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
We are either dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants, or we are just dwarfs.