The Renaissance Philosophy of Cartomancy

The history of cartomancy has been the subject of much research. In recent times, its history, fanciful and factual, has been examined by Stuart Kaplan's Encyclopedia of Tarot, starting with vol. 1 in 1978. Between 1980 and 1996, there were the carefully documented studies by Michael Dummett and his co-authors. More recently there have been essays by Ross Caldwell (notably "A Brief History of Cartomancy", in English at http://www.academia.edu/6477311/Brief_history_of_cartomancy, in Italian in Il Castello dei Tarocchi, edited by Andrea Vitali, pp. 163-176) and Mary Greer ("Origins of Cartomancy", http://marygreer.wordpress.com/2008/04/01/origins-of-divination-with-playing-cards/, with links to other essays). In Italian with English translation, there have been several essays.by Andrea Vitali, and one by Terry Zanetti, on the website of LeTarot Associazione Culturale. There are others, but these are the ones I will be building upon here.

I am going to focus on the conceptual side of that history. First, what is cartomancy, and in what form did it exist in the Renaissance ? Second, how was it, or might it have been, thought to work?

As far as I know, neither of these questions was addressed in those terms during the Renaissance. The word "cartomancy" did not exist, and it is not even clear that fortune-telling with cards was differentiated from other forms of fortune-telling that fell under the general rubric of sortilege, from the Latin legere, to read, and sors, a lot, as in "casting lots". A little was written about sortilege, aside from condemnations of it as illusory or diabolical, and in addition there were accounts by well-known authors in Roman antiquity. Sortilege in turn was a species of divination, which had a place of respect in the Platonic philosophy esteemed by many during the Renaissance. From these writings and from relevant reference in the literature of the time, it may be possible to infer, with more or less probability, a philosophy of cartomancy in the conceptual terms of the Renaissance.

I will be focusing on a few examples and discussing them at length, mostly in relation to two periods: first, the period between 1450 and 1550 in Spain and Italy; and second, the period from 1770 to 1791 in Paris, in the works of Etteilla (pseudonym of Jean Baptiste Alliette, 1738-Dec. 1791). I bring in Etteilla for two reasons. First, Etteilla wrote the first books on the subject of cartomancy, and historians of tarot agree that he was a practitioner (some even say "the first professional cartomancer"). There is thus the natural question, what in his account can be found in earlier, less systematic descriptions of divination with cards, and what cannot? Second, his books have continued to be quite influential, at least since Waite's Pictorial Key to the Tarot and Papus's Le Tarot Divinitoire, both published in 1910. These works propound a method by which a certain number of cards are laid out, and from lists of words or concepts associated with those cards, an interpretation is developed, applying to the person for whom the reading is being done, usually to his or her future. Such was the method of Etteilla, using many of the same words. Papus uses the Etteilla school's word-lists for the suit cards without alteration; Waite uses them among others. Etteilla is a bridge between Renaissance cartomancy and cartomancy of today.

WHAT IS CARTOMANCY?

The word cartomancie is first attested in 1789, in a piece by the Parisian cartomancer who called himself Etteilla. Decker, Dummett, and Depaulis, in Wicked Pack of Cards (1996), p. 96, cite an article by Etteilla in 1789; he is objecting to a disciple's book because it uses the word cartomancie. Etteilla calls the word "illogical" and says that the correct term is cartonomancie. Before then, in  the 1782 Paris censors' record (Wicked Pack p. 99) the word cartonomanie occurred in reference to a book that Etteilla was seeking to have published. Permission was not then granted; my guess is that the word is a misspelling of cartonomancie by an unsympathetic censor. It is not clear whether Etteilla coined cartonomancie so as to distinguish his type from other people's, or indeed  he was the first to use anything like that term. What is clear, however, is that Etteilla's term for his system of fortune-telling was cartonomancie and not cartomancie. Meanwhile the word cartomancie entered general usage as a generic term for the practice of predicting the future using cards, as can be seen from any dictionary (this is in fact the definition of the term in the Grand Robert Dictionnaire de la Langue Francaise, 1986: "Chercher l'avenir dans les dispositions fortuite des cartes", to seek the future in the fortuitous disposition of cards). It combines the word "carte", card, with "-mancie", from the Greek mantike, seer. Just as since ancient times there had been, for example, geomancy, hydromancy, aeromancy, pyromancy, there was now cartomancy, divination with cards. In each case the method was to use something outside anyone's conscious control--meaningful patterns in earth, water, air, and fire--as a means for getting insight into the future by some kind of supernatural means.

CARTOMANCY AS A SPECIES OF DRAWING LOTS

On some of the cards in the deck Etteilla made up, there is no apparent symbolic relationship between what is on the card and its meaning as defined by its keywords. For example, on the 6 of Swords, there are six swords along with the words "route", when the card appears upright in a spread, and "declaration" when it appears upside-down. The picture has nothing to do with the meaning. This is typical of his number cards in general.

The nearest equivalent of keywords in the time of the Renaissance is cards with verses on them. The European ones were undoubtedly preceded by cards used by speakers of Arabic; the Mamluk cards of Egypt, some of which are in museums, did have verses on them, some of them predicting happiness for the one who drew them (see "Mamluk Playing Cards, at http://www.wopc.co.uk/egypt/mamluk/index.html).

The use of verses by Christians is first documented in Spain, at a time when many Muslims lived in Christian-controlled territory. In c. 1450 Castile, Ferdinand de la Torre designed a deck with verses on them in different numbers of lines and in different colored inks (see Ross Caldwell's "El juego de napes of Fernande de la Torre, a fifteenth-century Spanish card game, The Playing Card, vol. 39, no. 1, pp. 33-54, online at https://www.academia.edu/6477341/_El_juego_de_naypes_of_Fernando_de_la_Torre_a_fifteenth-century_Spanish_card_game; see also "Fernando de la Torre's "Juego de naipes" a Game of Love, in La Corónica: A Journal of Medieval Spanish Language and Literature, vol. 35, no. 1 (2006), pp. 209-248). De la Torre suggested that by "echar a suerte"--literally, casting lots, but also a term for fortune-telling--his cards could could be interpreted to show which women one loved best, among nuns, widows, married women, and maidens. These cards constituted a 48 card deck that could be used to play the standard card games of his time. The four suits were indicated by the color of ink, and the rank by the number of lines of poetry on the card. In addition, the court cards had images of personages, living or legendary, related to those categories, mostly as virtuous exemplars of their type. The verses are not themselves fortunes, but rather reflections on love affairs with women of each type. How the cards were used for fortune-telling is not entirely clear. Perhaps one was dealt a certain number of cards, say 12, and the number of cards in particular suits and their rank might be seen as showing which class of women the recipient "loved most" and to what degree. If he also read the verses, which discussed the advantages and disadvantages, he could then decide whether he really wanted to go after that type or not.

Another example is from 1497, again in the court of Castile, the Juego trabado que hizo ala reyna doña Isabel (Troubadour game made for the lady Isabel), by Jerónimo Pinar (for the source where this appears, see http://diegocatalan.blogia.com/2010/121401-102.-3.-gritando-va-el-caballero-y-am-913-ra-yo-una-senora.php). This was a game in which the first line of a versified fortune was on each card. The person drawing it would have to recite or sing the rest of the fortune from memory. The fortune was to apply not to the singer, but to someone else in the court, probably of the royal family. These cards apparently did not have suits or ranks. An example, number 31, is given at http://cvc.cervantes.es/el_rinconete/anteriores/mayo_12/11052012_01.htm:

A vos dama se os publique
que la dicha os da el rosal
qu’es de todos como enrrique
entre blancas vn real.
Y ell aue sera vn doral.
Y un romance verdadero
de dolor muy desigual:
Gritando va el cauallero.
Y el refrán de los antigos:
Que muchos son los amigos.

(To you, lady, this is made public,
giving you the rose
that of all enriches,
a royal one among the white.
And ell aue [the bird?] will be golden
And a real romance
Of pain very uneven:
Crying is the knight.
And the saying of the ancients:
That many are the friends.

While recounting a typical troubadour theme, this poem is also in the form of a fortune.

There were also lot-books, which in the 15th century seem to have used dice  One is described by a Dr. Johann Hartlieb in 1456, according to Mary Greer in her online essay "Origins of Cartomancy".  It is a matter of correlating the results of the throw with a particular question, which leads to an old man who points to a judge "who will explain the self-same question". Another in Germany, without cards but with pictures of birds and animals was in 1485; that was the basis for one in Mainz using playing cards, in 1505 or 1510 (http://trionfi.com/0/p/41/).

In Italy there is a 1507 reference to sortilege by Francesco Giovanni Pico, nephew of the more famous Pico. He says (Ross Caldwell, "Brief History of Cartomancy", available online):

There are many kinds of lots [sortium], as in casting bones, in throwing dice, in the figures depicted in a pack of cards [in figuris chartaceo ludo pictis]; and in the expectation of whatever first should arrive, in picking the longer husk, or in casting the eyes on a page.

This reference to the "figures depicted in a pack of cards" might be to the use of a lot-book. As we shall see in a 1540 example, these books used pictures of  playing cards, both of number and court cards. Also, the other examples Francesco gives are of ones that just depend on a ranking, from low to high. But it is not clear how these "figuris" were used.

This 1540 lot-book, the earliest surviving one in Italy designed for cards uniquely, is Le sorti di Francesco Marcolini da Forli intitolate giardino di pensieri (The oracles of Francesco Marcolini da Forli entitled garden of thoughts);  a reproduction of the whole book is online. Marcolini was the publisher, with text by the Venetian poet Lodovico Dolce. One drew a pair of cards, and looked in a book, which had pictures of the cards. Either there was a verse stating one's fortune, or there were further directions. Eventually one got to the fortune. The only relationship of card to fortune was by way of its rank. Here is a translation of five of the verses shown in the half-page at right:

Never any suffering or person / will strike your heart because of your wife, / and equal will be the start and end of the year.

Alchemy is right for you, in case you did not know; / do not doubt that from the beginning of the world, / you will have credit with other people.

The stars give you great fortune, / because for your wife, whoever she is, / you will not have to bear any point of breathlessness [i.e. have any anxiety]...

If already his body is not in the earth/ and his soul where it pleases God, / he will return after much war.

If you are a gentleman, and seek honor / True and not false, whether in letters or in arms; / I tell you, do not serve a Lord.

In Etteilla's case, there was just a word, not a whole thought. There was a "keyword" at the top and bottom. One of these words, depending on whether the card when laid out appeared right-side up or upside down, had to be combined with other words from other cards, to produce the thought or thoughts that made up the prediction.This combining of meanings is not a feature of lot-books. Although more than one card was used to get there, the result was a single one, indicated by a verse. But both lot-books and Etteilla arrived at a sequence of words by way of the random drawing of a series of cards.

How was it thought that the lot-book worked its magic? In the Renaissance, I don't know of any source addressing cards in particular. But cards are just a species of lots. Cicero, first century b.c.e., in On Divination, Book II, Ch. 41 (a source readily accessible even before the Renaissance), says (with Adlington's 1556 translation as revised in 1905):

Numerium Suffustium Praenestinorum monumenta declarant, honestum hominem et nobilem, somniis crebris, ad extremum etiam minacibus cum iuberetur certo in loco silicem caedere, perterritum visis, inridentibus suis civibus id agere coepisse; itaque perfracto saxo sortis erupisse in robore insculptas priscarum litterarum notis.

According to the annals of Praeneste, Numerius Suffustius, who was a distinguished man of noble birth, was admonished by dreams, often repeated, and finally even by threats, to split open a flint rock which was lying in a designated place. Frightened by the visions and disregarding the jeers of his fellow-townsmen he set about doing as he had been directed. And so when he had broken open the stone, the lots [sortis] sprang forth carved on oak, in ancient characters.

The soothsayers then fashioned a chest to put them into, and oracles were pronounced based on the verses on the lots, when "drawn by a child". The justification so far is its miraculous origin and later fame. Its fame implies the chief argument in favor of divination (enunciated in the dialogue by Cicero's brother Quintius in Book I), that it works. To be sure, it is not infallible, but then neither is any art, such as medicine or the art of making war.

Cicero himself, in the person of his alter ego "Marcus" (also Cicero's first name), raises many questions about the legend; but he seems to stand by the account as far as describing what the lots looked like and how they were used, even if only in his day by the common people and only in a few places. "Marcus's" own opinion is as follows, just before the quote above:

Quid enim sors est? Idem prope modum quod micare, quod talos iacere, quod tesseras, quibus in rebus temeritas et casus, non ratio nec consilium valet. Tota res est inventa fallaciis aut ad quaestum aut ad superstitionem aut ad errorem.

And pray what is the need, do you think, to talk about the casting of lots? It is much like playing at morra [micare], dice [talos], or knuckle-bones [tesserae], in which recklessness and luck prevail rather than reflection and judgement. The whole scheme of divination by lots was fraudulently contrived from mercenary motives, or as a means of encouraging superstition and error.

In  Book One of On Divination, Cicero puts the contrary view of divination by lots into the mouth of his brother Quintius. Here is a passage from I. 18 (for Book I, I use a new translation, of that book only, by David Wardle in 2007; it seems more literal, even if sometimes the sense is not as clear as in the older one):

quae tamen ductae ut in rem apte cadant, fieri credo posse divinitus. quorum omnium interpretes, ut grammatici poetarum, proxime ad eorum, quos interpretantur, divinationem videntur accedere.

The lot itself is not to be despised, if it also has the sanction of antiquity, as in the case of those lots which we are told sprang from the earth. I believe, however, that under divine influence it may happen that they can be drawn so as to fall appropriately. Those who interpret all these things seem to approach very closely to the divine intention of those they interpret, just as philologists do for  poets.

For "philologists" the other translation has "scholars", which seems to make more sense as interpreters of poets. Here I think "lots we are told sprang form the earth" fits, as a well-known example, the ones at Praeneste discussed by name in Book II. "Quintius" uses Stoic, Peripatetic (i.e. Aristotelian) and Platonist arguments in favor of divinations, although toward the end says he favors the Peripatetics, and that the Stoic "smacked too much of superstition" (II. 100).  His problem with the Stoics is probably that they see divination as the working of Fate, which, as "Marcus" argues, does away with a main purpose of divination, which is that of heeding its warnings and encouragements, and not simply preparing one for the inevitable. The Platonists and Peripatetics did not argue in such terms.

Quintius does not "recognize the drawers of lots [Falconer: fortune-tellers], nor those who divine for the sake of money, nor necromancers" (I. 132: sortilegos acque eos, qui questus causa hariolentur, ne psychomantia quidem); he only approves of "divination without triviality, emptiness [Falconer: falseness], or trickery" (levitate, vanitate, militia exclusa divinationem probo). By "sortilegos", Wardle explains, he means the common hucksters, not those who attended the sacred oracles.

Quintius cites Aristotle in favor of divination in two places, I. 53 and I. 72. In the first, a man named Eudemus has a dream in which Alexander will soon be killed and after five years he will return home. Alexander is indeed killed a few days later, and 5 years later, Eudemus is killed in battle. "Returning home" is interpreted as when his soul left his body. The second reference is short enough to quote (Wardle's translation):

Aristotles quidem eos etiam, qui valetudinis vitiofurerent et melancholici dicerentur, censebat habere aliquid in animis praesagiens atque divinimum.

Aristotle thought that those who rave because of illness and are called 'melancholics' have in their souls some divine, prescient power.

The word "melancholici", Falconer tells us, is from the Greek for "sufferers of black bile". Wardle (p. 307) says that the citation is a "reasonable paraphrase" of a passage in Aristotle's De Divinatione per somniae 432b, even though Wardle's translation of the passage suggests that Aristotle attributes the truth of such dreams to chance.

Belief in divination was endorsed by Plato in several of his works, although he doesn't mention lots. In the Phaedrus prophecy is a type of madness from the gods, ranking along with poetry, the mysteries, and philosophy. There is also the Apology, where Socrates refutes the charge of atheism by averring that he has a daemon who speaks to him in his mind and advises him when he should not embark on a particular course of action.

Two centuries after Cicero, the Platonic philosopher Apuleius, in On the God of Socrates, a Latin work found by the humanists at Monte Casino and printed with the other works associated with him in 1469, enlarged on that passage in the Apology. The Apuleius, published by Conrad Sweynheyn and Arnold Pannartz, was one of the first books printed in Italy. Here is a modern translation of the relevant passage (The Unknown Socrates, translated by William Musgrave Calder, p. 256, in Google Books):

The Greeks call them daemons, and between those who dwell on earth and those who dwell in heaven they act as couriers of prayers from here and of gifts from there .... Through these same powers, as Plato avers in the Symposium, all revelations, the various marvels of the mages, and all kinds of predictions are conducted. In fact, from their number designated individuals attend to matters according to their given sphere of influence: fashioning dreams, dividing entrails, controlling birds of good omen, training birds of ill omen, inspiring prophets, hurling thunderbolts, shaking clouds, and all the rest of the phenomena by which we know the future.

Somehow the gods knew the future, and sometimes, if asked in the right way, they would share some of this knowledge with the humans concerned, via daemons. Although Apuleius does not mention lots here, the same principle would readily apply to them: by guiding one's hand, they could communicate what they saw in the future to someone in the present.

Apuleius in another work, also printed in 1469 but known throughout the Middle Ages, writes about a fraudulent use of lots. In The Metamorphoses (more popularly known as The Golden Ass), Book 9 Ch. 8, he writes of a traveling group of scoundrels calling themselves "eunuchs". Standards must have been much relaxed by his time, because there are no prayers or purification. What is fraudulent in this example is not the drawing of lots as such, but rather the particular method he describes (I give the Adlington translation of 1556 as revised in 1905):

Sorte unica pro casibus pluribus enotata consulentes de rebus variis plurimos ad hunc modum cavillantur. Sors haec erat: Ideo coniuncti terram proscindunt boves, ut in futurum laeta germinent sata.

..they had one lot wherein was written this cheating answer, which they gave for every inquiry, thus: "The oxen tied and yoked together, /Do plough the ground to the intent that it may bring forth her increase."

Another translation (by Joel C. Reihan, p. 182, on Google Books) has:

They had one single response for all the lots they drew from, fit for a wide range of circumstances, and in this way they hoodwink the wide range of all those who came to consult with them about various matters. This was the response: "For this the team of oxen plough the furrowed earth, / So fertile fields of grain may sprout in times to come."

Or as Robert Graves put it in his rather free translation: "Yoke the oxen, plough the land, /High the golden grain will stand."

Either there was only one object used as a lot (pebble, piece of wood, etc.), or they wrote the same verse on all of them. Then if a man came inquiring if he should marry, he was advised to take up the yoke of matrimony and he would beget many children. If it was a business trip, he was told to yoke up his animals and expect much profit. If it was a soldier after bandits, he was advised to put the necks of his enemies under the yoke, that he might profit richly from the spoils. And if he was a farmer, the literal meaning would apply. This is a good example of how a saying on a lot can fit many questions, but it is not divination, because there is no opportunity for the gods to communicate their will by this means, given that there is only one choice. (These two sources, Cicero and Apuleius, are discussed in more detail in "Sorte unica pro casibus pluribus enotata: Literary Texts and Lot Inscriptions as Sources for Ancient Kleromancy", by Christiano Grottanelli, in Mantike: Studies in Ancient Divination, edited by Sarah Iles Johnston and Peter T. Struck, 2005.)

Another Platonic philosopher who endorsed divination was Plutarch (45-120 c.e.). In On the Apparent Face in the Orb of the Moon he speaks of oracle-tenders as departed souls that have undergone purification on the Moon and returned to earth (Section 30, my emphasis):

Yet not forever do the Spirits tarry upon the moon; they descend hither to take charge of oracles, they attend and participate in the highest of the mystic rituals, they act as warders against misdeeds and chastisers of them, and they flash forth as saviour a manifest in war and on the sea.

In this case, the Christian equivalent would probably be saints, who continue to aid humans even after their deaths on earth. However for Plutarch, as he said in another essay, "On the Decline of the Oracles", these spirits only tended a particular oracle for a limited time. So for example the famous oracle at Delphi (at which Plutarch himself was a priest) no longer functioned as such. 

In Book II of On divination, Cicero's "Marcus", of a skeptical bent, had given numerous arguments against divination. But Renaissance Platonists continued to believe in it.  It was found even in the Bible, e.g. Acts, 1:23-26, where the disciples choose Judas's successor by lots. Christian faith undercut Ciceronian rhetoric. Marsilio Ficino (1432-1500) wrote in favor of divination in an early letter that was among those edited by him before publication in 1495. In his 9th letter, "On Divination and the Divinity of the Soul" (Letters, Vol. 1, edited by the author and printed 1495, p. 49f of English translation),  His example of a prophetic dream was one his mother had of his father's falling off a horse, something that happened in reality three days later. He says that he could have given many more examples. He also seems to have believed in astrology. Of Giovanni Pico, who wrote against astrology, I will say more later.

In the early 16th century, Cornelius Agrippa in Three Books of Occult Philosophy (written 1510-1530 in Germany) speaks in terms similar to Apuleius and Cicero's "Quintius". In Book II Ch. LIV he begins:

Whatsoever divinations and predictions of humans events, are made.by lottery, must of necessity, besides the lot, have some sublime occult cause, which indeed shall not be a cause by accident, such as Aristotle describes fortune to be. 

Agrippa's account of an Aristotle skeptical of divination is probably based on those works of his that have survived, as opposed to those now known only from the accounts of others, such as Cicero.

Agrippa also has a second discussion of lots in Book III Ch. LII. Here he emphasizes the importance of prayer and seriousness of intent, with "purity, chastity,and holiness towards God and the celestials...that he may be made worthy of receiving the divine spirits, and knowing the divine pleasure". This is what in Agrippa corresponds to "Quintius's" insistence that he only endorses oracles done in sacred places by the people who were engaged in sacred rituals there.

Cards, it seems to me, are simply a species of lots and cartomancy , which could be done by any randomizing device, from dice to coins to cards, the type done where the randomizing element is shuffling a deck of cards. Writers sometimes condemned "sortilege" and gave a list of means: dice, cards, knucklebones, etc. For example, besides Francesco Pico in Italy, there is Martin de Azpilcueta in 1554 (reported by Caldwell in "A Brief History of Cartomancy):

He commits a mortal sin who asks, or even purposes to ask, charlatans or diviners about a stolen object or any other secret: or else tries to know the same thing by lots, rolling dice, cards, books, a sieve or an astrolabe..

Given these series of similar expositions of what sortilege consisted of, we might also consider mentions of sortilege that don't list the means.  For example Pope Adrian VI in a letter (translated in Witchcraft in Europe, 400-1700, a documentary history, 2nd edition, edited by Kors and Peters, 2001, p. 246) speaks of a report by the Inquisitor in Cremona, during the time of Julius II (d. 1513), describing a sect there that:

taking the Devil to be their Lord and Master, promising him worship and obedicnce, and with accursed incantaions, charms, sortilege, and other foul magic rites were doing grave harm to men, animals, and the fruit of the earth...

Cremona, of course, as the seat of the Bembo worskhop, was one of the earliest centers of tarot card manufacture. The sortilege involved might well have used cards

In the case of sortilege with cards, it wouldn't have mattered whether the card had a verse or a picture on it. If there can be a verse about oxen plowing the earth, there can also be a picture of it. Then the abundant harvest can be shown elsewhere on the  same card. Each form can be symbolic or not. The important thing is that the drawing of the token be free of deliberate direction by someone, so as to allow God or the angel to control the choice. The verses on the Mamluk playing cards in the Topkapi Museum in Istanbul only promise happiness (see again http://www.wopc.co.uk/egypt/mamluk/index.html); these, at least the ones given on the website had much the same fortune in different words. For that reason they are a dubious example of fortune-telling. The 1497 verses seem to be more specific, although I have only seen stanza 31. It promises love with periods of pain. Probably they are generic enough to fit anybody, but also different from one another in specific content

Lot-books existed in ancient times. They had a list of questions, and then a response would be selected by rolling knucklebones. In one 2nd century set of inscriptions, there were five throws of a four-sided knucklebone, in any order; the sides, which did not all have an equal probability, were numbered 1, 3, 4, and 6. Each oracle specified a deity, presumably the one guiding the knucklebones, and a prognostication (Fritz Graf, "Rolling the Dice for an Answer", pp. 51-98 of Mantiké). Here are a couple of examples (pp. 89, 93f). The number after the enumeration of the throws is their sum:

XXVII. 44333     17       Serapis
If two fours are cast and three threes. Take courage and fight. Zeus the Owner (Ktesios) is your helper. You will punish your opponent and have him under your fist, and he will give happiness to the works for which you will thank him.

LVI  66666     30     Square Hermes 

If all that are cast together are sixes: do not go, whatever you intend to; it will be better for you to stay; I see something hostile to you, thus wait; afterwards, ti will be possible, and (the god) will free you from fear and save you from evil.

Such books continued to be used in the middle ages even by Christian clergy, as is known by the edicts threatening excommunication to priests who used them. One 6th century lot-book, the Sortes Sangellenses, is preserved in the monastery of St. Gallen, Switzerland (see William E. Klingshirn, "Christian Divination in Late Roman Gaul: the Sortes Sangellenses", pp. 99-128 of Mantike). Presumably angels rather than demons would have been the agents behind the scene, one means by which guardian angels could take care of their charges. In the 9th century, however, there are numerous manuscripts of a Sortes Sanctorum, "Oracles of the Saints" (Graff p. 79). It used six-sided dice; instructed three days of fasting and the singing of a mass beforehand; the layout was similar to the Greek ones just shown, with the numbers thrown on one line and the oracle on the next. There was also the Sortes Monacenses, with manuscripts from the 11th century. While the Greek lot book was not known until the late 19th century, the ones in Latin could well have been an inspiration for Renaissance lot-books. 

Given that casting lots was a means of determining God's will, as in the example of the disciples choosing Judas's successor (Acts 1:23-26), if God or his angel could control the casting of lots by the disciples, surely they could also control the drawing of a card, even if the Church would think the comparison was blasphemous. The lot-book needed only contain the type of information that the person wanted to know and that the angel wanted to communicate. The angel, or its divine sponsor, would know what card to select. After all, it was right there in the lot-book, a much easier thing to know than the future. It was then just a matter of guiding the hand.

The advantage of lots over the other types of "signs" was that the prediction was right there on the piece of stone or wood--or page of a book--where the angel could read it before directing the person's hand, and thus harder to fake and more dependable for the angel, than the whim of an interpreter, some of whom will interpret a lightning strike in one way and some in another (one of Cicero's arguments against them).  

The problem with such procedures is that there are bad daemons as well as good ones. Even if they did not predict falsehoods, they could still give sayings that could easily be misinterpreted by evil or incompetent interpreters. Shakespeare's Macbeth has examples. In one Macbeth receives the oracle that he will never be defeated until a certain forest comes to a certain castle. He interprets this as meaning he is invulnerable; in fact he is defeated when an army comes to that castle carrying boughs cut from that forest to disguise themselves.

Plutarch mentions the problem of bad spirits infecting oracles in the section  of On the Apparent Face in the Orb of the Moon already cited. The souls of dead people who have not mastered their passions even after death then "seize upon a body" in our world:

...it is no slight, quiet, or harmonious business when with the affective faculty apart from reason they seize upon a body. Creatures like Tityus and Typho and the Python that with insolence and violence occupied Delphi and confounded the oracle belonged to this class of souls, void of reason and subject to the affective element gone astray through delusion;

Presumably the presence of a priest, crosses, the Bible, etc.--much more powerful than their pagan equivalents--would discourage such malevolent beings from contaminating the work when it involved the random selection of a verse from the Bible. Prayers to God and the saints were used in other cases as well, as shown in the accounts of witch-trials; when done without the blessing of the papacy, none of this mattered to the Inquisition.

Even when not being intentional misleading, someone could take a verse the wrong way. For example, the lot book I showed at the beginning ends, "...he will return after much war". In a case discussed by Cicero's "Quintius", a man dreamed that he would return home after 5 years, and the prediction was considered fulfilled when after 5 years he died in battle. "Home" was where his soul had set out from.


FOLENGO'S TAROCCHI SONNETS

A much-discussed literary passage is in The Chaos of Triperuno (Chaos of the Three-in-one), by an independent-minded monk named Teofilio Folengo. It was published in 1527 Venice under the pseudonym "Merlinus Cocai", who appears in the poem as "Merlino". This name, associated with the famous magician of the Arthurian romances, already associates the events being narrated with magic. At one point in the dialogue, another of the author's alter egos, Limerno ("Merlino" transposed), tells Merlino about four sonnets he has just written. Each of them incorporate five subjects from the 22 special cards of the tarot, so as to tell the four people who drew these cards something about their "suertes", i.e. destinies or fortunes. The occasion is a meeting Limerno had with his friends Giuberto, Focilla, Falcone and Mirella (text and Anne Mullaney's translation at http://www.folengo.com/Chaos%20with%20English%20DRAFT%20Feb%2017%202014.pdf):

dove, trovati c’hebbero le carte lusorie de trionphi, quelli a sorte fra di loro si divisero e, volto a me, ciascuno di loro la sorte propria m’espose, pregandomi che sopra quelli un sonetto gli componessi”

(where, having found luxurious triumph cards, they divided them by lot among them and, in front of me, each of them revealed to me their lots, begging me to compose a sonnet on them.)

Each gave him the names of five cards; Limerno was to compose a sonnet interpreting them. Since the cards were drawn randomly, they would qualify as lots in the ancient practice of kleromancy, in Latin, sortilege, the divining of what will happen, through fate, destiny, or chance, in someone's life. The daemon or guardian angel has chosen which five cards each will get.

There is a close correspondence here to the method of Etteilla. In the 3rd Cahier (notebook) Etteilla describes the standard layout as three rows of seven cards, with only the top row face up; the top row was used first, and then if there was no meaningful result, the next row was used, and if there was still no result, the third row. A c. 1838 book on Etteilla's method by "Julia Orsini" (pseudonym of the publisher) has a pictorial example (at left) with just the first row; card 8 is the card in Etteilla's system that signifies the female querent.

Alternatively, if there was only one question, Etteilla said, the reading could be done with five cards, repeated up to three times if needed (the passage is quoted by Papus in Le Tarot Divinitoire, pp. 244-245 of Stockman's English translation; for Etteilla's original, see my essay at http://thirdcahier.blogspot.com/2012/10/blank_3683.html). A pictorial example of this type is at left, in this case using ordinary cards. The card at the top represents the querent, The alleged artist of this print died in 1765, five years before Etteilla's first book; but to me the dress looks more the period of Napoleon. These numbers, 5 and 7, are close to those of Folengo, but without the safeguard of doing the reading over again if necessary.

Folengo continues:

Hora vegnamo dunque primeramente a la ventura overo sorte di Giuberto, dopoi la quale, né più né meno, voglioti lo sonetto di quella recitare, ove potrai diligentemente considerare tutti li detti trionfi, a ciascaduno sonetto singularmente sortiti, essere quattro fiate nominati si come con lo aiuto de le maggiori figure si comprende:

(So then now let us come first to the future or rather the destiny [sorte, which can mean also "fate", "fortune", or "chance"] of Giuberto, after which, I want to recite no more or less, the sonnet of that [destiny] to you, where you will be able to diligently consider all the trump cards mentioned, sorted [sortiti] one by one to each sonnet, to be named four times so that with the help of the major figures it is understood:)

It is explicit here that the sonnets are to relate to the future of the four persons, whether called fate, lot, or happenstance. Giuberto drew Justice, the Angel (the early name for the Judgment card), the Devil, Fire (the early name for the Tower), and Love. Limerno then combined these subjects in four ways, all coming to the same conclusion: 

Quando ‘l Foco d’Amor, che m’arde ognhora, 
Penso e ripenso, fra me stesso i’ dico, 
Angiol di Dio non è, ma lo Nemico 
Che la Giustitia spinse del ciel fora

(When I consider and reconsider the Fire of Love, which burns me even now, to myself I say, “This is not the Angel of God, but the Enemy whom Justice pushed out of heaven.”) 

Et è pur chi qual Angiolo l’adora, 
Chiamando le sue Fiamme dolce intrico, 
Ma nego ciò, ché di Giustitia amico 
Non mai fu, chi in Demonio s’innamora.

(And there are still those who adore him as an Angel, calling his flames sweet intrigue. But I refute that, because no one was ever a friend of Justice who falls in love with a Demon.)

Amor di donna è Ardor d’un Spirito nero, 
Lo cui viso se’n gli occhi un Angiol pare, 
Non t’ingannar, ch’è fraude e non Giustitia.

(Love of a woman is the fervor of a black Spirit, whose face if it appears in the eyes to be an Angel, don’t be fooled, because this is deception and not Justice.) 

Giustitia esser non puote, ove malitia
Ripose de sue Faci il crudo Arciero,
er cui Satan Angiol di luce appare.

(This cannot be Justice, where the cruel Archer sets the malice of his Torches, so that Satan appears the Angel of light.)

The last sentence sums up the rest; all are warnings to Giuberto to let his sense of justice rule him rather than his passions. It is an "if...then" sort of prediction. It is not Giuberto's "destiny" in the sense of something he cannot avoid. It is a flaw in his character, which he challenges at his peril.

Dummett in Il Mondo e L'Angelo (1993) objected that this use is a mere literary device, not true divination. This is true--after all, it occurs in a work of fiction--but one must wonder, as Terry Zanetti does in a 2006 essay ("Genesi della Cartomanzia", pp. 75-77 of Il Tarocchino di Bologna, edited by Vitali and Zanetti, on p. 75; also available online), whether it was not inspired by a pre-existing practice. That is a good question. But is the pre-existing practice one of fortune-telling, or merely that of using the titles of the cards in poems? It seems to me that since the cards are described as having been chosen randomly, and the sonnet as the result of combining the cards so chosen--as opposed just to incorporating the five subjects in a poem he is relating to his friend--it counts as fortune telling.  In the lot-books there was one verse. Here there are five tarot-subjects that need to be put together, so as to reveal something unknown, or not brought to consciousness, before. This is precisely what Etteilla practiced.

There remains the question of how Limerno accomplished the interpretation. For someone who knows about the seductiveness of passion and its ability to rule one's actions over one's sense of justice, this combination of subjects is easy enough. That part of the process is indeed in the genre of tarocchi appropriati, i.e  poetry incorporating tarot-subjects, usually related to a particular person of the poet's acquaintance or a fictional character. One might in fact wonder whether  tarocchi appropriati might have originated from the practice of interpreting the cards as symbolic oracles.

On the other hand, by articulating a moral truth relevant to the person in question, Folengo's sonnet could be appreciated even by someone who didn't believe in cartomancy. Someone like Cicero could have said that whatever cards Giuberto had drawn, Limerno could have made up an appropriate sonnet. There is a certain uncertainty here, even though, as Folengo tells the story, one is led to marvel at how the sonnet comes naturally from the cards, as though magic were involved in their happening to be the ones they were. Tarot interpreters today experience the same wonderment (for examples, see Andrea Vitali's online essay "Predicting the future with the tarot", http://www.associazioneletarot.it/page.aspx?id=467&lng=ENG).
Yet the interpretive gap between the titles and the sonnet, and the literary context itself, give Folengo an excuse, if he were questioned by the Inquisition. It is only a story, he could say, and one indeed  for which he probably would have been able to compose an apt sonnet regardless what the distribution of cards had been. It is an example of what I would call "the principle of deniability", applying whenever there is a discrepancy between what is approved by the authorities and what is approved by a subculture under those authorities. I will give two other examples in the next section, both from Ferrara.

Limerno's sonnets also show how the interpreter can protect his client against the work of malicious daemons. The interpreter must use the card-titles, or a synonym, in such a way as to articulate truths consistent with morality. At the same time the binding quality of moral precepts--not just that people follow them, but that they ought to follow them--is not something given to the outer senses; for the Platonist, they come from another realm, that of the archetypes, in other words, the mind of God. To the extent that one draws upon that world, a person experiences the higher realm himself.
Folengo is important as an example where the reading of lots, sortilege, is by a combination of card-subjects, as opposed to a verse. In that respect he is much like Etteilla, if the subject of the card is defined by its keyword. The difference is that for Etteilla each card has two titles in that sense, one for the upright and the other for the reversed, corresponding to the two ways in which a card may be drawn after shuffling the deck. There may be other differences.

SUBJECTS AND KEYWORDS

For Etteilla, the card-reader had not only to pay attention to the keywords printed on the card, but also also numerous "synonyms and different significations". While I have not been able to locate an original list, the ones in Le Grand Etteilla, ou L'Art de Tirer les Cartes, by "Julia Orsini" (pseudonym of the publisher Simon Blocquel) are probably derived from one or the other. An example is at right. The "dark-haired girl" is also an honest, natural girl,  and represents such values of honesty, civility, etc. There is quite a range for "usury", too.

It is the same for Folengo. He uses not only the title, but other words associated with that title:

Love:  "archer".
Devil:  "Enemy...pushed out of heaven"; "Demon"; "black spirit"; "Satan".
Fire: "flames"; "fervor"; "torches".

To understand "archer" you have to know that Cupid, the little flying boy with a bow and arrow, usually blindfolded, is a symbolic figure representing love. And so on for the others. This was characteristic of some of the tarocchi appropriati, too. The reader had to know the equivalences. The different words connote different images, either descriptive or symbolic. The range is not in this sonnet quite as wide as in Etteilla, but it is only his first poem. I will get to another in a moment.

There is an analogy with prophetic dreams. A coming fervor might appear as flames or torches. Love might appear as an archer. And sometimes, as Freud said, a cigar is just a cigar; i.e. someone dreams of fire and then the house burns down. Likewise, Folengo just uses the title of the card some of the time, and Etteilla has "Justice" for the keyword on the card with the standard representation of Justice.

At the same time, both Folengo and Etteilla use symbolism of a non-conventional variety. For Etteilla, the card with Eclaircissement (Enlightenment) and Feu (Fire) on it is in relation to a red star with rays. That is fairly original, at least in my familiarity with symbols before his time.

For a comparable example in Folengo, we need to go to the third sonnet. presumably directed toward a man who is in government or the military. Folengo prefaces it by saying that he would have wished a better fortune for him. The cards are given as Moon, Hanged Man, Pope, Emperor, and Popess. In this case the text, in the first edition, was published with gaps in it. I will give the original with its gaps. In the second edition of Triperuno, the sonnet was left out entirely. In the third edition the gaps were filled in. In the English translation below, I put the filled-in words in brackets. The translation is Mullaney's again, except for the fifth line; there she has "Alas, the one...", which leaves out one of the subjects):

Europa mia, quando fia mai che l’Una
Parte di te, c’ha il turco Traditore,
Rifràncati lo Papa o Imperatore,
Mentre han le chiavi in man per lor Fortuna?   

(My Europe, when does it ever happen that the one part of you, which the Traitorous Turk holds, the Pope or the Emperor frees for you, while they have the keys in their hands of their Fortune?)

Aime la Traditrice et importuna
Ripose in man .....................honore
Di ...........e tien ................. furore,
Sol contra il giglio e non contra la Luna. 

(Alas, the inopportune and Traitorous one places in the hands of [a woman] the honor of [Peter] and maintains [the Emperor's] furor only against the lily and not against the Moon.)

Che se ‘l .......... non fusse una .............
Che per un piè .................Sospeso tiene
La Luna in griffo a l’aquila vedrei;

(Because if the [Pope] were not a [Popess] who holds [Marcin, little Mark] Hanging by one foot, I would see the Moon in the clutches of the eagle.)

Ma questi ..............................miei
Fan sì che mia Papessa far si viene
La Luna, e vo’ Appiccarmi da me stessa.

(But these [Popes and Emperors] of mine act so that my Popess comes to make herself the Moon, and I want to Hang myself.) 

A gloss to the first stanza (presumably by the author) has it that "Papessa fatta Fortuna", i.e. the Popess is made Fortune. So the "woman" in the fourth line, referring to Fortune, really means "Papessa". Likewise, where the 3rd edition has "Peter", "Pope" is what he means. And I think that when he says "Traditrice", "Traitor" with a feminine ending, he is referring to Europe.

In the last two lines, "fan...far si viene/La Luna", literally "acts...to make she comes herself the Moon", might mean "acts so as to become a lunatic" (Marco Ponzi, on Tarot History Forum). Another possibility, suggested by Steve Mangan in another post, is "make the Moon shine".

There is much non-obvious symbolism here, some of which involves the titles of the cards. The lily is the French; the Moon is the Turks, who had the crescent on their flag. The eagle is the Emperor, and "little Mark" is Venice, whose most honored relics were the bones of St. Mark. Moreover, "Popess" means "womanish Pope", i.e. one who is afraid to fight. The point is that the Pope, by allying with the Emperor against the French instead of, like the Venetians, fighting against the Turk, will let the latter, the enemy of Christianity, flourish, making the Pope's action lunacy. The cards symbolize this conclusion.

It is true that "Moon" here has a very particular symbolism that probably would not apply to many other cases. whereas Etteilla's meanings are more systematic. But even for Etteilla there was an enormous amount of flexibility in interpretation, depending on the other cards, the particularity of the querent, and the reader's intuition.

You have only to look at the lists of "synonyms or different significations" that Etteilla's followers developed, with his encouragement. I have already given one example; here is another. "Temperance" includes air temperature and tempered musical sounds.  Etteilla in the 3rd Cahier, speaking of naive card-readers who only look at key-words, said: "Lack of order, Usury, Calumny, each of these words has in their ears only one sense, or one sound." By "one sense, one sound" he means that not only does the reader have to attend to different senses of words and shades of meaning, but also to words that sound similar, homonyms. He sounds like Freud, with his theory that dreams used puns. Folengo is in good company. Moreover, his meaning of "Moon" does fit the generic meaning of the darkness of which the Moon is mistress and that Turkey was thought to represent.

Here we have gone considerably beyond the simple codes of lot-books and time-worn symbolic equivalences, with their one to one correspondences, to one where there are many choices.  If so, there is a problem. How can the interpreter know, out of all the various possibilities, which one the daemon is responding to when guiding the hand to that card? 

Cicero's Quintius said that the interpreter himself is "very near to the divine spirit of the gods", as are the interpreters of poetry. It is like knowing what an ancient poet meant by his obscure verse. So Limerno gets the thoughts of his sonnets by understanding what the daemon was thinking. To interpret the verse or combinations of words, one has to enter into its world, and not just its world, because the daemon is merely an intermediary from the higher world.

CARD INTERPRETATION AS REVELATION OF THE HIDDEN

Cartomancy is a species of divination, that done with cards, just as pyromancy is done with fire, hydromancy with water, chiromancy with the palm of the hand, and so on. Divination, in turn, is the uncovering of something hidden by mysterious means. The Grand Robert Dictionnaire de la Lange Francaise's first definition of "divination" is as follows:

1. Action de découvrir ce qui est cache par les moyens qui ne relèvent par d'une connaissance naturelle ou ordinaire, pratique permettant cette découverte.

(1. Action of discovering that which is hidden by means other than natural or ordinary knowledge, practice permitting this discovery.)

It is the discovery of something previously hidden, by non-ordinary means. In Folengo's imagined situation, it is the disposition of the cards that is mysterious and non-ordinary. Limerno is merely bringing out what the cards are, in some way, "saying": not to count on the Pope to fight the Turks, or on love rather than justice. These are things presumably not known by the persons themselves, or perhaps in some way known but also minimized, things they don't want to know, or things known but not so clearly as after the divination. But hearing the truth, they would know in their hearts it was true, that it wasn't something planted by a bad angel.

This type of interpretation can be found other places at this time. Ariosto, in Orlando Furioso, wrote of a magic ring that the good sorceress Melissa gives the hero Ruggiero; she says its power is to reveal the truth. Putting on the ring, he goes to meet the beautiful lady he is in love with. Then, as Ariosto writes:

Ma l’anel venne à interpretar le carte
Che già molti anni havean celato il vero.

(But the ring came now to interpret the carte
Which already for many years had hidden the truth.)

She is suddenly revealed to him as she is, old and ugly. The ring reveals the truth she had hidden; it is also a prediction in the sense that her love for him is similarly a sham, and he, like others, will be silenced and disposed of when she tires of him. It is then that Ruggiero remembers a talking tree that warned him about her when he first arrived in her domain, a tree that gave its name as that of an old friend of Ruggiero's, now sadly turned into a tree. The sorceress with the ring was no bad angel.

The ring's revelation of truth is comparable to how in a poem by Petrarch, Christ's birth "interpreted the pages" of the Old Testament, by revealing some of them to be predictions of the event. In the circle of the Estense, for whom Ariosto was writing, however, "carte" were the "carte di sorti" of Isabella d'Este's favorite emblem, slips of paper, emblematic of the mix of good and bad fortune. They appear, for example, in a painting by Dosso Dossi for Isabella, an "Allegory of Fortune", in which Chance holds the "sorti", lots, in front of Fortune but outside her reach. She is good fortune now, but one never knows what chance, holding the lots, may bring. The Getty Museum says that these are the tickets of lotteries conducted by cities to raise money. However, the vessel from which they are drawn also connects them to the tesserae, knucklebones, described by Cicero. Each lot reveals its truth, "interpretar le carte", interpreting the papers, when its number is compared to the winning ones, each with a correspondng prize.

In Ariosto's case there is specifically an element of magic. One would not think of lottery tickets, but of papers with pictures or words on them that hid some truth when a person drew one or more of them blindly, which would be revealed by a good interpreter. The ring is such an interpreter. And papers are not pages. The word in the context of the Estensi is not "pages" but "cards", and that is in fact the way modern translations of the passage read it (Guido Waldman, Orlando Furioso: an English prose translation, p. 69; Claire Carroll, The Orlando Furioso: a Stoic Comedy, p. 227).

Still, it is an elusive metaphor. Perhaps there was a reason to be elusive. The Church at that time was against divination with cards or other means beyond its control. Ambiguous language gave a writer and his subculture audience a way of saying, and hearing with enjoyment, a prohibited practice. It is like the Beatles' "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds", which doesn't actually say LSD. (For more on this topic, see Andrea Vitali's online essay, An Enigma in Orlando Furioso, plus my "Addendum" to the English translation.)

In this connection I will give one more example to show the context of Ariosto's use of carte. This one suggests that the tarot trumps were probably among the cards interpreted at that time. Ariosto had started writing his poem in 1504-1505, according to Alberto Cassadei in "The History of the Furioso", (pp. 55-70 of Ariosto Today, Toronto 2003, p. 57), and periodically read selected passages to Isabella d'Este, his most enthusiastic fan. In 1508 a minor poet in Ferrara just one year older than Ariosto was brutally murdered. The victim was Ercole Strozzi, son of Tito Vespasiano Strozzi; he was a first cousin to Matteo Boiardo, author of Orlando Inamorato, to which Orlando Furioso was a sequel. Ercole Strozzi was found dead on a Ferrara street one morning with his hair pulled out and 22 stab wounds in his body.

Historians have not disagreed as to the number of wounds, although they have about who had him killed. In 1904 Ferdinand Gregorovius (Lucretia Borgia According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day, 1874, p. 326) showed that Ercole Strozzi had served as the courier of secret letters between Ippolito’s brother Alfonso’s wife, Lucrezia Borgia, and Isabella’s husband, Francesco Gonzaga (I owe this reference to Lothar Teikemeier). Gregorovius theorized that Ercole had been charmed into this dangerous mission by Lucrezia (somewhat as Alcina had charmed Ruggiero in Ariosto’s story!). As to the culprit, he noted that Duke Alfonso, "who had always shown himself an unyielding supporter of the law, allowed the matter to drop".

Sarah Bradford, in her 2004 biography Lucrezia Borgia, endorses Gregorovius' suspicions and argues that the murder was likely committed by Masino del Forno, a thug employed by “the senior Este brothers” (p. 283; for longer quotations, see my posts on Tarot History Forum at:

http://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=503&p=13864&hilit=wounds#p13887). 

The hair was a trademark of his; just the year before, he had grabbed one of Ippolito’s d'Este's
chamberlains by the hair while arresting him. She assumes that Isabella had found one or more letters from Lucrezia in her husband's office.

The historians do not speculate on the significance of the number 22; but to me the murder would seem to be in the nature of a prediction of the fate to befall the pair - Lucrezia and Francesco, one or both - if they persisted in pursuing their affair. The 22 stab wounds are like a tarot spread, and one not hard to interpret. Like the ring, it is meant to bring the couple to their senses and foretell their fate if they are not careful. No magic is involved. For his part, Francesco from then on scrupulously avoided any possibility of a compromising situation. Lucrezia, for her part, was careful only to write letters that testified to friendship and nothing more.

Perhaps Strozzi's body had as its hidden meaning the duties of marriage for a woman, different than for a man. That might be the expression of a marriage archetype in the particular context of 1507 Ferrara.

LLULLIAN WHEELS

Etteilla went beyond Folengo's sonnets and the message of Ercole Strozzi's body, with their hypothetical predictions based on present dispositions. He claimed to get specific predictions (although not such as to conflict with free will), and for people he did not know. He also gave an elaborate justification: his mastery of the Egyptians' superior wisdom, a science he could allude to in his books but not really explain to those unprepared for serious (and expensive) study. If nothing else, there is a qualitative advance in rhetoric, which he might not have entirely invented.

Etteilla did not give many clues as to where he got his system. In the 2nd Cahier (p. 134) he said he learned it from a certain certain "very aged Piemontese", the grandson of "Alexis said Piemontese" (for the quotations see my blog at http://etteillastrumps.blogspot.com/2012/05/cards-as-whole.html). This last refers to the author of a famous book on folk medicines still reprinted in Etteilla's day, written under the pseudonym "Alexis Piemontese" (1500-1566). According to Wikipedia he was part of a group in Naples that tested the remedies to be sure they worked. There the lead ends. 

In the 3rd Cahier, Eteilla mentions two others that he thinks used the "Egyptian" method, Raimon Llull and Trithemius. Not much of Trithemius has been translated, and in what has been translated I see nothing relevant. But there is a possible tie-in to Llull, which applies also to Folengo.

 In the 15th century a new method of doing theology and philosophy was brought to Italy from Barcelona, using "Lullian Wheels", a system devised by the 14th century Catalan philosopher (and missionary to the Arabs) Ramon Llull. In his Ars Brevis, the system had six categories of nine items each (A-K), in four diagrams; combined by rotating wheels and combining one with another using a chart. (It is strikingly reminiscent of the lot-book's procedure.) The fourth diagram used three such subjects, but all six were used at one point or another in the process, by which one could deduce from simple axioms a myriad of interesting philosophical and theological propositions, in a manner that has been compared to Spinoza later. At left is the fourth of four sets of wheels.

Interest in Llull was great in 15th century Italy; for example alchemical works attributed to him were recopied in Florence of c. 1460. The Ars Brevis seems to have arrived in Padua around 1430, according to Anthony Bonner in Selected works of Ramon Llull, vol. 1. In the 1470s there was even a Hebrew translation of this work, which scholars suspect was produced by Flavius Mithridites, the apostate Jew whom Giovanni Pico della Mirandola hired to translate Jewish texts (Harvey Hames, "Jewish Magic with a Christian Text: a Hebrew Translation of Ramon Llull's 'Ars Brevis'" Traditio, Vol. 54, 1999, pp. 283-300, on p. 291, available on JSTOR. See also his "Between the March of Ancona and Florence", in Invoking Angels: Theurgic Ideas and Practices, Thirteenth to Sixteenth Centuries, ed. Claire Fanger, 2012, pp. 294-311; and "Ramon Llull's Ars Brevis Translated into Hebrew, Problems of Terminology and Methodology," in Latin into Hebrew: Texts and Studies, Vol. 2, ed, Resianne Fontaine and Gad Freudenthal, 2013, pp. 136-159; both are available online.) The manuscript used has on it the names of men, presumably former owners, who had received degrees in Padua in 1430 and 1444. An Italian application of the Ars Brevis to Kabbalah, the De auditu kabbalistico, was published anonymously in 1518 Venice (Umberto Eco, From the Tree to the Labyrinth, 2014, p. 414f; also Thorndike, History of Magic and Experimental Science Vol. V, 1929, p. 325).

As you can see at left, the seven virtues are part of Llull's system. Instead of vices, one could simply put in the more negative cards: Fool, Bagatella, Fortune, Hanged Man, Death, Devil, Tower. The so-called "names of God" are in the first column, of which the Emperor, Empress, Pope, Popess, and a few others could correspond. The remaining words, including quantitative answers to the questions and those of "Figure T", could be allocated to the suits, resulting in something similar to what see in Etteilla. There does not have to be an exact correspondence; what counts is the general idea of combining preformulated ideas to answer a theological or philosophical question.

Folengo's use of the subject-names Limerno's friends have given him is similar. In the first case, he deals with the Angel, Justice, Love,  as such. For the Devil card he seems to be substituting lust as a great deceiver. In the third sonnet he does likewise. The Pope is a great spiritual power, but the card's association with the Popess, which he seems to interpret in the "Pope Joan" way, as someone appearing to be a man but really a woman, makes him weak in the face of danger. The Moon is a lesser light in which things appear other than they are, more so than in the day. It is a suitable image for the Muslim power. He is abstracting and then particularizing.

 While Llull had six categories, they were not all combined at once: in his first set of wheels, he uses one pair, then another pair in his next set, then another, and finally a threesome in his fourth set. Folengo's examples simply combine five subjets. But like the words on Llull's wheels, they are a stimulus to his thinking once put into abstract (Pope = extreme holiness) as well as particular terms (pope = a particular man of Folengo's time). And the result, a cautionary sonnet, is somehow given extra validity from the means by which it was attained, the random drawing of the cards, which frees the interpretation from the diviner and gives it to the divine.  In addition, the words come from the persons themselves, reminiscent of how Socrates in Plato's dialogues pulls philosophical truths from the words of his interlocutors. It is an example of Renaissance ascent and descent

In Etteilla the keywords substitute for Folengo's titles. There are 78 x 2 of them (minus a few that are the same upright and reversed), which gives an opportunity for great diversity and specificity. Etteilla can give more specific predictions than Folengo. Each reflect an archetype in the upper world, to which the querent is someohow drawn, and which the interpreter must somehow enter into, too. We know where some of the keywords came from, because they are the same as the titles of the 22 special cards of the tarot. For the others, I have suggested suit and number symbolism as the stimulus.

FOLENGO, KABBALA, AND "SECOND SIGHT"

A feature of Folengo's sonnets is that the order of the subjects varies in each of the four parts of the poem. So we have:

First stanza: Hanged Man, Moon [Turk], Pope, Emperor, Popess.
Second stanza: Hanged Man, Popess ["woman"], Pope ["Peter"], Emperor, Moon.
Third stanza: Pope, Popess, Hanged Man, Moon, Emperor ["eagle"].
Fourth stanza: Pope, Emperor, Popess, Moon, Hanged Man.

While this change in order may simply have been dictated by the needs of his verses, there is also a resemblance,  greatly simplified, to the Kabbalist practice of letter permutations to induce a trance state and a connection to the divine, raising the person to a higher realm. The conversion of "Merlino" to "Limerno" is another such permutation.

In Florence, at least by the 1480s and 1490s, there was much interaction between a few humanist Jews and a few humanist Christians, most notably between Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and the Jewish humanist Johannan Alemanno. Alemanno had been educated in Florence in the 1450s-early 1460s and was only a couple of years younger than Ficino ("Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Jochanan Alemanno", by B. C. Novak, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 45 (1982), pp. 125-147, p. 126, including note 11). Like Ficino, he was the son of a poor physician. He lived with the family of Yehiel da Pisa, the wealthiest and most prominent Jewish family in Tuscany, the Jewish equivalent of living with the Medici. Plato was a main topic among humanists in Florence then, and Jews as well as Christians received humanist educations. Weak evidence that Alemanno was influenced by Platonism then is that in the 1450s the prominent (and conservative) rabbi Yehuda Messer Leon, one of whose students had recently married da Pisa's daughter, wrote a letter of protest to the rabbis of Florence about the unhealthy interest in Platonism by Jewish students there (David Ruderman, The World of a Renaissance Jew, 1981, p. 51). In the 1480s Alemanno returned to Florence, where by his report he and Pico had many productive conversations (Novak p. 130f). Novak identifies numerous parallels between the writings of the two thinkers, especially on the Kabbalah.

Speaking of Alemanno's particular Neoplatonist brand of Kabbalah, Moshe Idel writes (Kabbalah in Italy, 2011, p. 252):

Alemanno attributes the creative possibilities inherent in the letters not only to their
magical powers, the details of which are transmitted from one sage to another, but
also to the ascent of the mystic to a prophetic vision that enables him to reach the
archetypes appointed over the lower world and to use this knowledge.

An advantage of this method is that it goes above the air-based daemons of ancient Platonism to the source of their information, above even the spirits of the planets, stars, and constellations. Instead of letters, what Folengo is permutating, weakly, is words. According to Idel, it wasn't only letters that were combined; there wer "combinations of letters and divine names" (p. 236). The cards, in so far as they represent archetypes, are divine names.

Alemmano's colleague Giovanni Pico mentions the kabbalist combinaorial technique\ in his Conclusiones as "the science of the revolution of the alphabet" (11>2). In the Apologia he wrote a few months afterwards to explain himself more fully, he adds (quoted in Harvey J. Hanes, The Art of Conversion: Christianity & Kabbalah in the Thirteenth Century, 2000, p. 1, in Google Books):

Unam quae dicitur hohmat ha-zeraf  id est ars combinandi et est modus quidam procededendi in scientiis et est simile quid sicut apud nostros dicitur ars Raymundi, licet forte diuerso modo proceda...

that which is called hohmat ha-zeraf [revolution or combination of letters] is a combinatory Art and it is a method for gaining knowledge, and it is similar to that which we refer to as the ars Raymundi, although it proceeds in a very different manner.

The reference is to Raimon Llull,  as numerous commentators have pointed out. Of the two procedures, gematria and Llull's Ars, it is the latter that seems to me to have the more applicability to the tarot, because it combines concepts rather than letters. In that way, too, Folengo's sonnets use such a combinatorial method to arrive at their verses.

Alemanno's vocalizations of letter combinations could be a means to sudden insights of a prophetic nature::

Thus, when dealing with the moment of revelation, Alemanno combines elements found in ecstatic Kabbalah, especially the concept of a "science of prophecy" and the "sphere of letters," with an Avicennan and Ibn Tufayl's theory of "sudden vision," a form of intuition that is sometimes also called prophecy, and with a concept of nature.

Alemanno's "sudden vision"--in Hebrew, hashqqfah pit'omit (Idel p. 295)--of an extra-sensory kind, upon performing the letter combinations, corresponds eerily to the reports of "second sight" in 16th century Scotland and England after the visits of first Cardano and then Bruno. In 1638 a Scottish poet boasted (Schuchard, Wisdom of the Temple, p. 103):

We have the Mason word, and second sight;
Things for to come we can foretell aright.

According to Schuchard (p. 103),

The masons' claim to "second sight" was probably rooted in Cabalistic visualization techniques that were transmitted from Eastern and Southern Europe.

Cardano, one possible source, visited Scotland in 1552 (p. 157). Schuchard explains (p. 159)

When Cardano practised the art of memory, he concentrated on the numerical-linguistic and architectural images advocated by the Cabalists and Lullists. By methodically intensifying these mental gymnastics and visualizations, he would achieve an "intuitive flash" that made the proper connections and analogies of all elements--natural as well as supernatural--vividly clear. From this insight, he could sometimes predict future events.

Schuchard does not say what she is basing this account on, but it is at least a reasonable extrapolation from what we do know. Cardano, who resorted to card games when he was short on money, wrote a book on card games. It seems to me that if he regularly won, he must have used a memory system. Schucard's claim, however, goes beyond what could be expected from a memory system alone.

Another source for "second sight" techniques might have been Giordano Bruno, who had written a book on memory systems. He visited England in 1583 and acquired a Scottish disciple named Alexander Dickson (Schuchard p. 203). Dickson gave lessons on the basics, but apparently not enough to achieve "second sight". One student, Hugh Platt, writes (quoted by John Meador at http://www.tarotforum.net/showpost.php?p=1729736&postcount=6):

...two especial uses, I have often exercised this art for the better help of my own memory, and the same as yet has never failed me. Although I have heard some of Master Dickson, his schollers, that have prooved such cunning Cardplayers hereby, that they could tell the course of all the Cards and what every gamester had in his hand. So ready we are to turn an honest and commendable invention into craft and cousenage." -Hugh Platt: The Jewell House of Art and Nature 1594

He is complaining that Master Dickson used his technique not just to remember what cards have been plated, but also, somehow, what "every gamester had in his hand", which Platt considers a form of cheating ("cousenage"). It is possible that Dickson's pupils were playing a practical joke, mystifying what was really just a memory system. But perhaps not.

There is no indication in any of these accounts that the specific cards, words, or letters used to attain the ecstatic state played a role in shaping the ecstatic vision of the future. But memory systems, by allowing one to run easily through different examples of a concept, increase one's facility of grasping its meaning on various levels and so of future instances of it. The most elaborate example of this type of system is the "memory theatre" of Giulio Camillo, which had thousands of entries for the various crafts, arts, sciences, and so on. Frances Yates described it in her Art of Memory.

Memory is what we ordinarily use to predict future events, e.g. that the sun will rise tomorrow. In one's memory, one goes through a sufficient number of past occurrence of 24 hour cycles, and the sun's presence. They all have the sun rising, although indicated in different sensory ways, e.g. when the sky is cloudy vs. when it is clear; and if one knows about the arctic region, that serves as an exception to be kept in mind, too.

In the Renaissance, the difference between valid and invalid induction from past occurrences of something was not as well understood as it is by people today, at least educated people. Scientific method was not yet formalized; especially, people did not think in terms of disconfirming instances of a hypthesis. Most were not as perceptive as Cicero. For Cicero's brother, mouthpiece of the many, knowledge of the future was all divination. The only difference was that some divination was by inspired madness and some wasn't (Book I Sec. 18, from which I have already quoted the part at the end):

Eis igitur assentior, qui duo genera divinationum esse dixerunt, unum, quod particeps esset artis, alterum, quod arte careret. est enim ars in eis qui novas res coniectura persequuntur, veteres observatione didicerunt. carent autem arte ei qui, non ratione aut coniectura observatis ac notatis signis, sed concitatione quadam animi aut soluto liberoque motu, futura praesentiunt, quod et somniantibus saepe contingit et non numquam vaticinantibus per furorem,...

So I agree  with those who have said that there are two kinds of divination: one in which technique has a part and the other which involves no technique. For there is a technique for those who by conjecture deduce new things and have learnt the ancient by having observed them. On the other hand, they involve no technique who foretell the future not by reason or conjecture (by having observed them by signs), but by a certain stirring of the mind  or some free unrestrained movement, as happens often to people who dream and sometimes to those who prophesy in frenzy... those do without art who, unaided by reason or deduction or by signs which have been observed and recorded, forecast the future while under the influence of mental excitement, or of some free and unrestrained emotion. This condition often occurs to men while dreaming and sometimes to persons who prophesy while in a frenzy...

Here I think the 1556 translator, or his reviser, did a better job with the second sentence, which in the 2005 translation makes little sense when it speaks of "having learnt the ancient". What is meant is "having learnt the known". The other translation has:

Those diviners employ art, who, having learned the known by observation, seek the unknown by deduction.

This method sounds very much like how the scientist proceeds. But astrology was--and still is, by some--thought to be founded on observation: people with certain sun, moon, and rising signs tended to have certain personalities. And astrological predictions sometimes came true. If they didn't, there was always a convenient explanation. The problem is that it was also possible to give just as good a rationale for the opposite of these hypotheses. However not many people thought in those terms.

But using the method of positive examples, in divination by means of symbols, it was a matter of keeping in mind all kinds of examples of a particular symbol's occurrence, so as to grasp in some way their guiding principle. Then there could be an "intuitive flash"; if so, the process could be thought of not only as generalizing from the known and deducing the unknown, but also by that means a momentary entry into higher realms. This could not be said for the contrary hypothesis. The same could be applied to a series of cards, the result, by an "ascent" by means of memory and a "descent" by means of intuition, a kind of multidimensional triangulation--in this case, a conjunction of images--to pinpoint a fortune, good or ill.

CARTOMANCY AS AN EXTENSION OF NATURAL MAGIC

The Church and many others, as we know, looked down upon divination that invoked daemons, calling them "demons" and thus diabolical. Renaissance Platonists such as Ficino and Pico wanted to develop a kind of magic that did not depend on these lesser spirits; they called the endeavor "natural magic". It depended rather on the natural affinities of things, analogies and associations: the color green with Venus and fertility, red with blood and Mars (the red planet); the Moon, the closest planet, with birth; Saturn, the furthest planet, with death, etc. These affinities were verifiable ones.

I have not found any text by these thinkers that addresses divination from this standpoint. But there are clues in Agrippa, Three Books of Occult Philosophy: snakes predict death, for example. So perhaps a dream of a snake would also predict death. Snakes also were associated with healing and renewal. This is an example of a two-pronged symbol, a unity of opposites, and of both the hypothesis and the contrary hypothesis being indicated. Which it was would depend upon the other indications, other symbols, and the intuitive flash. The association here is by means of the symbol's real-life equivalent, snakes whose venom was poisonous but could also be made into a medicine. Animals were thought of as unusually sensitive to the upper world, in which the future was known in advance; how else could they seem to know ahead of time when a storm was coming, or a bad winter? Minerals had the power of their celestial correspondents. We also know from Agrippa that Egyptian hieroglyphs, as interpreted by the Greek writer Horapollo, were thought tosymbolize animals in a way that could be used for divination.

In the Timaeus, 70e-72b, Plato had a theory that did not mention daemons. The liver received impressions from the upper realm, which had access to the future, and in sleep sent them to the brain. When soothsayers inspected the entrails of newly sacrificed animals, it was again the liver that they looked at, seeing the the future in its lines.

For Plato there were two parts of the operation. First came the dream or prophecy, a garbled, enigmatic group of images and speech, or words spoken in an ecstatic state. These had to be interpreted, by someone with their wits about them (72a). So there was the art of dream interpretation.

If you have trouble taking the liver as the organ of prophecy seriously, think of the modern equivalent. Today we don't attribute dreams to the liver, but to the unconscious mind when we are asleep, in other words a part of the brain. Brain scans today in fact find that different parts of the brain are activated when people are asleep than when awake. So the daemon or angel has been replaced by a part of the brain that functions when our ordinary consciousness is in some way inoperative.

Ficino in the letter cited earlier did not say how divination worked. One possibility is that for him a daemon or angel had planted the imagery in his mother's liver--or soul, a Christian would say-- say--for it to appear when she was sleeping. It knew what imagery to plant because it was in the mind of God; the angel then just brought it to Ficino's mother. Another possibility is that the imagery simply came down to his mother's soul directly, without a daemon, from a place beyond space and time, i.e. the mind of God.
In the Republic Plato had a different account of prophetic dreams. They came when the mind was at ease and unperturbed by the passions of daily life, and the person exercised that part before going to sleep so that the reasoning power would be active during sleep and the lower parts of the soul not. At such times (572a, Grube translation):

...they [the lower parts] will allow it [the rational part], pure and by itself, to look for and reach toward the perception of what he does not know, be it past, present, or future;...then, having quieted both spirit and appetites, he arouses his third part in which intelligence resides and thus takes his rest; you know that it is then that he best grasps reality, and the visions which appear in his dreams are the least lawless.

An example of such a dream is that reported by Socrates in the Crito, 44a-b. While awaiting execution, Crito tells Socrates that he will probably have to take the hemlock the next day. Socrates disagrees, saying he had a dream just before his friend Crito came (Jowett translation):

Soc. There came to me the likeness of a woman, fair and comely, clothed in white raiment, who called to me and said: O Socrates- "The third day hence, to Phthia shalt thou go."

The quote is from Homer. Phthia was the home island of Achilles. In other words, Socrates was going home, i.e. going to the eternal world.

These two theories, the liver verses the rational part of the soul as the origin of prophetic dreams, it seems to me, are not really in conflict. The images from the liver, if from a higher realm, are best received by the rational part, even though the visions come in a disordered way. It is the cultivation of that part that is required, even when awake, both to interpret dreams and to receive the right images, as opposed to those from the lower, time-bound realm of everyday life. A prophet is one who is removed from the world of anger and appetite and thereby in touch with the "mind of God".

This would apply even to the drawing of cards, an activity done while awake. Before drawing lots, the person was, according to Agrippa, supposed to be in a purified state, chaste, prayerful and avoiding rich food. That would dampen the other parts of the soul. The ritual involved in drawing cards, requiring the mind's attention, would also serve to still the passions and activate the rational part. Also, the elevated state of mind of the card interpreter who is leading the ritual would affect the soul of the questioner.

The Jungian theory of dreams is that they come from the unconscious mind and can have meaning symbolically as well as, sometimes, literally. And while often they merely reflect the tumult of the previous few days, sometimes they intimate future events. This would have the unconscious mind somehow receiving images from the future, selecting what is important to it from the myriad of images that are there. If so, the unconscious mind operates in in a world that transcends time, space, and cause-effect causality, because in causality the cause precedes the effect. This is a realm beyond the limits of our spatio-temporal universe, which for Platonists was the realm of the "mind of God". This realm also corresponds to what Jung called "synchronicity", meaningful relationships between events, either at the same time or at different times, where a cause and effect relationship is ruled out ("Synchronicity, an Acausal Connecting Principle", Collected Works Vol. 8, translated by R.F.C. Hull, pp. 421-519). This is, to be sure, not an explanation but a label, for meaningful coincidences that cannot be explained by natural means. But perhaps it is worth labeling.

For Jung the principle applied not only to dreams but to phenomena in waking life; in particular he saw it at work in J. B. Rhine's experiments, where subjects would predict what geometric shapes, out of five basic ones, would turn up in a particular order when cards with particular shapes on them were turned over two weeks later. Other experiments on predicting the future have been done more recently by Prof. Daryl Bem at Cornell University, as Andrea Vitali pointed out in a recent essay, "Predicting the Future with the Tarot" (http://www.associazioneletarot.it/page.aspx?id=467#). Needless to say, both Rhine and Bem are controversial. The trouble with experiments is that there are many variables, including the attitude of the experimenter and the subject. Jung argued. from Rhine's results, that success varied according to the attitude of the subject: the more confidence he had, the better the results.

I do not know if the Renaissance had the idea of the unconscious mind. Agrippa in one place--book II, Ch. LIV--attributes the efficacy of lot-drawing, i.e. sortilege, to two types of influence. Besides "the help of other spirits", as in Apuleius, there was also the mind of the one drawing the lot.

Now that there is in man's soul a sufficient power and virtue to direct such kind of lots, it is hence manifest, because there is in our soul a divine virtue, and similitude, and apprehension, and power of all things; And as we said in the first Book, All things have a natural obedience to it, and of necessity have a motion and efficacy to that which the soul desires with a strong desire;...

Agrippa's idea is that if the soul has a strong enough desire, it can direct a person's hand to the right lot, using celestial influences. Tyson in his note to this sentence directs us to book I, ch. LXVII, which has the title "How man's mind may be joined with the mind and intelligences of the celestials, and together with them impress certain wonderful virtues upon inferior things". Desire extends outward from the soul to those of others; for example a happy soul spreads happiness, and likewise the unhappy. And somehow the mind itself takes a "more convenient hour" for a particular action. He even cites Thomas Aquinas, Book 3 of Contra Gentile, from which Tyson quotes in his notes (3.2.26-7 in Thomas):

...accordingly, when, through the influence of higher causes, in the aforesaid manner, a man is led to choose such things as turn to his profit without his being aware of the utility by his own reason....he is said to be fortunate.

This for Thomas is the result of God, an angel, and a celestial body acting upon the person's will, understanding, and disposition. The angel in Aquinas corresponds to the archetype in Platonism. In book II ch. XLIV, Agrippa applies the principle to the drawing of lots, adding the questioner's desire as the initiator of the process (a step that is not in Aquinas): the soul connects with the souls of the celestial world, which if favorable direct the hand to a lot congruent with his desire. The same would apply to dreams: if one wants a prophetic dream, one should ask for it before going to sleep, as guidance from higher realms.

In such a situation, of course, there is no question of "proving scientifically" the efficacy of lots. It is all contingent upon the will of the higher orders and the efficacy of one's connection to them. This connection between the mind of the prophet or dreamer in Agrippa is probably what is behind the upper part of a well-known engraving (above) in the Tomus secondus de supernaturali, naurali, praeternaturali et contranaturali microcosmi historia, 1619, of Robert Fludd (1474-1637). It shows a direct channel between the "Mundus Intellectualis" and the human brain. Instead of the liver, we now have the brain.

There is then the problem of how to interpret the card or lot. Agrippa uses the example of astrology:

And this is that ground and foundation of all Astrological questions, wherefore the mind being elevated into the excess of any desire, taketh of itself an hour and opportunity most convenient and efficacious, on which the Figure of the heaven being made, the Astrologer may then judge in it, and plainly know concerning that which any one desires, and is inquisitive to know. 

The mind itself picks a day and an hour as being most efficacious, without knowing its astrological significance;; the astrologer then interprets the astrological signs at that time to tell the person what he wants to know. That is not hard to extend to cards: the mind itself picks the card, even though consciously it does not know what is on it.

It seems to me that this principle could easily have been applied to cards. From a Platonic perspective, there is a world higher than that of the "celestials", namely, the world of the archetypes, imprinted on our minds before birth but then forgotten until examples of them are noticed in the world. As such, its access is not so much natural magic as what Idel calls "magia supranaturalis" (p. 256), a phrase that he appies to influx from beyond the astral realm ("natural magic"), as high as the Kabbalists' sefirot.

This higher world, i.e. the mind of God, is that of immaterial objects to which the images in dreams, the imagination, and on cards only point obscurely. These objects then have their effects in the myriads of things that fall under those archetypes, which they resemble. It is then a matter of identifying the archetypes that surface in a spread and combining them in a way that relates the querent, discovering from them the interpretation that stands out from all others. We do not know the archetypes as such, as they are too far beyond us. The most we can do is to know what falls under the archetype in our world, at every level. That requires a memory that not only retains a vast amount of material but keeps it accessible in an orderly way. That is the esoteric use of memory systems.

In the Renaissance people knew about dream interpretation from the Bible. Joseph's skill in interpreting Pharaoh's dream (Gen. 41) is a biblical example. In Joseph's case, he could interpret Pharaoh's dream because he was in touch with the higher realm. He tells Pharaoh, "God hath shewn to Pharaoh what he is about to do” (Gen. 41:16, Douay-Rheims translation of the Vulgate). With God's help also, Joseph could think symbolically.

This involves a kind of contact with the higher realm. In Plato's theory, it is achieved through a process of abstracting from the literal to the recognition of the archetype that determines the particular case. Looking at the particular expressions of the archetype in a specific cultural context allows the symbol to be understood in a way that extends to future cases

The method of abstraction from particulars is suggested in Plato's Symposium (210a-e). He says we find out about the archetype (idea, in Greek: the word "archetype" was introduced by Philo) of Beauty by seeing particular examples of beauty in the world, ascending thereby to higher forms, and grasping in some way what is common to them all, the archetype. So likewise we can look at combinations of a particular numbers in the world and abstract from them, to arrive at the archetype.

Pharaoh's dreams are then an example: 7 lean cows devour 7 fat cows, and 7 fat ears of grain are devoured by 7 withered ones. Here the number 7 recurs. Numbers in general were associated with time: time is governed by arithmetic, just as space is governed by geometry. In the Hebrew way of reckoning time, 7 was associated with the days of the week, i.e. a cycle. They corresponded to the days of creation, in which 7 marked the completion of the cycle. But harvests and the slaughter of animals are yearly. So instead of cycles of 7 days there are  cycles of 7 years. Withered and thin vs. fat and nutritious would also seem to have an archetypal element, in that the contrast can be applied to many instances, of which the dreams gave two.

Andrea Vitali's online iconological essays on the 22 "major arcana" of the tarot are in this context examples of what is involved in going through and remembering the kinds of examples represented by those 22 cards. By such means one can appreciate their archetypal meaning and therefore their significance in a tarot reading. It is somehow on the level of the archetype, the contents of the "mind of God", that the unconscious frequently works. However, the archetypes come to us in a specific cultural context, that of medieval Christianity and the classical legacy. It is by entering that world that one approaches their archetypal source.

It seems to me that this type of analysis applies not just to the "major arcana", at least in the Renaissance period, because numbers and suits were just as symbolic as other images. The medieval period took number symbolism very seriously, as it even occurred in the Bible, for example the famous "666". There were also Latin sources. For the numbers from 1 to 7, there was Macrobius's systematic account in Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, plus less systematic statements about other numbers;  unsystematically, there was also Martianus Capella's Marriage of Mercury and Philology; both were in Latin and available in the Middle Ages. More extensive examples were in newly available ancient Greek Neopythagorean works, such as the Theologumena Arithmeticae, brought from Greece by Bessarion around 1460. Examples are also to be found in writings in the period between Folengo and Etteilla, for example Guillaume D’Oncieu in 1584 Savoy, who in his Numeralium locorum decas gave vast lists of such groupings for all the numbers from 1 to 10  He even included, in his chapter on the number 4, the numbers he found significant in the game of tarot. (See Andrea Vitali's essay Tarotica 1584, unfortunately still in Italian only, at http://www.associazioneletarot.it/page.aspx?id=293.) Besides 4, D'Oncieu analyzed the occurrences of 1, 3, and 5, in the game played with the deck. Knowing these lists and running through them in one's mind would enable one to deal with new cases in which the number appeared, for example in a playing card or dream.

My own attempt to apply Neopythagorean number-symbolism to the images of the trumps, in the "Marseille" order, has yielded fairly positive results; likewise for the number cards, comparing their symbolism to the word-lists for the corresponding cards in Etteilla and the images on the very distinctive Sola-Busca deck of c. 1491 (see http://neopythagoreanisminthetrot.blogspot.com/).

The meanings of the suits could be obtained similarly. Coins, for example, are money, which is the means to material happiness and can be, if attained immorally, a source of spiritual suffering. If they are gold, gold also has symbolic meaning based on significant occurrences of that color elsewhere. Metal also has symbolic meaning. And so on.

These days science has given us alternatives to the higher realm. Parts of the brain that show little activity during the day light up in brain scans of the same people asleep, and the full extent of these "unconscious" parts' activities is unknown. In physics, according to Stephen Hawking, what we call "real time" is only what we construct to make sense of the second law of thermodynamics (A Brief History of Time, pp. 145-147). Underlying "real time" may be something else that physicists call "imaginary time" because of its analogy to so-called "imaginary numbers", but which may be more real than "real time"; mathematically, it moves in either direction (p. 134) and the second law of thermodynamics does not apply (p. 150). Also, string theory predicts the existence of 10 or 26 dimensions, as opposed to the 4 we know (p. 162). Through them may pass "wormholes" from one point in space-time to another (p. 163). While the other dimensions may be at too small a level to convey a spaceship (1 over 10 to the 30th power of an inch, Hawking says), conveying information is another thing. I am not aware of a lower limit. Could the brain pick up information by such means, even from the future, unite it with information from other "wormholes" that give the brain access to present things the eye cannot see, and direct the hand accordingly? Science has a way of making the inconceivable an everyday occurrence. If so, the Platonists' "mind of God" might be our own, in connection with everyone and everything else.

IMAGES CONCEALING ARCHETYPES

For Etteilla the keywords are somehow related to his pictures, some more clearly than others. There is a certain advantage in attributing one's system to the ancient Egyptians: one then does not have to explain how they arrived at it; its rationale is lost in time. Also, since the relationship of keyword to image is far from obvious, one has a ready-made system of "esoteric" meanings.

Those where the relationship is clearer are the ones with pictures on them other than merely repetitions of a suit-object, i.e. the 22 special cards and the court cards. These are the cards that traditionally did have meanings outside of divinatory contexts, given by their titles and the pictures themselves; the court cards had gender, social status, and whatever meaning the suit had, as well as, in France, associations with particular legendary or historical personages. Etteilla has simply continued the tradition, but in a way that does not use the traditional titles. For example, his image of the Chariot does not have the word "Chariot" but rather "Dissension". This is based on his comment in the 3rd Cahier, "The Chariot, means noise, quarrel, dissension, bad order" (see my translation at http://thirdcahier.blogspot.com/2012/10/introduction-and-part-i-of-translation.html). This relates to the chariot as an instrument of war.  Similarly, "Enlightenment" is at the top of the traditional Sun card, What his variation on the Moon card (presumably with dark blue water rather than green) has to do with "Propos", in French a word with several meanings, is not clear. A purpose, one meaning, is sometimes hidden, as with things in the dark.

The image, as part of the card, is part of what the daemon, angel, or Jungian unconscious has selected, as much as its title or keyword. If it were a dream image, a Jungian would look at it very carefully in terms of Jungian archetypes. For example, in commenting on the Devil card, what Jung found of interest was that it has the sexual characeristics of both genders: it is a hermaphrodite. This is a detail easy to miss, and not present at all in some versions.

It seems to me that it is in relation to an esoteric, i.e. hidden, system of card meanings, as opposed to the literal ones indicated by the title, that the specific details of the image in its cultural context would have played an important role, as effectively pointing toward the divine realm; I have given some examples in my essay on the Platonic interpretation of the tarot. Any of those Platonic interpretations could be part of an interpretation of a series of cards chosen at random for a reading. There would also have been other ways of interpreting the images, in terms of Dionysian initiations, myths from Egypt, the life of Christ, and so on. Any could count as a valid esoteric interpretation.

The Renaissance spoke explicitly of images in such a symbolic way, although in different terms. Most famously, Ficino wrote about a passage in which Plotinus commented on the Egyptian sages' practice of representing "things through wisdom", that they would use pictures rather than words. Platonus says (quoted in Boas, trans. The Hieroglyphica of Horapollo, p. 22):

Thus each picture was a kind of understanding and wisdom and substance and given all at once, and not discursive reason and deliberation.

Ficino commented, speaking of this passage (Boas p. 28):

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 is similar to God's own apprehension of the form, i.e. the archetype in the mind of God. 

So tarot images, along with a good many other images, were called "hieroglyphs" by some, meaning not that they were Egyptian but that they expressed sacred things in a way comparable to God's view of them. We see this term applied to the tarot images, although without Ficino's Neoplatonic  perspective, in a c. 1565 anonymous essay on the tarot from central Italy (Caldwell, Depaulis, and Ponzi, Explaining the Tarot: Two Italian renaissance Essays on the Meaning of the Tarot Pack, p. 53), as well as by others later, none intending to imply anything Egyptian about the cards.

Even before Ficino, in fact, the word "hieroglyph" was understood to denote a form of pictorial expression by which the wise could communicate the most sacred things to their counterparts of any place and time, long after their language had been forgotten Alberti said as much in his Ten Books on Architecture, in a passage probably part of its first version, submitted to the pope in 1450. His favorite example was the image he took as his own emblem, that of the "winged eye". In his essay "Rings", of the 1430s, he gave several interpretations and invited the reader to provide more. Language was incapable of exhausting its meaning.

There was also the term symbolum or symbolon, which referred among other things to the enigmatic Pythagorean sayings quoted in classical writings, which were said to have profound secret meanings. In pseudo-Dionysius symbols were manifestations in the sensible world of that which was inconceivable to us in the flesh and could be seen more clearly only after death (On Divine Names 1.4):

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" are just such symbols. In the 16th century there was a great vogue for images with a corresponding symbolum, or saying; the combination was called an "emblem".

Folengo's sonnets are not on this elevated level. His way of combining the cards does not need to go to the higher levels of the symbol, any more than Ficino's mother's dream of a man falling off a horse: a pope is a pope, a womanish one is a popess, and a moon is something on the Turkish flag. Etteilla, however, did claim to go to the archetype, transcending culture (even if in fact he did not); that is implied by his claim of tarot's Egyptian origin. The image on the card somehow is a symbol of the archetype, and from going to the archetypal level, Etteilla, or his imagined Egyptians, returned with the keywords with which to construct interpretations.

THE DECK AS A GOLEM

For Alemmano, the crowning achievement, in the elevated state, was the creation of a golem, an artificial intelligence that speaks hidden and prophetic truths. Referring to it as the "anthropoid", Idel adds, in the paragraph following the one I quoted earlier, about the mystical ascent to the "world of letters", which Idel also calls (p. 253) a "world of names":

The eclectic nature of this enterprise is clear: Alemanno brings together several different traditions dealing with spiritual attainments, while adding to them the more magical aspect of creating something in external nature, the anthropoid. In his syntheses of the ecstatic and magical traditions, Alemanno is reminiscent of Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, his Florentine contemporaries.

Idel goes on to quote a famous passage in Alemanno's notebooks from Eleazar of Worms' commentary on the Sefer Yetzirah, a passage specifically echoed in Ludovico Lazzarelli's account of "soul-making" in his Krater Hermetis, thus revealing another Christian Neoplatonist (or Heremeticist, but Hermetism was a specific kind of Platonism) as part of Alemanno's circle. (See pp. 253-260 of Kabbalah in Italy. Kristeller interpreted this "soul-making" as the Hermetic rebirth of a person, such as the King of Naples who serves as Lazzarelli's interlocutor in the work. But that would not be an act of magic; D. P. Walker [Spritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella, p. 70] was surely right in wanting to modify Kristeller's suggestion.)
That Christians in Florence were also apprised of such magic, starting in the early 1460s, is suggested by a drawing of "Hermes Trismegistus" done in the 1460s, above, one page of a sketchbook by the goldsmith and early engraver Finiguerra (d. 1464); the words "*MERCVRIVS*RE*DEGITTO*" are in the upper right corner. It was later repeated as an engraving by Baldini (fl. 1477-1487). The connection to Trismegistus would have been his connection to magic. The Aesclepius, attributed to him, had talked of gods being brought down from above and animating their statues, a work of magic. The being in the magician's hand does not suggest a statue, of course. It is a "little man", in Latin homunculus, an alchemical version of the golem. Like golems, homunculi were reputed to be able to foretell the future.

It is not hard to see the cards in terms of such an artificial intelligence, created from the soul of the elevated Kabbalist projected into dumb matter. "What do the cards say?" people ask. The deck is the golem's vocabulary, from which it draws its speech by means of the ritual through which the right cards are selected. But a deck of cards is a special kind of golem, one that speaks through its cards to anyone in need of advice: it communicates its secrets, albeit cryptically, to anyone who draws the cards in the proper way. The understanding of such speech. on all its levels, is another matter, one accessible only to one who has made the ascent and so knows the langauge.

Such a procedure, combining the hidden meanings of cards selected by an in reality magical but in appearance random procedure so as to bring forth hidden truths, would surely have been investigated by the Inquisition. Even talk of magic (outside the church) was anathema. We need think only of Pico's interrogation in 1487, after the Papacy ordered the confiscation and burning of all copies of his book  (Farmer, Syncretism in the West, 1998), which had spoken favorably about magic. After that the same would have occurred to Ficino for his 1489 Three Books on Life, except for the influence of powerful friends (detailed in book IX of the English translation of his Letters).The Roman Inquisition did pounce on Reuchlin, who was put on trial in 1513-1516 (see Introduction to the English translation of his On the Kabbalah). His case was never resolved.

Besides the realistic fear of prosecution, there was also what these thinkers identified as a tradition of keeping the most important doctrines unwritten. I have already quoted from Ficino and Pico to this effect. Ficino declared (Letters, Vol. 3 # 10, p. 53 of English translation):

I have not spoken openly about that which men are not permitted to speak. I have not given what is holy to dogs or pigs for it to be torn into shreds.

And Pico observed, in the late 1480s (Commentary on a Canzone of Benivieni, trans. Jayne, p. 169):

It was the opinion of the ancient theologians that one should not rashly make public the secret mysteries of theology except insofar as it was permitted to do so from above.

So it is impossible to say whether Kabbalah as such was applied to the tarot by the end of the century. Yet there was enough interest in Kabbalah in some of the places where the game of tarot was also played--especially Florence, but also Ferrara and Padua-- that possible connections are worth exploring.

Most obviously, there is the coincidence of the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet with the 22 special cards of the tarot. It is true that there were other reasons to have 22, such as the 22 chapters of Revelation. Yet the correspondence does give an opening to astrological interpretation. The Sefer Yetzirah assigned the letters of the Hebrew alphabet to 22 astrological entities: the 12 signs of the zodiac, the 7 planets, and the 3 elements above the earth. In Hebrew, in fact, the letters doubled as numbers. So it is merely a matter of correlating letters with cards, by number.

There are several problems with this hypothesis. First, the numbers assigned to the letters in Hebrew, and as used in Kabbalist gematria do not, after the tenth letter, correspond to the ordinal sequence of the triumphs. This problem could be overcome by ignoring the numerical meanings of the letters after 10.

Second, one of the triumphs was without number and so could not be assigned a letter unless given one by the interpreter: "no letter" is foreign to the SY and in any case would in any case require 23 special cards. Giving it the first leetter, aleph, would upsets the Hebrew assignments of letters to numbers even more. However it could be done. De Mellet ("Studies on the Tarots and on Divination by Tarot Cards", section IX) assigned the letters in reverse and gave the Fool the last letter, Tau. Levi made the Fool the 21st card, with the letter Shin. The Golden Dawn gave it the letter Aleph. It makes no difference what is chosen, as long as it is clear in advance, so that the mediating intelligence (daemon, mind of God, unconscious mind) knows.

Third, with any systematic assignment of letters to numbers and then to astrological entities, it is not easy to see how the subjects on the card and the astrological entities assigned to them could be descriptions of the same archetype. using any version of the Sefer Yetzirah (SY) or tarot sequence known in Italy at that time (as evidenced by the first printed versions in Mantua of 1562 and the surviving lists of tarot sequences). The Golden Dawn claimed to do so, but only by changing the order of triumphs and in its planetary assignments not following the versions of the SY known in the Renaissance. Fourth, the Christian Kabbalists of the Renaissance hardly talked about the SY, with its "paths", as opposed to interpretations of the sefirot. I do not rule out an interpretation of the tarot in terms of the SY; but it is a more difficult thesis than an assignment of triumphs to sefirot. I have discussed these problems, including two non-obvious solutions, more thoroughly elsewhere (http://latinsefiroth.blogspot.com/2009/08/introduction.html).

Etteilla's solution to the problem, in his 4th Cahier, was simply to print an indication of the astrological entity-- on the cards and ignore the SY's letter assignments. the zodiac for his first 12 triumphs, in SY order;  the 4 elements, the first 3 in SY order, on cards 2-5; and the 7 planets on the the last seven suit cards, in Coins, in SY order. There was no question of any relationship between anything else on the card and its astrological meaning.

Besides the 22 letters, there were also the 10 sefirot plus the En Sof, which could be imagined as first a descent and then an ascent through the various levels, for 22 in all. A correspondence between the symbolism of the sefirot and the symbolism of the corresponding imagery and words on the cards, again,would useful but not essential, given the correspondence in the numbers. Perhaps that is one reason why in the late 15th century, numbers started being put on the cards. No one much talks about why that practice started; the assumption is that it had to do with facilitating the trick-taking game. But another reason might be that, given the variety of orders, it would make it easier for the daemon to identify the corresponding sefira, as the picture alone would not be enough. At http://latinsefiroth.blogspot.com/ I have compared the two sequences in terms of their traditional symbolism. In the Milanese order, they are quite similar on the descent, less so on the ascent, although not impossibly so. In all the orders, "En Sof" is an especially good fit: just as the En Sof, meaning "no limit", is not part of its associated system of the sefirot, so the Fool, "without number", is not part of its system of the tarot sequence.

There is also the idea that the sefirot manifest in four worlds, from that of the sefirot themselves, Emanation, to that of our world, matter. This idea is articulated by Itzaq of Acre, whose work was one of the most important influences on Recanati, according to Idel (Kabbalah in Italy p. 119), whose work was translated for, and read by, Pico. Here is Idel's account of Yitzhak on the four worlds (p. 248f):

Yitzhaq of Acre presents the act of creation of the Golem in the framework of his peculiar kabbalistic Weltanschauung, which consists of the view that there are four worlds. The highest one, that of 'Atzilut, is the world of emanation, referred to by R Yitzhaq in the first 'A of the 'ABYA' acronym. The next one is the world of [p. 249] Beriy'ah, namely Creation, which is the world of the Divine Chariot, hinted at by the letter Bet. The third, the world of Yetzirah, meaning Formation, is the world of the angels, and corresponds to the letter Yod. Finally, the world of 'Asiyah, the lower world, is to be understood as the world of making.

These "four worlds" of course became the basis for the Golden Dawn's interpretation of the four suits of the tarot. But even in the 15th century, these could have been combined with the astrological interpretations of the trumps. However this is a highly speculative proposition, since none of the Christian Kabbalists of the time mention any four worlds or any of the astrological interpretations of either the tarot or the Sefer Yetzirah. I mention it merely for the sake of compelteness.

If the concepts suggested by the cards matched  the immaterial objects in the "mind of God" (in the sense of all falling under the same archetype there), then a separate intelligence, a daemon or golem, is not even necessary. The cards that appear in the spread are like the grooves in the liver. They occur naturally in response to the higher world and the need of the querent. Someone who knows the correlations to the higher world, shown in the imagery of the cards, can interpret the signs below. Just as dreams communicate in images what is received from above, so do the cards, sometimes literally and sometimes symbolically.

There is a group of "Magical Conclusions" by Giovanni Pico (published Dec. 1486) that might relate to this material: 

9>23. Every number besides the ternarius and denarius [3 and 10] are material numbers in magic. Those are formal numbers, and in magical arithmetic are the numbers of numbers.

9>24. Out of the principles of the more secret philosophy  it is necessary to acknowledge that characters [caracteres] and figures [figuras] are more powerful in a magical work than any material quality.

9>25. Just as characters are proper to magical work, so numbers are proper to a work of Cabala, with a medium existing between the two, appropriable by declination between the extremes through the use of letters.

Farmer, who did these translations (footnotes on pp. 501-502 of his Syncretism in the West), also offers some explanations. In 9>24, by "figures" Pico does not mean the figures in astrological talismans (as Yates held), but numbers, based on his explication in his Apology. By "the more secret philosophy", Pico means Pythagoreanism, in which numbers are the creative powers above that of material reality. I think it also includes Kabbalah, whose sefirot Pico called "numerations", thus seeing Kabbalah as a branch of Pythagoreanism. In 9>25, by "magical works" Pico means "those of contemplative or prophetic magic", attained by "magical arithmetic" (9>23), i.e. gematria, which converts words to numbers by taking the letters in the word according to the numbers they represent in Hebrew and Greek. Pico even gives an example of a prediction achieved by "magical arithmetic": the date of the end of the world: although he doesn't explain how he gets this figure, it is "five hundred and fourteen years and twenty-five days from now" (11>9), i.e. Jan. 1, 2000. (Given the scrambling that people had to do before that date to reprogram computers, that wasn't a bad guess.) It is especially this last part, "prophetic magic" through "magical arithmetic", that might relate to a Kabbalist/Pythagorean interpretation of numbered cards. Etteilla likewise does such "magical arithmetic", although how it relates to the cards is far from clear.

I have limited myself to what was undeniably known by some Christians of Jewish Kabbalah in the late 15th century. By the 17th century, much more was accessible, espeically the Zohar and the works of Cordovero, who wrote introductory as well as advanced works systematizing Kabbalah. By then, too, many Christians were able to read these Hebrew texts without Jewish help. These texts would have given many addied opportunities for application to the tarot. But how is impossible to determine.

THE FEAR FACTOR

As far as what was actually done historically, between the claims of Alemanno to those of Etteilla, everything is speculation. All the evidence is ambiguous and vague, including what I have made of Folengo's sonnets. But there is good reason for such vagueness. First, there was the sense that "pearls must not be laid before swine". Profound teachings if divulged to those who have not ascended the ladder of knowledge will be misunderstood and dragged in the mud. I have already quoted Ficino and Pico to such effect. Plato's 2nd Letter (314a-c) made a similar admonition. However some might have wanted to go ahead anyway, for the sake of selling books. For them, there is another deterrent, the fear factor.

Folengo gives an explanation for his lack of clarity, in what he says immediately after the sonnet involving the Pope, Popess, Emperor, Moon, and Hanged Man, where some instances of the first three terms are omitted:

TRIPERUNO: In this sonnet, my Master, you often play the mute.
LIMERNO: It was always praiseworthy.
TRIPERUNO: What?
LIMERNO: The truth...
TRIPERUNO: To confess?
LIMERNO: No, to keep silent.
TRIPERUNO: The reason?
LIMERNO: To circumvent hate.
TRIPERUNO: This hate is of little consequence, if persecution were not to follow it. [Di poco momento è questo odio, se non vi susseguisse la persecutione.]
LIMERNO: However a bridle was found for the mouth. [Però lo freno fu trovato per la bocca.]

Since the words he left out of the sonnet were "Papessa", "Papa", and "Imperator", Folengo is suggesting that it is not safe to criticize the Pope and the Emperor. He is testifying to an atmosphere of fear which, by assocation, applies to this part of the book generally.

For the source of such fear, extending to cartomancy itself, all one has to do is read the New Advent Encyclopedia's article on divination at http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05048b.htm. The Catholic Church considered then, and still considers, divinatory card-reading and all divination (outside the Church) to be either fraud or done with the assistance  of devils. The latter would require strong methods. For the period of the early tarot, it says 

Sixtus IV, Sixtus V, and the Fifth Council of Lateran likewise condemned divination. Governments have at times acted with great severity.

The Fifth Council of the Lateran was in 1512-1519, with the edicts presumably at the end. The year 1519 is of interest as the year of Ariosto's Orlando Furioso  I have no doubt that governments did act "with great severity", erratically but often enough. The Church, too, wasn't afraid to use its power, even over governments. For the periods of our interest it adds:

At the time of the Renaissance and again preceding the French Revolution, there was a marked growth of noxious methods.

Fortune-tellers were in league with devils, New Advent argues, even on the webpages of today's Internet:

These attempts have at times produced results which cannot be explained on merely natural grounds, they are so disproportionate or foreign to the means employed. They can not be regarded as the direct work of God nor as the effect of any purely material cause; hence they must be attributed to created spirits, and since they are inconsistent with what we know of God, the spirits causing them must be evil. 

It is not said where the inconsistency lies, how they know, given present knowledge of the human brain, that the predictions cannot be explained on natural grounds, or how it knows the ways of God. It would be interesting to know what actual cases they are thinking of. But the message is clear: fortune-telling is the devil's work.

In this spirit, the Council of Trent, which ended in 1563, prohibited lot books and writings about other forms of divination, by means of its Index. I get this, with a hint of the rationale, from a note cited in Eleonora Carinci, “Le Risposte di Leonora Bianca: Un gioco di divinazione del tardo Rinascimento” (p. 170 of Laboratorio di Nuova Ricerca: investigating gender, translation & culture in Italian studies, edited by Monica Boria and Linda Risso, 2007, viewable online in Google Books). The note is from an 18th century letter by Apostolo Zeno in his posthumous (d. 1750) Annotazioni to the Biblioteca della eloquenza italiana of Giusto Fontanini (my translation follows):

Tutte queste baje non meritavano che se ne parlasse, ma l’esenipio di Monsignore mi ha dato eccitamento. Il Padre Menestrier (l.c. pag. 407) condanna a ragione tutte queste sorte di giuochi, asserendo, che in verun modo non possono esser permessi, non solo a riguardo di tali indovinamenti, i quah sono mere fanfaluche, e chimere, ma perche in esse si fa abuso di cose sante, impiegandovi i nomi de’ Profeti, per dar mano a bugiarde risposte in quisiti vani, e profani; e pero a ragione tutti questi hbri di Ventura e di Sorti furono condannati dall’indice Tridentino (in Fontanini 1753, 190).

(All these below do not deserve to be spoken of, but the example of Monsignor gave me excitement. Father Ménestrier (l.c. p. 407) rightly condemns all this sort of games, asserting that in truth they cannot be allowed, not only in respect of such divination, which is mere balderdash, and chimaras, but because in essence they abuse holy things, impugning the names of the Prophets, giving into the hands of liars responses to vain and profane questions; so it is with reason that all these books of Fortune and Fates were condemned by the index of Trent (in Fontanini 1753, 190).

By "abusing holy things" the writer probably means such things as the Pope and Angel cards, and pictures of popes, prophets, and angels in lot-books. The Index thus prohibited such books from being published wherever the Church had the power. If anyone did read them, they were automatically excommunicated (Hankins, Humanism and Platonism in the Italian Renaissance, vol. 1, 2003, p. 492). By the late 16th century most national governments, even in Protestant England, instituted censorship boards governing what would be allowed. The witchcraft trials of the times include sortilege among the abominations for which its practioners were condemned to death, as documented in Kors and Peters among others (besides the previous mention of pre-1513 Cremona, see, for 1460 France, p. 173-5).

However that did not prevent the medieval lot-book Sortes Sanctorum (Oracle of the Saints) from being published, at least in 1687 Paris, as Graf relates (Mantike p. 79), presumably because of its Latin text and odor of sanctity. Likewise the same principle was used by the Church in bibliomancy, where people let a finger fall randomly on a particular verse of the Bible or some other holy book. Angels apparently knew, directed from above, what bible verses were most appropriate and guided fingers accordingly. The Church had no problem with such guidance, as long as it was appropriately supervised by a priest and followed by an appropriate expression of gratitude. In one 1517 case of divination, in this case from visions seen in some fumes of armies fighting each other while farm animals flee, even the pope got involved, turning it into a great crusade, and the fleeing pigs that had been reported (ignoring the other animals) into defeated Turks (Ottavia Niccoli in Prophecy and People in Renaissance Italy, pp. 73-88 (translation of Profeti e Popolo nell'Italia del Rinascimento, 1987). The Church's ambiguous attitude toward divination, condemning it in others while practicing it itself, probably served to contribute to belief in it, as well as to hiding its practice.

Naturally enough, the practice of cartomancy would have gone to people that were hard for the Inquisition to track: gypsies, for example, who had earlier been associated only with palmistry. It is possible that Jewish families might also have supplemented their incomes in time of need by such means, although I have only anecdotal information (i.e. someone's Jewish grandmother learning it from her mother; and whether that goes back further than the French occultists is unknown). 

In any case, from the Council of Trent onward, in Italy and other places, any written references to "interpreting the cards", mostly ambiguous ones, are made in a demonic context. Even then it is rare: it is not enough to condemn a practice, because perverse people sometimes practice precisely what is condemned. With cards, since it is a new invention, there is the opportunity to efface it from the imagination of the culture. All that survives, in Italy, is a few ambiguous references, as in Orlando Furioso, a few references in the records of the Venetian Inquisition to the use of the Devil card in witchcraft (see Vitali's "The Conjuration of the Tarrocco", "Witches and Inquisitors"), and records of repressive laws (Vitali's "Games and Magic in Ferrara"). The Lombard Inquisition's records were burned in 1788 (Ross Caldwell documents at http://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=917&p=13698&hilit=Inquisition#p13698). Good information about the early period still comes from the memoirs of the Lombard Inquisitors, which can testify to the numbers of burnings--hundreds in an inquisitor's term of office--if not to the actual charges (Michael M. Tavuzzi,  Renaissance inquisitors: Dominican inquisitors and inquisitorial districts in Northern Italy, 1474-1527, 2007, p. 149f). In Spain, there is more documentation, which Caldwell summarizes in his essay online, "A Brief History of Cartomancy" (http://www.academia.edu/6477311/Brief_history_of_cartomancy). The readings involved laying down the cards in rows and looking for significant pairs of court cards, showing whether a husband is having affairs and so on.

Even in the 18th century, fortune-tellers were arrested and imprisoned. Etteilla (quoted in Wicked Pack of Cards p. 96f) told of three persons who were put in prison for fortune telling with cards in 1751-53 Paris. Caldwell cites the documented arrest in Strasbourg in 1759 of 2 women and 8 men on charges of card-reading, and another in 1772 Marseille.

When books did start appearing that talked about reading one's destiny with playing cards, it was in England, outside the reach of the Index. Mary Greer, in her online essay "Origins of Cartomancy (Playing Card Divination)" (http://marygreer.wordpress.com/2008/04/01/origins-of-divination-with-playing-cards/) has a series of examples. The earliest, except for an anecdote in a book of 1620, was a lot-book in the 16th century manner; this was in 1690, one year after England adopted a "Bill of Rights" granting limited freedom of expression. In 1730 there appeared a play in English, Jack the Giant-Killer, that used the method of designating the Queen of hearts and three of the Kings as "significators", corresponding to the one female and three male observers/participants, and then interpreting the cards that appeared next to them (see Greer's online essay "285 Year-old Coffee Ground and Card Readings", https://marygreer.wordpress.com/2015/01/31/285-year-old-coffee-ground-and-card-readings/). 

By 1770, when Etteilla published his first book, the Enlightenment was in full swing, and the publication of books was decided by a group of Royal Censors rather than the Church. Even so, he had to say that he was offering only an "amusement". When he published his four Cahiers, there was still censorship, and even in 1782 a submission of his was initially denied, Etteilla said, until he corrected the title (Wicked Pack of Cards p. 83). As a sign of the times, Court de Gebelin, who had written favorably about cartomancy, was one of the censors himself, starting in 1781 (Wicked Pack p. 84); he died in 1784. With the Revolution, censorship was abolished (Wicked Pack p. 111). Napoleon restored it in 1811, but chiefly in matters of politics; he, too, was a creature of the Enlightenment.

Etteilla's cards preserve the tradition of cartomancy as the drawing of lots with words on them as well as Folengo's method of combining words to form a narrative. Instead of verses or titles, each card has associated with it two keywords, one for when it is right side up and the other upside down. Before he printed his own cards, one had to use an ordinary deck and look these up in a book. Even then, one had to be aware of other meanings, which were given in word-lists. Some combinations had set meanings, which were also in the book. The system was originally designed for use with a Piquet deck, i.e. an ordinary deck with the 2s through 6s removed. for 32 cards in all.  From my study of the keywords, it seems to me that they probably had a Pythagorean basis in the distant past. The keywords for the  22 special cards which he added later are simply associations to the "Marseille"-style images which had no doubt grown up, but some are unique to Etteilla. In his books he gives lip service to Plato, Hermes Trismegistus, and Kabbalah but rarely shows any relationship between these traditions and the cards. There are astrological signs on some of the cards, but they have no relation to any Kabbalist assignments; they are simply done in the usual astrological orders, the zodiac on cards 1 -12 and the planets on cards 71-77. The four elements are on cards 2-5, in the order fire, water, air, and earth.

CONCLUSION

Cartomancy, i.e. divination by means of cards, was a relatively new thing in early 16th century Italy. It began as an extension of "casting lots", from dice to another form of random number generation, this time one which happened to have symbolic images on some of the objects used. This made their selection by random means into a kind of text that could be interpreted in various ways. Numbers, which before had only served to indicate where to look in the lot-book, could also be intepreted symbolically, and so could be included in the text to be read.

How seriously such activity was taken is unclear. In ancient times, it had been taken very seriously; explanations for why it worked were incorproated in philosophical texts. Christianity had an two-sided attitude. On the one hand, within the Church divination was endorsed as coming from God. Outside the Church, it was the work of devils, to the extent it was not merely a sham. Since the Church condemned cartomancy, any surviving evidence for it before the 18th century can be expected to be meager, ambiguous, and in a demonic context.

As for how it worked, a variety of possibilities is suggested by the literature. Good daemons and bad demons were the traditional magician's helpers, now working through lot-books, etc. Besides the postulation of such creatures, there would have been the idea that if future events are communicated from a realm beyond time and space in dreams, the same could be true by means of words and images on cards. In that case one would need to know not only the literal meaning, but also symbolic ones, as reflections of ideas that could not be explained in purely material terms, given that their meaning was on a higher level, but by that means using materially expressed symbols that pointed to future events in the material realm. Cards, especially the special ones of the tarot, are eminently suitable for these more occult meanings, as a sensory bridge to secrets accessible in the immaterial realm. In this regard much of what the occultists later did apply to the tarot can be found in outline by the last decade or two of the 15th century. In our own day the Jungian unconscious, "imaginary time", and "wormholes" through the fabric of space-time offer a substitute for the immaterial realm and its daemon mediator. Both then and now, the interpretation of symbols encountered in dreams are a model for similar interpretations by means of cards.