Qabbalah and Tarot

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* Last year Kircher Tree of atf,sent to me by e mail few pages of the awesome book " A wicked pack of cards ".

- There Mr. Dummett pointed strongly that Qabbalah was known in Italy,at least 40 years later than Tarot birth there.

. What do you think ?
Exists a link between them ?
The Universe is like a Mamushka.

Re: Qabbalah and Tarot

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* As correctly Mr. Dummett said in his book,the first which introduced the Qabbalah was Pico della Mirandola.
Pico was a disciple of Marsilio Ficino.
But Marsilio which traduced many Alexandrian texts,was contrary to this idea,Pico s ideas.

- In the 14 cards theory is mentioned that Boiardo was uncle of Pico.
Boiardo has relations with Rabbi and may be he "forced" the 14 to reach the 22...

- And then all began.
The Universe is like a Mamushka.

Re: Kabbalah and Tarot

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The problem lies in that in no 15th century decks is there any evidence that there is any kind of influence of correlation with either the Hebrew alphabet or other Kabalistic considerations.

At most, what there may be is, as Mark Filipas suggests for later decks, a plausibility of card designs undergoing modification and reflecting an abecederium with the trumps reflecting, in order and with the Fou as last, ordinal reflections of concepts or overall imagery with Hebrew words and letters from dictionaries reflecting those times.
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association.tarotstudies.org

Re: Qabbalah and Tarot

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EUGIM wrote:* Last year Kircher Tree of atf,sent to me by e mail few pages of the awesome book " A wicked pack of cards ".

- There Mr. Dummett pointed strongly that Qabbalah was known in Italy,at least 40 years later than Tarot birth there.

. What do you think ?
Exists a link between them ?
There is a single coincidence between Tarot and Kabbalah. This is that there are 22 trumps in a standard Tarot deck, and there are 22 Hebrew letters.

Does this coincidence imply a relationship? Court de Gébelin thought so, and all subsequent esoteric theories are based on the belief that there is.

However, the names of the Hebrew letters are not the trump subjects, and there is no Hebrew letter that corresponds to zero, which is the value of the Fool (until the late 18th century, when Belgian decks made him 22).
There is therefore no way to correlate the two sets of 22 without forcing, severely, the meanings of both sets. This forcing is what occultists have done for two centuries.

Based on this simple observation, we can reject the idea that the Tarot trumps and the Hebrew alphabet have any relationship. We can test this, in theory, by asking a living Kabbalist, who knows nothing about Tarot, to explain if the trumps and the Hebrew alphabet are related, on being shown a deck.

Of course, this test raises many questions - which deck should be used? numbered or unnumbered? titled or untitled? can we use the Cary-Yale or the Visconti-Sforza (as the two oldest nearly complete decks), or do we have to assume that the Tarot de Marseille is the Ur-Tarot? All of these questions raise theoretical problems, which probably only give weight to the initial a priori conclusion that the whole exercise is futile anyway, since anybody can see there is no relationship between the Hebrew letters, and the pre-occultist Tarot decks.

Equating the Hebrew alphabet with Kabbalism is simplistic and sloppy, in any case, but the entire belief that the Tarot has something to do with Kabbalism rests on the coincidence of 22 trumps (really 21 and the Fool) and 22 Hebrew letters. If that equation doesn't hold water, then there is no reason to go any further into esoteric moralization about the four worlds = four suits, 10 sefirot = 10 pips, etc.

As an aside, Ficino's Cabalism is the reason why so many people like the 5x14 theory, since the 5x14 theory allows that the 22 trump structure developed later, at the same time as Ficino's school and Boiardo's poem. It thus appears to rescue the possibility of an "original" connection between Kabbalism and Tarot.

Ross
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Re: Qabbalah and Tarot

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As usual Ross, you've done a much better job summing up the same thoughts that I wish I could express so well. I just don't find the connection to kabbalah convincing, and generally feel that kabbalah has been forcefully graphed on top of tarot; and I prefer my tarot before the surgery.

Re: Qabbalah and Tarot

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Hello JMD:

- I never had clear clear when supposed Mr: Filipas the link between took place.
I saw it he said regarding Tarot de Marseille,but when.

-I expect is not as clumsy as E. Levy was LE FOV placement...
With any possible link regarding hebrew letters and numbers.

- We have not 22 cards. We have 21 + 1

- Or better : LE FOV,XIII and the rest 20 cards.named and numbered.
And this drives me to the relation between X and XXI
The first as ours wheel of life and XXI as the celestial wheel.
Last edited by EUGIM on 31 May 2009, 14:57, edited 1 time in total.
The Universe is like a Mamushka.

Re: Qabbalah and Tarot

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Ross: Marsilio Ficino was as far from the farthest regarding Qabbalah...

- Pico was the closest.

-Gershom Scholem said it very strongly that Qabbalah is pure neoplatonism so contrary to the orthodox belief.
The Universe is like a Mamushka.

Re: Qabbalah and Tarot

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I hate to see this thread just end, when there is so much more to be addressed.

First, on the issue of whether the 22 letters were connected to the 22 trumps: it is a fact that people did draw such correspondences more than two centuries ago (i.e. before 1809). De Mellet, in his 1781 essay accompanying de Gebelin's, did so in two places, neither entailing any absurdities about what letter corresponds to zero, or any repositioning of the Fool so it is other than in the "zero" position (i.e. right before the Magician). Here is his first passage, first talking about the Fool, and then more generally (http://tarotpaedia.com/wiki/Recherches_sur_les_Tarots, which also has the French):
This card does not have a rank: it completes the sacred Alphabet, & answers to the Tau which signifies completion, perfection: perhaps one wanted to represent in his direction the most natural result of the actions of men]. These twenty-two original Cards are not only hieroglyphics, which placed in their natural order tell the history of the first times, but they are also as many letters [the Hebrew alphabet is composed of 22 Letters] which differently combined, can form as many sentences; also their name (A-tout) is only the literal translation of their employment & general property.
Lest it be thought that de Mellet is proposing putting the Fool at the end of the sequence, here is the second passage:
The Sun answering to Gimel, means, in this direction, remuneration, happiness. Fortune or Lamed means Rule, Law, Science. Fol does not express anything by itself, it corresponds to the Tau, and it is simply a sign, a mark. The Typhon or Zain announces inconstancy, error, violated faith, and crime. Death or Teth indicates the action to reap: indeed, Death is a terrible reaper.
Gimel is the third letter of the Hebrew alphabet, corresponding to the tarot Sun, which is the third to the last trump. Lamed is the twelfth letter, corresponding to Fortune, which is twelfth from the end. Zain is the seventh letter, corresponding to the Devil (Typhon), seventh trump from the end. Teth is the ninth letter, and Death is the ninth trump from the end. Tau is the 22nd letter, corresponding to the 22nd trump from the end. To avoid the problem with zero, we simply count forward from the end.

I have no idea when this set of correspondences was set up. There is no reason in principle why it couldn't have been in the 15th century, although to be sure there is no evidence whatever before de Mellet. From the way in which de Mellet is writing it would seem that he is describing a divination system already in place rather than inventing something out of whole cloth. It of course would not have been part of the origin of tarot, just something tacked on at some point, and perhaps one reason why the number 22 stuck.

My other dissatisfaction with this thread so far is that it neglects the structure of the so-called "Tree of Life," with its ten numbered circles plus, above it, the unnumbered En Sof. Pico already in 1486 writes about this set of "enumerations." From his account it is not hard to construct associations to the 22 trumps. (I will expand on this remark if desired. It is not hard: you start with the Fool as the En Sof-- Pico calls it "the abyss" and "night"-- and go down until you reach the Wheel of Fortune as Malkhut, and then go back up again. But it won't work if you use any Kabbalist source not printed in Latin by 1518.) For fuller associations, there were Ricci's Portae Lucis 1516 and Reuchlin's Art of Kabbalah 1518. All were in easily read Latin done by people well versed in Hebrew sources--actually, different sources, Pico mostly Recanati, and Ricci offering a condensed translation of Gikatilla. No Christians used the Zohar then, or did much with the Sefer Yetsirah. Agrippa's Occult Philosophy 1533, which some people, including the Golden Dawn, have tried to relate to the tarot, is in fact not so useful, nor so well grounded. But at least Agrippa had the decency, soon after his death, to get translated into English. Poor Pico had to wait until Farmer's translation in 1998 (not counting Waite's muddled version of the first part in Holy Kabbalah).

These texts that Pico and Reuchlin read, Recanati and Gikatilla, while inspired by the Zohar, were nonetheless different from the Cordoverian and Lurianic texts that influenced later Jewish Kabbalah. (Most of Recanati, as far as I have found, is still only in Hebrew; an English translation of Gikatilla came out in 1994 as "Gates of Light." Ricci's condensation is available only in Latin; Blau translated his introduction into English in 1944.) Nor, of course, did Pico and Reuchlin have the benefit of Scholem and other modern commentators. Their understanding was filtered by conversos--Mithradaites for Pico and Ricci for Reuchlin. And Pico's "theses on magic" (the content of which Farmer thinks Yates exaggerated) were probably prompted by a certain Jewish Kabbalist lecturing in Florence who was considered heretical by other Italian Jewish Kabbalists. By Agrippa's time he had published his views for Christians to read. Moshe Idel has written about him, and a whole Jewish tendency toward magic in the period immediately after 1492, in Religion, Science and Magic, ed. Neussner et al. When I speak of Pico's Kabbalah, I am not talking about the theses on magic.

What Pico, Reuchlin, and their followers saw, I think, was the descent of the soul during this life, recapitulating its earlier descent into matter, followed by a possible ascent, again in this life but recapitulated in the life to come, 11 levels each crossed twice. The descent through the spheres before birth, and ascent after death, had been hinted at by Plato in the Timaeus ("He who lived well during his appointed time was to return and dwell in his native star") and stated explicitly by Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, among other Latin sources. Robert Fludd had a picture of the soul's journey through the spheres in one of early 17th century illustrations. It is Neoplatonic, to be sure, but also Christian, in its Neoplatonic elucidation The this-life recapitulation of the steps in this life is, among other places, in the Corpus Hermeticum, the vices coming from the various planetary spheres (Book I) and the virtues driving out the vices--an enormously common Renaissance theme--as one purifies oneself in this life (Book XIII). Dante's Divine Comedy would have been seen in a similar light, his journey down (Inferno) and up (Purgatorio and Paradiso) as this-worldly human experience. Pico in his 900 Theses explicitly connects the Corpus Hermeticum ascent of Book XIII with the Kabbalist "ten punishers," which he does not elaborate on because it is "secret"; but they are likely the vicious aspects of the sefiroth. Pico draws connections between pagan philosophy (both Platonic and Aristotelian), Christian theology, the Corpus Hermeticum, and Kabbalah, and sees them as different confirmations of a single Truth. This does not follow, to be sure: all four disciplines were touched by a common milieu in ancient Alexandria, a milieu of separate pagan, Jewish, and Christian strands with nonetheless many points in common, points reinforced in their continued interaction in succeeding centuries and places, including 13th century Castile.

What evidence do I have that anybody connected Pico's syncretism with the tarot? Well, there might be some relationship between Pico's summation of Kabbalah and Boiardo's poem, which came out around the same time and is about vices and virtues. Pico may have inspired Boiardo, or Boiardo may have shared his thoughts with Pico. But more interestingly, over the next two centuries b.k. (before Kircher), there was a continuing "esoteric" milieu, not esoteric in the sense of a secret kept through the ages, but just in the sense of a secret, without any long pedigree, kept from the authorities, both Protestant and Catholic, which tended to persecute such "Judaisers." (In relation to Ricci, Aryeh Kaplan mentions such "esoteric groups" in Meditation and Kabbalah, p. 127, in Google Books.) This milieu drew on Kabbalah, Hermetism, and alchemy; given that the tarot trumps spelled out a sequence leading to salvation, it is not unreasonable to suppose that esoteric versions, or "initiations," using tarot images, developed, too, in which Kabbalah would have been part of the act, along with Pythagorean and other frameworks. In alchemical illustrations of the 15th-17th centuries we see "philosophical trees" similar to the Kabbalist "tree of life," as pictured in the frontispiece of the Portae Lucis, Augsburg 1516, reprinted later in Basel (e.g. http://www.wordworks-uk.com/paulus_riti ... g_1516.jpg, where, incidentally, there are not 22 "paths" between circles--I am not talking about those at all;). The most common number of circles was seven rather than ten; but people would have had no trouble finding three or more hidden in the picture, such as in the trunk or roots, corresponding to the circles in the lower center of the Kabbalist tree. (See e.g.
http://www.memphisjungianseminar.com/im ... l_tree.jpg; http://www.benpadiah.com/otherstuff/crests/img015.jpg;). Some alchemical trees even had eleven circles, for example emblem 3 of Thurneisser 1572 (http://www.levity.com/alchemy/amcl_thurn.html) and emblem 10 of Norton 1630 (http://www.levity.com/alchemy/amcl_norton.html). Others had ten, thirteen, etc. They were primarily enumerating alchemical operations, but with an eye to other similar sets of steps. As such, some people might have constructed correlations that just went up, rather than down and then up, either twice or two per sefira. You can see such correlations worked out by people today on ATF; I see no reason why esoteric groups wouldn't have tried similar things in the past; however such ascent-only progressions just focus on one part of the journey, whereas historically (Plato, Macrobius) there were two parts.

I will be happy to elaborate on any of this, using sources readily accessible in the 15th-17th centuries, if I know there is some interest. (Otherwise, I have two blogs, "15th century Tarot," which is actually only on Boiardo and Pico, and "The Latin Sefiroth, 1486-1533," on the Latin texts' relation to tarot; but I can be more succinct here. I would also like feedback for improving these blogs.) None of these sources explicitly connects tarot with Kabbalah. Some people aren't interested unless there are such documents, ones that connect the dots explicitly, even though such writings could have gotten the writer, and maybe the tarot-designer, imprisoned or worse. If people in this forum are that demanding, I will spare you my thoughts. Yet they are thoughts I easily imagine others having had in centuries past.
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