I can't believe it has taken me over twenty years of studying and reading tarot but just this week I discovered that the Major Arcana in the Rider Waite tarot are designed as seen from the other side of the Tree of Life to the one we look at and only make sense when seen in mirror image (excellent background to the Qabalistic Tree of Life and tarot here).
The top of the Tree showing the top two pathways with their corresponding Trumps is shown above. I suppose I had probably thought the Fool and Magician looked slightly wrong imposed on the Tree (look, many magical men are gay for a reason) but then I read this:
'This iconic image of the Fool holds a number of hidden references to the Tree of Life. The white sun at the upper right refers to Kether, the first sephira. [...] The line of the image passes from the sun to the lower left, reflecting the Fool's path from an inside-the-Tree perspective.' T. Susan Chang and M.M. Meleen: Tarot Deciphered. Llewellyn Publications, Woodbury Minnesota, 2021, p.27.
So if you take the white sun on the Fool as representing kether, it means the Fool is actually depicted from inside the Tree, the other direction from the one we normally see it. To make sense on the Tree as normally depicted it needs to be seen in left-to-right mirror image thus:
And suddenly it all starts to make sense! The sun clearly represents kether and is in the right place and both the Fool's trajectory and the line of the mountains match the angle of the pathway as seen on the Tree. They are even in the all important to the Golden Dawn exact shade of the pathway so clearly can only mean the pathway.
So the Rider Waite Smith tarot contains some allusions to the Tree of Life which aren't automatically apparent because they're depicted the wrong way round for the Tree as we normally look at it. I wonder if this was one of Waite's deliberate blinds? I've come across many of them but didn't even know about this one!
Unfortunately further down the Tree it doesn't work so well because the Trumps are less obviously directional (or maybe Waite ran out of inspiration LOL) but on the other side the Magician also perfectly fits the Tree when seen in mirror image:
Perfect! Left arm raised towards kether (above) and right lowered towards binah (below), again in the angle of the pathway coming out of kether.
I can't believe I have missed this all these years!
Incidentally, before I hit publish, apologies if this looks peculiar on your screen. Although I have so far escaped the current problems with Blogger when I tried to preview the post it really didn't like it so I have no idea what it will look like when published. 🫣
Also, in the first image, the Fool can only continue his path forward but he won't get to the top of the tree as he will fall off that cliff (and likely squash whoever that is underneath - the Empress?). In your mirrored image, he has clearly reached that promontory and is fannying around in the sun for a bit before turning and taking the path behind him up to the top of the tree.
ReplyDeleteYes, it does make sense when seen from another perspective - as many things often do...
That's exactly the sense of wrongness I was getting at. And mirrored we also see the edge of the cliff is the end of the tree. Personally I prefer to tell things which way round to be, but that might just be me!
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