The Magician's Lemniscate

I was reading of certain sources ascribing the magician's hat as a incorporating the Lemniscate -- a symbol of mathematical infinity. I noticed that this concept of representing "infinity" by using the lemniscate was first suggested by the English mathematician John Wallis in 1650 and before that time was used by the Romans to denote 1,000, which was a very large by Roman standards.

Considering the creation of the J. Noblet Tarot (1650 thereof), how likely is it that such a correlation exists between the big, floppy hat and the symbol of infinity? I rather doubt there is one, considering the turmoil of the times across the English Channel and the much slower dissemination of ideas, not too mention the difficulty in the average (and even above average) person's ability to read and readily adapt complex mathematical treatises to esoteric notions but . . .
This idea must come from a much later rumination upon Tarot imagery (I suspect).

P.S. For everyone's amusement I include this graphical meditation upon Bernoulli's lemniscate. It's really quite cool.
http://thor.prohosting.com/~nraak/bernoullis.htm

IIRC, turning the Magician's hat into an explicit lemniscus shape is something that was started, IIRC, in the Oswald Wirth tarot from the late nineteenth century. Wirth's lemniscus was at least still planted firmly on the Magician's head, not floating above it like a Renaissance halo that got run over by a truck.

The conventional Roman numeral for 1000 is usually written as M; thus MMIII for 2003 and so forth. This was originally written much more cursively with rounded shapes. Thus, half of M is D. The original design for the Roman numeral for 1000 was two D's, one mirrored with the standard one, that shared a common centre line. This design resembled an uncial M, so the convention came about that M = 1000 and D = 500.

Thanks

That is good to know. I should take some time and read up on Wirth too.

After that damned Batman movie, anytime I hear the name "Oswald", I think of "the Penguin". Yeech!

ihcoyc said:

Wirth's lemniscus was at least still planted firmly on the Magician's head, not floating above it like a Renaissance halo that got run over by a truck.

Click to expand...

They didn't have trucks in those days. Most likely a Chariot.