The Esoteric Tarot by Ronald Decker

Author:Ronald Decker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Quest Books
Published: 2013-04-11T16:00:00+00:00

Figure 6.3. Illustration of the “Children of the Planets,” woodcut, German, ca. 1490.

Tower = Mars (fiery god) in the Portal of Toil (or Suffering). The burning tower is a standard feature in “the Children of the Planets” where Mars presides over a landscape incinerated by war (figure 6.6).

Star = Venus (watery goddess) in the place of Fortune (compare Venus as Lesser Fortune). In “the Children of the Planets,” the beneficiaries of Venus are shown drinking and bathing or swimming in the nude. Yet, as Paul Huson notes, the nude in the Star card is someone more otherworldly.5 In the early example in the Cary sheet (Beinecke Library, Yale), stars appear in the sky, but one star appears on the figure’s shoulder (figure 6.7). Huson has perceived the Star card as the Morning Star. He cites a text that personifies the Morning Star as a youth bearing a torch and scattering dew from an urn.6 This is an ancient visualization. (I find it embossed on the emperor’s breastplate for the “Augustus of Prima Porta,” a Roman sculpture now in the Vatican.) Of course, the morning star is really a planet, namely Venus. In this feminine guise, she still was said to dispense dew. Perhaps this context explains why the Tarot gives her two urns. Venus is the morning star and the evening star, too (figure 6.8). Pliny, a Roman encyclopedist of the first century, wrote that the planet Venus “is the cause of the birth of all things on earth; at both of its risings, it scatters a genital dew…”7

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