Magician

2. The Alchemical Magician: the one with objects that heal.

Robert O’Neill, in his book Tarot Symbolism, points to two alchemical images that resemble the Tarot Magician. For one, he cites de Rola’s Alchemy for a 1477 century manuscript of Norton’s Ordinall. Showing an alchemist at his table on which are a crescent, a cup, and a ball. Next to it I put a Magician card from Ferrara of almost exactly the same time, c. 1475; (I reproduce the alchemical  image from http://www.bridgemanart.com/asset/7746/English-School-15th-century/Add-10302-fol.37v-Alchemy-master-preparing-ingredi?search_context={%22url%22%3A%22\%2Fsearch\%2Fcategory\%2FScience-pre--1499\%2F1433%22%2C%22num_results%22%3A%22209%22%2C%22search_type%22%3A%22category_assets%22%2C%22category_id%22%3A%221433%22%2C%22item_index%22%3A4}

One might question whether this English manuscript would have been known outside of England, and even there by many people. But Elias Ashmole reproduced it as an engraving in his Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum, 1652. You can see that version at http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6b/Thomas_Norton_-_Ordinall_of_Alchemy-fig3.jpeg. Certainly after 1652 it was widely familiar. Anyone seeing it who also knew the tarot Magician would surely associate the two traditions as expressed in that card.

The other image that O’Neill refers to is Figure 15 of Frabricius’s Alchemy. This, Fabricius tells us, is from Basil Valentine: Revelation des mysteres des teintures essentielles des sept metau, Paris, 1668.
 
Again, it is too late to have influenced the tarot. But it could have influenced people’s thinking about the tarot Magician.

Another argument that O’Neill makes is that the tarot Magician is associated with the planet and god Mercury, and that is also the name of “the Artifex, the alchemist.” The problem is that there is no early evidence that the tarot Magician was associated with Mercury. Conjurors like the tarot Bagatto appears on illuminations and engravings of the “Children of the Moon.” In alchemy the child of Luna is Mercury, as early as the Emerald Tablet. But that is alchemy, not tarot. In later lists of the trumps in France, from the 17th century, however, where we would expect "Bateleur" as trump one, we get "Mercury."

One possible explanation is that Jesus might have been associated with Mercury as the conveyer of souls to heaven or hell. Then if Jesus was thought of as a magician, at least one magician would be associated with Mercury. This would be a more positive interpretation of the figure on the card than is usually associated with that figure. I don’t have documentation of such an interpretation. But if we look at the first known Magician card, we see that he puts his hand over something covered with a cloth. This suggests to me the Eucharist. In a later card, c. 1650, we see that the phallus that was depicted on the Fool card is now on the Bateleur's hand in plce of a wand.

  It is perhaps the magic substance snatched from the gods by the animal. During the Renaissance people were fascinated by Roman sarcophagi depicting Dionysian scenes, such as the one in the middle above. From classical authors such as Clement of Alexandria they read that phallic images were carried in chests to be displayed at the proper moment. The cloth of the Eucharist was presented as a worthier substitute for such chests.

Sometimes it is alleged that the finger on the Noblet Bateleur is merely the bottom half of a wand that has broken off. So I give you the similar image of the King of Batons from a 16th century printed deck. Batons was at that time a suit associated with the fertility of the earth. All the court figures of that suit in the deck for the Sforsas, c. 1455, were shown with green sleeves or gloves, for example. In the Noblet, the club on the Ace of Batons was colored green.

From the angle of the finger on the Noblet, we are directed to the purse, which takes the place of the covering on the earlier card. There is an object similar to the finger poking out of the purse. Again, we have the magic phallus. The purse is a survival of the ancient chest of the Dionysian rites.

Such phalli were in fact used as fertility charms in Renaissance Europe. At right  is one from a garbage dump of Bosch's home town of 'Shertengebosch, in Flanders. Another is depicted in a woodcut image of the Greek god Pripapus in the 1647 edition of Cartari's Images of the Gods of the Ancients.

THE ALCHEMICAL MAGICIAN AS MERCURY

However I think a case can be made that even in the 15th century, anyone who had heard of alchemy—most everyone, then—would almost automatically associate the person on the Bagatto card with the alchemical Magus. And it is through the association with alchemy that the Magician card might have gotten associated with the god Mercury..

For one thing, there was the “Artixan” card in the “Tarot of Mantegna, ” c. 1465-1470. It is similar to depictions of goldsmiths as O’Neill points out on the tarot.com website (http://www.tarot.com/about-tarot/library/boneill/bagatto). Goldsmiths and other metalworkers, were considered Children of Mercury and depicted as such in “Children of the Planets” series, such as this detail from c. 1465-1475 Florence, sometimes attributed to Baldini
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Alchemists, of course, also were workers in gold: they were trying to produce it, or produce something even better, the elixir, from it. It is

ALCHEMY AND MAGIC

For another thing, alchemy was widely regarded as a species of magic or conjuring, which might or might not mean the intentional creation of deceptive illusions. The only difference between alchemists and street conjurors was that the alchemist didn’t go around doing tricks at fairs. He did his privately, or at various courts. He also had a more impressive set of props, with his furnaces, flasks, and substances that transformed themselves before one’s eyes.

So while the two traditions likely don’t depend on each other for their images of the Bagatto/Bateleur vs. the Alchemist, it seems to me that anyone who had heard of alchemy would associate the tarot Magician card with the alchemist.

For those who knew more about alchemy than the average person, there would have been another level to the association. The alchemist was said to be an imitator of nature, as one who tried to duplicate the development of metals as they evolved in nature. It was theorized that they grew in the bowels of the earth like plants, and that the heavier metals like silver and gold were more mature members of the species (or genus?). In a sense, he was duplicating the work of God as Platonic demiurge.

A few alchemists were even said to have succeeded in creating artificial intelligence. In the 15th century some alchemists wrote about the creation of the homunculus, a small magical humanoid who knew the future and could do whatever one asked of it. The artist of the Florentine sketch-book included a sketch of an alchemist holding his homunculus, to the fascination and horror of an onlooker. Here is a detail, showing the magus and his creation, from Plate 51, titled "Mercurio Re Degitto," Mercury (i.e. Hermes Trismegistus) King of Egypt. Besides this drawing, there is a similar engraving, attributed to Baldini, c. 1465-75.

Likewise the tarot Magician might have been a version of the card-player or card-interpreter himself, whose combinations of cards might have been seen in terms of God’s combinations of the five elements, put together so as to create particular things. Like God or the alchemist’s homunculus, the card-reader would then have a magical ability to win at games of chance, have access to knowledge about the future, and perhaps even have the ability to change the future. For more on the homunculus, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homunculus. For a late medieval Jewish alchemical source, see http://books.google.com/books?id=LorvA_5Ex_UC&pg=PA307&lpg=PA307&dq=patai+jewish+homunculus&source=bl&ots=Cy_JBqUh4_&sig=3YntCiysFxh6ZpJYPJVTQrOOf-4&hl=en&ei=lSo7Tb-CCoK6sQPD3dXRAw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBMQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false.
 
An example of a tarot card very close to this image is Etteilla's Magician card in its second version, c. 1840. I reproduce that one, at right, along with the original, at left.

My conclusion is that for people who knew even common hearsay about alchemy, and also knew the Magician card of the tarot, the alchemist and the Bagatto would have been combined in their minds, so that aspects of one would be thought of in terms of the other, quite naturally.