The history of cartomancy has been the subject of much research. 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 will be mostly using examples already been discussed by tarot researchers. I want to focus on their conceptual side. First, what is cartomancy, and in what forms did it exist in the Renaissance? Second, why 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". Little seems to have been written about why sortilege was thought to work; but there were already accounts by well-known authors in Greco-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 Renaissance terms.
THE WORD "CARTOMANCY"
The word appears first in French, cartomancie, in a 1789 article by the Parisian cartomancer who called himself Etteilla (Decker, Dummett, and Depaulis, Wicked Pack of Cards, 1996, p. 96). Etteilla objects 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 spelling cartonomanie occurs in reference to a book that Etteilla hoped 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 if 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; for example, the Grand Robert Dictionnaire de la Langue Francaise, 1986 has "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 the suffix "-mancie", from the Greek mantike, divination. 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--patterns in earth, water, air, and fire--as a means for getting insight into the future by some kind of non-natural means.
CARTOMANCY AS A SPECIES OF SORTILEGE
From the accounts of fortune-telling games with cards that have been reported in the literature (see Caldwell and Greer above), a uniting feature seems to be that of drawing them in ways whose outcome was impossible to predict, i.e. from a face-down and thoroughly shuffled deck. Sometimes it was cards with verses on them; more often there were lot-books, which formerly used dice.
The earliest surviving lot-book in Italy designed specifically for cards is the 1540 Le sorti di Francesco Marcolini da Forli intitolate giardino di pensieri
allo illustrissimo Signore Hercole Estense, Duca di Ferrara (The oracles of Francesco Marcolini da Forli entitled garden of
thoughts to the most illustrious Lord Ercole d'Este, Duke of Ferrara); the whole book is online. Marcolini was
the publisher, with text by the Venetian poet Lodovico Dolce. First. one chose a question, directing one to the appropriate page, where one drew two cards. The outcome directed one to another page and the drawing of two more cards. Next to their pictures was the answer to the question. The only aspect of the card of relevance was its rank. Here is a translation of five of the verses on 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.As to why drawing lots was thought to work, I turn first to Cicero (106-43 b.c.e.), On Divination, Book II, Ch. 41, a source readily accessible even before the Renaissance. At II. 85 he refers to a certain oracle (translation by Falconer, 1927, for the Loeb Library, online):
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 fashioned a chest to put them in, 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 doubts about the legend; but stands by the account as far as what the lots looked like and how they were used, even if only in his day by the common people. "Marcus's" own opinion, just before the quote above, is that
the whole scheme of divination by lots was fraudulently contrived from mercenary motives, or as a means of encouraging superstition and error.At I. 34, Cicero's mouthpiece in favor of divination, his brother Quintius, says of lots (for Book I, I will use a new translation, of that book only, by David Wardle, 2007, as it seems more literal):
etsi sors contemnenda non est, si auctoritatem habet vetustatis, ut eae sunt sortes, quas e terra editar acceptimus; 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 accedre.The lots that "sprang from the earth" are probably the ones at Praeneste of Book II, both translators note. For "philologists", the older translation (Falconer) has "scholars".
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.
In defense of divination "Quintius" cites Platonic, Stoic, and Peripatetic (i.e. Aristotelian) views, although concluding that he prefers the Peripatetic and saying that the Stoic view "smacked too much of superstition". (II. 100; "Quintius" cites Aristotle in two places, I. 53 and I. 72.) 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. However the Platonists and Peripatetics did not argue in such terms.
Plato endorsed divination in several of his works, none mentioning lots specifically. In the Phaedrus (244a-e), prophecy is a type of madness from the gods, ranking along with poetry, the mysteries, and philosophy. In the Apology (31d), Socrates refutes the charge of atheism by averring that he has a "divine or supernatural experience" of a "voice which comes to me, and when it comes it always dissuades me form what I am proposing to do, and never urges me on." It is not merely his conscience, at least as understood by Cicero. An example he gives is of Socrates coming to a fork in a road and telling his companions that his "god" advises against taking the choice his companions favor; they ignore him and encounter the enemy cavalry, while he takes the other road and is safe.
Two centuries after Cicero the Platonic philosopher Apuleius (c.124-170 c.e.), in On the God of Socrates, a Latin work found by a humanist at Monte Casino and printed with other works associated with Apuleius in 1469, enlarged on the Apology. 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 the hand, they could communicate what they saw in the future to someone in the present. In Christian times, it would be a "guardian angel" rather than a "daemon", at least for someone who trusted in lots.
Another of Apuleius's works described a fraudulent use of lots. The Metamorphoses (popularly known as The Golden Ass), printed in the same 1469 edition as the essay "On the god of Socrates" but known throughout the Middle Ages, in Book 9 Ch. 8 tells of a traveling group of "eunuchs". There are no prayers or purification, but that is not the problem. Nor is it the drawing of lots as such, but rather the particular method used (I give the Adlington translation of 1556 as revised in 1905 for the Loeb Classical Libarry):
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.Or better, as Robert Graves put it in his translation: "Yoke the oxen, plough the land, /High the golden grain will stand."
..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."
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.)
In Book II of On divination, Cicero's "Marcus", of a skeptical bent, gave numerous arguments against divination. But Renaissance Platonists continued to believe in it, given that it was found even in the Bible, e.g. the numerous prophecies of Christ's birth, as well as the use of lots to determine God's will, as in Acts, 1:23-26, where the disciples choose Judas's successor by lot. 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 (1486-1535) in Three Books of Occult Philosophy (written 1510-1530) spoke in terms similar to Apuleius and Cicero's "Quintius". In Book II Ch. LIV he began (in a mid-17th century translation, with modernized spelling):
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 discussed lots later, in Book III Ch. LII. There he emphasized 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".
Cards, when drawn from a shuffled deck to tell fortunes, are simply a species of lots, and cartomancy one type of sortilege out of many. In 1450 and 1497 Spain. decks were described with verses on the cards. In 1450, the color of ink on the card drawn indicated a particular type of love as the "lot" of the person drawing the card, with nuns, widows, married women, or maidens (see Ross Caldwell, "'El judgo de naipes" of Fernando de la Torre: a fifteenth century card game", online). In 1497 the person drew a card with the first line of a fortune-telling poem and was expected to recite the rest (see http://cvc.cervantes.es/el_rinconete/anteriores/mayo_12/11052012_01.htm). In one way or another, one or more cards selected by a randomizing procedure led to a "fortune", a sors.
In the case of sortilege, the drawing of lots with cards, it wouldn't have mattered whether it was a verse or a picture that the card had 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" predicted can be shown, or written, elsewhere on the card. Either form can be symbolic or not. The important thing was that the outcome not be determined in advance, so as to allow God or the angel to control the choice.
Arabic verses on 16th century Mamluk playing cards in the Topkapi Museum in Istanbul seem to have only promised happiness (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 ones in Western Europe are more specific (even if generic enough to fit anybody's future) but differ in specific content
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 procedure, surely they could also control the drawing of a card, even if the Church would think the comparison blasphemous. A lot-book need 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, the instructions were in the lot-book, a much easier thing to know than the future. It was then just a matter of guiding the hand. It is similar to the practice known as bibliomancy, in which a verse selected by the random fall of a finger on a page of a Bible opened at random was used to decide on a course of action. It was believed that God somehow determined what verse the finger would land on.
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 was that there were bad daemons as well as good ones. Even if wicked spirits 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 something that will never happen, so that it means he is invulnerable; in fact he is defeated when an army comes to that castle carrying boughs cut from that forest to disguise themselves.
Presumably the presence of a priest, crosses, the Bible, etc. 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 intentionally 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 described by Cicero's "Quintius" (1. 53), 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 (1491-1544). 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 Triperuno about some sonnets he has just written. Four of them incorporate five subjects each from the 22 special cards of the tarot, so as to tell the four people who drew these cards something about their "sortes", 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 later practice. 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; 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, in Mulaney's translation:
There is a close correspondence here to later practice. 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; 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, in Mulaney's translation:
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:
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 did in a 2006 essay ("Genesi della Cartomanzia", pp. 75-77 of Il Tarocchino di Bologna, edited by Vitali and Zanetti, on p. 75; also 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 result is something that applies especially to that person, that person's particular weakness. So it is about fire, love, justice, devils, and angels: thus the moral danger of passionate love. The other people get cards addressing their weaknesses. For example, a man gets Pope, Popess, Emperor, Moon, and Hanged Man. It is a political message about the friend's political weakness, that of trusting (Hanged Man) political authorities (Pope and Emperor) not to act out of feminine weakness (Popess, so especially the Pope) and so not, despite their avowals, attacking the Turks (who have the Moon on their flag). The sonnet is then the result of combining the cards so fortuitously but randomly chosen, as opposed merely to incorporating five tarot subjects in a poem related to his friend. Thus it is 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 previously unknown, or not brought to consciousness.
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.
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.
CARD INTERPRETATION AS REVELATION OF THE HIDDENQuando ‘l Foco d’Amor, che m’arde ognhora,It is a warning 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.
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.)
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 did in a 2006 essay ("Genesi della Cartomanzia", pp. 75-77 of Il Tarocchino di Bologna, edited by Vitali and Zanetti, on p. 75; also 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 result is something that applies especially to that person, that person's particular weakness. So it is about fire, love, justice, devils, and angels: thus the moral danger of passionate love. The other people get cards addressing their weaknesses. For example, a man gets Pope, Popess, Emperor, Moon, and Hanged Man. It is a political message about the friend's political weakness, that of trusting (Hanged Man) political authorities (Pope and Emperor) not to act out of feminine weakness (Popess, so especially the Pope) and so not, despite their avowals, attacking the Turks (who have the Moon on their flag). The sonnet is then the result of combining the cards so fortuitously but randomly chosen, as opposed merely to incorporating five tarot subjects in a poem related to his friend. Thus it is 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 previously unknown, or not brought to consciousness.
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.
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.
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. Andrea Vitali in "An Enigma in in Orlando Furioso" (online) gives us an example. Ludovico Ariosto (1474-1533) wrote of a magic ring that the good sorceress Melissa gives the hero Ruggiero; she says its power is to reveal the truth. Reluctantly putting on the ring, he goes to meet the beautiful lady he is in love with. Then:
Ma l’anel venne à interpretar le carte
Che già molti anni havean celato il vero.
And 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.(But the ring came now to interpret the carte
Which already for many years had hidden the truth.)
In Ariosto's case there is an element specifically 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 or controversial practice. A mild example is the Beatles' "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds", which doesn't actually say LSD. Closer to Ariosto's situation, rock music lyrics in Poland under martial law, I am told, carried double meanings of subversive content. And if questioned, the musicians could say that nothing subversive was intended, and radio stations and music stores could say they had no idea. The same principle would apply to Folengo: his simple sonnets do not imply magic, he could say, because he could have constructed appropriate ones regardless of how the cards had been drawn, and any suggestion of magic is in the eye of the beholder.
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:
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:
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.
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, even though such an interpretation can be avoided, perhaps even suppressed, by those charged with the investigation. 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.
FOLENGO, KABBALAH, 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 sonnet. So we have:
First stanza: Fire, Love, Angel, Devil ("Enemy"), JusticeWhile 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.
Second stanza: Angel, Fire ("Flames"), Justice, Devil ("Demon"), Love.
Third stanza: Love, Fire ("fervor"), Devil ("black Spirit"), Angel, Justice
Fourth stanza: Justice, Love ("Archer"), Fire ("torches"), Devil ("Satan"), Angel.
In Florence, at least by the 1480s and 1490s, there was much interaction between a few humanist Jews and Christians, most notably Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and 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 theirAn 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.
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.
Instead of letters, what Folengo is permutating, weakly, is words. According to Idel, it wasn't only letters that were combined; there were "combinations of letters and divine names" (p. 236). The cards, in so far as they represent archetypes, are divine names.
Alemanno's vocalizations of letter combinations could then be a means to sudden insights of a prophetic nature::
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola seems to have been after something similar. In his Magical and Kabbalist sections of the 900 Conclusiones, 1486, In his case the means was what he called "magical arithmetic" (conclusion 9>23) "through the use of letters" (9>25), which means, his modern translator tells us (Farmer, Syncretism in the West, p. 501f, footnotes), gematria, the process of converting a word to a number and drawing equivalences to other words with the same number. By such means, (in 11>9, but without saying how), he could predict a date for the end of the world: January 1, 2000.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.
Pico refers to the Kabbalist technique of letter permutation as "the science of the revolution of the alphabet" (11>2). In the Apologia he wrote a few months later, 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...The reference is to Raimon Llull (1232-1316); in his case, it was words or phrases that were combined, five sets of 9 each; these sets (the table below is from Anthony Bonner, ed and trans., Selected Works of Ramon Llull, p. 581).
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.
These sets bear some similarity both to the names of the Kabbalist sefirot (e.g. wisdom, greatness, power, glory, eternity) and to the different types of thing in the tarot sequence. The left-hand list fits the positive types we see there: Popess (wisdom), Emperor (greatness), Pope (power, truth), Lover (virtue), Charioteer (will), Hermit (duration). The fourth list is a hierarchy, ending in God, which the numbered tarot sequence also is. Then there are the virtues. The last list corresponds to the Devil, Traitor, and some of the other cards if taken in a negative way. Llull's words stood for basic truths from which others could be derived, just as Folengo elucidates in his sonnets.
Alemanno's "sudden vision"--in Hebrew, hashqqfah pit'omit (Idel p. 295) 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):
According to Schuchard (p. 103),We have the Mason word, and second sight;
Things for to come we can foretell aright.
Cardano, one possible source, visited Scotland in 1552 (p. 157). Schuchard explains (p. 159)The Masons' claim to "second sight" was probably rooted in Cabalistic visualization techniques that were transmitted from Eastern and Southern Europe.
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. Schuchard's claim, however, goes beyond what could be expected from a memory system alone.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.
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):
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....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
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 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 (1480-1544), written 530-1544 in Paris and Milan, which had thousands of entries for the various crafts, arts, sciences, and so on (described by Frances Yates in 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 today. Scientific method was not yet formalized; especially, people did not think in terms of disconfirming instances of a hypthesis. 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,...Here I think the 1556 translator, or his Loeb reviser, did a better job with the second sentence, which the 2005 renders unclearly as "having learnt the ancient". What is meant, I think, is "having learnt the old". The other translation has:
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 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.
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. The "flash" would be a kind of confirmation of the process. 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.
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.. 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 then had to be interpreted by someone with their wits about them (72a):
'Tis for one in his wits to recall and understand the deliverances of divination and possession, waking or sleeping, and to discern the signification of all their visions, what evil or good, past, present or future, and to whom;...So there was the art of dream interpretation.
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 homeland 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.
Agrippa in one place, Book II, Ch. LIV, attributes the efficacy of lot-drawing, i.e. sortilege, to two types of influence. One is "the help of other spirits", as in Apuleius. But instead of the liver, he involved the soul or 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;...
His 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. Similarly, 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 would ask for it before going to sleep,
as guidance from higher realms. In such a situation, 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 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 applies to influx from beyond the astral realm of "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 an example. In his 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.
For Plato, contact with the higher realm 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 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.
We can also look at combinations of a particular numbers in the world and abstract from them, to arrive at the archetype. Pharaoh's dreams are 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 end of the cycle. Harvests and the slaughter of animals are yearly. So instead of 7 day cyeles they are 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.
The information on the cards is both numerical and pictorial. From details on the cards, and their place in the sequence, we can ascend to the archetype. I have given some examples in my essay "Platonism and the Tarot". Any of these could have been used to interpret a series of cards. There would also have been other ways of interpreting the images, in terms of mystery initiations, Egyptian myths, the life of Christ, Dante's Divine Comedy, and so on, as long as they followed the same archetypal patterns.
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: Macrobius in Commentary on the Dream of Scipio and Martianus Capella in Marriage of Mercury and Philology, both 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 after Folengo, e.g. 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, numbers appearing 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 imagery of the cards, in the "Marseille" numerical order, seems to me to yield fairly positive results (http://neopythagoreanisminthetrot.blogspot.com/). Such a process can also include Kabbalah's sefirot, which have the same numbers attached to them as the Pythagorean Decad. Pico in his Kabbalistic Conclusions even called the sefirot "enumerations". There are 10 sefirot going down, corresponding to the 10 numbers of the Pythagorean Decad and trumps I-X. At the Wheel, there is a reversal, and then 10 sefirot going back up, with the World representing the whole. or perhaps a return to the En Sof. The Fool corresponds well to the "En Sof", which means "no limit" i.e. "without number" and is outside the numerical sequence of the sefirot. At http://latinsefiroth.blogspot.com/ I have compared the two sequences in terms of symbolism. In the Milanese order, the two sets of symbols are surprising similar on the descent; they are less so on the ascent, but not impossibly so.
The same Pythagorean principles apply to the number cards, and since the court cards start the sequence again, from 1 to 4, they apply to them as well.. 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 again http://neopythagoreanisminthetrot.blogspot.com/), my results are positive.
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. Their occurrence on a card is in some way a sign from the higher world in accord with what the querent wants to know.
That there were, by the latter part of the 15th century, 22 triumphs also gives an opening to an interpretation by means of the 22 Hebrew letters, which the Sefer Yetzirah (SY) assigned to astrological entities. In Hebrew, in fact, the letters doubled as numbers. 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. Second, one of the triumphs was without number and so could not be assigned a letter unless given one by the interpreter; such an assignment is foreign to the SY and unless put at the end (as Tau) upsets the Hebrew assignments of letters to numbers even more. 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 could be descriptions of the same archetype. using any version of the Sefer Yetzirah 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 versions of the Sefer Yetzirah then known. Fourth, the Christian Kabbalists of the Renaissance hardly talked about the Sefer Yetzirah, as opposed to the sefirotic interpretations found in other Jewish sources. 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 more thoroughly elsewhere (http://latinsefiroth.blogspot.com/2009/08/introduction.html).
If the imagery on the cards matched its immaterial counterparts in the "mind of God", whether Platonic archetypes, Pythagorean numbers, or Kabbalist sefirot, a daemon would not be necessary. The cards that appear in the "spread" would be like the grooves in Plato's liver, appearing naturally in response to the higher world and the querent's desire. Someone who understood the archetypes reflected in the cards. and how these archetypal patterns are reflected in an answer to the querent's question, could then make predictions. If dreams could communicate, to those who understood the symbolism, by means of images based on something unknown but transcending time, so could cards, to one who understood them, literally or symbolically.
THE FEAR FACTOR
As far as what was actually done historically, applying the methods of Alemanno and Pico to combinations of cards, everything is speculation. All the evidence is ambiguous and vague, even what I have made of Folengo's sonnets. But there is good reason for such vagueness.
Folengo gives part of an explanation for his lack of clarity in what he says immediately after the third of his sonnets. It involved the Pope, Popess, Emperor, Moon, and Hanged Man; but in the first edition, there were some blanks in the text, where the words "Pope", "Popess", or "Emperor" were omitted. This leads to the following dialogue
TRIPERUNO: In this sonnet, my Master, you often play the mute.Since the words he left out of the sonnet were "Papessa", "Papa", and "Imperator", in the course of a poem criticizing the Pope and the Emperor for fighting each other instead of the Turks (who had the Moon on their flag), Folengo is in the part just quoted 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.
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.]
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:
This condemnation would also have extended to humanists, even if they insisted that they were not invoking the Devil. A practice of determining and combining the hidden meanings of cards 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 900 Conclusiones (Farmer, Syncretism in the West, 1998).. 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 vol. 9 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. Echoing Plato's 2nd letter, Ficino declared (Letters, Vol. 3 # 10, p. 53 of English translation):
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 on its current webpages:
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: all divination outside the Church is the devil's work.
This condemnation would also have extended to humanists, even if they insisted that they were not invoking the Devil. A practice of determining and combining the hidden meanings of cards 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 900 Conclusiones (Farmer, Syncretism in the West, 1998).. 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 vol. 9 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. Echoing Plato's 2nd letter, 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.After the Council of Trent, which ended in 1563, the situation became worse. It prohibited lot books and writings about 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).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, as documented in Kors and Peters among others (besides pre-1513 Cremona, see, for 1460 France, p. 173-5).
(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).
However that did not prevent the medieval lot-book Sortes Sanctorum (Oracle of the Saints) from being published, at least in 1687 Paris (Fritz Graff, "Rolling the Dice for an Answer", pp. 51-98 of Mantiké: Studies in Ancient Divination, edited by Sarah Iles Johnston and Peter T. Struck, 2005, on p. 79), presumably because of its odor of sanctity, although it followed the same format as prior pagan lot-books. Likewise the same principle was used by the Church in bibliomancy. The Church had no problem with such guidance, in the proper context. 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.
The practice of cartomancy might then have been taken up by people who were hard for the Inquisition to track: gypsies, for example, who had earlier been associated only with palmistry. Jews fell outside the Inquisition's jurisdiction unless they promoted attacks on Christianity..
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. So people destroy any evidence linking them with cartomancy. Also, since cards are a new invention, there is the chance to efface it from the cultural imagination. All that survives, in Italy, is a few ambiguous literary references, a few references by the Venetian Inquisition to the use of the Devil card in witchcraft (see Vitali's "The Conjuration of the Tarrocco" and "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 Caldwel verifies at http://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=917&p=13698&hilit=Inquisition#p13698). In their place are the memoirs of Lombard Inquisitors, which can testify to the numbers of burnings--hundreds in an inquisitor's term of office--if not the actual charges (Michael M. Tavuzzi, Renaissance inquisitors: Dominican inquisitors and inquisitorial districts in Northern Italy, 1474-1527, 2007, p. 149f).
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. He presented his system originally for use with a Piquet deck, i.e. an ordinary deck with the 2s through 6s removed, for 32 cards in all, plus a special card he called "Etteilla". 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 mostly associations to the "Marseille"-style images that 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 particular Kabbalist assignments except in the order the elements follow one another. The zodiac is on cards 1 -12, from Aries to Pisces; the planets are on cards 71-77, from Saturn to the Moon,; and the four elements are on cards 2-5, in the order fire, water, air, and earth. These are all perfectly conventional except that the elements are in the order they appear in the Sefer Yetzirah (usually water was lower), with the addition of earth, which was not there but in other lists was the lowest of the four.
The relation of word to image in Etteilla's system was thus strictly from the word to the image. One did not interpret a card by unerstanding the symbolism of the image, but rather by knowing the relevant keyword and other associated words; at best the image on the card served as a reminder of these words. In that way is method was similar to Folengo's, which relied on the title of the card, which for Etteilla would be the keywords. The difference is that Etteilla had two such titles, one for when the card appeared upright and the other for when it appeared upside down. If details of the image did at some point play a separate role in stimulating the card-reader's imagination, that was not something Etteilla wrote about. Even dream-interpretation manuals of his time, which often appeared in the same books as card-interpretations, used the images in dreams only to link them with generic words that could be looked up in an alphabetically arranged list of symbols and interpretations.
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 and words on some of the objects used. This made their selection by physically 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, most 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, daemons, now guardian angels, were the traditional helpers, working through lots and lot-books. Besides the postulation of such creatures, there would have been the idea that if future events could be 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 archetypes whose meaning was on a higher level, but was manifested in materially expressed, culturally embedded symbols that pointed to future events in the material realm. Cards are eminently suitable for these more occult meanings, as a sensory bridge, through their numbers, titles, and images, to the immaterial realm. In this regard much of what the occultists later applied to the tarot can be found in outline by the last decade or two of the 15th century and the first three of the next. Both then and now, the interpretation of symbols encountered in dreams is a model for similar interpretation of cards.
