the pyre is an example of "bringing fire to fire". It is the destruction of the solar hero in a way that allows his further transformation. In this picture, bringing Mercury to Mercury might be conveyed by the rope that hangs down from the elevated Hercules. It connects heaven and earth. On top is the ascended Hercules, and below the alchemist and the soror with the suffering Hercules. The rope that Hercules is offering connects the two. Hercules mortal and immortal selves are then comparable to the two boys ont he card.
The suffering and ascending Hercules is a precursor of Christ's suffering and ascent. In that he is the guide of soul's to the afterlife, he also can be considered a kind of Mercury.The connection between human suffering and divine ecstasy is what brings Mercury to Mercury.
To understand better the parallel between the Sun card with two boys and the alchemical sequences of the time we need to consier also their meaning for Renaissance Christians. "Gemini" just means "twins". In Greco-Roman mythology there were several sets of twins. The most important was the pair, mortal Castor and immortal Pollux, with the same mother but different fathers. The mortal twin died attempting with his brother to steal some cattle. The immortal one agreed to give up half his days in Olympus if they could be transferred to his brother and they could thereby spend the time together, half in Hades and half in Olympus. This, it seems to me, is a sacrifice comparable to Christ's sacrifice for the sake of humanity, whose half-sibling he was. So the Sun card might be alluding to that. Another Gemini is the pair Romulus and Remus. Remus sacrificed his life in a quarrel with his brother; but the result was the "eternal city." It is a similar sort of sacrifice.
In alchemy, we have Christ's soul, exalted while his body lies dead. The parallel with the Gemini would be Christ's descent into matter and death on the cross for the sake of the immortality on humanity conferred by his sacrifice. Although the Mutus Liber itself is silent, de Rola (p. can think of two appropriate maxims. One is "Kill the living to quicken the dead". Another is
Si fixum solvas, faciasque volare solatumIn other words, if one succeeds thoroughly in the work of fixing the volatile and volitalizing the fixed, one has made the red medicine of eternal life.
Et volucrum figas, faciet te vivere tutem;
(If the Fixed thou dissolvest, and the Dissolved makest fly,
And the winged stillest, it will surely make thee live.)
Two other images might also suggest Castor and Pollux, two images of Mercury at different stages of the work, Emblem 8 and Emblem 11 of the Mutus Liber (de Rola Golden Game pp. 274, 277). In each case, a Mercury is shown in a bubble, probably signifying what is in the alchemist's rertort, with the sun overhead. If we put the two together, we might have something like the two boys on the sun card.
There might also have been, early on, the simple mixing of gold dust in water. That mixture might well have been given to people for whom no medicine helped. It is reported that Ercole d'Este, in fact, was given such a mixture on his death bed. He died the next morning, Well, perhaps his physicians interpreted their alchemical texts too literally. What he was supposed to eat was bread transubstantiated into the body of Christ. That would have cured his soul, if not his body.The image of the Lion eating the Sun is simply that of Christ's willing sacrifice, as the Mercurial transformer of humanity, of himself as the material Sun.
How could any of this constitute a "Solar Coniunctio", said (by Jung, on p. 457 ff of Mysterium Coniunctionis, following Dorn) to be the union of the soul-spirit combination with the body? Possibilities: the descent of Christ into matter, and the resurrection of Christ in the body after his death. Or in the alchemist, the return to his body after the exalted journey to the sun. It is the becoming mortal of the immortal, and the becoming immortal that which is mortal. That is what the two boys represent, and as well the man and the woman of the Noblet, for it is by becoming mortal and dying that Mary, too, will be elevated to immortality.
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