B6 - B9: Amore, Carro Triomphale, Ruoto, Vecchio

For the rest of the cards before Death at 13, there are numerous variations. I am going to discuss the so-called "virtue" cards as one group (even though Justice was typically number 19 or 20 in the early lists) and the other cards before 13 as another group. I am going to discuss that second group first, since it presents the circumstances for the exercise of the "virtue" group. However I am going to discuss the card before Death, namely the Hanged Man, together in another group with Death because I think the two go together.

B6: Amore

On the early lists, the name was Amore, Love. It apparently became The Lover, L'Amoureux, in France, I cannot find pre-19th century cards with the plural, "Lovers". Nonetheless, in a Dionysian interpretation, the Love card is the marriage, or at least the love-at-first-sight meeting, of Dionysis and Ariadne, with his friend Cupid hovering overhead. From the early 18th century, there is actually a painting of this scene that looks very much like the Marseille II version of the card, with the older woman on the left as a Bacchante: (Again, the "Chosson" might not be 1672, or not originally by Chosson).

Alternatively, the card might be showing two candidates for initiation, male and female, being addressed by a female initiation leader. It might be as in Mozart's Magic Flute, where the two are destined to marry. Mystically, that could be the achievement of godlike androgyny, as depicted in alchemy.

The young man and the young woman are initiates enacting a sacred Dionysian drama; we were introduced to them in the previous card, where they were the acolytes taking an oath before the initiation-master. The older woman wearing the wreath is the Domina, the female initiator on the Dionysian sarcophagi. And there is another initiator, above them: Cupid, the Greek Eros. He is Dionysus, too. The Orphics identified Phanes, the first incarnation of Dionysus, with this Eros (http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/af/af10.htm):

First (I have sung) the vast necessity of ancient Chaos,
And Cronus, who in the boundless tracts brought forth
The Ether, and the splendid and glorious
Eros of a two-fold nature,
The illustrious father of night, existing from eternity.
Whom men call Phanes...

Phanes is Greek for "light-bringer", a suitable epithet for who is the center of intense rays of light. Dionysus as Eros is the instigator of love and passion. With his "two-fold nature", he represents the goal, the merger of the two into one, and also its product the child. Dionysus's wine is the lubricator of procreation. Cartari says that the ancients called Priapus the son of Venus and Dionysus because sexual love results from the combination of beauty and wine; however this function is also one that Dionysus himself serves. Cartari quotes a familiar saying that Venus can do nothing without Bacchus. There is also the Roman dramatist Terence: Sine Cerere et Baccho friget Venus, Without Ceres (bread) and Bacchus (wine) Venus (love) freezes (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Terence).

From the perspective of Dionysus as Osiris, another interpretation is possible: the marriage of Isis and Osiris, with their unborn son Horus on top, whom Plutarch called Apollo (hence the sunburst) and said was conceived and born even while his parents were in their mother the Moon's womb (Of Isis and Osiris XII, at http://thriceholy.net/Texts/Isis.html).

The descended Horus, Horus the child, the Greeks called Harpocrates. As the child of Osiris/Dionysus, they identified him with Priapus, as we can see from the passage below in Cartari, Lyon 1581 (http://www.uni-mannheim.de/mateo/camenaref/cartari/cartari1/te06.html). Priapus was the offspring of Venus and Dionysus. With his perpetual swollen member, he is an apt Egyptian version of the lower Cupid. The winged Horus would then be the celestial Cupid, in the exposition favored by Renaissance painters and humanists such as Equicola (see previous section on Plato and Ficino for more).

By his finger to the mouth, Harpocrates commended the virtue of silence, which is good for both the upper and lower mysteries of Bacchus and Venus. Below he appears in Cartari 1581 with his parents, Osiris as the all-seeing Sun and Isis, according to Cartari (p. 249-250 of the 1581, and the caption to the woodcut in the1647), as Angerona, goddess of the returning sun. Harpocrates' birthday was celebrated at the Winter Solstice, one of several precursors to Christ whose feast days Christianity co-opted.

The illustration did not use the device of the fold in the robe that we see in the d'Este paintings of Priapus. The 1647 version of this illustration gets around this issue by showing Carpocrates as a very Cupid-like little boy, even with wings; perhaps there is something in the text about his connection to the upper Horus, by then known as a hawk-god.

There are some hand gestures in the Chosson/Conver image that suggest an identification of the young man in the Lover card with the lower Cupid (Daimonax points them out in his discussion of the card).

In the Dodal of c. 1701, the young man hand points in the direction of his crotch. In the "Chosson" and Conver, it is the older woman's hand that does so, as though to say to him that marriage is about procreation. Meanwhile, the young woman has her hand on the young man's heart, indicating that for her the issue is love. In the two other cards, she has her hand in front of her belly. This is either to point to her womb (perhaps she is already pregnant) or a defensive gesture, that her love is chaste. Card players would have had fun with these gestures.

The earlier tarot Love cards have the lovers looking at each other and not some third party. This is also true for Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne: they look upon each other with transfixed gaze. Likewise Lorenzo de' Medici's carnival song opens:

Quest'è Bacco ed Arïanna,                Here are Bacchus and Ariadne,
belli, e l'un de l'altro ardenti:               Handsome, and burning for each other:
perché 'l tempo fugge e inganna,        Because time flees and fools,
sempre insieme stan contenti.            They stay together always content.

It is the lovers' union that is important: not only does one live in the other, as Erasmus characterized love, but the other lives in the one, even as God lives in his people.

Another important feature, among the early cards only in Milan, and then later in Noblet only, is that Cupid is blindfolded. This again is true to the Renaissance, as represented, for example, by Pico della Mirandola. One meaning of the blindfold is that when Cupid strikes, reason and good sense go out the window. But the Renaissance philosophy of Pico della Mirandolla kept the blindfold for another reason: Love is blind "because he is above the intellect" (Wind, Pagan Mysteries of the Renaissance  p. 54). The divine love here is that extolled by Plato, the love of God, the "joy above understanding" (Wind p. 56), to be experienced on the wings of Dialectic, i.e. the identification and transcending of contradictions.

For Pico and Ficino, as for Renaissance thinkers of many persuasions, it was by the union of the opposites (Nicholas of Cusa called it "the coincidence of opposites")--hence the "two-fold nature" of Eros in the Orphic quote--among them the male and the female, that one ascends the ladder toward God and a love beyond the capacity of the mind to grasp. When Pico spoke of a blind Cupid, he was consciously echoing a line from an Orphic hymn quoted by the Roman-era philosopher Proclus: "...in his breast guarding eyeless swift love" (Wind p. 57). For Proclus and Pico alike, "blind Amor" was an Orphic phrase for the love beyond intellect.

In the Marseille versions of the card, the two younger figures aren't looking at each other but at a third, older person. One  interpretation is that the card is one where the young man has to choose between between virtue, with a laurel wreath, and pleasure, decked with flowers. Depictions of "Hercules at the crossroads", based on a story attributed to Socrates by the Greek philosopher Xenophon, were common in the Renaissance, But such a choice hardly fits the Dionysian/Platonic interpretation of Socrates; for whom there are only lower and higher pleasures, and an ascent from one to the other.

In this vein, as early as 1498 Albrecht Durer did an etching, which he called simply "Hercules" (below), in which the figure of Virtue is about to club the recumbent Pleasure. Hercules blocks Virtue's swing with his cudgel. It is as if to say that Virtue need not oppose Pleasure, that the two can co-exist. The two ladies here are similar to two portraits Durer did at that time, of the same young woman, once as Piety and the other as Voluptas, Joy. They are the two aspects which when combined made a young woman attractive as a mate, as Panofsky observed (Durer, p. 41 and figs. 67, 68). 

Wind (p. 85f) relates that in 1618 the playwright Ben Jonson put on a masque for James I called "The Reconciliation of Virtue and Pleasure". Published in 1640, it made the point that even so-called lower pleasures such as dancing--which the English Puritans opposed--are not necessarily opposed to virtue: some dances even promote virtue--e.g. the ones in Jonson's masque. What is noble should be sweet", Jonson said. Yet the two poles are not equal: "Pleasure the servant, Virtue looking on", he concludes. Virtue must be in command. 

So perhaps on the Marseille version the young man is looking at the older woman for approval, and so is the young woman. Is their love virtuous? That is a question implicit in the Dionysus myth as well. His love for Nicea was not virtuous, since he took her asleep. But Ariadne, in the version of the myth represented by Titian and other painters, met his love with her own, and both rose to the stars.

On the Marseille card, the young woman has her hand to the young man's heart, as though to say that the pleasure she offers is of a loftier kind than mere sensuous enjoyment: her love is of the heart. The older one looks at both young people with a kindly expression: she is not Pleasure's rival at all. Virtue blesses the union of the young man with the mate of his heart.

B7: Carro Triomphale.

The Carro Triumphale, or Chariot, is Dionysus in his victory parade, the so-called "Triumph" which he was said to have invented. He is often shown in a chariot, usually pulled by centaurs. The victory hymn was called the "'Thriambos", from which the word "Triumph" derives (at least according to my Webster's New World Dictionary, 1967 edition). Not only that, but the first celebratory procession after military victories abroad was, according to Diodorus and others, that of Dionysus returning from India, as I have already discussed.

Otherwise, the card is of interest for reflecting the chariot of the soul in Plato's Phaedrus, in which first the dark horse leads the chariot to the experience of desire, and then its restraint by the light horse leads the chariot upwards toward the divine frenzy. The Phaedrus is nothing if not a Dionysian tract, in its philosophical phase. Here is how Plato describes the souls of gods and humans as charioteers (http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/phaedrus.1b.txt.):

...Now the winged horses and the charioteers of the gods are all of them noble and of noble descent, but those of other races are mixed: the human charioteer drives his in a pair; and one of them is noble and of noble breed, and the other is ignoble and of ignoble breed; and the driving of them of necessity gives a great deal of trouble to him... (1)

In the case of the Sforza (PMB) card (at left below), both horses have wings, go the same way and have the same color. The lady on the chariot must be one of Plato's goddesses, who rode their chariots in the highest part of the circuit of heaven. She is Chastity or Temperance, most likely, or some other virtue.

In the earlier Cary-Yale card (at right above), on the other hand, a groom is actually on top of one horse. That one has all four feet on the ground; that is Plato's horse of honor. The other has no human guide and is rearing its front feet, as though to charge ahead on its own initiative. It is the ignoble horse, the one that gives the charioteer a lot of trouble. The charioteer is actually the one on the horse, not the one on the chariot. So he is controlling his ignoble side by directing his noble side by reason. Later Chariot cards emphasized the two contrasting horses by giving them two colors, one light (whitish) and one dark (reddish). An example very close in time to the CY and PMB is the Chariot card from a Ferrara deck of c. 1450 (below left) that probably goes with two other trumps in Warsaw. A later example is the Catelin Geoffrey card of 1557 (below right), which like the Cary-Yale has a groom holding the noble horse, while replacing the woman with an older man. The groom is on the other side as compared with the Cary-Yale, but since the horses have also switched sides that makes no difference.

Here is what Plato says about the two horses later in his story:

The right-hand horse is upright and cleanly made: he has a lofty neck and an aquiline nose: his colour is white, and his eyes dark; he is a lover of honour and modesty and temperance, and the follower of true glory; he needs no touch of the whip, but is guided by word and admonition only. The other is a crooked lumbering animal, put together anyhow; he has a short thick neck; he is flat-faced and of a dark colour, with grey eyes and blood-red complexion; the mate of insolence and pride, shag-eared and deaf, hardly yielding to whip and spur.

This passage gives us an idea why in the Marseille version (below) there are no reins. The first horse responds to the words of the charioteer. The second horse is controlled by the first (although in Plato reins are in fact needed, for the unruly horse can be controlled only by the most concerted effort of both the other horse and the charioteer's pulling of the bit in its mouth).

In the Cary Sheet, it may be that the card was not colored. So the two horses are distinguished by their body positions. The head of the one on our left, the charioteer's right, goes in the direction of the other horse but its feet go the other way: the head follows reason, but the body does otherwise.

Noblet continues the body positions of the Cary Sheet, but reverses the direction that the horses look. Plato says that the noble horse is on the "better" side, which would be on the right. Noblet is seeing the horses from the perspective of the charioteer. He follows the Warsaw card and Catelin Geoffrey in making the horses different colors, reddish and whitish. In restoring the card, Flornoy got the colors more or less right; however in the original, the reddish horse seems to me the darker of the two. 

What then of the charioteer himself? Plato says he is the part of the soul that stands high enough up so that once he could see absolute Goodness, Beauty, etc., but now only discerns them dimly when he sees their imperfect copies in the material world, though a hazy recollection of his life before entering matter. He "sees through a glass dimly", the Jowett translation has it. Actually, the Greek is not so close to St. Paul's wording, although the sense is similar: he sees through darkened organs of perception. 

Neither horse has wings. Yet at the sight of Beauty, they start to grow back, as painfully as if they were new teeth. If the unruly horse has its way, then the horses are in danger of losing their wings for the next 9000 years. It depends on the strength of the charioteer--Plato has a vivid description of his effort reining in the unruly horse. That both horses are growing wings means that both are impulses toward the divine. But such impulses can go wrong without proper guidance. Only the strongest and most alert effort of will, in our card represented by the charioteer and the noble horse, can give the unruly horse a "holy fear", so that the chariot is directed well. Then both horses will move in the direction of the noble horse, as is starting to happen in the card.

The situation is similar to that of the Lover card, when the older lady is interpreted as Virtue and the younger as Pleasure. Both are needed to lead the soul upward. But it is as Ben Jonson said: "Pleasure the servant, Virtue looking on".

All this is in accord with Christian Neoplatonism. Divine beauty is none other than God, whom we must not try to be at one with through excessive zeal but approach in holy fear as well as desire, with no care for life, possessions, or other considerations of ordinary prudence, but with a respect born of fear. It is exactly such respect for Virtue that will be needed in the trials to come.

In the 1760-61 Conver version of the card (below), the horses are regrettably the same color. However Conver has made some effort to convey the meaning, in that the charioteer wears epaulettes that look like the masks of tragedy and comedy: the one being the sorry road of unmastered passion and the other the happy road of virtue's triumph (as in "Divine Comedy"). The two are not very clear, but the two masks, put side by side to represent drama as a whole, was seen everywhere. Camoin and Jodorowsky differentiated them in their "restoration" (with much interpretation as well) of 1999.

For Renaissance Platonists reading their Plutarch, it might have seemed that Plato had selectively borrowed the horses' colors from Egypt. For Plutarch (Of Isis and Osiris 22) says that red was the color of Seth, the god of disorder and suffering, while white was the color of Horus, son of Osiris and representing right order.(The part where he says that black was the color of Osiris must be selectively disregarded.) The struggle between the two horses is the epic battle between Seth and Horus for the throne of Egypt. And just as both horses are needed for things to go right, so in Plutarch's account, on Isis's orders Seth is not killed but only mastered. Such is the world, and as it should be, as Plutarch says in section 45:

For the harmony of the universe is reciprocal, like that of a lyre or bow, according to Heraclitus, and according to Euripides:—

“Evil and good cannot occur apart;
There is a mixture to make all go well.”

For without evil, there is no virtue, merely the habit of doing things in a certain way. And without disorder and opposition, there is no need for the creativity needed to surmount the opposites and ascend the ladder.

B8: Ruota. 

Early lists mostly have the Wheel before the Old Man; but sometimes it was the other way around (see "archaic orderings" at http://l-pollett.tripod.com/cards26.htm). It doesn't make much difference. She is. blindfolded in the PMB's Sforza card of the 1450s (center below), to signify that she strikes out at random, who strips us of our materiality and puts us in the position of the Vecchio, later called the Hermit.

The Wheel of Fortune is a traditional Greco-Roman symbol, symbolizing the buffets of fate. I think it is significant that in the Cary Sheet the man at the bottom still is on the wheel, hoping for another rise upward. In that way he is like the man on the bottom of the Wheel in the marble pavement of Siena Cathedral

The card-designers could have read about the Wheel in Clement of Alexandria, who in a chapter on symbolism speaks of a "Wheel that is turned around in the precincts of the gods and that was derived from the Egyptians".  For clarification, there was also Hero of Alexander, who said, "In Egyptian sanctuaries there are Wheels of bronze against the door-posts, and they are movable so that those who enter them may set them in motion, because of the belief that bronze purifies". Also, Proclus spoke of the Orphic "Wheel of birth" in the same context, which leads to purification. Since the Greek writers attributed the doctrine of reincarnation to the Egyptians, the card-designers would have assumed, with them, that the wheel in Egypt symbolized purification through successive incarnations. (I get these quotes from Jane Ellen Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, p. 591f. More from Proclus is in Thomas McEvilley, The Shape of Ancient Thought... - Google Books Result, p. 145.)

There is a suggestion of at least an arc, like that of the sun, from birth to death, and ascent/descent, in Noblet's version of the card (below, where Noblet's restoration makes the blue in the original clearer). There is water at the bottom on both sides, as though the ascending figure has come from it and the descending figure returns to it.

The Sphinx-like little king at the top of the wheel is an Egyptian image: Egyptian sphinxes, as opposed to Greek ones, were representations of the Pharaoh with the body of a lion, as the Greek authors on Egypt recorded. Yet perhaps the card makers attached the Greek meaning to them, derived from the famous story of Oedipus. The Sphinx, with her simple riddle, lured him into becoming King of Thebes and marrying its Queen. He thought he was clever, outwitting the oracle that had predicted he would kill his father and marry his mother. Yet the Queen of Thebes was in fact Oedipus's mother, and the reason she was a widow was that Oedipus had unwittingly killed her husband, Oedipus's father. The Sphinx at the top of the wheel suggests that "pride goeth before a fall", as they say, and that the future is out of one's hands. 

In tragedy, part of the Greek theatre of which Dionysus was the patron, there was the rise and fall of flawed heroes; in comedy, there was the suffering of the outcast who is restored to grace in the end. The sphinx-like king at the top of the Wheel in the "Marseill" designs might be a nod to the tragedy in which the sphinx both raises him up, as he gets the kingship of Thebes by answering its riddle, and brings him down, in that he thereby marries his mother.

In the Osiris myth we have his wise reign, then his treacherous murder, and finally his eventual triumph, through his son in this world and by his own and his wife's merit in the next. That is a cycle that ends happily, like that of Christian salvation.

For Dionysus, there is a cyclical development through incarnations: he is born as the child of Zeus, yet is dismembered by the Titans. He is conceived again, and Hera takes away his mother. Then Hera inflicts him with madness. He triumphs in India and again in Thebes. He wants to marry Nicea, and even violates her while in a drugged sleep, but she kills herself. He marries, but his wife, and in some accounts he himself, is killed by Perseus in his reckless attack on Argos (I will give the Roman-era references when discussing the Tower card).  He descends to Hades but eventually rises to Olympus.
 
In some early cards, such as the 15th-16th century Italian one in black and white above, the initiates are shown wiser going down than up, as shown by which part is human. The same was true in many depictions of the Wheel outside of the cards. Andrea (http://www.letarot.it/page.aspx?id=122) quotes from the early 16th century poet Ariosto, in his Satires (VII, 46-54)on this point:

Quella ruota dipinta mi sgomenta / ch’ogni mastro di carte a un modo finge: / tanta concordia non credo io che menta. / Quel che le siede in cima si dipinge / uno asinello: ognun lo enigma intende, / senza che chiami a interpretarlo Sfinge. / Vi si vede anco che ciascun che ascende / comincia a inasinir, le prime membre, e resta umano quel che a dietro pende”
(That painted wheel dismays me / that every card maker paints in the same way: / I don’t think I like seeing so much harmony. / What is set painted on its top / is a little donkey: everyone understands the enigma, / without calling a Sphinx to interpret it. / We can also see that everyone who ascends / starts to become a donkey, and what stays back and leans it is the human side).

The Sphinx, which perhaps even then sometimes replaced the donkey at the top (or why would he mention it?), in this way is an agent of the divine, evil serving good.

There is an Orphic medallion that contains iconic elements seen in all three of the preceding cards, Love, Chariot, and Wheel. I show it below together with another Chariot card,  Northern Italian, that I haven't shown yet. It is one of those cards found in the Sforza Castle and estimated to be c. 1600.

Most obvious on the medallion--and on the card as well--is the chariot, with what I think is a male and female riders, whom I suspect are Dionysus and Ariadne on the medallion. As in many of the early cards, the horses have a groom; I am not sure, but I think there is a horse on the card with a rider. In the medallion the groom is Mercury, god of intelligence and also guide of souls in the afterlife. The driver, urging the horses on, is Eros, Desire in the Platonic sense of that which leads us toward Beauty and the other divine archetypes. He would also seem to be the charioteer on the card as well, holding his flag; or is it a wing attached to his back?  Besides these elements, there is the wheel below them, the Orphic wheel of fate. And there is the ladder of ascent, from one level to the next. The medallion is very ancient; as it has on it only 11 signs of the zodiac, for at one time Scorpio took up two months, and the Balance, the only non-animal sign of the zodiac, wasn't yet there. But given the close similarity between the Sforza Castle card and the medallion, it is my strong surmise that it was known in 16th century Italy.

B9. Vecchio.

In most of the early cards, the Vecchio, or Old Man, is an old man on crutches, modeled on representations of Petrarch's Triumph of Time (at left below). But in the PMB card he gets a lantern (at right). That makes him more the one shining the light of truth in the darkness. His prototype may have been Diogenes, who had carried a lantern in the middle of the day and said he was looking for an honest man. Or it might have been one of those old hermits who spent their days meditating and having visions in the desert, like St. Anthony, frequently depicted in the Renaissance with his visions of demons.

He might have also been seen in terms of the Grail hermit Trevizent. Grail stories were popular then; the same workshop that did the PMB probably did a series of Grail Legend illustrations of around that time and place, judging from the style (Kaplan Encyclopedia of Tarot Vol. 2 pp. 162, 164; to view, see http://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=365&start=10#p4604 , http://www.tarotforum.net/showthread.php?p=1998820). Also, Pisanello in 1440 had decorated the castle at Mantua with a whole series of Grail Legend illustrations (http://www.thais.it/speciali/PISANELLO/Pisanello.htm).

In both the French (by Chretien) and German (by Wolfram) versions of the story (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceval,_the_Story_of_the_Grail, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parzival), the hero Parsifal/Parzival meets an old hermit who tells Parsifal/Parzival what he needs to know after he has been disgraced by a "loathsome damsel" at Arthur's court. The damsel (named Cundrie, in Wolfram) had said he failed to do what had been required of him at the Grail Castle, that of asking the proper question. Instead, he followed the advice of his previous mentor and kept quiet when in the presence of people he didn't know. Earlier he had been mostly impressed by knights in shining armor. Then, with this turn of Fortune, he is willing to listen to someone dressed more humbly, who tells him who he is and what he must do. The ignorant fool is learning wisdom.

It seems to me that the protagonist's name must have some relationship to "Parfait Fol" in French, "perfect fool", and that this relationship would have been recognized. So the story is another version of the "fool's journey", which is also told in the "game of the fool"--or madman--i.e. tarot.Likewise, "Trevizent" suggests "Thrice-seen," (Latin passive participle visus), i.e. Hermes Trismegistus.(For a more precise derivation of "Trevizent" from "Trismegistus", see Kahane & Kahane, The Krater and the Grail: Hermetic Sources of the Parzival.)

In that sense, the Hermit is like the initiator in the Dionysian sarcophagi, who leads the initiate through the darkness of this life (below, from http://www.bacchos.org/tarothtm/0et9mathermite2.html).

There is no lantern here, but in Apuleius's Golden Ass, part of the procession of Isis has people with lanterns (Lindsay translation p. 240, at Google Books in Marvin Meyer's The Ancient Mysteries, p. 181):

There was a further host of men and women who followed with lanterns, torches, waxtapers, and every other kind of illumination in honour of Her who was begotten of the Stars of Heaven.

In his personal initiation that follows, the protagonist of the novel is described as holding a torch. Likewise, torches are quite visible in other Dionysian sarcophagi (also from Daimonax, http://www.bacchos.org/tarothtm/15diable2.html).

We may also notice in this connection the suggestions of a rising sun in the folds of the later Hermit of the "Chosson" and the Conver.
 
The title of this card changed over the centuries. From Vecchio, Old Man, in the early lists, it becomes "L'Eremite" in the Noblet and still in the "Chosson". Then with Conver it changes to "L'Hermite". (Daimonax points this out at http://www.bacchos.org/tarothtm/0et9mathermite3.html). Since the "h" is not pronounced in French, it may be making explicit a double meaning that existed even in the earlier title. "L'Hermite" is a word that suggests not only the hermit but also the Hermetic, which derives from Hermes Trismegistus, the legendary writer of the Corpus Hermeticum and founder of alchemy. Some people might also have seen a connection between "Trismegistus" and "Trevrizent", Wolfram's name for the hermit of Parzival (which in fact does derive from "Trismegistus" according to Kahane & Kahane, The Krater and the Grail: Hermetic Sources of the Parzival).

In the 17th and 18th centuries, alchemy was quite fashionable, and mysterious books could be purchased with tantalizing images suggestive of this card. Here is one that shows an old man in something like an egg, shutting him off from the world (Daniel Stolcius de Stolcenberg, Viridarium chymicum figuria cupro incisis adornatum et poeticia picturis illustratum 1624, fig. XCIX; I take it from Fabricius, Alchemy fig. 193 p. 109). He in isolation yet in contact with his spirit and soul (the two little birdlike creatures). The lines in the picture link him to the other world.

 

He is in one of those states of madness described by Plato, Ficino, and Erasmus. Agrippa classified it as melancholia, but not in the sense of sadness and irritability with others, but as a state of detachment from the world. To be sure, those born under Saturn are afflicted with melancholy, but some of them also see beyond the visible into the realm of prophecy and divine inspiration. Agrippa (Three Books on Occult Philosophy Book I Ch. LX) listed three types of divine melancholy. According to Tyson's commentary to the English translation, this positive side of melancholy went back to pseudo-Aristotle, in the 13th of his Problems. That is is another side of the alchemical adept: melancholy much of the time, isolating from society, but also no stranger to spiritual ascent.

Another 17th century alchemical engraving shows an old man with a lantern like the Hermit's (Michael Maier, Atalanta Fugiens, 1618, emblem XLII: I take it from Fabricius, Alchemy fig. 84 p. 55). He is the alchemist following Nature's footsteps in his alchemical experiments, as some interpret the image.

It also can be seen Wisdom, that of the Platonic "anima mundi", soul of the world, who speaks in the language of nature. That is made explicit in another version of the same scene, done . The Jewish star or hexagram signifies arcane knowledge, Kabbalah of the Christian sense that was infused into alchemy by the 17th century. (This is from the frontispiece to the Musaeum hermeticum, 1625, reproduced by de Rola Golden Game p. 184. Here the animal of the sun is the lion, as the sun astrologically governs Leo, and that of the moon the crayfish, i.e. Cancer.)
It is hard to know how far back this association between the Hermit and the alchemist goes. The alchemist, as a spiritual figure and in personality, was associated with Saturn, who was typically depicted as lame (see e.g. the illustration at http://astrolibrary.org/saturn-house.html), as in the man on crutches; even as far back as the PMB, there is a resemblance to contemporary representations of Saturn, as for example in the so-called "Tarot of Mantegna" (below).