Of Lovers and Mothers

Shade

Question for Marseilles aficionados, where does the tradition of one of the women on the card being older than the other come from? Is it that one seems to have her head covered in certain decks?

I've always enjoyed the Vice and Virtue interpretation but I admit I have no idea where that comes from either.
 

_R_

Question for Marseilles aficionados, where does the tradition of one of the women on the card being older than the other come from? Is it that one seems to have her head covered in certain decks?

I've always enjoyed the Vice and Virtue interpretation but I admit I have no idea where that comes from either.



For the first question, you will want to go further back than Marseilles decks - examine the iconography of older decks and see what you find.

As to the second question, it comes from an anecdote concerning Hercules in Xenophon's Memorabilia: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=xen.+mem.+2.1.21
(click the right arrow to continue reading.)
 

Shade

Thank you very much, that's a beautiful passage. I'll investigate the earlier decks and see what turns up.
 

Abrac

Court de Gebelin in his Game of Tarots (1781) mentions a picture of an ancient monument in Boissard's Antiquities known as the Simulacrum Fidei [A Picture of Fidelity]. The monument shows a man and woman with a child between them. Next to the woman is the word Veritas [Truth]; next to the man is Honor; and above the child's head is Amor. It is said to symbolize marital union, the man and woman held together in a bond of love, represented by the child. Waite also mentions it in his commentary on the Lovers in Part 1 of the Pictorial Key, but he doesn't seem to be very familiar with it.

Here's a link to a picture of the actual monument from the first century. Supposedly the inscriptions were added at a later date.

http://www.rdklabor.de/wiki/Datei:08-0831-1.jpg

Here's a link to a later illustration based on it (1621).

http://www.emblems.arts.gla.ac.uk/alciato/picturae.php?id=A21a009

Check out the Lovers from the Vieville Tarot. It looks like a man and woman with a young man between them.

The question of where the older woman and younger woman comes from originally is pretty murky but I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say it could have begun with the Simulacrum Fidei. The man in the 1621 illustration above has a somewhat feminine appearance. The man could have simply been transformed into an older woman; add Cupid and voilĂ , you have a picture of a young man leaving his mother and beginning a new life with his young bride. :)