Rosanne said:
Flamen Dialis could or had the right to throw people off the roof of the Temple on Capitoline Hill. He could also throw slave chains off the same and free the slave.
The latter might be the more relevant meaning here. Depends on if this was known when tarot sprang up: interesting connexion.
The tower seems to have mostly three windows- the Trinity
Perhaps not primarily, as the Marseilles usually has them looking quite phallic, one tall window flanke by two 'gonads', which reinforces the orgasmic aspect of the surface meaning - it is a very complicated symbol-nexus here, the most complex one of all for me, even though complexity itself is specifically symbolized by LeMonde I think. But it is not the trinity that is having its crown burned off, rather something parading in importance in its place (externals). For 16 is the atomic number of sulfur, found primarily in the skin, hair, and nails.
...but I have absolutely no idea what the billiard Balls are all about ~Rosanne
They puzzle me as well, so I will speculate out loud. Certainly they represent debris, perhaps the resolution of the shattered into its constituent elemental units, units being rounds (ultimately). Hebrew ayin is bardic O and its oldest character a wheel
without spokes, meaning in the act of spinning round, to symbolize the driving motor, so to speak. O is 4 (making the round of the four quarters), hence 16's square root... but since 16 is S-willow and stands at the summit or keystone of the Royal Arch (the 'head', according to
Sefer Yetzirah), perhaps the little "O"s stand for the vapors of mercury (O's column in the alchemical vessel) rising up all the way to the level of S (top of vessel), these vapors being what compel that it be a
closed (round) vessel. In a sense of course they are the hanging boughs of the willow that mess up one's hair (though willow leaves are anything but round).
The two dots between crown and flame are our projection that there is a being
behind the misfortune or shattered illusion, though that being is in reality an aspect of the greater self (our own thinker, who willow-weaves the threads its doer spins).
One final capping rumination. As S, it is, in runic, a lightning-bolt (vertical zig-zag). In
The Two and the One (N.Y.: Harper & Row, 1965), page 22, Mircea Eliade said, "The rapidity of spiritual illumination has been compared in many religions to lightning. Furthermore, the swift flash of lightning rending the darkness has been given the value of a
mysterium tremendum which, by transfiguring the world, fills the soul with holy terror." This trump is not the oak ("god who makes fire for a head") LePendu who receives the enlightening flash, but rather the flash itself. (Though it aims for the summit it veers as it approaches its target usually, leading to its being 'gathered in' by the laterally extending 'arms' of oak, making oak the most common 'burnt offering'.) The orgasm, which like this flash leaves the individual somewhat changed, is its external 'caricature', save when the aim is procreation, in which case it becomes more of a 'solidification' of it I guess (a talismanic 'harnessing' of Light). But note the fiery 'bolt' hits the tower's head, not its base: it casts duality down
to its base. I suppose the relation to orgasm, then, is the latter's unifying effect when the goal of the couple is united in desire for offspring (lawful invocation of the Name).