Mitosis and the Devil?

I'm not sure if this has been addressed before, I apologize if it has, but none of my books have any mention of it. Basically, the two spheres at the base of the Devil Trump, XV, are representations of cells in the anaphase stage of mitosis. The chromosomes are lining up and pairing off. I'm not sure if anyone knows what this is to symbolize...2 becoming 4? New beginnings? Rebirth?

Henry

Henry lee, I noticed it too and I did mention it here somewhere!! Under "favorite tarot symbolism"

I am so excited someone else mentioned this! It's a really odd image and one I had seen numerous times under a microscope, it was so embedded in my subconscious that it took a while for me to consciously notice it.

I think every card - or many of them - have some image relating to the reproductive sperm-egg-zygote-mitosis-gestation etc. cycle, if you look closely.

I always thought they were a big pair of testicles.

What's a mitosis then?

Mitosis is what it is called when any cell divides into two cells.
It is not really sexual, except in the sense of creating something new.
What it really is, is asexual reproduction.

Those two spheres on the card, without the human figures in them, look just like a cell looks when it is about to divide in two.

Like what they show on TV?
One cell, two cell, four cell. eight...?

I did that once. It came out as a baby.
Was I surprised!

Cheers. Mitosis is my new word for the day.
I'll have to look at the card again with that in mind.

I just thought, oh, look, it's a big wotsit.
Like the A in Crowleys sig.

Astrid, if you see that at work every day you must be a scientist or something. That's so cool.

When a fertilized egg cell divides and comes out as a baby, it is called meiosis, not mitosis.
With mitosis, depending on what cell it starts with, it can come out as skin, or any part of the body (or as part of a plant, or anything else which has cells). Or, as cancer, if the division continues unchecked.

I'm with Astrid in being glad this was mentioned. I'm surprised I never noticed it.
I've been looking at the Devil card today in general and only just noticed the phallic-testicular interpretation a few hours ago.

Before that, I looked at this card and thought, well, there's a column, going through a circle; there's a goat (probably representing Pan), with bizarrely long horns which I've never seen on a real goat (twisted like DNA); and he's got grapes on his head (probably a reference to Bacchus). And a third eye. He seems to be standing on nothing.
Then the two spheres at the bottom- on the left, three women and a child- they seem to be pushing out at the boundaries of the sphere; on the right, three men and some creature- the creature is pushing down two of the men's heads and standing on the other, and the man on the bottom seems to be holding the two others together.
A winged staff with two snakes, but not a caduceus.
Tangled cloudy grey stuff over a pink background.

Pan made it sexual enough, but now the phallic symbolism and the mitosis. Maybe it's about both division and restraint, the sexual and the asexual.

Hi Lillie!
I was referring to my days as a student years back. Took a lot of lab science classes, and we looked at cells apparently way too much. (These days I am actually a mom and sculptor)

.
"Tangled cloudy grey stuff over a pink background."
I think this quote says it all!!!

HenryLee said:

The chromosomes are lining up and pairing off. I'm not sure if anyone knows what this is to symbolize...2 becoming 4? New beginnings? Rebirth?

Click to expand...

Testes (male) correspond to the ovaries (female) as glands associated with the function of generation. Though Trump XV is described by Lon Milo DuQuette (in his book, Understanding Aleister Crowley's Thoth Tarot) as the most masculine of all the cards in the Crowley deck, referring to the testicular/phallic complex as central to the Devil imagery, the presence of testes suggests the idea of ovaries, as well; this idea is further developed through the appearance of figures of both genders within the testes, standing in the positions occupied by the chained figures in the RWS deck. Thus man and woman, masculine and feminine impulses, unite multiple levels of being, becoming links in a chain of creation physically encoded in/enabled by the DNA coil or chain -- a commentary on the bondage theme typically assocated with Trump XV. Here, what is expressed is paradox: the inevitable appearance of the new, unpredictabiliy within the ground of what is already established, through the process of permutation, including (but not limited to) mitosis.

Crowley's use of numerology highlights this understanding, since numbers are entities, themselves, unfolding progressively and according to an ordered logic, simultaneously embodying and carrying out the process of manifestation. Two becomes four via three -- on the biological level, through the two testes and the phallus. One could draw many conclusions from the number symbolism associated with Trump XV, and all of them would be present in its symbolism -- I think that this is a basic message of the Devil: pure creative possibility, inherent in the organism.

Hajo Banzhaf, in the book The Crowley Tarot, refers to the four male and four female figures within the gonads as embryos which have "already been given the genotype as an architectural plan of God," underscoring these ideas and understanding the Devil as representative of the functions of life and creativity on all levels, exuberant and unstoppable, from seed-to-tree.