Author's note: This essay was revised slightly in Sept. 2017,
adding one
paragraph to the discussion of the world-soul, relating it to the Myth
of Er in the Republic, and making a few changes immediately before and
after. It was revised more extensively in August 2018, adding material
from Ficino and more from Piscina.
The tarot is an enigma, so little is known about the early
years of
its recorded history. Especially unclear is the rationale, if any, for
the 22 special cards that were added to the regular suits, i.e. the
“major arcana”, the 21 trump cards plus the Fool. How were these images
chosen and why are they in a particular order? That is a
subject made doubly difficult if one considers that there were over a
dozen early orders and that no one knows the circumstances of the
tarot's creation, not even how many special cards there were, even if
the number soon became 22 everywhere.There are of course numerous theories about how the tarot came to be.
One
aspect of the tarot is the sequence of designs and corresponding
titles, which remains remarkably constant despite the various ways of
ordering them. Given
the various
symbol systems then popular among various strata of the people in Italy
during the formative period of the tarot, which of them make sense of
the tarot's order, images, and titles when applied to the cards as they
existed in one or more of its early centers? Roman
Catholic Christianity, in Latin and its vernacular derivatives, has to
be one such symbol system, at least for many of the
images. (I specify these languages because some of the original titles
differ from their English versions.) The images of Giustizia (Justice),
Fortezza (Fortitude, Strength), Temperanza (Temperance, Self-Control),
Papa (Pope), Diavolo (Devil), Fuoco or Sagitta (Fire or Arrow, i.e. the
Lightning-Struck Tower), and l'Angelo (Angel, i.e. Judgment), for
example, reflect conventional imagery
in churches and illuminated manuscripts during the Middle Ages. However,
their medieval interpretations do not exclude those of other symbol
systems, if only after the fact, as
providing an interpretive schema for understanding the cards and their
order. Platonism, I think, is one such system.
Why
Plato? It is simple. He was, intellectually speaking, the “man of the
hour” in 15th century Italy. Before then, few people spoke Greek. and
only part of one work, the Timaeus, was available even in Latin.
Suddenly in the 14th and 15th centuries, with the collapse of the
Byzantine Empire, Italy was awash with manuscripts and teachers of
Greek, including the works of Plato.
Other Platonic
works in Greek arrived for the first
time as well. In the Middle Ages, again, what had been available was
mostly what had been written Latin, such as Cicero, Apuleius, and
Macrobius. An
exception was the writer in Greek called "Dionysius the Areopagite",
whose works
were deemed worthy of translation because he was confused with the
Dionysius mentioned in the Bible as a disciple of Paul, The author was
actually
a fifth century Greek Christianizer of the pagan Neoplatonist Proclus.
But by the 15th century
there were many more Neoplatonic works, including pseudo-Dionysius's
model, Proclus. This new interest in Platonic works was
accompanied by a new and elegant translation of pseudo-Dionysius by the
influential Florentine monk Ambrogio Traversari in c. 1436. Besides
Proclus, other Platonists became available in the 15th century as well,
Plutarch, Plontinus, Porphyry, and Iamblichus. and others. By the end of
the century there were, in the cities of the early tarot, new works in
the Neoplatonist tradition by Italian Christians written by those who
had studied the works of antiquity, most notably Marsilio Ficino, whose
commentaries on works he translated and his own theological works slowly
became available in the 16th century, to enjoy a continuing popularity
into the 17th and 18th.
In
such
conditions, it is reasonable to surmise that Platonism, which has been
fruitfully applied to Renaissance art, might also apply to the tarot
sequence. If any Platonic analyses were written, they have not survived;
however one of only two commentaries on the tarot, that by Francesco
Piscina in 1565 does make Platonic references (Love, Devil, Tower, and
to Ficino on Plato for the four suits; the modern editors' notes pick up
all but the one for Fire).
The paucity of documents does not mean that
humanistically educated people would not
have thought of the tarot in such terms, for several reasons. First,
there were few philosophical analyses even of works of high art then.
Symbolism was thought
to exist on many levels and was best left to be discovered by the
viewer, although a court humanist might discuss it orally with his
patron. Second, writing a Platonic interpretation would go against
entrenched ways of thinking. Clergy were accustomed to thinking that
Christianity had surpassed pagan thought and therefore going back to
Plato would be a regression. In the universities, it was thought that
the synthesis of Aristotle with Christianity achieved by Aquinas
included anything good Plato offered. Finally, some people who promoted a
broader approach were in fact persecuted by the Church (Pico, Reuchlin,
and Ficino almost, as documented in Vol. 9 of his letters); one never
knew what would be considered objectionable. Moreover, such
interpretations might cause the tarot itself to be outlawed, thus
depriving humanity of both any lessons to be derived from its trump
sequence and a game played with this special deck that they may have
found
superior to those with ordinary cards.
Then there is
the question of which decks, of those for which there are surviving
cards, such an analysis would apply to. The tarot decks of Milan and Pavia had somewhat different deigns
from those of Florence and Bologna, and those of Ferrara and Venice, while
related to the others, differed from both. In addition to cards, there is also the order
to consider. Although the first documentation of decks called "trionfi"
is in 1440
Florence, there is no indication of how many cards there were or their
order; the only 15th century account of the order is from the Ferrara
area,
some time after 1460, the so-called "Steele Sermon"; it lists
the usual 22 subjects in an order that is not completely the same as any to
which we are accustomed today.
While the main
subjects, as indicated by the titles that have been preserved, were much
the same from one deck to another, the other imagery on the cards
differs from deck to deck. Some Chariot cards have men on the chariot,
while others have women. Some Hanged Men have their hands clutching money bags, others have them tied behind their backs. The Star, Moon, and Sun cards show widely different scenes. If the
cards had allegorical meanings, such differences are important, even
if in playing a card game they are not. I am not going to deal with
all the variations. Instead, I want to make a case for a Platonic
interpretation of what was to become most popular French deck, the
so-called "Marseille" pattern, and what I take to be some of its
antecedents in 15th and early 16th century Milan.
Milan
has left us three partial early decks, perhaps four. In
the literature, they are referred to in terms of their modern owners or
former owners, names that are not very meaningful for present purposes;
what is more important are the dates tentatively given for their
completion. So here are the names
plus current estimates of the dates; later I will mostly just use dates.
The three certain ones are illuminated decks which Bandera and Tanzi, in the Brera Gallery's 2013 Milan exhibition catalog, attribute to the Bembo workshop in Cremona, near Milan. Two of these are early 1440s: one (Cary-Yale, or CY) is c. 1442; the other (Brera-Brambilla, or BB), is c. 1444. Why the BB is judged later is because it has 14 cards per regular suit suit, as in later decks, while the CY has 16 per suit. The CY has eleven surviving special cards, and the BB only two. (I am myself not sure this is a convincing reason.) The third deck (Pierpont Morgan Bergamo, or PMB) has cards in two different styles, one of the 1450s, with 14 of the special cards, and the other in a style of later in the century, with 6 others; I will call them the “1450s” and the “later 1400s” cards. Bandera and Tanzi attribute the 1450s cards to Bonifacio and Ambrogio Bembo and the “later 1400s” cards to Antonio Cicognara, an artist whose career began in c. 1480. Many tarot researchers do not accept that attribution or so late a date.
A fourth set of cards, called the Cary
Sheet, is
in the form of a sheet of unseparated cards of c. 1500, with all or
part of 18 special cards showing. It is not certain that this sheet
was of Milanese design, as the French then were occupying Milan.
But the cards are clearly descended from something like the earlier
illuminated decks of Milan, because of numerous features unique to early
Milan decks.
None of these four sets has 22 surviving
special cards. The BB of c. 1444 has only two. And of the usual
subjects the CY of c. 1442 has only eight; the other three are the
theological virtues Hope, Faith, and Charity. Put together, however, the
four sets do include all 22
normal subjects, even if two of them, the Devil and the Tower, are seen only in the c. 1500 Cary Sheet. That does not mean they weren't there earlier. Since both were associated with the Devil, and that card was thought favored by Satanists for use in spells, their owners might have discreetly gotten rid of them.
I am not going to argue that the tarot as
represented in
Milan and after was designed with Platonic allegories in mind. It might
have
been, since they fit so well. The original designers' intentions
are hard to determine; it is not even clear whether the tarot had
22 special cards at first or if that number was reached after a period
of development. I only want to show that it would have
been natural to see the tarot sequence from a Platonic perspective among
humanists and those who followed them, some cards as early as the first
extant decks, the rest by the end of the 15th century.
In
my presentation I am not going to follow the order as given in the
"Steele Sermon" or any other of the early lists, but rather from the
more to the less straightforward, in terms of Plato. This order also
corresponds more or less to when the relevant works by Plato, along with
other ancient works by Platonists, came to the attention of humanist
circles. At the end, I will give an overview of the whole sequence in
Platonic terms and following the French order, first attested in 1558
Lyon. an order very close to that of Milan and Pavia as given in the
16th century Lombard lists.
THE FOUR PRINCIPAL VIRTUES
One of the first newly available works of Plato to be translated into Latin was the Republic, first translated in 1404 (Hankins, Plato in the Italian Renaissance,
vol. 1 p. 108) and again in 1436-1440 (Hankins p. 120), both times in Milan.
In that work Plato defined the good life as that lived in accordance
with certain eternal "ideas". The Jewish Platonist Philo later called them
"archetypes", a term I prefer because it is less likely to be confused
with the word “idea” as it is used in English. Because the archetypes were unchanging
principles, Plato held them to be more real than the
changing and sometimes illusory objects that appear to our senses. Plato's
four basic ethical archetypes, for the state as well as the individual, were, as they became known in Latin, Temperantia (Temperance), Fortitudine (Fortitude or Strength), Sapientia (Wisdom), and Iusticia (Justice) (Republic IV 427c-444e; all Plato citations here are to The Collected Works of Plato,
ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, 1961). Their primacy later
became
part of standard Church doctrine, with just one change: instead of
Wisdom, the Church, following Cicero's terminology, had Prudence. In the
early
tarot, three of these virtues are card titles, in the early lists (I
give here the Italian and the French titles): Temperanza/ Temperance,
Fortezza/Force, and Giustizia/Justice, each depicted with standard
medieval attributes. The only omission was Prudenza/Prudence. I will
deal with the three virtues that became titles of tarot cards in due
course; in this section I want to discuss the omitted one.
Why
is one or the other of these virtues, Plato's Wisdom or Cicero's
Prudence, not named in the early lists? One possible explanation is that
Aristotle, and after him Aquinas, classified these these virtues as
intellectual, as opposed to moral, virtues.Alternatively. there might have been an issue of which to use (if not both). Wisdom, when differentiated from Prudence, was knowledge of divine things, too exalted for the common man. Prudence, as the use of reason to guide action, was within the reach of all, given the guidance of the Church. But if one authority has "Wisdom" and another "Prudence", it might be better to leave both out.
Another possibility is that Wisdom or Prudence, one or the other, was represented by a card with another title. One possibility is the Popess. Plato had a female wisdom-figure, Diotima, Socrates' initiator into the "mysteries of love" in the Symposium; she may be the same as what, in the Apology, he called his daemon, in the sense of guardian spirit, which warned him of courses of action that would be bad for him. If so, Diotima would be an inner voice with which Socrates conversed. A female Pope could then be such a figure in Christian dress, and an exemplar, in Platonic terms, of the archetype of Wisdom, corresponding to Prudence for the Church.
In
favor of the Popess as an embodiment of Prudence or Wisdom, the card
has two of their
medieval attributes, the cross-staff and the
book (at left above, the first known Popess, 1450s, supports the staff
with her right hand). An early example of Prudence with these attributes
is in an illumination of the 8th century, (at left: Autun, Bibliothèque
Municipale, MS 19 bis, fol. 173v, dated in Adolph
Katzenellenbogen, Allegories of the Virtues and Vices in Medieval Art,
1939; Lothar Teikemeier located the image online). Another, this one of
Wisdom from a 13th century manuscript in Florence's Laurentian Library,
Bibbia Mugellana 2, f. 189, is labeled Sapientia and wears a crown (below right). The illumination is of the first letter of "Omnis Sapientia a Domino Deo est et cum illo fuit", all wisdom is from the Lord God, and hath been always with him. (This information from Bibbie Miniate della Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana di Firenzi,
by Laura Alidori Bartaglia et al, 2006, p. 97; the Bible verse is
Ecclesiasticus 1:1, in the Vulgate's Latin and the Douhy Rheims' English
translation.) But why, if the Popess is Wisdom, is she not enthroned, as in
the illumination? We cannot say what the figure looked like originally, if she existed in earlier tarots before this one. But one answer, for the first card we do know, might be in Petrarch's treatment of the virtue in his De Remediis (1.12, “Sapienta”), which ends: “Nihil ascendat quam himilitas operosa: nothing leads higher than effort in humility" (Rawski translation, p. 36). Petrarch is echoing Augustine, who in the Enchiridion had said (Outler translation, 1955, online):
Human wisdom consists in piety. This you have in the book of the saintly Job, for there he writes that Wisdom herself said to man, "Behold, piety is wisdom."What kind of piety is Wisdom referring to? Augustine asks. His answer: “man’s service of God”, which is thereby “the source of human wisdom”. A humble and pious Wisdom will likely not be found on a throne.
THE POPESS AND THE CROWNED VIRGIN
Another association to the card, deriving from an association with the Church, might have been to the Virgin Mary. For example, Erwin Panofsky identified a 1302-1310 statue of a "crowned woman nursing two babies", by Giovanni Pisano on the pulpit of the Pisa Duomo, as "the regal figure of Maria-Sponsa-Ecclesia" (Studies in Iconology, p. 157 and note 97 of 1972 paperback edition). Panofsky did not explain the two babies. The crowned Virgin was the "Bride of Christ". This also identified her with the sponsa of the Song of Songs, who in turn was identified with the Church.
Virgins
with papal-like crowns appeared frequently in Renaissance art. Examples
are that of the Sienese painter Martino di Bartolomeo. c. 1400 (near
left)., and another in 1446 England, in the charter for the founding of
King’s College, Cambridge, for which the Virgin was one of the
College’s patron saints (far left). (This last image was posted on the
Tarot History Forum by Jean-Michel David.) The Virgin, like Wisdom, was often shown with a book, sometimes learning how to read from her mother, more often pointing to the Book of Isaiah at the Annunciation. For people familiar with such depictions, an association of the Popess card with the crowned Virgin would be a natural one, and from there, for those who knew their theology, to Wisdom and its earthly approximations. I do not say that the Popess is the Virgin, let me make clear, just that the Virgin is another image of the archetype for those who knew the symbols.
In these Bembo Virgins, there is some facial resemblance to the Popess. In one attributed to Ambrogio Bembo, 1445-1450 (at left above), she conforms to the standard late Gothic Lombard image of the Virgin, but also has some similarity to the Popess. In the "Ascension", c. 1440-1445, by his brother Bonifacio (at right above), the resemblance seems to me rather striking.
Coronations of the Virgin usually had a dove somewhere in the painting; the Bembo altarpieces do not. Tanzi says only, "l’assenza dello Spirito Santo è legata a una precisa questione dottrinale": "the absence of the Holy Spirit is linked to a precise doctrinal question" (Arcigotissimo Bembo. 2011, p. 27). Unfortunately he does not say what that question was. The Holy Spirit was indeed debated at the Council, especially when the Greek Church arrived; a major issue dividing the two Churches was whether the Holy Spirit “proceeded from the Father”, as the Greeks maintained, or “proceeded from the Father and the Son”, as the Latins said. In both Greek and Roman art, the Holy Spirit was frequently represented by a dove; whether the form the Holy Spirit took at Mary's coronation was part of the debate I do not know. But it is not far-fetched to hypothesize that Mary, in these Bembo altarpieces, replaced the dove, so that the three figures of the Coronation are also the Trinity. In support I can only quote the New World Encyclopedia (http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Holy_Spirit):
In light of the biblical notion of the androgynous image of God who created male and female in his image (Gen. 1:27), it has been suggested that a feminine Holy Spirit would be the appropriate counterpart to the male figure of the Son, who is manifest in Jesus Christ. The work of the Holy Spirit as comforter, intercessor and source of inspiration could be represented in the ministrations of Mary and other holy women of God.Mary is especially appropriate if she, like the Son, was with God from the beginning.
OTHER CARDS THAT MIGHT REPRESENT WISDOM OR PRUDENCE
The humility with which Petrarch characterized Wisdom, and which was depicted by means of the crowned Virgin, was also taught by Plato, in his account of the trial of Socrates. The oracle at Delphi had declared that no one was wiser than Socrates (Apology 21a). Socrates did not believe that, but when he listened to others, he concluded that perhaps he was, because he at least knew when he was ignorant (21b)l Also, any prudence he evidenced, he said, was the result of listening to a voice within him (31d), his daemon, i.e. a divine source.
However the first surviving Old Man card (of which a detail is at left) is dressed rather well, and he carries an hourglass. That associates him with Time, Chronos, and probably also to Cronos, the Greek Saturn, who was associated with Chronos by the similar pronunciation of the words. Later versions of this card turned the hourglass into a lantern, which perhaps is a symbol of illumination, i.e. wisdom or knowledge. In Plato's "allegory of the cave" (Republic VII, 514-521) the light of a fire is a weak substitute for sunlight, i.e. true illumination. But perhaps it is a start. Socrates never claimed to be wise; he was merely wiser than those who thought they had wisdom. On the "Marseille" versions, a fold in the Hermit's robe resembles a sun with its rays, another suggestion of illumination, or at least a semblance of it.
But
Wisdom or Prudence, as an intellectual virtue, might have been thought
of as separate from the others and so near the beginning, where the
Popess is, or at the end. At the
end (or possibly second to the end, as it was in Florence and Bologna),
the World is the highest card, triumphing over everything else,
just as Plato’s virtue of wisdom governs the others. In Florence
the earliest extant World card, c. 1460-1470, shows
a lady with an octagonal halo (near left), like the
ladies on that deck's virtue cards. If the card was a virtue there, it
might have been one in Milan. The obvious one is Prudence or Wisdom. Of
the latter, the personfied Wisdom of God, the Book of Wisdom said, "She
reacheth, therefore, from end to end mightily, and ordereth all things
sweetly.", and also "And if riches be desired in life, what is richer
than wisdom, which maketh all things? (Wis. 8:1 and 8:5, Douay-Rheims
translation of Vulgate). However she
might also be the Triumph of Fame, which. Boccaccio had described in
connection
with a circle with villas, hills, and seas in it; similar circles
are in the illustrations of this part of Petrarch's poem. One version
of this card (the Visconti) has a sea. There are other possibilities,
too, to be discussed later.
It is possible that the city
in a bubble
on the c. 1480 World
card of Milan (far left) was seen as an approximation of Plato’s ideal
republic. If so, the city would be a model of wisdom. Alternatively, if
that card depicted the New Jerusalem of the
Book of Revelation, it again would be an illustration of prudence and
wisdom. For
such a reward, it was prudent to embrace Christianity. For Plato as
well as Christianity, Wisdom as such was known only in heaven.
The Risposta [Answer] of Imperiali to the Invettiva [Invective] of Lollio, Ferrara c. 1554, as Andrea Vitali has pointed out (http://www.letarot.it/page.aspx?id=124&lng=eng),
listed "prudentia" in the place where one would expect the Hanged Man. The image at that time was conventionally used on posters denouncing someone as a traitor, and was in fact the punishment often given to traitors. Its presence in the deck might have been a replacement for a different image of Prudence, which showed a woman holding a mirror and looking behind her. The Hanged Man is a rather vivid reminder to the players not to be disloyal to one's lord or city, and to the ruler of the appropriate punishment.
THE DIGNITARIES
Soon
after Plato's death the "Ideas" or "archetypes" came to be thought of as within the
mind of God. As such they entered the "Names of God" tradition of the
Middle Ages. This interpretation had developed after the medieval translations (10th
century) of
pseudo-Dionysius's book of that name. In On Divine Names pseudo-Dionysius had said (1.4, Luibheid translation):
For we shall be equal to the angels, as the truth of the Oracles affirms, and sons of God, being sons of the resurrection. But now, to the best of our ability, we use symbols appropriate to things Divine, and from these again we elevate ourselves, according to our degree...
The
"divine names" needed symbols, i.e. words or images that would lead
us upwards from the everyday to the divine. This text, remember, had
been
newly translated in Florence in 1436. Images as well as words were
symbols. This principle can be applied to the Popess as Wisdom, one of the divine names, but also to the three cards after her in the order: Empress, Emperor, and Pope.
The Empress (c. 1442 and 1450s at left), as the one who gives birth to and nurtures new emperors, is an embodiment of the divine name “source of life” (856B). The 1450s Empress’s green glove in that deck is a symbol of the ever-renewing cycle of life. Her shield, displaying the symbol of the Holy Roman Empire, sits on her lap, where an infant would sit in a
portrait of a mother and child. The divine name "King of Kings" (969A) is a term readily understood as relating to the Emperor; (in the c. 1442 version, far left, and 1450s, near left). Another divine name is “Ancient of Days" (936D), which doesn't fit the 1442 Emperor (far left), but does the 1450s one (as well as the
Hermit/Old Man).As if recognizing the analogy to God, the designer of the 1450s cards changed the Emperor's appearance so that he would have a long white beard similar to that of God the Father on the card depicting the Last Judgment (detail below left). We may have been intended to see the 1450s Emperor as embodying qualities of God (for which see Andrea Vitali's essay on the card, here). The Emperor card in the 1440s decks, in contrast (the CY's is at left above), looks more like the real emperor at that time.
Typically the emperor was shown with a globe in one hand and a scepter in the other, showing his authority over the whole world, or at least a large part of it. Christ in Majesty, like the Emperor, was depicted on a throne. And while he usually holds a book, thus masculinizing the figure of Wisdom, he sometimes held a globe instead, sometimes surmounted by a cross. Occasionally he also has a scepter, making him a kind of model in ideal form for his earthly equivalent as ruler of the world. .
The divine name "Holy of Holies" (On Divine Names 969A) fits the Pope; his priestly vestments
signify the “capacity to guide spiritually to the divine and mysterious
sights” (533A). His shorter beard, compared with the Visconti-Sforza Emperor, might suggest that he has more to
learn, but I think it is simply the way the artist was drawing popes and other still vigorous but aging men. A similar beard is on
Pope Gregory the Great in the Cavalcabò Chapel in St. Agostino, Cremona,
by the same Bembo workshop (Tanzi, Archigoticissimo Bembo, 2011, p. 70). The divine name "Eternity" (937B) fits the Sforza World card as portrayed in the late 15th century card shown earlier, two putti (child angels) gesturing to a city in a bubble. It also fits the Marseille tarot card with the symbols of four evangelists in the corners, each of which had symbolic meaning (336D-337A).
"Time" for Plato was “the moving image of eternity” (Timaeus 37d) and for ps.-Dionysius was another “name of God” (937B); it fits the Hermit, then called both the Old Man or Time, early on holding an hourglass. For him there is also the divine name "Ancient of Days".
The three cards that had the names of virtues—Iustitia, Fortitudine, and Temperantia--are also names of God or closely related concepts. All the virtues flow from God’s goodness. God's Justice is ps.-Dionysius's “Righteousness”, by which God orders his cosmos, thus “giving each thing what it inherently deserved” (896A). "Omnipotence" (936A), another divine name, meaning unlimited strength, descends to humanity as Fortitude, i.e. Strength in the sense of "strength of soul", as opposed to body. But God himself is Fortitudine, the Italian Fortezza, in the sense that his strength, of whatever in God corresponds to soul in humans, can overcome any evil; and on earth as Christ, he displays the same, treating pain and death itself as to be preferred over compromise with evil. Temperance (717A) is in God his self-control, meaning that his rational aspect dominates over anything in him corresponding to the emotions or appetites that humans think in terms of.
Rather than being Divine Names themselves, the figures on these cards are vivid, memorable examplars corresponding to them. Some depict mortals in our world; others are simply symbolic images: e.g. for Fortitude a woman putting her hand on or into the muzzle of a lion; for Justice, one holding a sword and a scales, and for Temperance, one pouring liquid from one vessel to anothe; it is either water, to dilute wine, or cold water to dilute hot, either way the virtue of moderation.
In the Milan-based tarot, the cards are in the order Justice-Fortitude-Temperance, with one or more cards in between. This order is not seen in previous sources; with Prudence added at the end, the most usual order was that given by St. Thomas Aquinas (http://catholicism.about.com/od/beliefsteachings/tp/Cardinal_Virtues.htm). Plato in the Republic, with Wisdom instead of Prudence, gave them in the order Temperance-Fortitude-Wisdom-Justice, with Temperance as the virtue that governs our bodily appetites, Fortitude our spirit, Wisdom the rational part, and Justice the management of the three previous. Once Wisdom or Prudence is removed, the order Temperance-Fortitude-Justice is that of Florence and Ferrara. The Bible, another source, gave them in another order at Wisdom 8:7: "She [Wisdom] teacheth temperance, and prudence, and justice, and fortitude, which are such things as men can have nothing more profitable in life." This, excluding prudence, is the order seen in Bologna.
HOW PICTURES WERE BETTER THAN WORDS
Images of the sort found in the tarot were thought even more suitable for divine things than words. This dictum was understood at least by the 1430s, following the 1419 discovery of an ancient book called Hieroglyphica, Greek for "sacred carvings"; it professed to interpret the picture writing of the Egyptians, explaining how the Egyptians used pictures of animals and other things to represent complex ideas. Humanists connected this with what other ancient writers said about Egyptian writing. In Latin, for example, there was Tacitus (c. 56-after 117 c.e.), in his Annals Book 14 (http://classics.mit.edu/Tacitus/annals.7.xi.html):
It was the Egyptians who first symbolized ideas, and that by the figures of animals. These records, the most ancient of all human history, are still seen engraved on stone. The Egyptians also claim to have invented the alphabet, which the Phoenicians, they say, by means of their superior seamanship, introduced into Greece....As he and others explained, the Egyptians had a phonetic writing for everyday use, but for higher things they used pictures. The Christian bishop Isidore of Seville (c. 560-636) was another Latin source (trans. Barney, p. 39, in Google books):
Queen Isis devised the Egyptian letters when she came over from Greece. The priests used some letters and the common people used others. The priestly letters are known as eiros (sacred) and the common letters, pandemos (common) .There were also many similar accounts in ancient Greek writings. So in the 1440s Leon Battista Alberti could write of the Egyptians, in De Edificio (On Building, in ten books, trans. Rykwert, Leach, and Tavernor, p. 256):
They maintained that each nation knew only its own alphabet, and that eventually all knowledge of it would be lost—as has happened with our own Etruscan. The same, the Egyptians claimed, should happen to all other alphabets, whereas the method of writing they used could be understood easily by expert men all over the world, to whom alone noble matters should be communicated..Pictures were more lasting than words for conveying noble or sacred matters; not only were the meanings hidden from those who would not understand them, but they would be clear even without words to those acquainted with Truth.
Moreover, pictures could easily embody a multitude of equally valid interpretations. In his essay "Rings", c. 1432, Alberti gave several interpretations of his own favorite image, that of a winged eye, which he imagined put on a ring. Then he added (Dinner Pieces, Marsh translation, p. 213f).:
In describing this first ring, I have chosen to be brief, for it would take too long to discuss all the aspects of a matter so rich in lessons. Besides, since you are wise, you will be able to appreciate their value clearly and plainly if you reflect on them.He called such allegorical devices “mysteries” (mysteria) that had a special appeal to the imaginations of learned men. For fuller quotations from this and other writers see http://www.tarotforum.net/showthread.php?t=94755&page=5, starting with my 2nd post.
In his 1492 translation, with commentary, of Plotinus's Enneads, the Renaissance Neoplatonist Marsilio Ficino described this founder of Neoplatonism as making such teachings part of his philosophy, explaining a passage in Plotinus as follows (Boas, The Hieroglyphics of Horapollo, 1993 edition, p. 14, in Google Books):
...Thus the Egyptian priests, when they wished to signify divine things, did not use letters, but whole figures of plants, trees, and animals; for God doubtless has a knowledge of things which is not discursive thought about a subject, but, as it were, the simple and steadfast form of it.In other words, a picture can capture an idea in a way that suggests God's own apprehension of the form, i.e. the archetype in the mind of God, which for us is ungraspable, even contradictory, but to him is simple; we are like the proverbial blind men feeling the different parts of an elephant. In that way the picture is like the "symbol" of ps.-Dionysius, which points beyond our finite understanding.
Here is part of what Ficino was commenting on in Plotinus himself (from Ennead V.8.5-6, as translated by Boas, p. 8; that page is not online, but this quote and the whole of the next can be found elsewhere on the Web):
It must not be thought that in the Intelligible World the gods and the blessed see propositions; everything expressed there is a beautiful image, such as one imagines to be in the soul of a wise man, images not drawn, but real. ...And therefore the Ancients said that real being is ideas and substances.Then he discusses the Egyptian sages' practice of drawing pictures, ending:
...Thus each picture was a kind of understanding and wisdom and substance and given all at once, and not discursive reasoning and deliberation.Discursive reasoning and deliberation, Boas then paraphrases Plotinus, come subsequently. That is very much like Alberti's account of his emblem, or an analysis in words of a tarot image.
Soon humanists, starting with Alciato’s Emblemata in 1531, were writing so-called "emblem books" with multitudes of their own such images, each associated with a Latin saying. It wasn't long before the tarot triumphs themselves were called "hieroglyphs", not meaning of Egyptian origin but simply enigmatic pictures with deep, noble, even sacred meanings. (For examples of the word in this context, from c. 1570 Italy and 1603 Spain, see Ross Caldwell in the first post of http://www.tarotforum.net/showthread.php?t=94755; the first is an anonymous Discorso on the tarot from 1570 central Italy, for which see Explaining the Tarot: Two Italian Renaissance Essays on the Meaning of the Tarot Pack, edited and translated by Caldwell, Depaulis, and Ponzi. p. 53 and p. 67 note 25.)
THE MAGICIAN
In Italian the Magician card was first called El Bagatella, Is that the person on the card or his tricks. The 18th century historian Ludovico Muratori, in Dissertazioni sopra le antichità italiane (Vol. 2, 1751, pp. 171-172) says that "they [the Italians] called trifles and the tricks and games of Mountebanks (Montambanchi, entertainers who stood on platforms to draw a crowd to hear a sales pitch) “Bagattelle”. He also quoted a couple of lines from a 1298 poem using the word. Marco Ponzi on Tarot History Forum found the rest of the sentence and translated it:
Lassovi la fortuna fella /Travagliar qual Bagattella:Here "Bagatella" would seem to be a personification. It could also be the trick: fortune working like a conjurer's trick. Another quotation Muratori gives, from 1389, has "Bagatella" as a person's nickname, "propter ejus cavillationes umbratillus et puerilus" - "on account of his shadowy and puerile banter". In that way the person who does the bagatella can be called a bagatella, too. Perhaps it is the masculine article, "El" that makes the difference, as opposed to the moer usual feminine "la" in front of "bagatelle". In any case, illusion is involved, even deliberate illusion, i.e. deception. "Looks are deceiving," the saying goes. (For Muratori's text, see Ross Caldwell at http://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=764;.the translation is a few posts later. For Andrea Vitali's slightly different perspective, which includes questioning the 1298 and 1389 dates for the word "bagatella" that appears there, see http://www.letarot.it/page.aspx?id=386&lng=ENG, footnote 6.)
Quanto più si mostra bella, /Come anguilla squizza via.
I leave to you wicked fortune/ Who acts like a Bagattella:
whenever she seems most beautiful,/ she slips away like an eel,
La Bagatella also meant "small thing", thing of little importance. With that association, he differed from a Mago, who was considered to be in league with supernatural powers. In French the word became Bateleur, referring to the quick-handed entertainer, possibly related to baton, and so a stick-wielder. But in English, “Magician” is a perfectly good translation, as long as we do not give him an exalted status.
What Platonic allegory, or Neoplatonic "Name of God" might he depict? A Magician combines truth with illusion: the result is real, but only appears to be magic. So, Platonically, he is combining being with non-being. In that way he is like the Demiurgos (a Greek word ordinarily meaning craftsman, artisan, artificer) of Plato’s Timaeus. This is a suggestion that Prof. Paolo Rossi mentions without discussion at the end of his essay "Ermetismo e Arte della Memoria", on the website of LeTarot (http://www.associazioneletarot.it/page.aspx?id=200); it seems to me a suggestion worth developing further. The divine name would be "Creator".
The Demiurge is the divine being that Plato posited as maker of our world, using the archetypes as a model and imposing them on recalcitrant matter in a complex way. In the Timaeus the demiurge starts with the concepts "same", "different" and "being", using them to construct triangles, and them to make earth, water, air, and fire, mixed in various ways, to create what we see with our senses. The result, for our finite intelligence, is a mixture of truth and illusion, being and non-being. For us straight sticks appear bent when put into water, what is beautiful often appears ugly, and what is bad appears good. At the end of the Republic Plato even compared such illusions to those of a conjurer, i.e. someone engaging in "trickery" (602c-d). Earlier in the same work Plato had gone so far as to compare the world of the senses to shadows on the wall of a cave, artfully positioned by unseen performers, and from which it was necessary to turn away if one wanted to know the truth (514-516).
An essay on the tarot written anonymously around 1465 makes a somewhat similar comparison, affirming of the inventor of the tarot (Caldwell et al, pp. 54-55; here the translator has broken the sentence into two for the sake of clarity; however the result is not as clear as a literal translation, which I suggest in brackets):
Gli posa appresso il Bagatello, percioche si come coloro, che con prestezza di mano giacando, una cosa per un' altro parer ci fanno, il che oltre alla maraviglia porge vana dilettatione, non essendo il suo fine altro che inganno cosi il Mondo allettando altrui sotto imagine di bello, et dilettevole promettendo contentezza, al fine da guai, et in guisa di prestigiatore non havendo in se cosa premanente ne durabile, con finta apparenza di bene, conduce a miserabil fine.
He [the inventor] placed the Bagattello next to him [meaning the Fool], because,like those that play with swift hands, making one thing look like another one, causing wonder and a vain amusement, since his only goal is deception, in the same way, the world attracts [the] others with images of beauty and delight, promising happiness at the end of trouble. As a juggler it contains [literally, "In the manner of a slight of hand artist, having"] nothing either permanent or durable, [it, the world] leads to a miserable end, under the false appearance of good.Here the writer compares the world, not its creator, to a slight of hand artist. But for Plato--and indeed, the Christian--the world, as the play of shadows on a cave, also has a creator whose result is such illusions.
Why would such a presumably beneficent god, as Plato asserted in the Timaeus the demiurge was, introduce such illusions? If our world is like a cave and we face toward illusion and not toward truth, why did the demiurge not arrange for us to face toward truth when he made us? Plato merely says that the demiurge left the details of “fashioning the mortal bodies” of humans to the “younger gods” (Timaeus 42d), who apparently underestimated the power of chaotic motions of the elements to affect the souls of men so that “they become false and foolish” (44a). Proper education and rational thinking can prevent such an outcome.
But we can ask the question again: why would a beneficent god have left such an important task in such incompetent hands? I cannot see where Plato gave an explicit answer. One answer might be that a finite intelligence could not possibly survive in a world if it perceived things "as they are". According to Plato in the Timaeus, although he does not rule out more basic principles, the demiurge probably created the universe from four necessary elements (31b-32d) each built up out of triangles (53c-d) according to definite mathematical principles (54c-56c) to create the things of the visible world. It is true that modern physics does not see the world in this precise way. But this is only a matter of detail: more elements than four, and more complicated mathematics to describe the building blocks. The same question arises: How is a finite intelligence perceiving triangles - or subatomic wave/particles identified by complex equations - going to know which groups of them are good to eat and which not? To philosophize, one must first eat. But still, why not design us so that we can see both at once, the macro-reality and the micro-?
A more fundamental answer is in terms of the Greek conception of virtue, arete, which Plato shares (see Republic 353b). A thing's virtue is its excellence in terms of a goal for which it is to be used: e.g. a sword's sharpness is judged by its ability to cut in battle more effectively than other tools, or even other swords. There are different measures of effectiveness: penetrating to vital organs, perhaps, or cutting through armor, if that is a factor--the best is that which can accomplish it best, In the case of humans' particular excellence, the ability to act according to reason, the more difficult the problem it can solve, the better it is.
In the Renaissance, Pico della Mirandola’s famous Oration
gave a more Christian answer to the problem. God gave
everyone the power to make of themselves what they will, as well as the power to distinguish good from evil. If they choose evil
and to be on the level of the animals, when they could choose good and
be at the level of the angels, that is their choice. If so, it is not
the world that creates the illusions, but our own imaginations, seeing
the world in terms of our animal appetites.To this can be added the wisdom of the Book of Job. It is easy to be devout if our faith is never tested. The greater the test, the greater the merit. If we are surrounded by illusions and temptations, it is for the sake of developing a goodness higher even than that of the angels. This answer is much like the one I imagined for Plato.
In this scenario, God made us susceptible to the transitory and illusory things of the world, but also gave us the tools by which to separate truth from illusion: the eternal archetypes and the power of reason. With them we can get past the Magician’s illusions, which depend on our trust in the senses, and live a life based on Truth. If the Magician is a Devil tempting us, he is also an aspect of God's goodness.
These symbols were made by some writers and artists to correspond, in various ways, to the four elements that make up the world and so, ultimately, the physical conditions in which we find ourselves at birth and after. One
example
from the 15th century is at left (my image is reproduced from Laurinda Dixon's Bosch). The only object missing is a cup for
water. Thus the suit-objects become the elements, the world’s
and our own material constituents, which the Demiurge combines to produce our bodies. .
There
is also a strange hat at
the end of the Magician's table, which is reminiscent of the cloth
covering the
chalice of the Eucharist. (In the Marseille pattern, what corresponds
is a purse.) This might suggest the special cards, a kind of fifth suit, the trumps or "major
arcana", representing the
archetypes by which we can triumph over the elements in the "game of
life". The players get from the divine dealer combinations of cards of
both
sorts; symbolically, then, the Magician is the demiurgic power bestowing
on the soul both the
archetypes and the material conditions of life. This interpretation of the Magician puts him in a rather more exalted position than that of a street performer. However in the Gospel of John the same being by whom “all things were made” (John 1:3), there called the Logos, came to earth as an itinerant preacher of humble origins. He, too, was a magician, in the broader sense of doing things by mysterious means.
A preacher and sometime bishop in 1529 England, Hugh Latimer, made the analogy between Jesus and a card-dealer explicit, in a game with ordinary cards in which one suit is designated trumps. He said (Selected Sermons of Hugh Latimer, 1906 edition, p. 6):
And for because I cannot declare Christ's rule unto you at one time, as it ought to be done, I will apply myself according to your custom at this time of Christmas: I will, as I said, declare unto you Christ's rule, but that shall be in Christ's cards. And whereas you are wont to celebrate Christmas in playing at cards, I intend, by God's grace, to deal unto you Christ's cards, wherein you shall perceive Christ's rule. The game that we will play at shall be called the triumph, which if it be well played at, he that dealeth shall win; the players shall likewise win; and the standers and lookers upon shall do the same; insomuch that there is no man that is willing to play at this triumph with these cards, but they shall be all winners, and no losers.He then went on to give details about “Christ’s cards”, which turn out to be the precepts of “Christ’s rule” plus the trumps, which are hearts, i.e. obeying Christ with all one’s heart. In the game of life, Christ is in the position of dealer, giving to everyone at birth the cards they need to win at the end, even, doing Plato one better, coming to earth to remind people of what they may have forgotten. The world-weary look on the Magician’s face hints at the world’s failure to take his words to heart. (The sermon, written by a nascent Protestant, was vilified by later Catholic writers. For details, see Andrea Vitali’s online essay “A Clownish Sermon 1529” and my addendum there.)
A similar analogy, although this time with God as the other player, was made in an anonymous poem printed in Márgenes literarios del juego: una poética del naipe siglos XVI-XVIII, by Jean-Pierre Etienvre (p.62), "Romance del juego del trunfo". It begins (as posted on Tarot History Forum by Marco Ponzi, who also did the translation):
Hombre I Dios juegan al trunfo,I would guess that by “sky” (or "heaven") the poet means the trumps, and by “world” he means the suits. God is impossible to beat, of course. But perhaps he will sometimes let the most meritorious people win, by his grace. That is one difference between Plato and Roman Catholicism. In Plato's case, if one doesn't "win", the cosmos gives one other chances in new incarnations, other tries at the game, so to speak. In Roman Catholic Christianity, God gives all but the most saintly souls a chance to pay what is owed, in a place beyond this world called Purgatory.
cielo i mundo es la baraja,
ponense ambos a la mesa,
i Dios reparte las cartas.
Man and God play “trunfo”,
the sky and the world are the deck,
they both sit at the table,
and God deals the cards.
In relation to Jesus as a demiurgic "dealer", the earliest known Magician, of 1450s Milan, bears a a rather
striking facial resemblance to the depictions of Jesus in the two Bembo
paintings I cited in relation to the Virgin Mary, the Coronation
and the
Ascension: they repeat the similar light-colored beards and doleful
faces we see on the card. In the
other extant Bembo cards, the only other similar face is that
of the
King of Cups 
in the c. 1442 deck (far left). Given that the Ace of
Cups is a baptismal font, I think it likely that Cups is meant as the
suit of religion, among other things, and of course the King of religion
is Christ In other Bembo art, however, people other than Christ have similar faces and beards: a St. Mark in the Cavalcabò Chapel of St. Agostino, Cremona (near left, from Tanzi, Archigoticissimo Bembo, 2011, p. 70), also the second king in an Adoration, and a couple of King Davids in an illuminated manuscripts (all in Bandera and Tanzi 2013). These are all related to Christ in some way, and so do not invalidate putting the Magician in the same company.
But how is one to tell the “good” cards from the “bad” ones? In a card game, it is by knowing the rules ahead of time. Plato actually has something similar: one recognizes the archetypes by remembering them, from before one enters the world. Things in this world call them to mind. There is a famous passage in Plato’s Meno (82b-86b) in which Socrates draws geometric diagrams in the dust and asks a slave boy questions until the boy comes to recognize a geometrical truth that goes against what he thought at first. The source of that knowledge is not the crude drawing in the dust, but the reasoning the boy makes about it. Yet it is not just a matter of logic either. Socrates concludes that it can only be a recollection of something already known, but not in this world of uncertainties
This point is illustrated in an ancient Platonic text popular in the Renaissance called the Tablet of Cebes (translated into Latin in 1497; Cebes is one of Socrates' friends in Plato's Phaedo). In it the custodian of a temple describes to a visitor a fresco in front of them that shows an old man handing out sheets of paper to naked infants entering a garden. These sheets are presumably a map of the garden, just as in the fresco; representative temptations are shown at the bottom, and the virtues toward the top. It maps a literal "overcoming" of the vices. In 1521 Hans Holbein did an engraving of the scene, which his publisher made the frontispiece of an unrelated work; the old man at the entrance is labeled “Genius”, meaning a spirit, no doubt taken from Socrates’ account of his daemon. Especially in a version done in 1523, perhaps by a different engraver (a useful discussion of the various versions is at https://ackland.org/files/2016/02/A-Moralizing-Title-Page-The-Tabula-Cebetis-D-in-Sixteenth-Century-Intellectual-Circles-2.pdf), he resembles the Magician of a deck by Catelin Geoffroy of 1557 Lyon. Below top left, is the relevant detail in Holbein's original, below that the 1523 version; the Geoffroy card is at right.
About this scene the text of the Tabula Cebetis says (translation from The Greek Pilgrim's progress, generally Known as The Picture, by "Cebes (of Thebes)", trans. Kenneth Sylvan Guthrie, Yonkers, NY: Platonist Press, 1910):
First you must know that the name of this whole place is the Life. This innumerable multitude surging in front of the Gate are they about to enter into life. The Old Man who holds a scroll and with the other is pointing out something is the Good Genius. To those who are entering is he setting forth what they should do do when they shall have entered; and he is pointing out to them which WAY they shall have to walk in if they propose to be saved in 'the Life.'At the gate there is also a woman who has the souls drink from a cup she is holding; her name is Delusion ("Suadela," Deceit, in the engravings), and her drink is that of "Error and Ignorance." Unfortunately all who enter must take this drink. Both references are to Platonic allegory. Plato taught that archetypes of the Good, the True, the Beautiful, and other perfections were implanted in our minds before birth: the "good genius" is then the agent of such implantation. He also taught that souls were required to drink the "cup of forgetfulness", Lethe, before entering a new incarnation.
A few 16th century writers interpreted the card in a way that lends
itself to the image of the man at the gate of the garden of life.
Alciato, 1544 (Parerga iuris: libri VII. posteriores, p. 90),
called the card “Innkeeper”; the Sicilian card to this day shows what
looks like an innkeeper, although the title is “the young men” (far left). There is also a 19th century version of Piedmont (near left). The idea of the innkeeper is also in a c. 1565 Discorso
on the
tarot by Piscina. For Piscina the Bagatto (his term) is the innkeeper at
the “Inn of the Fool”, as opposed to the “Inn of the Looking-Glass”. It
seems to me that the point of this metaphor is that the the cards
represent the company inside the inn; as such, people used to interpret
them in a reflective way, as a teacher of wisdom, but now they have
forgotten all that.LOVE AND CHARIOT
Love, Amore, was the early name for the card. It is also, for ps.-Dionysius, a name of God, expressing his yearning to be with his creatures and for them to be with him (Divine Names 13, 712A-B):
And in truth, it must be said too that the very cause of the universe is the beautiful, good superabundance of his benign yearning for all is also carried outside of himself in the loving care he has for everything. He is, as it were, beguiled by goodness, by love, and by yearning and is enticed away from his transcendent dwelling place and comes to abide within all things, and he does so by virtue of his supernatural and ecstatic capacity to remain, nevertheless, within himself.In this conception, love descends to humans as a divine force in us that leads people toward God. In Plato's Symposium (Joyce translation, 211a-b), the object of yearning - in Greek, love as eros (also the name of the god -, is Beauty, from lower to ever higher levels, until one has a vision of the “eternal oneness” which is beyond words or images. When
we
love people, Plato says, what we love is their beauty, whether a beautiful
body or a beautiful soul (in which case there was the Greek philia, of friendship), which in turn is a reflection of the
“everlasting loveliness” (211a). There is a “heavenly ladder” (211c)
that goes from physical beauty to the beauty of souls to the beauty of
institutions and the sciences to Beauty itself, beyond all images and words.Cupid's blindfold on the 1450s card is a standard medieval attribute, signifying how "love is blind", i.e. it leads one to ignore facts that anyone else can see; all that is seen, in other words, is the archetype, on one level or another or several at once. For Plato love of another person could be heterosexual on the material and ethical level, with progeny of the flesh or of fame and virtue (208). The material level is what in the Symposium he called Aphrodite Pandemos, where the latter term means "of all the people". On the highest level, of the mind and mental or spiritual progeny, he speaks in terms of a male couple; they are ruled by what in the Symposium he calls Aphrodite Urania, the second term meaning "heaven" or "the sky". Whether the gender assignments had to be male to male, or even same sex, he does not say. The humanists debated whether one could have a relationship on the higher level with a person of the opposite sex, and also whether that person could be the same as the one with which one had children. (For some quotations, see my online essay "Dionysus and the Historical Tarot", part A6.)
Piscina in his 1565 essay distinguishes the two loves in his description of Cupid as "god of Love, which can be interpreted in two ways", one of which he explicitly calls "vulgar love", "volgare" in the sense of "common, popular" (as in the word Vulgate, the Bible in the common tongue). Such love, he says must be ruled by Justice, i.e. "intellect and judgment" exercised "without passion and affection", which in the sequence is signifies by the Justice card's appearing with a higher number than the Love card, thus the former's triumphing over the latter. On the Visconti-Sforza card, the lady's green glove is a suggestion of fertility and passion. On the other hand, their shaking hands suggests agreement to the marriage contract, binding each to specific duties before God and Man. It suggests Piscina's rule of Justice over passion.
At some point early on a sunburst was added to the card behind Cupid. The sun was a common symbol for God and the divine, so that the sunburst means the source of Love, whether in humanity or elsewhere in the universe, in God, On the card they complement the wings, which are what carries desire, eros, aloft to higher and higher forms. The gesture of the man's kneeling before the lady, seen on some versions of the card, is a theme from the Arthurian and troubadour theme of the knight and the lady, in which the knight is sworn to honor his lord, the same person that the lady is sworn to honor in marriage. Either their love ascends to a "Platonic" level, or else there is big trouble.
Later
a
third person (apart from Cupid) was added, of ambiguous gender, perhaps
at first a priest (in Vieville, c. 1650 Paris, far left), then more
feminine (far left, Noblet, c. 1650 Paris, near left). He or she adds
other Platonic dimensions to the card. The priest of the Vieville could
well be marrying the couple, or at least telling them what is expected
of them in marriage. Given the laurel leaves on the older lady of the
Noblet, she might be Honor giving the couple a lecture similar to that a
priest would give.
If there is a frown on the young lady's face, perhaps that is because
we are to wonder whether the older lady is perhaps the young man's
mother, who finds the lady who would take her son deficient. With her
hand to the young man's
heart, she does not deny human deficiency, but expresses that her love
is sincere, of the heart. Whose hand extends toward her center of
generation is left unclear. If it is hers, the gesture would indicate
her safeguarding her chastity. If it is his, well, who knows. Perhaps it
is to express his sincere desire to give his mother grandchildren. It
is an earthy card.A more pervasive interpretation of the card has the scene a "Choice of Hercules" between virtue and vice. That allegory derives from a text by Plato's contemporary Xenophon (Memorabilia 2.1.21-30). I have trouble seeing either lady as fitting Xenophon's description of vice, which gives her "plumpness and softness" and "robe through which her beauty would readily show itself"; the allegory nonetheless does express a Platonic theme, the soul's impulses torn between honorable and dishonorable love. In that case, the young woman's frown might be her sense of being rejected by the man, who is listening to intently to her competitor and sensing that her hand to his heart is insincere.. The other hand indicates her physical allure. In Platonic myth, the alternatives correspond to the desires of the two horses of the chariot of the soul, as I shall try to explain in relation to the tarot's Chariot card (in Italian Carro, French Chariot, which specifies the vehicle used in triumphal parades that is universally shown on the card).
Plato’s allegory of the Charioteer is in his Phaedrus, of which Leonardo Bruni published the relevant part in 1424 and again, with the Apology and other dialogues, in 1428 (Hankins, Plato in the Italian Renaissance, vol. 1 p. 67). These translations would not have gone unnoticed. Bruni, Chancellor of the Florentine Republic, "was, on good authority, the best-selling author of the 15th century", Hankins says (Humanism of Leonardo Bruni, p. 45). His letters, including at least one on Plato’s teachings on love, also circulated widely. After Bruni other commentators, most notably Ficino, wrote on both the Phaedrus and the Symposium.
Plato’s chariot, representing the human soul, has a charioteer and two winged horses, one white and noble and the other dark and ignoble. In the heavens before his earthly life, the charioteer, from his high vantage point, sees the gods and archetypes riding in similar chariots, but with horses that are both white, beyond a wall that separates them from him. Then disaster strikes. The ignoble dark horse pushes the chariot downward, and the closer they are to the earth the weaker the wings become, until they disappear entirely. On earth the ignoble horse remains disobedient and drags the chariot toward a beautiful body hoping to satisfy its lust. But then something unexpected happens, if the charioteer has not been corrupted by life in the body too long (251a, Hackforth translation):
But when one who is fresh from the mystery, and saw much of the vision, beholds a godlike face or bodily form that truly expresses beauty, first there come upon him a shuddering and a measure of that awe which the vision inspired, and then reverence as at the sight of a god, but for fear of being deemed a very madman he would offer sacrifice to his beloved, as to a holy image of deity.
This vision moves the charioteer to exhort the noble horse in strong words
and to apply the whip and bit to the ignoble horse, to prevent it from
attaining its goal. This struggle between virtue and vice is depicted on
a 1529 Italian medal with the words “Platonic Chariot” in Latin.
Through such bouts of unrelenting pain the ignoble horse eventually
learns to follow the lead of the noble horse, who follows the lead of
the charioteer. Different parts of this allegory fit the Chariot card in each of three extant Milanese decks. The earliest. c. 1442 (far left below), shows a chariot led by two horses. Even though both are white, one is disorderly, while the other lets itself be controlled by a groom. Neither has wings. On top is a beautiful lady bearing a large gold medallion with a Visconti emblem, a white dove in solar rays. Here we have, as in Plato’s allegory, a disorderly horse, an orderly horse, and a chariot. But unlike in the allegory, there are two humans, a man and a woman. Also, both horses are white; in the allegory, Plato has the disorderly one “dark” and the other white.
It seems to me that the image combines two thoughts in one—a common enough occurrence at that time. On the one hand, the horses are the white horses of the gods and archetypes, and the woman a heavenly archetype such as Chastity or Beauty. The Phaedrus speaks of the human charioteer as the soul before its descent to earth looking over a wall that separates mortal from immortal chariots, seeing across the wall "Beauty with her attendant Chastity” (254b) riding in a chariot with two white horses. Here one lady stands for all: Beauty itself, Chastity, and Virtue in general. On the other hand, the man standing next to the orderly horse is the rational part of the soul, leading the orderly horse, which in turn keeps the disorderly one within bounds. The man and the woman are likely meant to be the same figures as on the Love card. The card signifies that the man is rational and noble, and the woman the sum of feminine virtues.
As
in the case of the Love card, I do not think we need assume that the
man is assuring the woman of a "purely Platonic" relationship, as we
would say--i.e., non-sexual. In the Symposium Plato allows the
mutual satisfaction of physical desire, when done under honorable
conditions, as part of the "lesser mysteries" (229a) of love. It is just
the first rung of the ladder, after which comes the mutual love of
beauty in the soul, and so on, until the vision of "Beauty itself". The
"higher mysteries", however, cannot be enjoyed with another while one is
also satisfying physical desire, Plato says in the Phaedrus (256). That is the condition of a soul whose ignoble horse keeps it earth-bound. The 1450s Chariot card (near left above), is similar to the first, except that there is no groom and both horses have wings.That depiction portrays the situation of the chariots of the gods and archetypes. whose horses are both noble. As such, they have their wings for eternity, because there is no ignoble horse to pull them down. The wings on the two horses make this card a clearer representation of archetypal, heavenly Beauty or Virtue than the preceding design, which requires giving the horses a double role, as those of a human chariot on earth (whose horses are wingless) as well as a divine chariot in the heavens (and thus with two white horses).
I want to emphasize that I am presenting neither of these interpretations as necessarily the artist’s or designer’s intention (although it may have been). It is merely a natural interpretation for someone familiar with the Phaedrus myth, one that was then as well known as it was controversial, in part because of its references to pagan gods but mostly because it envisions love in explicitly male to male terms, which Bruni’s translation did its best to obscure. The virtues, at least in medieval art, were typically represented as women.
By the end of the 15th century a variation had been introduced, visible in the Cary Sheet: one horse turns its head toward the other. That would be the formerly disorderly horse, now tamed, following the lead of the noble one. Although we do not have the rest of the card, and we do not know what color the horses would have been, the same design appears in the Noblet of c. 1650 Paris and afterwards. On the Noblet, the horse with the turned head was red (the color has faded). Redis a suitable color for the passionate and impulsive part of our nature.
THE FOOL
In the Phaedrus, love is characterized as a madness; likewise the early name for the card of the Fool was Matto, the Madman. Again there is a language problem. In English, a fool is primarily someone who exercises poor judgment, not necessary someone mentally defective. A Matto, however, is just such a person; the word also applies to someone in a frenzy, drug-induced or otherwise. The Italian Folle, like the French Fou, takes in all these cases. In Plato, it is Madness that is mainly of interest.
For Plato there were two basic types of madness. Bruni, the Phaedrus’s first translator, wrote about the distinction in a 1429 letter, (Ep. 6.1 in Hankins Plato in the Italian Renaissance, pp. 70f), one that Hankins says "already circulated widely even before Bruni published the first version of his collected letters around 1440" (Humanism and Platonism in the Italian Renaissance vol. 1 p. 149 n. 21). Bruni writes:
For, as we know from Plato, there are two species of madness, one flowing from human diseases--an evil and detestable thing of course--; the other from a divine alienation of the mind.Of course our interest is in the second type, which he says is“from Venus, and arises from the contemplation of true Beauty”. After recounting the passage that I already quoted, about the charioteer/rational soul's shudder and sudden recall of divine Beauty through its image, Bruni says:
This violent seizing and capture of the mind is called Love, a kind of divine alienation [alienato] and forgetfulness [oblivio] of self [in id], a transferal into that whose beauty we admire. If you call this madness [furorem] and insanity [vesaniam], I would wholly agree, so long as you understand that no poet can be any good who is not seized by a "madness" of this sort [huiuscemodi furore correptum], nor can God be well and perfectly worshiped, except through this kind of mental alienation.Around this time Bruni also wrote the Canzone a laude di Venere, Song in Praise of Venus (I thank Andrea Vitali for help in translation; there is a published translation, but it is too inaccurate):
Chi amor crede biasimare, il lodaConsidering that this “furore” is what drives the soul toward the experience of more and more absract images of Beauty, ascending step by step by means of its passion, the tarot sequence can perhaps be seen as the “game of the Fool” in this laudatory sense, that of the madness of being possessed by spirit, in which the sequence itself shows the way forward.
quando insano e furente in suo dir chiama
colui che fervente ama;
perchè divin furore è ben perfetto.
La Sibilla non mai il vero isnoda,
se non quandà è furente, matta e grama.
è la divina trama
cerne il commosso, e non il sano petto,
e gli vaticinanti ch 'àn predetto
furente vider. Sicchè non è rio
il furor che da Dio
discende nella mente. E così amore
da Vener nasce, ed è divine furore.
He who thinks love to blame, praises it
when in his speech he calls insane and in furor
one who loves fervently;
because divine furor is very perfect.
The Sibyl never the truth unloosens,
except when she is in furor, mad and wretched;
it is the divine contriving that
picks the disordered and not the healthy breast,
and the prophets that predicted
saw in furor. So that it is not evil,
the furor that from God
descends into the mind. And so love
from Venus is born, and is divine furor.
Is the 1450s Matto brought to this state by remorse over his former folly (his culpable mistakes in life), or is he so intensely "responding to internal stimuli" (in the language of the modern mental health clinician) that he is unaware or uncaring of how he appears to others, his outer state mirroring his inner? Both seem likely. Madness involves disintegration of the personality, often preceded by intolerable guilt, in Greek drama exemplified by Sophocles' Oedipus or Euripides' Orestes. Euripides' Hecuba also descends to madness, in this case provoked by intolerable loss rather than guilt. But there can also be reintegration, most memorably exemplified in Oedipus at Colonus. For a Renaissance example, we need only think of King Lear on the heath, spouting truth in madness, experiencing in scattered images his awareness of his foolishness when sane. A crisis in one's mode of being leads to a disordered mind, which can allow a new way of being to emerge.
This disorder, to which the influx from a divine source descends, also relates the Fool card to the allegory of the Timaeus, in which the Demiurge creates the cosmos by putting the previously existing disorder into order ("out of disorder he brought order", 30a). In such an interpretation the Fool would be seen as the first card, the preexisting disorder which the Magician as Demiurge shapes according to the archetypes of the Divine Mind. Thereby the mind of the Fool, perhaps paradoxically, may attain a height above this world. In this sense the PMB Fool's feathers, as the components of wings, can be seen symbolically as the means by which the soul rises to celestial heights, in Plato's allegory of the charioteer in the Phaedrus. The symbolism is made explicit by Ficino in his commentary on that dialogue: "The wing is the upward-drawing power" (Marsilio Ficino, Commentaries on Plato, Vol 1: the Ion and the Phaedrus, trans. Michael J. B. Allen, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, p. 69) For Plato an exemplary life was required to grow such wings. However in Christianity there is also God's grace.
...he breaks free of them, away from what sees and is seen, and he plunges into the truly mysterious darkness of unknowing. Here, renouncing all that the mind may conceive, wrapped entirely in the intangible and the invisible, he belongs completely to him who is beyond everything. Here, being neither oneself nor someone else, one is supremely united to the completely unknown by an inactivity of all knowledge, and knows beyond the mind by knowing nothing.Ps.-Dionysius makes this point in another way in a passage in Divine Names. Citing St. Paul in I Cor. 1:25: “The foolishness of God is wiser than men” (865B), he explains (865C):
And here the divine apostle is said to be praising God for his “foolishness,” which in itself seems absurd and strange, but uplifts [us] to the ineffable truth which is there before all reasoning.Corresponding to this interpretation, the Fool card is without number, as though to indicate its lack of confinement or limitation in human concepts. This same idea runs through the later Platonists of antiquity: above the Demiurge is the Divine Mind, above that the One, and perhaps something else, but eventually nothing that can be described in words
In I Corinthians, the Vulgate's word for foolishness are stultum and insipiens, not furore; and it is meant as the opposite of wisdom, sapientius:"quia quod sultum est Dei Sapientius est hominibus" (For the foolishness of God is wiser than man's wisdom). The rest of the sentence is "...and the weakness of God is stronger than man's strength". From this it seems clear that it is God as Jesus that Paul is talking about, and also the God who possessed him on the road to Damascus. Like Socrates heeding his daemon, Jesus was indifferent to the wisdom of the world, which would have cautioned against his angering the authorities. In the same way, the martyr saints cared more about their unity with God than for their lives on earth.
That the tarot Fool was in fact seen as God is suggested by the final tercet of a "tarrochi" sonnet of Ferrara 1530-1560 cited by Andrea Vitali in his essay "Tarot in Literature I" (here):
Per poter dire i buon tarocchi mej
Saran, s’avien ch’io giuochi, et questi uno
Vo trarre il Matto che ‘è cervel divino.
So that to be able to say the good tarots will be
Mine, I have to play, and this one card
I draw will be the Fool, which is [the] divine brain.
In the Italian trick-taking game played with the cards, as far as can be determined from later accounts, the rule for using the Matto suggests an allegory like that I have been describing. The card was so weak in power it could not win against any other card, even the lowest numeral card; so also is the fool or madman in relation to the world. Second, it could be played at any time; similarly, the madness of love may come when we least expect it. Third, because it could be played at any time it was useful as a kind of sacrificial card, to play instead of a more powerful card. It is a kind of sacrifice that also is not a sacrifice, because the card then usually returned to the one who played it, just as Christ, the ineffable God on earth, sacrificed himself for the beings that God created in “his own image””—and just as Socrates, following his daemon, sacrificed himself for the good of Athens and was immortalized by history in return.
FORTUNE, HANGED MAN, DEATH, AND THE PLACEMENT OF FORTITUDE
In
the Middle Ages the Wheel of Fortune (Ruota della Fortuna, Roue de la Fortune) represented the changeable nature
of the world, in which we should therefore place no trust. In one of the
early Milan decks, the Brera-Brambilla of c. 1444, the one going up and
the one on top have donkey’s ears, representing their foolish desires.
The one going down and the one on the bottom have lost their asinine
attribute; they are wiser for having seen the illusoriness of their
ambition.In Plato’s philosophy, the correspondence is to the ephemeral nature of opinion or belief; what seems true at one time seems false at another. Without a solid basis in eternal archetypes, belief is like the “house built upon the sand” of the gospels.
These donkey ears on the card were continued in some 16th century Venetian cards. In the French decks all three of the figures (they left out the bottom one) were made entirely into animals, perhaps to show how the striving after material goals reduces humanity to the animal level. Even here, however, the head of the animal going down is more human-looking than the one going up, which now is given the entire head of an ass.
In
the “Marseille" order of the trumps, first documented in the Catelin
Goeffroy tarot of 1558 Lyon, the virtue of Fortezza/La Force came next
after the Wheel. This position is further on in the sequence than it was
in other early centers of the tarot, even Milan and Pavia; all of them
put it before the Wheel, near the other two virtues.However if the Wheel is seen as radical change, where what appeared desirable is suddenly either beyond reach or recognized as illusory, then some of the traditional imagery of the virtue takes on a specific meaning having to do with its place in the order. If a lady puts her hands on the mouth of a lion (as we see first in the c. 1442 deck), we can see the lion as a solar animal, and as such in Christian symbolism representing not only Strength (Forza in Italian, Force in French) but God. Fortitude, in Italian Fortezza d'anima, strength of soul, the virtue of the lady, is then putting one’s trust in God rather than power devoted to sensual ends. The symbolic equivalence of the sun with God goes back at least to Plato's Republic (532a-d) where the sun is an image of the Good, Plato's highest archetype.
The c. 1480 Milanese hand-painted card shows a man beating on a cowering lion with a club. This is not the moral virtue of Fortitude; it illustrates the other aspect of the Italian Fortezza, that of physical power. Fortitude, in contrast, was exemplified best by "the strength of Christ", as Paul had put it (1Cor. 1:25), and of the holy martyrs of the Church.
In the early lists of Milan and Pavia, the positions of the Vecchio and Fortezza were reversed. It makes little difference. If Fortezza is before the Ruota, the symbolism is to prepare one for the necessary reorientation in what comes next. If the Vecchio
is first, then it is he who advises of the change in orientation. As
though to suggest the equivalence, the folds in the 18th century French
cards. the Hermit's robe acquired lines at knee level suggesting a
rising sun, again a reminder to orient oneself to God. And either way,
the symbolism is the Platonic one of the Sun with the archetype of the
Good.Another French innovation is the name change; hermits were considered to be in a special relationship to God, enabling them to see higher and further than others. There is sometimes also a change of spelling in the third French card, from "l'Ermite" to "l'Hermite". "Ermite" is the usual spelling of the French word for a hermit; Why the change? Perhaps to associate the figure with Hermes, i.e. either Hermes Trismegistus, the wise Egyptian demigod of the Platonically inspired Corpus Hermeticum, an aged figure whom in that way he physically resembles, or the god Hermes, messenger of the gods to humans.
In this spirit the card was even identified, in one 16th century poem, with the missing virtue of prudence (for the reference, see Andrea Vitali's essay "The Hanged Man: Betrayal and Prudence', online at http://www.associazioneletarot.it/page.aspx?id=124&lng=ENG, as I indicated earlier). Not that the Traitor was prudent, presumably, but that he was imprudent. In the same spirit, his image in the Charles VI tarot (figure 1 of Andrea's essay) has him weighed down by money bags, perhaps suggesting Judas.
But from Plato there is another meaning: someone who goes against what is conventionally expected, even at the cost of sacrificing his life, as Plato in the Apology portrays Socrates doing; the humanists would have seen his act of self-sacrifice (taking hemlock rather than disobeying the law by escaping) as of the type more exaltedly represented by Christ. In this interpretation his allegiance is to virtue in a higher sense than that of convention as defined by social institutions. In fact the father of Francisco Sforza himself had had “Hanged Man" posters put up against him by a Pope, as Gertrude Moakley pointed out (The Tarot Cards Painted by Bonifacio Bembo, 1966, p. 95). Later that Pope was declared an Antipope, while Attendola Sforza’s withdrawal of support helped end the schism.
On
the
earliest extant card, that of 1450s Milan, details suggesting the
sacrifice that
brings renewal are the hole under his head, as though to plant a seed,
the
green color of his leggings, and his halo-like hair. The green leggings
were not preserved in the "Marseille" pattern, but the halo-like hair
and the hole were.But in addition, there were in its earlier versions 11 notches on the two poles. Judas, hanging from that one, would have in that case been the 12th. He was known historically as the "12th disciple". The Charles VI tarot's depiction of the upside down man clutching money bags suggests that interpretation, too--Judas and his 30 pieces of silver. So does the number of the card, 12 in all the early lists.
On the other hand there is also the fact that his legs form a cross, suggestive of Jesus, and (for the 1450s) the X that was the first letter of the word "Christos" in Greek (Χριστός). The X is a natural enough position for a man in that position to take; the cross is not. But the 19th century occultists cannot have been the first to draw attention to that odd position: Alciato in 1544 actually named the card "Crux" with a capital "C" in his list of the trumps, in backwards order (for the whole poem and its source, see Andrea Vitali's essay "Temperance", here):
Mundus habet primas, croceas dein Angelus alis:I will talk about Temperance as "Fama" later. But as for "Crux", the legs are already portrayed in that shape in a 1410 fresco at St. Petronius in Bologna, there associated with "idolatria" (figure 5 here). I expect that as a representation of the cross it was there to remind the viewer of what the idolator, the traitor to God, has rejected; Judas would be sn example par excellence. Whether that was true for Alciato I don't know. In the c. 1650 Noblet, that the two poles are colored gray and green (shown above in Flornoy's restoration, with the original here), of death and life, could imply either.
Tum Phoebus, luna, & stellæ, cum fulmine dæmon:
Fama necem, Crux ante senem, fortuna quadrigas:
(The world has the primate, then the golden winged angel;
Then Phoebus, the moon and the stars, with lightning the devil demon;
Fame precedes death, the Cross the old man, fortune the chariot;...
Although
"Traitor" and "Judas" (a word meaning the same thing in ordinary
vituperation) was the traditional meaning, the example of Muzio
Attendelo turns it on its head (so to speak). Jesus also was a
traitor—to
the Sanhedrin who ruled the Judaic religion. And the later "Marseille"
images, such as the Conver 1761 (2nd above, right), had 12 notches on
the
sides, all colored blood-red, the color of sacrifice; the 13th at the
top would then be Christ, the Hanged Man again as the
sacrifice that brings regeneration. His halo-like hair and the hole in
the ground, as though for a seed, better fit that interpretation, too.There is also the matter of the odd, feather-like portrayal of the man's fingers, present in the Cary Sheet and the earlier "Marseille" images
, as though the man had wings (above, a drawing of Cupid from Alberti's De Edificio,
published in the late 15th century, and the Dodal of c. 1701; see also
the Cary Sheet and Noblet images, 3rd above, and a 1616 Stuttgart
engraving, of which the detail is at left, posted by M. J. Hurst and
described here;
the suggestion about wings was made by Al Craig). Of course both devils
and angels had wings. If the man is Judas, is it possible, however,
that even he was being portrayed as someone who sacrificed himself, at
least his honor and discipleship, in a just cause. "The Son of Man has now been glorified"
the Gospel of John (13:31, Douay-Rheims translation) has Jesus say to
the disciples just after Judas, to whom he had "predicted"--or
assigned--the fatal task in handing him the "sop" of soup-soaked bread. In Platonism, Socrates was the exemplar of self-sacrifice in the name of a higher truth. The road to Truth started with the critique of conventional ideas, the activity for which Socrates was condemned to death. The effect, as his disciple Plato described allegorically, was a personal “conversion” in the original meaning of the Latin convertere, which meant “to turn around completely”. That is what we see on the Wheel, continued in the Hanged Man, a reversal of direction, turning him upside down. It is also what the prisoners in Plato’s “allegory of the cave” do when they manage to loosen their shackles: they "turn around" (Republic 515c, 532b) from the shadows on the cave wall and look the other way, "upward", Plato says, toward the causes of those shadows, beyond which lies the entrance to the cave.
The Death card (Morte, Mort) focuses us on the brevity of life and its vanities. Beneath the scythe on the first known card, c. 1442, are emperors and
popes. he skeletal form reminds us of what we will become someday.
At the same time death marks a return to what Plato called the world
of being. Socrates’ last words before death, as related in the Phaedo,
are to ask his friends to sacrifice a cock for him to Aesclepius.
Aesclepius was the god of healing; thus for Plato physical death is the healing from
the sickness of living in a world permeated by non-being.
Appropriately, the Tarot of Marseille image depicts heads that seem alive,
hands aspiring upwards, and a Death that might merely be clearing out
the weeds. The hands seem to be straining to break free of the darkness of underground, suggesting also the underworld, For Plato there are two possible interpretations. One is that they are in process of a new incarnation, after a period in the netherworld and a drink of the water of forgetfulness, Lethe, prior to their rebirth. But this is only after a lengthy journey that takes the deceased souls into a view of the cosmic whirl itself, as described in the Myth of Er in the Republic. In the tarot sequence, such a journey upwards, step by step through the "spheres" of the cosmos, has yet to be accomplished. It is only if this card is seen in a reversed sequence, descending from the World through the celestial regions and below (a region as yet undefined but corresponding to at least two of the four elements, fire and air) that the earth is finally reached. But here most of the body parts seem to be emerging from the earth rather than coming to it. It is the shucking off of the "earthy body" of flesh and bones,leaving what Ficino called the "aerial body" as the vehicle for the soul's rise. That body, too, will be shucked off to reveal one lighter yet. Ficino (Phaedrus Commentary, pp. 73, 75 of Allen'stranslation) observes that on the descent:
being attracted to this life by the imagination and vital power simultaneously, then the rational soul, in a way contracts. Moreover, it acquires under heaven a more contracted body, that is, an airy body, until, having contracted still more, it descends into the most contracted body of all, the earthy. Everywhere it is principally named man, but in heaven, celestial.man; in the air, airy man; and on earth, earthy manAt this point, as the soul moves upwards, the soul with its airy body is beckoned upwards by the celestial body. For its part the earthy body was "not entirely suitable for life"; the soul does not so much approach it as much as it is "borne downward to the body in a headlong fall and sustains with labor and governs it with care." The ascent, however, is quite different: "Yet this does not happen in this way with respect to the soul and the celestial body. For the latter turns toward the soul with a sort of wonderful readiness just as the soul turns toward it, as Plotinus frequently mentions." (Ibid). I do not know where in Plotinus he says what Ficino is attributing to him in so many words; perhaps it is implied by his whole discussion. A version of the soul's descent through successive bodies is at Enneads 4.3.15 (http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/plotenn/enn301.htm):
The souls peering forth from the Intellectual Realm descend first to the heavens and there put on a body; this becomes at once the medium by which as they reach out more and more towards magnitude [physical extension] they proceed to bodies progressively more earthy.The body that the soul puts on in the heavens must be the celestial body. Plotinus in the above passage does not name the airy body as such, but only bodies "progressively more earthy". However at 4.3.9 he speaks of "a soul leaving an aerial or fiery body for one of earth"; so he at least makes the distinction. In this whole discussion of Enneads 4.3. what Ficino says is perhaps implied:t since the body is a mirror of the soul, the higher body will both reflect the higher soul and draw to it the lower soul.
THE POSITION OF TEMPERANCE, AND THE FOUR ELEMENTS
In the earliest known list of tarot subjects, that of the Ludus cum Alias, Temperance is positioned just after Love, as though to say that Temperance (rather than Piscina's Justice) is what is needed to quell and discipline the passions of love. Pictorially there were two ways of representing such dampening of ardor. One, the most common in the tarot, was with a lady pouring from one vessel into another, sometimes specified as water into wine. It was though, no doubt from observation,t that drinking undiluted wine would provoke the passions, whether of irascability or of concupiscence, more than if a considerable amount of water was added first.
The other way was with a torch and a jug of water. In
the Middle Ages, Temperance was imagined, in addition to the image of
pouring from one vessel to antoher, that of a torch and a vessel.
Talking about a 9th century manuscript with the four cardinal virtues
(at right below), Katzenellenbogen (Allegories of the virtues and vices in mediaeval art, p. 55):Temperance holds a torch and pours out a jug full of water, for, as Julianus Pomerius says: "Ignem libidinosse voluptatis extinguit". Footnote: De vita contemplativa lib. III, cap. 19 (Migne P[atrologia] L[atina] 59, 502)."It extingishes the fire of pleasurable lust", is my rough translation. Another example is a "Tree of the Virtues and Vices" of the book in the title of The Psalter of Robert de Lisle in the British Library, by Lucy Freeman Sandler, of which my scan is here.
As the hart panteth after the fountains of water, so my soul panteth after thee, O God.An example is in the 13th century St. Albans Psalter (http://www.abdn.ac.uk/stalbanspsalter/english/commentary/page154.shtml). The virtue not only helps separate the soul from bodily passions, but leads it upwards in the ascent. The stag can also be seen as the animal of Diana, who would then be the figure on its back, a pose familar from paintings of the pair; a famous one by Lucas Cranach, c. 1526, is at https://www.royalcollection.org.uk/collection/407294/apollo-and-diana. For more on this card see my blog at http://deerontemperance.blogspot.com/).
The Milanese order of trumps, continued in France, unlike the others, has Temperance immediately after Death. This position in the order is not verified until sometime in the first half of the 16th century, in Alciato, 1544 (in the poem quoted above with regard to the Hanged Man), and Susio, sometime 1525-1540 or 1570 (Vitali and Berti, Le carte di corte. I tarocchi 1987, p. 106 n. 29); so that position may not have been the original one in Milan. Yet the fact that in the Cary Sheet Temperance is right next to the Devil and the Tower, in that order from right to left, suggests, as Dummett observed in Il mondo e l'angelo, that it was there at least by the time of that sheet, around 1500.
Why would these three appear at this point in the sequence, after the Death card? Temperance is especially puzzling. Why does a soul no longer afflicted by the body need a virtue for the curbing of the excesses from the lower parts of the soul influenced most by the body, as Plato had characterized that virtue? In other centers of the tarot--Florence, Ferrara, Bologna--Temperance was put in the vicinity of Love and the Chariot, as though to warn there of excesses in love or in enjoying the fruits of triumph. That makes Platonic sense.
One explanation is suggested by Alciaoi's name for the card, "Fama". This word is also seen, in the same place in the sequence, in the card of Vieville, c. 1650 Paris where the lady pouring liquids holds a banner with the words "Fama Sol", Fame Alone (probably not "Fame Sun").
However we must also remember the quotation from Ficino discussed in relation to the Death card, in which at death the soul is said to exchange its earthy body for an aerial one.This idea is already found in Dante (Purgatorio XXV 80-108), in accounting for the appearance of "shades" in Hell. He wrote, in a modern prose translation of the passage (https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Italian/DantPurg22to28.php#_Toc64099696), with the most relevant portion in bold:
And when Lachesis [one of the Fates] has no more thread to draw, the soul frees itself from the flesh, taking both the human and divine powers: the other faculties falling silent: memory, intellect, and will far keener in action than they were before. It falls, by itself, wondrously, without waiting, to one of these shores: there it first learns its location.Although he does not use the term "body" specifically, to indicate the form that the soul prints on the air, it is close in meaning to Ficino's conception of the "airy body". .
As soon as that place encircles it, the formative power radiates round, in quantity and form as in the living members: and as saturated air displays diverse colours, by the light of another body reflected in it, so the surrounding air takes on that form that the soul, which rests there, powerfully prints on it: and then, like the flame that follows fire wherever it moves, the spirit is followed by its new form.
Since it is in this way that it takes its appearance, it is called a shadow: and in this way it shapes the organs of every sense including sight. In this way we speak, and laugh, form tears, and sighs, which you might have heard, around the mountain. The shade is shaped according to how desires and other affections stir us, and this is the cause of what you wondered at.
In this framework we may imagine one vessel as the earthy body, and the other as the airy body, with the soul as the liquid between them. Given that the earthy body is lower than the airy body, this interpretation gives the odd result that the liquid flows upward, defying gravity. In its airy body, the soul can either stay where it is, haunting the earth, or rise higher.
In this regard the image of a liquid being poured from one vessel to another can serve other associations. As the adding of water to wine, there is an association to the Eucharist of Christianity, whose liquid plus wafer corresponds to the nectar and ambrosia which Plato says the chariot horses are fed in heaven, and which the gods themselves needed to eat and drink to remain immortal.
One striking feature of the "Marseille" style card, starting with Noblet in c. 1650 (http://www.tarot-history.com/Jean-Noblet/images/Noblet-original/14-lemperance.jpg), is that the lady on the card has sprouted wings. Since wings are the upward moving aspect of the soul, such wings are appropriate. They also suggest the characterization of the soul's vehicle as "longing for God" which the Eucharist, and the practice of the virtues, makes possible
What corresponds to the salvific Eucharist in Plato is philosophy, literally the love of wisdom. By its means the soul could separate from the illusions of the body and undertake an “upward journey of the soul to the intelligible realm” (Republic 517b, Grube translation), which he compares to someone ascending from a cave below ground into the sunlight.. Philosophy, the “art of dying” as Plato had Socrates say, was the first step in a transition from one world to another.
The Platonic upward striving of the soul was well known in the early days of the tarot, thanks to Neoplatonist accounts already available in Latin, for example that of Macrobius (Commentary on the Dream of Scipio). The background image is the medieval view of the cosmos, as depicted in the so-called “cosmograph”, a picture of the universe as a series of concentric spheres around the earth, starting with the four elements Macrobius describes the soul's body as that with which the soul descends to earth, and to which “ethereal” accretions from the planets attach and weigh it down (Scipio, English translation, p. 133). After death the soul ascends as far as its life in
the body has allowed it to throw off these accretions. It was also
thought that before death one could ascend in contemplation to these
levels, including ones above the visible universe. Besides the Platonists' testimony, the visions of
Ezekiel, Daniel, and other prophets were considered proof enough.Among many others, at left is an illustration in a book of music theory from around the time of the Cary Sheet, 1496, showing the descent of the soul as the tail of a serpent whose head is at the center of the earth. The elements are labeled at the bottom; the planetary spheres are named on the right. Many cosmographs went higher, through the nine choirs of angels posited by pseudo-Dionysius. Above the fixed stars, Dante's Paradiso had the "Primum Mobile", (First Moved) before the final sphere of the "Prima Causa" (First Cause), also called the Empyrean. It was also thought that even before death some could reach the heights in meditation, of which Dante's poem is perhaps an erudite variation.
The first sphere above the earth was water, appropriately for a card showing the pouring of water. After water, the next spheres, still below the moon, were air and fire. These, as we shall see, correspond to the Hell and Purgatory of Dante's Divine Comedy.
DEVIL AND TOWER
We might wonder how air could be the domain of the Devil, when in Dante's Inferno and countless church frescoes he was situated in Hell, below the earth. But in the medieval imagination demons also filled the air: frescoes showed demons flying through the air grabbing souls.
In
the Cary Sheet, his
earliest Milanese depiction, a devil (if not The Devil) is shown very
much above ground, putting
souls into a basket on his back. The
tarot Devil usually has functional-looking wings (at right, left to
right: Cary Sheet, Noblet c. 1650 as restored by Noblet, Conver 1761). Piscina, writing in c. 1565, says of the card (p. 23 of Caldwell, Depaulis, and Ponzi):
As Meleto said in answer to Socrates' question, they [the demons, demoni] are neither earthly nor celestial. It has been the opinion of many, and especially the Platonists, that the Demons are Spirits that are in the Air & are somehow in the middle between Gods and men).Meletus was the prosecutor at Socrates’ trial in Plato’s Apology. He does not say there that demoni, in Greek δαίμονας” (daimonas), are “neither earthly nor celestial”; he merely agrees with Socrates that they are either “gods or children of gods” (27d). The doctrine that demoni are “in the middle between gods and men” can be found in the Symposium (202e); whether that means spatially or in character is not clear. But by the time of the Roman-era Platonists, such as Apuleius (City of God Book 8 Chapter 15, discussing Apuleius), who took the next step of locating the demoni in the air. Similar to Piscina is Alciato in 1544, Milan or Pavia, who called the card "daemon". In the Christian meanng of evil spirits, they can be found in the medieval imagination in the air attempting to grab the souls of those trying to ascend to heaven, for example in a so-called "Triumph of Death" fresco in 1330s Pisa.
Piscina called the next card, which we today call the Tower, by one of its early names, “Fire” (p. 23):
After the Demons, comes Fire, as the due mean between the stars, that are celestial, and mundane things.Speaking of levels above the earth in terms of “means”, each to the one below and above, is a Platonic conception, for example when Plato in the Timaeus (32b) argues that there must be two means between earth and fire as opposed to one. Given that the star card, representing the fifth element of ether, is two after the Devil, representing air, the mean between them is fire.
Regarding both the Devil and the Tower, there is also the account of the Platonic allegorist Plutarch, of Athens in the first and second centuries of our era. In "On the Apparent Face in the Orb of the Moon", he allegorically located Hades in the upper part of the air, which he surmised extended far above us, but still below the moon. In that region the soul was purified of its sins, if they were not too great. I expect that demons would have abounded there, but he does not say.
Plutarch’s accounts are in a large collection of essays known as the Moralia. The humanist Filelfo had made a copy for himself during his time in Greece, where he had worked on behalf of Venice. After some years in Florence, he spent time in Siena and Bologna, then most of the rest of his life, starting in late 1439, in and around Milan, including, to escape the plague of 1450, Cremona (all in Robin, Filelfo in Milan). In 1438-1439 another copy of the Moralia was brought by the Greek delegation to Ferrara and Florence, where it was surely copied.
The relevant passages are in a couple of pages at the end of one essay and a half page of another. In “On the Apparent Face in the Orb of the Moon”, the relevant part begins:
All soul, whether without mind or with it, when it has issued from the body is destined to wander in the region between earth and moon but not for an equal time. Unjust and licentious souls pay penalties for their offences; but the good souls must in the gentlest part of the air, which they call "the meads of Hades," pass a certain set time sufficient to purge and blow away the pollutions contracted from the body as from an evil odour.Here there is no lightning; the air alone is sufficient to fumigate the souls suspended there.
Plutarch's other essay on the subjec,.“On the Daemon of Socrates”, describes this region more vividly. The river Styx starts in the upper region of the universe and passes through the region of air (591C):
As the Styx draws near, the souls cry out in terror, for many slip off and are carried away by Hades; others, whose cessation of birth [footnote 127: release from the cycle of birth and death] falls out at the proper moment, swim up from below and are rescued by the Moon, the foul and unclean excepted. These the Moon, with lightning and a terrible roar, forbids to approach, and bewailing their lot they fall away and are borne downward again to another birth, as you see.In this version, the moon generates the lightning, as a way of sending souls back to the earth for another incarnation. The region of lightning is almost to the moon itself. The moon is here a judge of souls, although this moment will not be their Last Judgment. Even on the moon souls will not be safe, as we shall see.
THE CELESTIALS
In the tarot of Milan, the Star, Moon, and Sun are first seen in the six cards added to the 1450s deck, done in a style that suggests to art historians the 1480s. Those designs (not shown here), probably for a particular ruler, did not endure in the tarot cards that followed, as seen in the Cary Sheet. It is those images (below) that influenced the French designs of the 17th century.
They
are, in every city of the early tarot, in the order Star, Moon, Sun, as they are in the Cary Sheet (going from right to
left). This order is somewhat perplexing. The cosmograph invariably has the
stars further from the earth than the planets. If so, why in the tarot
does the Star come before the Moon and the Sun cards? Even if, as some
say, the Star-lady is Venus, the card should at least come after the Moon.This suggests to me that the cosmograph did not, at least at first, govern the placement of the celestials. The cards' order is that of increasing light, a principle evoked by Piscina and easily remembered by the players. In fact all the cards from Devil to Angel can be seen in this way; from no light in the Devil (or just a torch, in the Marseille), to a brief fire from heaven in the Tower, to a persisting light in the Star, to a greater such light in the Moon and the Sun.
In Plato, this progression corresponds to the increasing light experienced by the prisoner in the "Allegory of the Cave". The prisoner is at first facing the end wall of a cave, his head and limbs fettered so that he cannot turn around (514a). Shadows dance on the wall in front of him, which he takes to be reality. Then he is freed so he can turn around (515c). He sees a fire, painful to the eyes, and that what he took for reality was really shadows made by cut-outs held in front of that fire. So we have the Devil and Fire cards. Beyond the fire, however, he sees the light of day at the entrance to the cave. Each step will pain his eyes, however, so that a period of adjustment is needed before going on. Plato has Socrates say (516a-b) of his experience outside the cave (Paul Shorey translation):
At first he would most easily discern the shadows and, after that, the likenesses or reflections in water of men and other things, and later, the things themselves, and from these he would go on to contemplate the appearances in the heavens and heaven itself, more easily by night, looking at the light of the stars and the moon, than by day the sun and the sun's light. ... And so, finally, I suppose he would be able to look upon the sun itself and see its true nature, not by reflections in water of phantasms of it in an alien setting, but in and by itself in its own place.Here things are presented in order of reality: first shadows, then the images of things and people, then the things themselves,, then reflections of the more lasting things in the heavens, then those things themselves, in the order: stars, moon, sun, an order of increasing illumination. (I thank Patricia Fulbright for drawing this parallel to my attention, after I had read this passage a dozen times and still not seen it.) The sun is allegorically the Good, Plato's highest archetype in the Republic.
Although the order Devil-Tower-Star-Moon-Sun is everywhere the same, 1480s Milan, below the Star is a woman looking up toward it, in a pose similar to that of the c. 1441's Hope lady toward a similar star there. In the c. 1460s Florence, it is two astronomers, one looking up and the other pointing to our left. In the 16th century minchiate (the expanded tarot with 40 special cards), it is a man on a camel heading toward a star on our left. A 16th century Bolognese card has three persons looking at stars. These all suggest the Star of Bethlehem.
The first appearance of the Marseille-style Star card patterns is precisely in the Cary Sheet of c. 1500. It shows a young person pouring liquid from two jars. Both empty into a large body of water; in the French cards, that feature was changed to water and land. (above middle and right, Conver 1761 and Dodal c. 1701).
Water
is a dominant
theme of both the Star and Moon cards. Hence the Star card shows someone
reminiscent of Aquarius the water-bearer, then sometimes represented
then as an
androgynous figure with two jugs, e.g. in this zodiac from Troyes,
France, 1496. Here the signs for Cancer (a crustacean) and Gemini
(twins) are also of
interest, in relation to the Moon and Sun cards.Water plays a role in the allegory of the cave as the medium for reflections. Aquarius, however, has no relationship that I can see to a Platonic allegory for the card, either as a zodiacal constellation or as a mythic figure.
The situation is different for the idea of two streams of water, abstracted temporarily from their carrier. An allegorical reference, I suspect, is to two streams, Lethe (Greek for "forgetfulness") and Eunoë ("good knowledge), originating from one spring at the top of the Mount of Purgatory, in Dante’s Purgatorio, Cantos 28-33 (online in English here). He comes to these streams in the “Earthly Paradise”, after first braving a ring of fire around it. If so, the planets and stars are still overhead, as depicted in a 1465 fresco done for the Duomo in Florence, where it still is. Below is the relevant part (the rest is easily seen online), where the artist, Domenico di Michelino, has put Adam and Eve. Above them is a cosmograph of concentric spheres, with the so-called "fixed stars" at the top on the left. The others, except for the Sun and Moon, also count as "stars" in a broader sense, as points of light in the night-time sky.
Later Platonists, notably Porphyry and Macrobius, elaborated on this imagery; one of the openings was through the zodiacal sign of Cancer, to return to the earth, and another through the sign of Capricorn to ascend to heaven (e.g. Macrobius, English translation p. 134). Porphyry in his allegorical "Cave of the Nymphs", allegorized Homer's account in the Odyssey of a cave in which water nymphs weave wondrous cloth. The cave has two doors, one for men to descend, and the other for immotals. There are also jars in which bees deposit honey. In Porphyry's interpretation, the nymphs are weaving souls, and the sweetness of the honey is what draws the souls down to the sensuous pleasures of the earth. In addition, the honey both cleanses--in that way like the River Lethe-- and preserves--in that way an aid to immortality.. (For quotes and analysis, see Andrea Vitali's essay "The Stars", here.)
Dante, instead of having two doors, described two streams that he had to drink from at the top of the Mount of Purgatory: one temporarily made him forget his sins (making it also a cleansing agent) and another for remembering his good deeds, on the strength of which he could enter Paradise (i.e. immortality). Both came from a common spring watched over by a nymph.
On the Cary Sheet, the streams from both jugs end up in one body of water. That is the position Dante himself described, receiving from both in turn, so as to distance himself from his sins while identifying him more strongly with his good deeds.
The star on the Cary Sheet nymph’s shoulder probably makes her the planet Venus, since there are five small stars in all, for five planets (not counting the sun and moon). That is another allegory, of Heavenly Love, Aphrodite Urania, regenerating the soul and shepherding its ascent, or else acting as Vulgar Love, Aphrodite Pandemos (both from Symposium (180d-e), and sending it into the world of becoming.
Since
there are seven stars in the "Marseille" card, it may be that the
designer thought
they should represent all seven planets, or a particular constellation
with seven stars (e.g. the Pleiades, said, in the King James Version's
inaccurate translation of Job 38:31, to exert influences on human lives:
"Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades...?"). The large star
at the
top might represent Christ, the "bright and morning star" of Rev, 22:16,
whose love allows victory over fate. In
Plato, it is the love of the archetype of Beauty that allows that triumph.If the action of the Star-maiden is what puts the soul into the realm of the stars, then there is another Platonic way of explaining why the Star card comes before the Moon. In order to ascend to any celestial body, including the Moon, the soul must shed its "airy body" (in Ficino's terms) and acquire a "celestial body": it is only in that vehicle that space-travel is possible, through its medium called "the ether". Another term might be "ethereal body". Yet another, whicht has come into use since the 19th century is that of the "astral body". This term is reminiscent of a line in Plato's Timaeus, in which he declares of the cup in which the Demiurge made the universe, mingling the elements with the soul of the universe [the world-soul] and diluting it "to the second and third degree":
...he divided the whole mixture into souls equal in number to the stars and assigned each soul to a star, and having there placed them as in a chariot he showed them the mixture of the universe and declared to them the laws of destiny..after which the souls were "to come forth the most religious of animals", i.e. humanity (41d-42a).
The celestial body must be considerably lighter than the airy body, just as the airy body is lighter than the material body. Much of the heaviness will have been burned or blown off by the lightning and storms of the region of Fire. But a residue remains, which needs to be washed away. Psychologically this would correspond to the forgetfulness of mundane things that Dante acquires when drinking of the waters of Lethe. At the same time the celestial body, which has always been there underneath the airy body, needs to be given its own shine. That could be what is in the other jug, like the oil with which Greek heroes and Hebrew high priests and kings were annointed. After the child of Solomon and Sheba is born dead, a sign of displeasure from God, David washes and annoints himself before praying to God, afer which God grants him Solomon as his son (2 Solomon 12:20, 24).. Likewise Odysseus, before he slays Penelope's suitors, has himself washed and annointed. Then both heroes are able to gain further good for themselves and their families.
There are signs of this process on a few Star cards. One shows a figure much like that of Michelangelo's David on the card. On another, there is a kind of play on words, with the word on the card actually being "Le toile" rather than "Lestoile", Letoille" or "L'etoille". "Toille" is similar to "toile", meaning "cloth", and in spelling (as opposed to pronunciation) the French "toaille", meanng towel. There is also a beautiful alchemical illustration that shows what I have imagined happening to the hero of the alchemical journey, offered a towel by an angel with a star over her head (https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgu7Hdz8v8EeIyDhlLi9fGf6BIPY42sU7V4xKUf6SLErVubP7zPKLBqY-M6y-yPTjXWjG44s0SgxX7g6_GFyHsOF27sKjV6YH7vbezMBEIRpL2lDIQqoDJwVCibHvckAmA1IEwQefCshCQ/s1600/17splendorsolisDET.jpg).
Plutarch describes the result of this part of the journey in the continuation of the previous quote from “Face of the Moon”, by saying, of those who have withstood the purges and frights of Hades (943D; I omit a part about their wailing)
Then, as if brought home from banishment abroad, they savour joy most like that of initiates, which attended by glad expectation is mingled with confusion and excitement.This seems to be a comparison of the soul’s state to that of initiates into the mysteries, Plato’s second type of madness (the others were divination, poetry, and love, with the Charioteer as a lover).
It is no such thing, but just as our earth contains gulfs that are deep and extensive, one here pouring in towards us through the Pillars of Heracles and outside the Caspian and the Red Sea with its gulfs, so those features are depths and hollows of the moon. The largest of them is called "Hecatê's Recess," where the souls suffer and exact penalties for whatever they have endured or committed after having already become Spirits; and the two long ones are called "the Gates", for through them pass the souls now to the side of the moon that faces heaven and now back to the side that faces earth.The Moon was identified with Hecate, one of her three manifestations (along with Persephone in the underworld and Diana on the earth). The crayfish or crab, present in the Cary Sheet card, is the sign in the zodiac identified with the Moon; but the crustacean's size, gives it an ominous quality that Hecate, goddess of witchcraft, also connoted. Plutarch's account of the "Gates" offers a fitting interpretation of the two towers on the card: they would be guardhouses needed to regulate the flow of soul to and from the side facing away from the earth.
Macrobius had said that the path of descent was that of Cancer; corresponding to that dictum, the zodiacal sign of Cancer dominates the lower part of the card. If so, the top half of the card, with the moon and its side away from us, might point beyond itself to the sign of Capricorn.
Although
the cosmographs had a separate sphere for each of the
planets, in Plutarch the soul goes from the Moon directly to the Sun,
and to no other.In medieval Christianity the sun was a symbol for God. So on the bottoms of the early cards we see reminders of the desired deliverance from mortality: an young boy reaches for the sun (late 1400s, far left), and in the Cary Sheet, of which we see half (middle left) a young boy waves a flag of victory. The Vieville card of Paris c. 1650 is another version of that idea. As we have seen, for Plato the sun was comparably the visible manifestation of the Good, the object of the philosopher’s quest, now literally within the child's grasp. Alternatively, he could be returning to the planetary god with which he was associated before birth, as Plato described in the Phaedrus (253b), in this case Apollo. Apollo was always depicted blond and young, just as the sun was yellow and always rose with the same vigor every morning. In addition, youth corresponds to the state of the newly reborn soul; and had not Christ said "become as little children" (Matt. 28:3)?. Nudity, in turn, suggests a casting off of the things of this world.
The
image on the “Marseille” Sun card curiously, has the Gemini, a zodiacal
sign not associated with the Sun. Originally this type of design seems
to have shown a man and a woman, as in a card found in the Sforza Castle
in Milan and repeated on the Noblet, (here as restored by Flornoy).
This image
is similar to that in the 1496 zodiac, which depicts a man and a woman
embracing. But what could such a representation mean, Platonically?What is especially in need of explanation is the pair's sad look, which they have even in versions with two boys. I think Plutarch’s essay provides an answer. On the other side of the Moon, he says, the spirit takes leave of the soul for a journey to the Sun, its final destination, where the “ultimate alteration” will occur (944E):
They achieve it, some sooner and some later, once the mind has been separated from the soul. It is separated by love for the image in the sun through which shines forth manifest the desirable and fair and divine and blessed towards which all nature in one way or another yearns.On the Moon, there is a kind of second death. The soul remains on the Moon to be absorbed there into material for new souls. For a pair that has gone through so much together, it is a sad day, even though a necessary one for the spirit’s return home to the Sun—where it, too, will dissolve into raw material for new spirits, which will join with new souls on the Moon.
Plutarch related the earth, moon, and sun to the three Fates, imagining the descent to earth from the sun as follows (945C, Loeb p. 22):
Of the three Fates too Atropos enthroned in the sun initiates generation, Clotho in motion on the moon mingles and binds together, and finally upon the earth Lachesis too puts her hand to the task, she who has the largest share in chance,The central role of Clotho in this account may be why Clotho was sometimes shown on the Sun card: she is mingling threads, those of soul from the moon with those she has just received from the sun above her. That of course also associates her with the moon, which is where Vieville in c. 1650 Paris put Clotho instead.
There may be something else to the sadness, in Plato rather than Plutarch. The sadness might express the parting of Platonic lovers who have gone through life together, experiencing Beauty through each other. This aspect is brought brought out best in the "Marseille" decks. The lovers dedicate themselves to God in the Pope card and to each other in the Lovers card. Then they appear in different ways throughout the sequence: the animals going up and down the Wheel, the two poles of the Hanged Man, the two heads on the ground in the Death card, the two jugs of Temperance and the Star, the two small devils of the Devil card, the two figures at the Tower, the two dogs of the Moon, and the two souls facing us in the Judgment card.
As far as the gender, in Latin "anima", meaning "soul", is feminine, while "spiritus", meaning "spirit", is masculine. When both became depicted as male, the association is probably to Castor and Pollux, life-long companions and half-brothers, one of whom was mortal and the other immortal. When the mortal one, still a young man, died and went to Hades, the immortal one was so distraught that he gave up half of his immortality so that his brother could be with him in one place or the other.
JUDGMENT AND WORLD, AND JUSTICE BETWEEN
The Judgment card was called the Angel in the early lists, because it always had a prominent angel on top blowing a trumpet. That scene, of curse, is thoroughly Judeo-Christian. From Plutarch’s perspective, however, the angel's wings, and the call to higher spheres, suggest the spirit after the it leaves the soul and journeys to the Sun, where its substance is absorbed, to be recycled to make new spirits that will join new souls on the Moon and their material body on earth
In the cosmograph, the Angel would be above the Fixed Stars, where ps.-Dionysius in his Celestial Hierarchy, put nine levels of angels. On the other hand, since the souls on the card come out of their graves on earth, the card seems to recapitulate the entire journey of the soul after death. Or perhaps the cards between Death and Angel were a late addition, since they cover the same course as the Angel card (for more on this point, see the end of this essay).
Apart from that issue, a Platonic equivalent to the card might be the image in the Phaedrus of
the virtuous soul regaining its wings for its journey heavenward after
death. Plato's description in fact seems to have inspired least a couple of
artworks of the period. One is a medallion in a sculpture which the sculptor (probably
Donatello), placed hanging from the neck of a noble-looking youth. Art
historian Francis Ames-Lewis thinks it was probably done in honor of
Cosimo de' Medici's son Giovanni, who died in 1463 at age 42
("Neoplatonism and the Visual Arts", in Marsilio Ficino, his Theology, his Philosophy, his Legacy, ed. Allen and Rees, 1981, p. 337). Here the charioteer has the wings rather than the horses. In the
passages where Plato talks about the upward flight of the soul, he
mentions wings but not horses (Phaedrus 249a, 249c, 256b).
In this context Ames-Lewis tells us that "Ficino drew comparisons
between the journey of the soul to God and the Christian concept of the
Last Judgment" (p. 329). The Angel card invites such a comparison.A
similar Platonic image, in an explicitly funereal context, adorns a tomb
made in Florence around the same time for a Cardinal of Portugal. In
each case, one horse looks downward, as though with some regret, while
the other looks up.In Ferrara, unusually, the Justice card was put between Judgment and World. In Plato's Republic, three of the four virtues related to the individual parts of the soul (temperance to the appetites, fortitude to the spirit of honor, and wisdom to the rational faculty), while the fourth, justice, related to all three parts, as that which puts each in its proper place and makes the soul a harmonious whole. While with wisdom the soul knows the good, with the virtue of justice it does the good, Plato says (443d). Thus it is the most important virtue for Guardians of the state to possess (540d-e). Such valuation is in keeping with Duke Borso d'Este's own high valuation of the virtue; Pope Pius II said after his death, "During his lifetime the people erected a statue representing him seated, administrating justice" (Commentaries of Pius II, Book II, transl. Gragg and Gabel, pp. 180-1). The placement of the Justice card a next to the Angel of Judgment also emphasizes that while man's justice may be flawed, God's is not.
The “Sforza Castle” card (middle left) has the scene we today are more accustomed to, that of a youthful figure, probably female, in a mandorla, with the symbols of the evangelists in the corners.
In the “Tarot of Mantegna” S series, late 15th century (near left above), the same four figures in the same places (the corners, although not the same corners) represent the sphere of the Prima Causa, i.e. God. (Inside, of course, is a cosmograph.) Considering that "mondo" in Italian also meant "cosmos" or "universe", such a card may have been before Piscina when he wrote (p. 25):
Now the author has placed the image of the world in the middle of these four Holy Evangelists, in order to teach us that the world cannot be without religion..Since the evangelists show the way to God, the card might symbolize leaving the world of the elements for something higher, closer to the "Prima Causa", as in the four “beasts” on the flaming chariot of Ezekiel’s vision. But then who would the figure inside the chariot be?
In the "Sforza Castle" card (already shown, above middle), the figure is somewhat ambiguous between male and female, but more feminine than masculine. Vieville in c. 1650 Paris made that image more masculine, rather clearly Jesus (above. far left). Noblet (near left) made it a masculine looking female.
One suggestion has been that she represents Plato’s “World-Soul”, soul of the cosmos (see Andrea Vitali's essay here). In that case, the four evangelists would represent the four elements that make up the cosmos, and the figure in the middle its soul. In the Timaeus Plato imagined the body of the cosmos as a globe (33b), in the center of which he put its soul (34b), which then diffused throughout.
Albrecht Dürer did an
engraving of such a figure (for the Prognosticon of Johannes Stabius, 1502).
Called
“Urania”, the Greek word for “heaven”, also the name
of the Muse of Astronomy, Dürer’s
depiction
comes close to that of Plato’s description of the World Soul,
“interfused everywhere from the center to the circumference of heaven,
of which she is the external envelopement" (Timaeus 36E). However
she might be a kind of emenation of the World Soul, as the muses were
for Apollo, whom Cartari, 1571, said were commonly depicted dancing
around Apollo at the center, all getting inspiration from him. Cartari
writes ( o, 47 of Mulryan translation),Holding each other's hands they performed a lovely circular dance led by Apollo; he is that light from above that symbolizes the human mind, or shows that Apollo is at the center of these disciplinesHere the highest, Urania, serves for all. In that case Apollo could represent the World-Soul, as Cartari goes on to say:
Apollo is given a place in the middle not only here, but in the universe as well, because he spreads his power through everythng, and that's why he was called heaven't heart.Another account that parallels Dürer's image is in the "Myth of Er" at the end of Plato's Republic. The souls of the dead, before returning to earth in a new incarnation, see on their journey "a straight light like a pillar, most nearly resembling the rainbow, but brighter and purer. ...this light was the girdle of the heavens like the undergirders of of triremes, holding together in like manner the entire revolving vault. And from the extremeties was stretched the spindle of Necessity, through which all the orbits turned" (616b-c). In Dürer's engraving, the "pillar" would be the vertical line, and the "girdle" the other lines. In that sense, there is a part of Urania, its upper part, that extends higher than the cosmos..
Given that the four figures in the corners still represent the Evangelists, the preachers of a reality higher than the cosmos (where the branches are in Dürer's engraving), we could imagine the figure in the middle, while still the World-soul, also on a higher level, that of archetypal Beauty, the “everlasting loveliness” of the “eternal oneness” (Symposium 211a), on the level of the Platonic archetypes, two levels higher than the cosmos (which was one level below the Demiurge, which was one level below the archetypes, which was one level below the God beyond concepts).It is that Beauty which the soul saw in the heights before its first incarnation and which the sight of earthly beauty reminds him, so that he bows down in awe before the the earthly manifestation on which the unruly horse would have satisfied his lutst.
Although a soul left behind its earthly clothes in its ascent to Heaven (or descent to Hell), it presumably got new ones upon arrival. As such, with a few more clothes, the figure in the middle of the card could be the Christian version of Venus Urania, i.e. the ascended Virgin. Like Christ and Venus, the ascended Virgin was often portrayed in a mandorla (for examples see Andrea Vitali's online essay on the World card). Another image, closer to the "Sforza Castle" and "Marseille" cards, is in a 15th century manuscript of Heilege Dreifaltigkeit (Holy Trinity), a work sponsored by the father of the mid-15th century Marchioness of Mantua, Barbara of Brandenburg (Wikipedia on Barbara and its link to her father).
In this connection the German mystic Mechthild of Magdeburg (c.1207-c.1282) wrote an unusual account of the Virgin. Between the 15th and late 19th century this text was relatively unknown. But it fits, as an admirable summary of the Platonic ladder of love in the setting of medieval mystical Christianity, which even without Plato's actual text expressed its message. Mechthield imagines the Lord saying to her (translation by Ralph Manheim, from the German in “Jesus’ Round Dance and Crucifixion” by Max Pulver, in The Mysteries: Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks, ed. Joseph Campbell, pp. 175-176):
Maiden, dance as deftly before me as my elect has danced before thee.And the Virgin replies:
I would not dance, Lord, unless thou leadest me.
Wouldst thou that I spring mightily,
Then must thou sing for me.
Thus will I leap into love,
From love into knowledge,
From knowledge into joy,
From joy beyond all human senses.
Then we are in the realm of the Fool again, as the God beyond
number and concepts, a return to the divine source.
CONCLUSION
I will end by looking at the cards in relation to each other in the
sequence, as depicting the life of the soul. The Fool, being unnumbered,
is to that extent outside the series, in that way fitting the Neoplatonic conception of a
God outside space and time, totally nonconceptual. The image also works to
express the madness of the lover (philia) of wisdom (sophia), the force
leading him upwards. And finally, since the Fool cannot take any trick,
it is also the state of the soul before all experience, i.e. before
birth.
Then the Magician is the one who gets things started, in the game as
dealer, in the Platonic universe as Demiurge, in life as the distributor of the
archetypes and physical conditions to the soul at birth. Interpreting
the Magician as the Demiurge of Plato and the Logos of the Gospel of
John gives an allegorical explanation of why a sleight of hand artist, out
of all the practitioners of deceptive practices in the world, would be
on card 1. As children we learn by example. So the Popess represents the
wisdom embodied in the piety of humble servants of the Church. As such
she is also “conductor of the mysteries” throughout life, like Socrates’
Diotima, and the Wisdom of God, who, like the Logos, was "with God from
the beginning". The Empress then represents the outflow of life and
care from the divine source, while the Emperor is the divine lordship
over that life. They also can be models for the players themselves, male
and female, in the sense that they rule over their lives, to
make of them what they will. The Pope is then a model of the connection
to God that the soul needs, like the Platonic philosopher who rules wisely in virtue of his connection to the Good.
In this Platonic interpretation of the cards, I am proposing a different
type of narrative for the cards from Death to the Sun, no longer "Names
of God" but a linear progression out of this world. In a sense this
progression is already implicit in the other cards, if, as I think,
Petrarch's I Trionfi was a kind of loose model for their
structure, triumphs in temporal sequence. Love was followed by Chastity
(in the Milan tarot, the lady on the Chariot), Chastity by Death, Death
by Fame (the figure with the trumpet, or perhaps the Devil with his
torch), Fame by Time (the Hermit, out of sequence, or the Celestials),
and Time by Eternity (the last card, whether Angel or World). Fortune
was added to the model from Boccaccio's Amorosa Visione.
In the course of that journey the virtues would have been the tools of
success; the Fool, Magician, Emperor, Empress, Pope and Popess seem to
be travelers themselves (as illustrated in the "Dance of Death"
scenes of the time) as well as material representatives of
ps.-Dionysius's archetypal "Names of God".
However
the Empress and Emperor, to the extent they represent the players, and
sometimes even of royalty in the world, have yet to forge their
connection to the divine reality. For that process there is the ladder
of Love,
in which Beauty shines from each of the pair, like a beacon to guide the
Lovers in the Chariot of the soul. That achievement entails living in
accord with
virtue, as represented by the card of Justice, which in Plato is the
virtue
that keeps the various parts of the soul in harmony (but Temperance
will do as well, if Justice is toward the end). If one triumphs in
virtue, the Old Man cautions against attaching too much significance to
that success; it is rather like in "On Wisdom" in Petrarch’s De Remediis,
which cautions against thinking too highly of oneself. The Wheel of
Fortune is the exemplar of such teaching, reminding us that worldly
success, and perhaps even the attainment of what we thought was virtue
and knowledge, is uncertain. Here one requires Fortitude, inner
Strength, which is most severely tested in the accusations of betrayal
that assail the Hanged Man. One’s commitment to virtue in such cases
goes beyond one’s loyalty to individuals and institutions. In the face
of Death, one must think about one’s soul, the severing of its
connection with the body to travel upwards, allegorically speaking,
through more tests of courage and loyalty, remembering virtue and
forgetting vice, reflected now in the Star card. As in life, just when
one expects victory, there are more trials, as we see on the Moon
card. At the end, as the sad faces on the Sun card tell us, one comes to accept
the separation of the soul's parts, and of the lovers, as well as the
loss of one’s individual ego itself, spirit-death beyond concepts which
is also a merger with Plato's divine One.
There
remain
the Angel and the World cards. In some lists the Angel was the highest
card;
in others it was the World. The order makes a difference to the Platonic
interpretaiton of the World card. If it is between Sun and Judgment,
then the interpretation of the lady in the middle as the Platonic World
Soul makes sense, because the Sun is in the cosmos and the Angel takes
one to a higher reality, above the cosmos. A vision of the cosmos as a
whole then is intermediary between the two. On the other hand, if the
World comes after the Angel, then that World is in a different realm
than our present cosmos. It is in the archetypal world, which is higher
than the Cosmos. It is Plato's ideal state, and also the soul’s vision
of that world, the world
indicated by the city in a bubble or of the four evangelists leading, in
the mandorla, to
the archetype of Beauty. The Judgment is then a way into that world, the
original place of the Charioteer watching Temperance and Beauty and the
rest riding their pure-white horses..
APPENDIX: THE SEQUENCE AS A HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT
Michael Dummett
noticed in his books that if the virtue cards are excluded
from consideration, all the various historical sequences have the same
cards, although in various orders, from Magician through Pope, Love
through Hanged Man, and Death through World. It is as though the deck
designers, although isolated from each other and so not keeping to the
same sequences exactly, somehow respected this division into three sections.
How
would they have seen the three groups? Some propose a division
in terms of the Platonic three parts of the
soul, i.e. appetite, will, and reason. It seems to me that this
division does not really work. The Pope or Emperor card (as
opposed to individual popes or emperors) is not an example of appetite
ruling. Plato's examples of appetite are typically merchants, farmers,
and tyrants.
There might, however, be a division into three stages of the
soul. When the soul descends into a human body, it forgets the
archetypes or Divine Names, which it already knew in heaven before
birth. But it comes to recognize them as instantiated in particular
examples in this world: Wisdom or Faith in the representatives of the
Church and others, a benevolent King of Kings in the Emperor, and the
Holy of Holies in the Pope. In the second stage the soul recognizes
archetypes as ideals to be striven for in one’s own life: love, the
virtues, triumphs of various sorts, even against conventional opinion
and with the certainty of the body’s death. The third stage has to do
with the ascent of the soul after death, an ascent that can be emulated
in imagination before death. All three Platonic parts of the soul are
engaged at all the levels, but in different ways.
Another
way of seeing the cards might be in terms of successive
historical layers added on at different times. In the beginning there
might have been only
trump, the Emperor, as likely was the case in a deck of c. 1450 Spain
(Ross
Caldwell, "'El judgo de naipes" of Fernando de la Torre: a fifteenth
century card game", online), or more than one, since a game of "VIII
Emperors" is recorded in 1423 Ferrara. By the time of
Filippo Visconti in Milan (who reigned until 1447), the other familiar
trumps take shape. They follow Petrarch's series
Love-Chastity-Death-Fame-Time-Eternity (the sections of his long poem I Trionfi),
but with Time moved before Death and Boccaccio’s Fortune added, along
with the seven traditional virtues, as the tools needed for the soul at
various stages. And since this Visconti deck has feminine versions of
all the court cards, an Empress is added as well, for 16 in both trumps
and regular suits. That might be when Queens were added to the tarot
suits: Queen cards in 15th century Italy are characteristic of tarot
decks but much less so of regular decks. In other decks, the courts
number 14; perhaps the trumps did so as well.
Then the trumps increase in number. For evidence of a newer layer of trumps
we need to pay attention not to the cards that vary from one historical
sequence to another, as Dummett did, but to those that remain the same.
If cards are always in the same position, that suggests a time when
decks are produced by one region for export to another, when there is moer travel
from one region to another, and a tendency toward standardization. The
Fool is always without number. The Magician is always number one. The
Pope is always at the end of the first group, "triumphing" over the Emperor. The Hanged Man always
comes immediately before Death. The sequence from Devil to Sun is always in exactly
the same order. At least some of these might be cards that appeared later, by this reasoning.
By
"later" I
mean from roughly the time of the deck for the Sforzas, i.e. the 1450s
or a little before. And by "later cards" I don't mean later everywhere,
just
later as part of the sequence in more than one region, when the deck was
being standardized, and especially, given my subject here, later in
Milan.
The earlier cards also change: the virtue
Prudence might become the Popess. She is the Pope's female equivalent,
paralleling the Empress, sometimes put with him, sometimes with her.
Time, which may
never have been put in the Petrarchan order, might be the Old Man with
an hourglass, before Death, sometimes just before and sometimes just
after the Wheel. Or he might have become the three celestials, before
Judgment.
Instead of the theological virtues there are the three celestials (which
outside of Milan may been there already, instead of the theologicals).
There still
might have been much variation in the number and subjects of trumps
from place to place. However on this theory the number of
trumps, including the "later" ones, might always have at least equaled
the
number of cards in the regular suits. Lothar Teikemeir has documented several
ambiguous
suggestions of 14 trumps, in Ferrara from 1441 to c. 1477, at http://trionfi.com/0/f/x/.)
This
account of the development of the tarot sequence in stages roughly
parallels the topics of interest in Platonism in different periods.
First it was the Republic, with its four virtues (expanded to
seven by the Church) and its Guardians of both genders (for the Emperor
and the Empress). That text, along with Petrarch's poem and the three
theological virtues of the Church, provides a basis for the structure as
seen in the c. 1442 deck, a model that might have been used in decks
for several years before then. The Republic also shapes how the Timaeus might have been seen, as a creator of semblances (the Magician card). Then the Phaedrus and Apology,
in Bruni's late 1420s translations, were of the most interest, along
with ps.-Dionysius's works, newly translated c. 1436. These add
important ideas (the Phaedrean Charioteer, the Old Man as Socrates). A
little later there was also the Symposium (the Popess as
Diotima). By the fourth quarter of the 15th centurysome would have
turned to the works of Plutarch, a later Platonist (On the Apparent Face in the Orb of the Moon).
After that, Ficino's commentaries were available as well as the
Neoplatonists Pltoninus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, and Proclus, among
others. I have not established any of this as true. It is merely a
reasonable hypothesis.
