Good research, Huck. I see nothing to complain about. I am going on with Dummett, now on cartomancy.
His Chapter Five starts out with a question (p. 109):
I tarocchi sono utilizzati per due scopi del tutto diversi. Sono usati per un particolare tipo di gioco di carte e sono usati per predire il futuro e come fonte di teoria e simbolismo occulti. In paesi quali l’Inghilterra e gli Stati Uniti, dove non sono mai stati molto popolari come gioco, la maggior parte della gente che li ha sentiti nominare li conosce solo per questo secondo uso; ma in Italia, come in molti altri paesi d’Europa, si sa altrettanto bene che servono a giocare. La nostra domanda è: per quale di questi due usi furono originariamente ideati?
(Tarot cards are used for two completely different purposes. They are used for a particular kind of card game and are used to predict the future and as a source of theory and occult symbolism. In countries such as England and the United States, where they have never been very popular as a game, most of the people who have heard of them know them only for this second use; but in Italy, as in many other European countries, they are known just as well for their use in games. Our question is: for which of these two uses were they originally designed?)
That is not the question he actually answers. What he answers is something more comprehensive: When were tarot cards first used for predicting the future and as a source of theory and occult symbolism? His answer is that it was not until around 1770 in France. In fact, it seems as though he wants to say that about cards in general, not just tarot cards.
About the original purpose of the game, in my view if we have only vague ideas about what the deck originally consisted of or who invented it, speculation about why it was invented won't get very far. If it started as an expansion of Emperors and incorporated the seven virtues and the seven Petrarchan-Boccaccian virtues, perhaps using a chess analogy, that suggests that it was not invented for the purposes of cartomancy, nor with any hidden meanings. The question for me, as for “hidden meanings” and meanings generally, is whether there are any reasons for supposing these purposes might have influenced the deck (tarot and otherwise) and its use as it developed and afterwards, but before 1770?
One argument is that there are no reports of such uses, and it is something we would expect to have been reported, starting with the "Steele Sermon". Speaking of that preacher, Dummett says (p. 112):
Possiamo solo concludere che, mentre gli erano perfettamente noti la composizione del mazzo dei tarocchi e il suo uso per il gioco, non aveva il più lontano sentore di qualsiasi altro uso. Se i trionfi del mazzo dei tarocchi fossero stati originariamente ideati per scopi divinatori o comunque occultistici, l’aura magica sarebbe rimasta loro appiccicata: ma di quest’aura non troviamo traccia prima del tardo XVIII secolo.
(We can only conclude that, while the composition of the tarot deck they were perfectly known, and its use for the game, he had not the most distant hint of any other use. If the trumps of the tarot deck they were originally designed for divination or otherwise occult purposes, the magical aura would have been pasted
on them: but we find no trace of this aura before the late eighteenth century.)
It is not easy to speculate on someone's motives a long time ago. Either the preacher didn't know or didn't want to publicize this use. If he publicized it, it might get people interested in that use who hadn’t known about it before. If he didn't know, it might have been because there was good reason not to tell a preacher such as this one.
Ross Caldwell (
http://www.academia.edu/6477311/Brief_h ... cartomancy) has documented some examples of card-reading for fortune-telling in Spain of the 16th century, and they are all in witchcraft cases, or about fictional witches. If there aren't any for Ferrara or Lombardy, it may be because the records of the Lombard Inquisition were all destroyed in 1787. (Most of what is known is from the memoirs of Inquistors, who boasted of what amounts to about 60 burnings a year in the area northwest and northeast of Milan.) The Lombard Inquistion, assigned to the Dominicans, had jurisdiction over Ferrara, Milan, Bologna, and points north, east and west, except Venice. Andrea has documented one example of the Venetian Inquisition's prosecution of a "witch" using the Devil card to cast a spell; that is not exactly cartomancy. Although the Estensi did what they could to minimize its role in their cities, this did not apply to smaller jurisdictions. especially if requested by their rulers. Count Giovanni Francesco Pico della Mirandola, the more famous Pico's successor, wrote an account of their successful prosecution and burning in his domain in 1515. In 1505, he he had writttn against divination, including with "images depicted in a card game" as one kind of sortilege (literally, the "reading of fates"), Ross documents. Ross also cites other somewhat unclear references that sound like fortune-telling with cards as early as 1450 in Spain. Tarot is not mentioned, however, just "figures",which might mean just court cards. Tarot is not mentioned by name until Etteilla in 1770, in passing and not described. as Dummett observes. However it is mentioned in Marseille in 1772 (cited by Caldwell), and I at least find it unlikely that the woman put in shackles there with a bonnet of "tarots" was already a student of Etteilla's as yet unpublished method of tarot reading.
Dummett goes on:
E assai frequente, per esempio, che gli studiosi suggeriscano, senza traccia di prove, che un qualche tipo di mazzo di carte — mettiamo, il mazzo mamelucco — sia stato usato per scopi divinatori: non viene loro in mente di aver bisogno di prove per un’ipotesi del genere più di quanto non pensino che occorrano prove per dimostrare che le spade erano usate per combattere. Questo atteggiamento è del tutto errato. Come il nome stesso suggerisce, le carte da gioco {chartae lusoriae, cartes à jouer, Spielkarten, playing cards) furono fin dall’inizio considerate strumenti per giocare, come gli scacchi: parecchi secoli passarono dopo la prima introduzione delle carte in Europa prima che venisse in mente a qualcuno usarle per la divinazione.
And very frequently, for example, that scholars suggest, without a trace of evidence, that some kind of deck of cards - say, the Mameluke deck - has been used for divination purposes: it does not come into their mind that they need evidence to such a situation more than they think that there must be evidence to show that the swords were used for fighting. This attitude is totally wrong. As the name suggests, playing cards (chartae lusoriae, cartes à jouer, Spielkarten, carte da gioco) were considered from the outset instruments for play, like chess: several centuries passed before after the introduction of the cards in Europe before it first came to anyone’s mind to use them for divination.)
Mamluk cards had writing on them, adages or proverbs. Here are some examples (from
http://www.wopc.co.uk/egypt/mamluk/index.html):
“With the sword of happiness I shall redeem a beloved who will afterwards take my life“ - “O thou who hast possessions, remain happy and thou shalt have a pleasant life.” - “Let it come to me, because acquired good is durable; it rejoices me with all its utility” - “Pleasures for the soul and agreeable things, in my colours there are all kinds” - “Look how wonderful my game is and my dress extraordinarily beautiful” - “I am as a garden, the like of which will never exist” - “O my heart, for thee the good news that rejoices” - “Rejoice in the happiness that returns, as a bird that sings its joy”.
“As for the present that rejoices, thy heart will soon open up“ - “I will, as pearls on a string, be lifted in the hands of kings” - “May God give thee prosperity; then thou will already have achieved thy aim” - “Rejoice for thy lasting happiness” - “Rejoice in the pleasant things and the success of the objects” - “I am as a flower, a string of pearls is my soil?” - “The alif rejoices and fulfils your wishes” - “Whosoever will call me to his happiness, he will only see joyful looks”.
They are like Chinese fortune cookies. Not divination, but instructive regarding one’s proper attitude toward the world. It mostly shows that there was no dichotomy between instruction and game-playing.
However then it appears that even if cards were used in fortune-telling, that is not what cartomancy consists of, in Dummett’s view:
La predizione dell’avvenire non è da identificare con lo studio serio delle scienze occulte o con la pratica seria della magia. La divinazione può essere un semplice passatempo, senza che coloro che vi partecipano vi prestino fede; oppure può basarsi sulla pura superstizione, sfruttata dagli indovini di mestiere. Per gli occultisti sinceri, d’altronde, la teoria delia magia è una scienza profonda, e la sua pratica una disciplina ardua, che si può esercitare solo sulla base di una conoscenza della teoria: secondo loro, bisogna celare sia la teoria che la pratica al volgo, che le fraintenderebbe e ne abuserebbe. Perciò essi disdegnano gli indovini di mestiere e i loro clienti; disdegnano anche quelli che si dilettano di predizione senza essere istruiti nelle scienze occulte. Gli occultisti ritengono che nessun vero mago venderebbe per denaro la sua perizia. Di conseguenza, gli indovini di mestiere sono ciarlatani, e i dilettanti sono frivoli: desiderano i frutti della magia, senza la fatica di ottenerli.
Benché, fuori dell’ambito degli occultisti impegnati, po- [end of 112] chissimi abbiano una vera fiducia nella magia, molti nutrono una credenza parziale. Questi non suppongono che ci si possa rendere invisibili, per esempio, o far apparire gli spiriti dei morti. Pensano, comunque, che un mago possa essere capace di scacciare la sfortuna, per mezzo di talismani o incanti, e di predire la sorte. Per questa ragione, la divinazione è l’abilità principale che la gente si aspetta dal mago. La gente comune non sa niente delle teorie grandiose degli occultisti; per essa, la magia è interessante solo se produce risultati e il primo risultato che si aspetta è la predizione.
Per gli occultisti la divinazione è uno degli scopi della loro tecnica magica; ma le attribuiscono poca importanza, appunto a causa della sua pratica da parte degli indovini di mestiere, che essi disprezzano. Inoltre, essi usano solo metodi basati su un’intera teoria magica del cosmo, che postula sistematiche connessioni fra fenomeni diversi. Un occultista, dunque, di solito non userà come strumento di divinazione un qualsiasi artefatto che gli capiti per caso fra le mani: userà solo cose che, a suo parere, abbiano un significato cosmico e non esiterà a lasciare agli indovini di mestiere e ai dilettanti molte tecniche per predire la sorte. La divinazione per mezzo di foglie di té o di fondi di caffè, per esempio, non potrebbe essere integrata in una teoria del cosmo; per gli occultisti è solo una tecnica inautentica. Da lungo tempo questi predicevano la sorte per mezzo dell’oroscopo; l’astrologia non era principalmente un metodo di predizione, bensì una scienza genuina basata sul principio della corrispondenza fra il macrocosmo e il microcosmo, che forniva la struttura dell’intera teoria occulta dell’universo.
(The prediction of the future is not to be identified with the serious study of the occult sciences or with the serious practice of magic. Divination can be a simple pastime, without those who participate lending it their faith; or it may be based on pure superstition, exploited by the soothsayers of the trade. To honest occultists, on the other hand, the theory of magic is a deep science, and its practice arduous discipline, which can be exercised only on the basis of a knowledge of the theory: according to them, you have to conceal both the theory and the practice from the crowd, who misunderstand and have abused it. Therefore they despise the soothsayers by trade and their customers; they also despise those who delight inprediction without being instructed in the occult sciences. The occultists believe that no true magician would sell for money his expertise. As a result, the soothsayers of the trade are charlatans and are frivolous amateurs: they want the fruits of magic, without the trouble of getting them.
Although, outside the ambit of the committed occultists, [end of 112] very few have a real belief in magic, many have a partial belief. These do not assume that you can become invisible, for example, or bring up the spirits of the dead. They think, however, that a magician may be able to ward off bad luck, by means of talismans or charms, and fortune-telling. For this reason, divination is a skill that people expect from the wizard. Ordinary people do not know anything about the theories of the great occultists; for them, the magic is interesting only if it produces results and the first result that expect is the prediction
To occultists divination is one of the aims of their magical technique; but one to which they give little importance, precisely because of its practice on the part of fortune tellers by trade, whom they despise. Moreover, they use only methods based on an entire magical theory of the universe, which postulates systematic connections between different phenomena. An occultist, therefore, does not usually use as a tool of divination any artifact that happens by chance in his hands: he only uses things that, in his opinion, have a cosmic significance and will hesitate to leave it to the magicians by trade and amateur many techniques to predict fate. Divination by tea leaves or coffee grounds, for example, could not be integrated into a theory of the cosmos; for occultists it is only an inauthentic technique. For a long time those predicted by the fate of the horoscope; Astrology was not primarily a method of prediction, but a genuine science based on the principle of correspondence between the macrocosm and the microcosm, which provided the structure of the whole occult theory of the universe.
Reading Agrippa
Three books on occult philosophy, 1531, a primary source for “occult sciences” of the 16th century, I do not see him despising the “soothsayers by trade”. There are different ways in which the macrocosm affects the microcosm. Some people have an intuitive gift, some go into trance, others just seem inexplicably inspired. The wonder for him is that it happens to people who are quite unlearned.
Dummett speaks of occultists as claiming to have the power to become invisible or bring up spirits of the dead. I do not know who in the Renaissance he is speaking of, outside the realm of fiction, such as Ariosto's
Orlando Furioso.
We might ask, is predicting the future by means of Newtonian mechanics an example of occultism? By Dummett’s definition, it would seem to be, because Newtonian mechanics involves a mysterious force called gravity. Galileo refused to believe that the moon affected the tides because"the theory smacked of the occult", as a US Public Broadcasting Service article puts it (
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/earth/gali ... stake.html).
As to whether occultists took money for their services, it depends on who Dummett has in mind. Ficino certainly took a villa and an income from the Medici. Bruno was paid by universities and private citizens. Cartomancers later were not above taking money for their services. Etteilla famously advertised his wares in the back of his books, with prices.
Pythagoras was in Renaissance Italy associated with divination. For example, there was a "Wheel of Pythagoras" in c. 1500 Venice (
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_5e7P4Y3Wo3w/T ... 6wheel.jpg), in which one asked a question and the fortune-teller did a number-letter correlation for one's name or birthplace, added the numbers, and looked for it in the center of the card; if the number was on the top half of the card, the answer was yes; if not, no (Heninger,
Touches of Sweet Harmony: Pythagorean Cosmology and Renaissance Poetics, p. 238; the Image was originally in Christophe de Cattan,
The Geomancie, trans. Francis Sparry, London 1591, but according to Heninger the "wheel" is from Venice a century earlier.) This of course is not Pythagoreanism, but merely the use of his name.
Pythagoreans, as much as Newton (and Kepler actually was one), did believe that number ruled the universe, from the smallest to the largest part of it. Renaissance architects built their edifices on Pythagorean principles, as we learn from books like
Pythagorean Palaces. When it comes to cards, I expect that the application would have been less substantial, but real nonetheless For example, the ancient sources, such as the
Theologumenae Arithmeticae, held that eight month pregnancies have a lower survival rate than seven or nine month ones. Also, an infant is more likely to die in the eighth hour of life than otherwise. It is concluded that these results have something to do with the Ogdoad. So 8 and 18 becomes numbers of trial (and also the transition from one group of 7 to another). There was much written about the properties of numbers. Their application to cards would only be a particular case, not worth writing about in particular and probably dangerous to do so. And which properties were valuable in cartomancy and which not might have been considered a matter of seeing the results and learning from gifted cartomancers.
When I look at Etteilla or de Mellet, both of whom describe cartomancy, according to Dummett, I do not see any explanation of in terms of occult forces, unless Egyptian myths are such. When I try to analyze Etteilla’s number card meanings in terms of Pythagoreanism (in the thread on the sola-busca pips), it makes a kind of sense. So it is possible that Pythagoreanism was a source at some point, the details of which were forgotten. This is my speculation. The details are not in Etteilla, despite his extolling of the “science of numbers”.
I argued in a previous post that the tarot sequence, being numbered, would naturally have been interpreted, and also ordered so that it could be interpreted, in terms of Pythagorean number theory. The Pythagorean associations for each of the first ten numbers were very numerous; just look at the text surrounding the "Tarotica" document, which is a list of such associations. Given that the suits had particular associations--batons to the countryside, peasants, minor nobility, and fertility, swords with soldiers, war, law, etc.; coins with money and other sorts of wealth; and cups with love, it would be possible to generate four types of Pythagorean interpretations of each of the ten numerical suit-cards. De Mellet’s wording (“portend” etc) is both an interpretation of the suit-signs and also an indication of their use in fortune-telling. However he does not invoke Pythagreanism for particular numbers, nor is it clear why particular numbers get particular interpretations. The origin of the interpretations has been lost.
For Dummett cartomancy is intrinsically part of a larger magical repertory. This may have been true for Levi etc., although nowhere in his book does Dummett give any details, even for him, or others who followed. If there were such cartomantists in the 15th-16th centuries, it is not surprising that we don’t know about them. Magic was linked with witchcraft. Even the mildest sort, i.e. wearing certain gems in order to bring down certain celestial influences, was considered heretical by powerful Dominicans, as Ficino found out (described in vol. 9 of his letters).
Dummett moves on to examples in art that have been thought to suggest cartomancy. One is a painting he has already discussed in
Game of Tarot, p. 94. Mary Greer has a nice discussion of it, with pictures, at
http://marygreer.wordpress.com/2009/11/ ... %E2%80%9D/. She says Lucas van Leyden did it at age 14, in 1508. I don’t know how she knows that; to me it merely seems the earliest possibility, and it is not even clear that he did it. An inaccurate engraving was made of it for a French magazine in 1842, whether she was playing cards or not was unclear in the original, because only her part of the table was visible; the engravng showed much more of the table, with nobody at it. Here is Dummett (p. 114f):
Il dipinto mostra davvero una donna seduta a un tavolo nell’atto di maneggiare carte, ma del tavolo se ne vede molto meno e non c’è motivo per ritenere che la donna non stia semplicemente partecipando a un gioco di carte con altri giocatori che non compaiono nel quadro. Sia nel dipinto che nell’incisione, la donna sta ricevendo — o forse glielo sta dando — un giglio da un giovanotto in piedi alla sua destra, che si leva il berretto davanti a lei; ma, nel quadro, le è molto più vicino e in atteggiamento meno supplice. Il professor Hoffmann ritiene che il quadro raffiguri il figliol prodigo che dissipa i suoi beni in una vita dissoluta. Devo confessare che la gente ritratta nel quadro non mi sembra particolarmente dissoluta; ma, quale che sia il soggetto del quadro, non c’è nulla in esso che implichi che ci troviamo di fronte a un [end of 114] episodio di divinazione, né, per quanto ne so, esiste alcuna prova che il titolo ‘Filippo il Buono che consulta l’indovina’ sia mai stato attribuito al quadro prima del 1842
(The painting actually shows a woman sitting at a table in the act of handling the cards, but of the table we see a lot less and there is no reason to believe that the woman is not merely participating in a game of cards with other players who do not appear in the picture. Both in the painting and the engraving, the woman is receiving - or perhaps is giving him - a lily from a young man standing at her right hand, who holds his cap before her; but, in the painting, has the much closer and less suppliant attitude. Professor Hoffmann believes that the painting depicts the prodigal son who dissipates his property in dissolute living. I must confess that the people portrayed in the picture does not seem particularly dissolute; but, whatever the subject of the picture, there is nothing in it that implies that we are facing an [end of 114] episode of divination, nor, as far as I know, is there evidence that the title 'Philip the Good, who consults the seer' has ever been attributed to the painting prior to 1842.)
It seems to me that if she were playing cards with others, there would have been some indication in the painting. Ot else it is intentionally ambiguous. Greer says that the central figure is thought by some to be Margaretha of Austria and Savoy. She has an interesting history. She was born in Flanders in 1480, daughter of Maximilian I and Mary of Burgundy. At the age of 3 she was betrothed to the Dauphin of France but was sent back to her family at age 10 when Charles VII married someone else (his stepmother, actually). So from age 3 to age 10 she is with the French court somewhere in France, where she becomes friends with Louise of Savoy; then she's back to Flanders. In 1494 she becomes stepdaughter of Bianca Maria Sforza, daughter of Galeazzo Maria Sforza. It is not clear if they actually met. In 1497 she marries the son of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain and went to Madrid. He died 6 months later and her child was stillborn. In 1501 she married Phillip of Savoy, whom she loved greatly and who supported Ludovico Sforza against the French until "they made him an offer he couldn't refuse", Greer says. He died, her brother Phillip the Handsome died, and in 1506 (Wikipedia) or 1507 (Greer) she became Regent of the Netherlands. She vowed never to remarry and took the motto "FORTUNE . INFORTUNE . FORT.UNE, meaning “Fortune, misfortune, and one strong to meet them.” She ruled wisely, apparently. She and her sister-in-law Louise negotiated the Treaty of Cambrai. Greer's discussion on Aeclectic says that Cornelius Agrippa was her "panegyrist." I do not know what that means in particular. (
http://www.tarotforum.net/showthread.ph ... 534&page=5).
Greer thinks it's either a commemoration of her accession as regent of the Southern Netherlands, with important political personnages around her, or an allegory of fortune, with the person in back of the lady as a professional Fool. If it's about fortune, she would either be playing some game or seeing what the cards foresaw for her. Solitaire wasn't invented yet. It is objected that since she only holds a few cards it wouldn't be fortune-telling. But maybe these are the ones she's drawn. It did not take many cards to read a fortune. There is a hint of more at the lower border, probably the deck she drew from.
It certainly looks to me like she's saying something that the people around her find disturbing. The painting is probably around the time of her vow not to remarry. So I'd guess it has to do with that. Maybe the person in back is a suitor, or perhaps her husband or brother; admirers were sometimes portrayed with guitars to serenade their beloved with (there is a guitar on the man's back). In that context, the cards she has drawn, so far as we can see, contain no court cards. A common interpretation of court cards in Etteilla's method was to predict a romantic interest in the near future: a Jack of Hearts meant a young blond man, etc. (Even in 1450 Spain, Ross quotes an author as saying how, with a special form of the common
naïpes that he had designed, players could "tell fortunes with them to know who each one loves most and who is most desired and by many other and diverse ways" [
http://www.academia.edu/6477311/Brief_h ... cartomancy].) There are no men in Margaretha's future, in other words. This is not necessarily a formal card reading (which would be important to be able to deny, if there was suspicion that someone was endorsing witchcraft). Actual hands of a game also were interpreted symbolically (as in a humorous round of Piquet in a 1727 book reported at
http://marygreer.wordpress.com/2008/04/ ... ing-cards/). The person on our left might be her dead husband or brother, or another suitor (although a bit young). Her husband had called her a flower, Greer says. Her name is the French word for daisy (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisy_%28given_name%29). The flower he offers her is not a daisy, but perhaps that was considered too common a flower to give her.
Her song-book, posted by MJ Hurst at has a tarot-like "ranks of man" picture (
http://pre-gebelin.blogspot.com/2013/02 ... nkind.html)
The other painting Dummett discusses appears not to have been discussed in
Game of Tarot--or anywhere else that I can find. Here is Dummett. footnote 8 on p. 119):
8. Un articolo di Gunter Grzimek, ‘Warum stets nach dem dernier [corrected from my "demier"] cri?’, in Die Weltkunst, Jhrg. XXX, n. 13, 1 luglio 1960, pp. 5-6, riguarda un quadro, riprodotto, che fa parte della collezione privata dell’autore, a cui egli dà il titolo ‘La cartomante’. Il quadro, che egli data al 1648 circa, mostra una vecchia che guarda dritto davanti a sé con la palma della destra alzata verso lo spettatore. La sinistra poggia su un gran libro aperto, su cui sono buttate alla rinfusa carte con semi francesi, alcune in procinto di cadere dal bordo del libro. Anche se la datazione del dottor Grizmek è corretta, cosa di cui dubito, c tutt’altro che chiaro che la vecchia stia divinando dalle carte, azione che richiede una disposizione ben ordinata. Questo quadro non può essere usato come prova di una pratica della cartomanzia nel XVII secolo.
(8. An article by Gunter Grzimek, 'Warum stets nach dem Dernier cri [corrected from "demier Christian]?',in Die Weltkunst, Jhrg. XXX, no. 13, July 1, 1960, pp. 5-6 relates to a picture, reproduced, which is part of the private collection of the author, to which he gives the title 'The cartomant'. The painting, which he dates to 1648 or so, shows an old woman looking straight ahead with the palm of her right hand raised toward the viewer. The left rests on a large open book, on which are thrown higgledy-piggledy cards with French suits, some about to fall off the edge of the book. Although the dating of Dr. Grizmek may be correct, which I doubt, it is far from clear that the old woman is divining by cards, an action that requires a well-ordered arrangement. This picture cannot be used as evidence of a practice of cartomancy in the seventeenth century.)
It is not at all clear that divination requires a well-ordered arrangement. That is a projection of present practice onto a much earlier time. How can he claim to know what the practice in other forms of divination were, such that this particular method is excluded from being applied here? Throwing objects down and interpreting events from the way they lie is described is described in a 14th century poem about Roland. Andrea talks about it at
http://www.associazioneletarot.it/page.aspx?id=449
Il cerchio, le ossa di morti impiccati e le parole infernali sono componenti comuni della ritualità magica. A proposito del cerchio occorre ricordare, in riferimento all’utilizzo delle carte a scopo divinatorio, che un verso del Canto XX del poema La Spagna Istoriata, un romanzo cavalleresco composto nel XIV secolo ma stampato a Milano solo nel 1519, fa riferimento al sortilegio con il quale Rolando cercò di scoprire i nemici di Carlo Magno: “Fe’ un cerchio e poscia vi gittò le carte” il che vuol dire, come argutamente suggerisce il Lozzi in un suo articolo del 1899, che “non gittò le carte come si fa nel giuoco, o nella gittata de’ dadi, ma le gittò entro al cerchio, per iscoprire dalla loro giacitura, determinata da virtù magica (sortilegio) quali fossero e dove si trovassero i nemici dell’imperatore” (9). Non sappiamo di preciso quale tecnica volesse intendere l’autore del poema nello scrivere questi versi, cioè se facesse riferimento ad una lettura di carte utilizzate come gli astragali, in cui il responso intuitivo veniva emesso dall’osservazione del disegno complessivo che gli ossi venivano a creare una volta gettati a terra o se invece si trattasse di una vera e propria lettura come conosciamo oggi
(The circle, the bones of dead hanged ones, and infernal words are common components of ritual magic. About the circle it should be recalled, in reference to the use of the cards for divination, that a verse of Canto XX of the poem Storied Spain, a chivalric romance composed in the fourteenth century but only printed in Milan in 1519, makes reference to the sortilege with which Roland sought to discover the enemies of Charlemagne: "He made a circle and afterwards threw the cards", which means, as Lozzi pointedly suggests in his article of 1899, that "he threw the cards as is done in a game, or in the throwing of dice, but threw them within the circle, to discover from their arrangement, as determined by magic power (sortilege) who were the enemies of the Emperor and where they were to be found" (9). We do not know exactly what technique the author of the poem meant in writing these verses, that is, if it refers to a reading of cards used as knucklebones, in which the response issued was an intuitive observation of the overall design that the bones created once thrown to the ground or whether it was an actual reading as we know it today.)
It strikes me that the book in the painting might have served as a substitute for the less witchlike magic circle.
Dummett next discusses lot-books and why they shouldn’t be considered cartomancy when cards are involved. I will get to that next.