I'm somewhat hesitant to post because my bank of historical knowledge is vastly inferior to that of many other members here,also I don't want to repeat old discussions that you may have had on other forums that I haven't seen. So forgive me if this idea is an old one. Could 'The World' possibly be an abbreviation of 'The Light of the World'? - used for any one or more of a number of reasons - lack of space, too obvious to need stating or alternatively, necessary ambiguity? I've recently seen a Madonna and child with the Four Evangelists - I think it was in Hind's An Introduction to a History of Woodcut - would these symbols not have been reserved for sacred subjects?

robert wrote: I think it most likely that the original card has Christ, with evangelists, in Mandorla.

So you favour the Christ>>>Quasi Christ>>>Woman scenario?

Or is it parallel - Christ>>>Woman in some places, Christ>>>Quasi-Christ in others?

Do you think Christ was more obvious - say with the Cross-flag - in the ur-Tarot de Marseille World, and later became more ambiguous because of religious sensibilities?

I agree with you that, if pressed to interpret the figure, most people then, just as now, would guess "Christ". But the meaning is blurred by the absence of some defining characteristics, if the author wanted to really say "This is Jesus Christ". That's not to say that this wasn't the intention, and the ambiguity was deliberate, as I postulated in my first post.

marco wrote:

Pen wrote:That image though (and others that seem to echo the tarot archetypes yet are not exact enough to be certain references to the same subject), makes me wonder how similar an image has to be before serious historians feel able to say: 'This is it!', 'Eureka!', or whatever.

Hello Pen,
I think a card like the Vieville World is ambiguous. There are many analogies to Resurrected Christ images like the beautiful engraving we are discussing, but there are differences as well. The Vieville figure is not bearded and is naked: covering his sex with the sceptre. This is not consistent with the iconography of Christ of that time. If it was meant to be Christ, how do we explain such differences? In my opinion, before we can say Eureka, we need to explain these important details of the central figure.


Marco

Marco, I guess my question was mostly rhetorical. 'Beyond Reasonable Doubt' wouldn't be enough unless one removed the word 'Reasonable'. What's needed is both image with accompanying explanatory/confimatory text before we can say 'Eureka!'

Pen wrote:I'm somewhat hesitant to post because my bank of historical knowledge is vastly inferior to that of many other members here,also I don't want to repeat old discussions that you may have had on other forums that I haven't seen. So forgive me if this idea is an old one. Could 'The World' possibly be an abbreviation of 'The Light of the World'? - used for any one or more of a number of reasons - lack of space, too obvious to need stating or alternatively, necessary ambiguity?

That has been suggested, but I don't think that anyone else finds the idea convincing.

The designs triumphing over the Devil (aka, the Prince of Darkness) suggest a hierarchy of light, culminating in the Light of the World. The Evangelists and mandorla, along with attributes of the Passion, clearly indicate Christ, while the female characteristics suggest an allegorical figure. This would make the primary intended subject matter something like the Glory of God (Shekinah) or Light of the World, not as Christ himself but as a personified -- allegorical -- attribute of Christ. A more popular interpretation is Anima Mundi, which connects with the "World" name and appeals to the more alchemically inclined, and Anima Christi is yet another related concept. As you suggest, ambiguity is apparent whether or not it was intended.



Best regards,
Michael

Hi Michael,

The idea of

A hierarchy of light, culminating in the Light of the World

is incredibly appealing, especially illustrated like that. And Marco's concern's re.the figure on the Vieville World card (beardless and naked) would surely not apply if the intention of the engraver had been to depict Christ as a child (reborn/resurrected, yet grown enough to stand upright and rule). There is something very childlike and 'pure' (for want of a better word) about that figure.

Pen

edited to add: interesting how small details change from deck to deck - eg the laurel leaves in the image above (pointing downwards) and the ones in the Vieville (pointing upwards).

Hi, Marco,

Marco wrote:I think a card like the Vieville World is ambiguous. There are many analogies to Resurrected Christ images like the beautiful engraving we are discussing, but there are differences as well. The Vieville figure is not bearded and is naked: covering his sex with the sceptre. This is not consistent with the iconography of Christ of that time. If it was meant to be Christ, how do we explain such differences? In my opinion, before we can say Eureka, we need to explain these important details of the central figure.

These elements have been explained, in various ways by various authors over the years. But let's start with the obvious fact that a naked figure with attributes of the Passion (they stripped him, put a red cape on him, and put a stick in his hand), surrounded by a mandorla and emblems of the Evangelists, is being depicted either as Christ or as a person/thing closely related to Christ. This is a reasonable conclusion BEFORE looking at the more peculiar elements. That Eureka! moment should happen pretty much instantly upon seeing the Tarot image.

That is the defining context within which we need to interpret the other elements.

Why might Christ (or an aspect of Christ like Anima Christi, or an allegorical subject associated with Christ, etc.) be depicted as beardless, or with breasts? As always, it helps to remember those who have already spent time and effort on the question, rather than pretending that October of 2009 is the first time anyone has looked at this. We can start with Stuart Kaplan's 1986 presentation of George Wald. George David Wald (1906-1997) was a Nobel Prize-winning biologist, Higgins Professor of Biology at Harvard University, and a promoter of progressive political and social causes. In 1982 he wrote a manuscript about Tarot, from which Kaplan quoted at some length. He discussed the beardless Vievil figure, as well as the more common feminine figure.

I was introduced to the tarot through a strange experience coming from a quite different direction. Some years ago I found in the Dutch city of Delft a series of eighteenth-century Biblical tiles showing Jesus as a beardless androgyne. When seminude, as when beaten by Pilate's soldiers or crucified, he was shown with heavy, pendulous breasts.

From time to time over the years I have tried to determine what might have impelled the simple, probably illiterate workmen who made those tiles, or the customers who purchased them, to think of Jesus in that way, so breaking with the icon of the bearded Christ that had been traditional for over a millennium. Christ with a beard appeared in the role of teacher and sufferer, as contrasted with the beardless (although very rare) Christ Triumphant, in which he is portrayed as the Son of God, transfigured from the Son of Man (Didron, 1851). Michelangelo's Christ in Judgment portrayed a youthful, unbearded and athletic type of Jesus. One day I came upon that pathetic androgyne again, this time in a reproduction of tarot card XXI The World, in the deck by Payen, dated 1713. It was beyond question the figure of Jesus, as demonstrated by its similarity to the Christ of the Vievil deck, the presence of the four creatures, and the traditional mandorla (Italian for "almond"), the two-pointed oval that frames the figure.

The designation of The World to Christ is appropriate. God the Father is in heaven, but Jesus is God made manifest on the earth. As he says in John (9:5), "As long as I am in the world I am the light of the world." But he is also identified as being the world. An example occurs in one of the most widely known legends in European folklore, that of Saint Christopher. On a wildly stormy night this gigantic man, then a pagan, was driven by a persistent child who wished to be carried across a raging torrent. As the man struggled across, the child seemed to grow heavier and heavier. "And when he was escaped with great pain and passed the water, and set the child aground, he said, 'Child, thou has put me in great peril. Thou weighest almost as if I had all the world upon me'... And the child answered, 'Christopher -- named so now -- marvel thou no thing. For thou has not only borne all the world upon thee; but thou has born Him that created and made all the world upon thy shoulders. I am Jesus Christ..."

And finally, why an androgynous Jesus?
[...]

The character given God the Father is unalterably male: assertive, aggressive, the God of Battles. In contrast, Jesus is gentle, forbearing, forgiving, loving his enemies, nurturing ("Suffer little children to come unto me"), an ostensible male fulfilling a feminine stereotype. The pre-Reformation church and laity at prayer, as distinct from the formal theology, for centuries experienced Jesus as Mother, Sister, and Nurse, as well as King, Knight, Lover and Brother; and developed to go with this attitude an androgynous system of metaphor (McLaughlin, 1975). So Saint Anselm, the eleventh-century archbishop of Canterbury, prayed: "Christ, my mother, you gather your chickens under your wings... For by your gentleness the badly frightened are comforted, by your sweet smell the despairing are revived, your warmth gives life to the dead... Mother, known again your dead son...." The thirteenth-century prioress Marguerite d'Oingt, addresses Jesus as the Mother who in labor on the cross as child bed brings forth a redeemed world (McLaughlin, 1975).

Perhaps you don't like his comments, but at least they deserve to be acknowledged and rebutted before saying that we have no explanation for the details. Anselm's mysticism, talking about the soul's relationship with God as child to mother, is expressed via such figurative passages. The conflation of motifs apparent in the Tarot image is not merely related to the Passion, nor to the Resurrection, but also to the personal experience of the Salvator Mundi. There are other sources that echo Wald comments about a feminine Christ. Although they offer mainly textual sources to explain this topos, they offer extremely prominent ones. Perhaps the first book to look at would be Caroline Walker Bynum's Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (1984).

Any explanation of the medieval theme of God as mother must begin by noting that it is not an invention of twelfth-century devotional writers. In the Old Testament, God frequently speaks of himself as mother, bearing the Israelites in his bosom, conceiving them in his womb (e.g., Isa. 49:1, 49:15, and 66:11-13). The Wisdom of God is a feminine principle; in Ecclesiasticus she says: "I am the mother of fair love, and of fear, and of knowledge, and of holy hope.... Come over to me, all ye that desire me: and be filled with my fruits" (Ecclus. 24:24-26). In the New Testament such imagery is nonexistent. The gospel of John does apply to Christ some of the titles of the Old Testament wisdom literature (e.g., John 14:6), but it uses no feminine language.

The really interesting material is more proximate to the provenance of Tarot, i.e., starting with those 12th-century devotional writers. You can search the text at Amazon.

Bernard of Clairvaux, whose use of maternal imagery for male figures is more extensive and complex than that on any other twelfth-century figure, used "mother" to describe Jesus, Moses, Peter, Paul, prelates in general, abbots in general, and, more frequently, himself as abbot. To Bernard, the maternal image is almost without exception elaborated not as giving birth or even as conceiving or sheltering in a womb but as nurturing, particularly suckling. Breasts, to Bernard, are a symbol of the pouring out towards others of affectivity or of instruction and almost invariably suggest to him a discussion of the duties of prelates or abbots. Bernard not only develops an elaborate picture of the abbot (he usually has himself in mind) as mother, contrasting mater to magister or dominis and stating repeatedly that a mother is one who cannot fail to love her child; he also frequently attributes maternal characteristics, especially suckling with milk, to the abbot when he refers to him as father. (Pages 115-6.)

In contrast to Bernard, William of St. Thierry avoids explicit references to God a mother, using "father and child" or "bridegroom and bride" to describe the soul's relationship to God. But, like Bernard, William expounds the references to breasts in the Song of Songs as descriptions of Christ feeding and instructing the individual soul. Like Bernard, William uses such references to breasts as opportunities to discuss the burdens of the abbacy. (Page 119.)

Several of the scholars who have noticed the use of maternal imagery in medieval authors from Anselm of Canterbury to Julian of Norwich have associated this particular image with the rise, from the eleventh century on, of a lyrical, emotional piety that focuses increasingly on the humanity of Christ. Descriptions of God as a woman nursing the soul at her breasts, drying its tears, punishing its petty mischief-making, giving birth to it in agony and travail, are part of a growing tendency to speak of the divine in homey images and to emphasize its approachability. (Page 129.)

People in the high Middle Ages argued that the ideal child-rearing pattern was for the mother to nurse her own child; in medieval medical theory breast milk is processed blood. According to medieval understanding of physiology, the loving mother, like the pelican who is also a symbol for Christ, feeds her child with her own blood. Thus, the connection of blood and milk in many medieval texts is based on more than merely the parallelism of two bodily fluids. Clement of Alexandria as early as the second century makes explicit the connection between breast milk and the blood supplied to the foetus in order to use the nursing Christ as an image of the eucharist. (Page 132.)

And so on.

On the subject of Bernard's use of the idea, Philip Leonard (Trajectories of Mysticism in Theory and Literature, 2000) wrote:

There was, indeed, a trend of "feminization" in monastic writing, linked to the rise of affective spirituality, of which Cistercian mystic writer Bernard of Clairvaus (d. 1153) is one of the earliest representatives. In writing about "mystical union" in the erotic terms provided by the Song of Songs, some monks chose to incribe themselves or, rather, their souls (the Latin "anima" being a feminine word) as the brides of Christ. There was also a tendency to describe Christ as a maternal figure, attributing him "breasts" ("ubera" being the term used in the Vulgate to translate the Hebrew word "love" from Song 1:1). The idea of Christ as a nursing figure was also connected in the writings of twelfth-century Clairvaus (and in those of sixteenth-century Spanish Franciscan preachers) with the Pauline image of Christians as babes who still need Christ's milk, not being strong enough spiritually to take solid food. Maternal metaphors had already been used in the Old Testament but it is only with the development of "affective" Christian spirituality that they began to be used to refer to the presence of the divinity. (Page 105)

Jonathan Sawday (The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture, 1996) wrote:

"As a wounded hero", Stefaniak has observed, Christ "was like a woman" within the cultural nexus of sixteenth-century religious and social attitudes. The "willingness of the divine victim' to submit to the penetration of the crucifixion -- the thorns, nails, the soldier's spear -- enabled a "further inflection of the woundedness metaphor into feminine erotic response", so that the "violence of the passion" could be "displaced to sixteenth-century women". Such a tradition, in which the body of Christ could be "identified with nurturing female flesh" had not entirely vanished by the seventeenth century: as Crashaw's poem on a lactating Christ suckling his mother demonstrated. Crashaw's poems on the passion seem to establish themselves within the androgynous tradition of representation, while at the same moment they gesture towards the anatomist's public demonstration of the body's secretive interior. (Page 121)

Christ's body, moreover, was the pattern of unity upon which rested the super-structure of the church -- Ecclesia. But, as we have already seen, there also existed a tradition of Christ represented as a nurturing female body. This tradition, as Gail Kern Paster suggests, determines the symbolic representation of the church as "ecclesia lactans" -- the nurturing church. Ecclesia was thus female, the nurturing body of Christ and the bride of Christ. According to St. Paul, Ecclesia was composed of parts -- members -- gathered together to form the greater unity of the universal church. Ecclesia's body was not, therefore, itself ideal. If Christ, as St. Augustine explained, was the head of the body, its perfection lay at some future date when all the members had been gathered in order that completion would be achieved "in due time". (Page 217)

The basic design of the card makes the Christian subject matter plain, and the troublesome "details" to be explained are the feminine features as well as the card's significance in the sequence. The family of explanations suggested above might not be ones you like, but they are readily available and have been in the Tarot world at least since Wald's passage was published by Kaplan. If you have a better explanation ("woodcutter's ignorance" is always popular) then we have multiple explanations to choose from, but you can't say that we have none.

Best regards,
Michael

Ross G. R. Caldwell wrote:So you favour the Christ>>>Quasi Christ>>>Woman scenario?

Or is it parallel - Christ>>>Woman in some places, Christ>>>Quasi-Christ in others?

Do you think Christ was more obvious - say with the Cross-flag - in the ur-Tarot de Marseille World, and later became more ambiguous because of religious sensibilities?

I'm not sure. That's why I enjoy exploring this so much.



I think the Vieville is certainly closest to what I imagine an ur-Tarot de Marseille might be (although I'm not even sure I believe in such a thing as an ur-Tarot de Marseille at all). Particularly, the figure is male, and he is haloed. The halo is gone in the Noblet, and... well.. Yup, those sure do look like breasts. So what is happening here? Do we have a Christ figure who is being secularised and transformed into a woman? Or do we have a woman who is being rerendered as a saint or Christ himself? Why would that happen? I find it much easier to believe it started off as a haloed man and turned into a non-haloed woman than the other way around. So the Vieville is the only one that really maintains that character. Or is it? What of the Dodal?


I'd guess the Dodal is also a man, and there is a line that comes down below the neck which I imagine is similar to where the tie of the cape is on the Vieville. The halo is not on the Dodal.

Dodal and Noblet have both covered up the nudity with what looks like leaves.

There's also the Sforza Castle World card to take into consideration, and I personal suspect it is the type of card that the Dodal is based on, (and perhaps I'd even dare say "traced" off of). Here it is shown with another image of Christ which was uploaded to Tarotpedia by Marco:



When we consider the Tarot de Marseille II style decks, the figure is clearly a woman, the cape is instead a scarf, and one of the evangelists has no halo; as shown here in the Conver:


So what can we make of this? I'm not sure that I would agree that any cardmaker ever intended the figure to be androgynous. I think it more likely that the figure of Christ was converted to a secular Fortune-type figure. I have a harder time believing it would happen in reverse. If not Christ, then it needs to be a figure that would be accompanied by the four evangelists and have a halo, I'm open to suggestions, but Christ seems the most likely subject.

But as everyone has pointed out, it is convoluted. A question to be answered is whether it was convoluted from the start or if it became that way? I just don't think we have enough evidence to know... yet.

A compelling argument, yet it seems that answering those questions raises others.

Some years ago I found in the Dutch city of Delft a series of eighteenth-century Biblical tiles showing Jesus as a beardless androgyne. When seminude, as when beaten by Pilate's soldiers or crucified, he was shown with heavy, pendulous breasts.

This statement seems to suggest that this occasion in Delft was the first time George David Walde had come across such an image of Christ. Can we therefore assume (taking the quote below into account) that such images are rare, in spite of the textual evidence Michael's mentioned later in his post? I can't recall such an image of Christ in spite of a lifelong interest in the history of painting and printmaking.

One day I came upon that pathetic androgyne again, this time in a reproduction of tarot card XXI The World, in the deck by Payen, dated 1713. It was beyond question the figure of Jesus, as demonstrated by its similarity to the Christ of the Vievil deck, the presence of the four creatures, and the traditional mandorla (Italian for "almond"), the two-pointed oval that frames the figure.

If we accept that a nurturing and feminized Christ was familiar to the monks and clergy, it somehow seems less easy to believe that the ordinary man or woman would have thought of him in this way too, in spite of the statement:

The pre-Reformation church and laity at prayer, as distinct from the formal theology, for centuries experienced Jesus as Mother, Sister, and Nurse, as well as King, Knight, Lover and Brother; and developed to go with this attitude an androgynous system of metaphor (McLaughlin, 1975).

For if they had, surely it's logical to suppose that there would be more imagery from the time (apart from the tarot) to reflect this?

And is it logical to suppose that each and every image on the tarot trumps would have been familiar and easily recognisable for exactly what it was intended to represent to the ordinary man or woman of those times (card publishers and wood engravers included), just as we recognize Death and those other tarot archetypes such as Judgement etc.? I wonder.

So as far as the breasted Christ/woman is concerned, it's not quite Eureka for me just yet...

Pen

The Payen 1713 trumps are shown (in b/w) at Uri Raz's site
http://www.tarot.org.il/Payen/

They used to be at the Yale Beinecke site as well, but seem to have disappeared.



(just so we're in no doubt, he includes the 2 of Deniers with the date as well)



If Wald took that as his clear androgynous analogue, I'm not sure how far we can trust his judgment on what the Delft tile showed (I don't see any breasts at all).

Hi, Robert,

Given the near-universal practice of looking at each card in isolation, trying to find the best available pictorial cognate elsewhere, and then imposing that meaning on the Tarot card, your analysis makes some sense, I guess. It was a conventional Christ image and it became corrupted, because no one knew what Christ was supposed to look like. They just gave him tits, 'cause they didn't know no better.

I find it much easier to believe it started off as a haloed man and turned into a non-haloed woman than the other way around.

I have to agree that many details of many decks do appear to be best explained by simple sloppiness and ignorance. For example, only a die-hard occultist would insist on inventing an intended meaning for something like the bull's lost halo -- that is just silly.

But still... giving our dear fluffy Lord and Savior titties? WHY?!

That's not an everyday kind of mistake.

You seem to assume that the original version was simple and conventional, which is fine, but it seems implausible that a simple and conventional Christ in Majesty figure would be ruined so perversely.

I'm not sure that I would agree that any cardmaker ever intended the figure to be androgynous. I think it more likely that the figure of Christ was converted to a secular Fortune-type figure.

I tend to agree that there may not have been any intent to make an androgynous Christ, and I tend to be sympathetic to the idea of secularizing Tarot images. That was done many times with different cards in different places. But what does "Fortune-type" mean? That you want to call it Fortune but can't, because it obvioulsy isn't? What is it, or what things might it be?

I have a harder time believing it would happen in reverse. If not Christ, then it needs to be a figure that would be accompanied by the four evangelists and have a halo, I'm open to suggestions, but Christ seems the most likely subject.

For which deck? You seem to arguing that these different decks are all depicting the same subject, which gets us back to the "Christ with tits" problem.

THE QUESTION OF AMBIGUITY

Let me try a different approach. Given the amount of disagreement about Tarot, I don't think it is much of a leap to assume that the trump cycle is either 1) a relatively meaningless assemblage of subjects in a rough hierarchy, simply to serve as decorative trumps in the game, a vague triumphal sampler as suggested by Dummett, or 2) it is a coherent cycle or program of some sort but there is subtlety and complexity in the design. If it were both coherent as well as clear and simple, then someone would have pointed that out by now. If Dummett's suggestion is correct then detailed study is a waste of time, so let's assume that Tarot is coherent but hard.

The iconographic program, if any, wasn't designed by dolts, nor for dolts.

Second, let's acknowledge that every locale in Italy created its own Tarot. Different subject matter on some of the trumps, and a different ordering for some of the trumps, gave each area a local-pride variant -- their own Tarot. Each such variant needs to be taken on its own terms, so to speak. Tarot de Marseille, in particular, is quite odd when compared with the majority of decks. Consider the penultimate card, Judgment.



First, quite obviously, it doesn't show Judgment. It shows resurrection. On the surface, it appears to show the general resurrection, but that isn't quite the case. Only one of the three figures is actually rising from a tomb. Moreover, the other two figures are in poses of supplication facing the rising figure rather than the angel of resurrection. Clearly, the central figure is Christ, and the cross on the trumpet is the same cross usually shown on Christ's banner as he rises.

Staring at Christ's naked butt is not the normal iconography for the Risen Christ!

And yet there it is. This being the case, the woman is the Virgin and the bearded man is the Baptist -- the two intercessors, cf. Deesis -- as depicted in a thousand scenes of Resurrection to JUDGMENT!



The image conflates the general resurrection with the resurrection of Christ and with the Last Judgment. Iconographically, it's a mess, and yet it is rather well designed and laid out, and intelligible. It's wildly unconventional, but it is genuinely ambiguous -- it signifies more than one thing.

Putting a woman in Christ's place in the World card is an example of a conventional method of creating allegorical personifications. For example, put a woman in the place of Hercules or Sampson and you have an allegory of Strength, Fortitude. So the figure is not Christ any more than Fortitude is Hercules, but rather an allegory of what he represents in this context. And because of the conflated motifs, it is an inherently ambiguous, or at least broadly conceived allegory. This is analogous to giving papal attributes to a woman to create an allegory of the Faith, the Papacy, the Church, Lex Canonica, Divine Providence, etc. Note that without a controlling context, the subject matter of the papal allegory is also ambiguous, and was in fact used for a number of different allegories.


Divine Providence triumphs over Fortune

Most Tarot enthusiasts use the word "ambiguous" as a practical synonym for "unknown". It's a simple way to dodge the subject, to avoid being specific.

(Hi, )

The other meaning of ambiguous is polysemous: there are multiple meanings entailed. In most early Tarot decks there was a standard series of subjects. Most decks, however, conflated individual standard subjects with related subjects of a more idiosyncratic nature. Leber-Rouen is an extreme case, in which each secondary subject almost overwhelms the primary one. Sometimes this conflation is simple and clear, like Diogenes in the barrel with Alexander on the Este Sun card. Sometimes it is less obvious but just as clear once it has been pointed out, like Marco's recent identification of the Orpheus & Eurydice motif in the Geoffroy deck. Sometimes it is related to other cards in the series, the way the Charles VI World card derives the additional meaning of Prudence from the polygonal halo, being shared with Justice, Fortitude, and Temperance. These cards are ambiguous in the sense that they have a primary meaning as the standard Tarot subject matter, and a secondary meaning overlaid. And each deck is more or less unique in these secondary meanings.

In the case of Tarot de Marseille, this is carried to an extreme in several ways. In the example above, Judgment conflates Christ's resurrection with the Last Resurrection and Judgment. As another example, the Pope and Devil are iconographic twins, with parallel elements that suggest pairing the two cards for an eschatological reference to the Antichrist. For example, that business with the hierarchy of light: the subjects suggest that design in most decks, but it is only illustrated in a dramatic fashion in this deck. There are a number of such complex and subtle conflations in Tarot de Marseille. It is ambiguous in the sense of being identifiably polysemous, not just in the sense of being obscure and unknown.

LECTIO DIFFICILIOR POTIOR

That's the same story I've been telling since 2000, and it probably isn't any more persuasive today... although, it has been noted that more people are getting comfortable with the general idea that it is a Christian cycle. Still, the basic idea here is that the World figure -- especially the most common one -- conflates Christ in Majesty with the Passion and those damned feminine elements. That kind of conflation and complexity is consistent with many other aspects of the deck. This complexity in some areas justifies looking for intended complexity in others, rather than attempting to explain away such odd pictures.

Textual criticism attempts to create family trees, to identify alterations in the transmission of texts. People made errors and intentional changes in copying manuscripts, and in many cases the original doesn't exist. Even the place of a particular version in the line of transmission is often uncertain. Textual criticism trys to sort out the evolutionary tree of the surviving examples. This is very closely related to the search for Tarot's family tree. One of the guiding principles, a general rule of thumb, is lectio difficilior potier.

Lectio difficilior potior (Latin for "the more difficult reading is the stronger") is a main principle of textual criticism. Where different manuscripts conflict on a particular word, the principle suggests that the more unusual one is more likely the original. The presupposition is that scribes would more often replace odd words and hard sayings with more familiar and less controversial ones, than vice versa (Carson 1991). It will readily be seen that lectio difficilior potior is an internal criterion, which is independent of criteria for evaluating the manuscript in which it is found,[1] and that it is as applicable to manuscripts of a roman courtois or a classical poet as it is to a biblical text. This principle has some wider everyday application. If one wants to determine the correct spelling of a name, and finds conflicting versions, it is often the more "difficult" one that is correct, not the one that is most widely used.

Let's turn your evolutionary process upside down.


Suppose that the Tarot de Marseille trump cycle was created as a complex and subtle program, rather than a conventional group of simple images. The World card, specifically, conflated multiple conventional subjects related to Christ -- attributes from the Passion, (sometimes shown in images of his resurrection), blended into an overall Majestas Domini motif -- and turned that into a female allegory. While it is difficult to imagine someone, even our ignorant dolt of a hypothetical cardmaker, giving God boobs, it is pretty easy to imagine a not-quite-so-stupid cardmaker correcting what appears to be an obvious blunder, turning that unique and obscure allegorical figure into a more conventional Christ in Majesty.

As I tried to point out to Marco, there are various explanations for the odd features of this card. Number one has to be yours, that the variations were mindless corruptions. At least that seems to be the most commonly cited explanation. Wald's position, which I offered to Marco to rebut his claim that there was NO explanation, is that it is an androgynous Christ. My point in defending his position is not to adopt it but to show that it is defensible, a legitimate alternative explanation rather than the usual empty hand-waiving bullshit one expects in Tarot forums. It makes some sense not only of the image but also of its place in sequence, given other elements (like the hierarchy of light I illustrated) which suggest a mystical subtext.

A third explanation, or rather family of explanations, is that the figure was not an androgynous Christ but an allegorical subject. Lots of people have offered variations on this, most commonly in the form of Anima Mundi (alchemists love it) and Sophia/Divine Wisdom (Gnostics love it). My own view is in this third category. The intended subject matter might have been something as direct as a personification of Lux Mundi.

It is traditional for occult Tarot enthusiasts, like O'Neill, to claim that Tarot was Christianized over time. Usually the opposite was the case. Overtly Christian elements were often replaced, which is what you suggest here. In this one instance, however, my view is that the allegorical subject matter (as best exemplified in the Chosson/Conver style decks) was replaced with more conventional historical subject matter, i.e., approximations to Christ in Majesty. It was always Christian, but it became more conventionally Christian.

Finally, with regard to Ross' critique of Wald, the Payen physique shows a very narrow chest, somewhat flaring hips and thighs, and the face is beardless and small-chinned with a luxurious head of hair. If it isn't feminine, it's really sickly. (Wald describes it as "pathetic".) So I'm more inclined to trust Wald's judgment here than Ross', especially given that the (phantom) Delft image also showed "heavy, pendulous breasts".

Best regards,
Michael