Vetrate Angels
Since I'm on an angel kick, I wanted to examine two cards that in traditional Marseille decks contain adult angels: Temperance and Judgement. I'm excluding cards like The Lovers which typically contains an infant cherub, sometimes seen as an infant Cupid. Vetrate's Lovers also has an infant.
Vetrate doesn't identify its angels by name, but the depictions are inspiring enough to draw some comparisons.
I love Temperance, because unlike all the other angels in the deck, who have plain white robes and white wings, this one wears a vibrant pink robe and has rainbow-coloured wings! I might be encouraged to draw a comparison with symbolism in modern sexual orientation movements, but I highly doubt that Scapini intended it this way.
Since Vetrate deals with the exchanges of energies, Temperance completely balances them in a glorious rainbow. Colour symbolism is very importance in a stained glass deck, but rainbows are less frequent in this one. Another Major that presents a rainbow is The Sun, which shows a ring of angels fracturing the sun's light into the colour spectrum. So I take the balanced energies to be a very positive factor and assurance that all will be well, fair, and just., with the twin suns behind it even more confirmation.
On the other hand, the context of the Vetrate Judgement is very different from what most decks show. Typically, there is a single angel on a cloud in a clear sky blowing the trumpet to awaken the dead. The same scene is depicted differently here that gives the card a more foreboding interpretation. Two feet, presumably God's, are planted on the backs of two minor angels blowing trumpets to awaken the dead. The sky has darkened to a bloody red, and the Sun and the Moon have grim, angry visages. The Moon has turned red. Scapini says this is to depict the harshness of the Day of Judgement in the Book of Revelations, when the natural world will be destroyed by the wrath of God at the same time as the human world is judged.
The lone angel is exchanged for two who look the same as others throughout the deck, and their being physically dominated by God certainly makes the scene more sinister than joyous. It is as if the subject of the card were not the dead being raised, but the unseen living who will be judged in wrath. Rather than signifying rebirth and absolution, this is card of dire warning that a process is coming to an end, and the reader had best be prepared to face the results.
Interestingly a third, unlikely person in Vetrate also happens to be winged: The Empress!
She's the only one of the ordinarly human Major figures who is winged. Unfortunately Scapini doesn't say what stained glass image inspired this one, and I'd love to know what made him choose it. But it is clear that he has identified the Empress as the Woman Clothed with the Sun of Revelations, who is given two wings of an eagle that she might fly into the wilderness to escape the great dragon. Waite doesn't give his Empress wings in the RWS, but also identifies her as the same person, though she is "not the soul that has attained wings." Therefore in both decks, the Empress is not a true angel, an immortal spirit created by God, but a different character altogether.
The winged Empress is therefore even more important than an ordinary human woman. She is Mary, or Eve, a figure of important participation in Biblical history.
