Re: How eccentric is the Sola-Busca?
Posted: 30 Jan 2015, 16:26
Two other attributes on the MATTO card - one of which seemingly confirms the Marsyas aspect:
* The raven, at which the Matto stares at while playing, is Apollo's bird. Marsyas challenges Apollo to a musical duel and then is flayed after losing. But per my earlier post, Marsyas could have a virtuous side, perhaps latent but developed after undergoing what Ficno would a call a "purgation" (Marsyas' flaying) of earthly interests (the mess of feathers on his head point to his animal nature).
* The mountains: this is the only trump that does not have a flat landscape in the background. The Matto thus seems to be a pied piper-like figure leading us through a geographical border to another place, perhaps mythical or, more precisely, a somnium, inhabited by the Roman Republican and Biblical era figures of the other trumps (see not only the Dream of Scipio but Lucan's adaptation of that theme in his Pharsalia). The mountains (and feathers) are both the earth (e.g., the mountians on the Ercole Este World trump) from which the soul leaves in a dream/otherworldy journey but could also indicate a massa confusa or the quality of materia/body before being purgated for divine insights. So again, Marsyas as a silenus/satyr figure who has the potential to conceive and be graced by the Apollonian truth - thus a symbol of the self.
To me the Sola Busca is much more philosophical/cosmological, with a focus on the place of the soul within that framework, than strictly alchemical.
The precedent here for the Sola Busca Matto-Marsyas identification is none other than Dante, who draws from Ovid’s Metamorphoses' telling of the Marsyas myth (6.382-400) at the opening of the Paradiso (1.19-27) to describe the soul’s departure from the body in his invocation to Apollo:
”Here in the proem to the paradise, the leaves (folgie) of the crown are complicated subtely by their metapoetic connection not only to pages (Latin folia), but also to the wood (legno) of the symbolic tree which reactivates the ancient sense of materia (subject matter) as ‘timber.’" (“The Classical Languages and Italian: Some Questions of Grammar and Rhetoric”, Guilio Leschy, in Italy and the Classical Tradition: Language, Thought and Poetry 1300-1600, ed. C. Caruso and A. Laird, 2009: 12.)
Finally, the only reasonable identification of the next card, Panfilo [‘lover/friend of all’], is Boccaccio’s character in his Decameron, but we also find in his Genealogy of the Pagan Gods this passage regarding Marsyas right after his allegorical explanation of the significance of Bacchic vomiting (“purgings”):
* The raven, at which the Matto stares at while playing, is Apollo's bird. Marsyas challenges Apollo to a musical duel and then is flayed after losing. But per my earlier post, Marsyas could have a virtuous side, perhaps latent but developed after undergoing what Ficno would a call a "purgation" (Marsyas' flaying) of earthly interests (the mess of feathers on his head point to his animal nature).
* The mountains: this is the only trump that does not have a flat landscape in the background. The Matto thus seems to be a pied piper-like figure leading us through a geographical border to another place, perhaps mythical or, more precisely, a somnium, inhabited by the Roman Republican and Biblical era figures of the other trumps (see not only the Dream of Scipio but Lucan's adaptation of that theme in his Pharsalia). The mountains (and feathers) are both the earth (e.g., the mountians on the Ercole Este World trump) from which the soul leaves in a dream/otherworldy journey but could also indicate a massa confusa or the quality of materia/body before being purgated for divine insights. So again, Marsyas as a silenus/satyr figure who has the potential to conceive and be graced by the Apollonian truth - thus a symbol of the self.
To me the Sola Busca is much more philosophical/cosmological, with a focus on the place of the soul within that framework, than strictly alchemical.
The precedent here for the Sola Busca Matto-Marsyas identification is none other than Dante, who draws from Ovid’s Metamorphoses' telling of the Marsyas myth (6.382-400) at the opening of the Paradiso (1.19-27) to describe the soul’s departure from the body in his invocation to Apollo:
The only question this raises is if the Sola Busca Matto figure wears the traditional feathers or if they have been transformed into a mess of laurel leaves here…Enter into my breast and breathe in me just as when you drew Marsyas, out from the sheath of limbs. O divine strength, if you lend me of yourself enough that I may show the shadow of the blessed realm sealed on my head, you will see me come to the foot of your beloved tree, and crown myself with the very leaves which the subject and you will make me deserve.
”Here in the proem to the paradise, the leaves (folgie) of the crown are complicated subtely by their metapoetic connection not only to pages (Latin folia), but also to the wood (legno) of the symbolic tree which reactivates the ancient sense of materia (subject matter) as ‘timber.’" (“The Classical Languages and Italian: Some Questions of Grammar and Rhetoric”, Guilio Leschy, in Italy and the Classical Tradition: Language, Thought and Poetry 1300-1600, ed. C. Caruso and A. Laird, 2009: 12.)
Finally, the only reasonable identification of the next card, Panfilo [‘lover/friend of all’], is Boccaccio’s character in his Decameron, but we also find in his Genealogy of the Pagan Gods this passage regarding Marsyas right after his allegorical explanation of the significance of Bacchic vomiting (“purgings”):
A few lines further down Boccacio even leads us back to not only Apollo but also to a possible reason as to why insects appear in the Sola Busca:I think they wanted Marsyas to be under his [Bacchus’] guardianship because he was daring, in fact, rash, toward Apollo and in this rashness of the intoxicated I understand loquaciousness toward everyone [Panfilo?]. Because of this, wise men often seem to be confused by the ignornant in the eyes of the uneducated, who do not notice that the speech of the wise does not proced in any order but moves in the manner of a satyr like Marsyas, proceeding by leaping here and there. (Book V.25.22, p. 717 of J. Solomon trans. for I Tatti)
And Macrobius leads us back to the Dream of Scipio....Some again also add to the fiction that even though he [Bacchus] was dismembered and then buried, he rose again whole. I think that this must be understood in that after many imbibings, the heat of the wine produces small insects, and the combined result is drunkenness; from this it is quite clear that Bacchus lives and does something. About this Albericus said:He says this. But I think this Bacchus of Albericus must be understood as Macroius’ sun, to whom Macrobius transfers the divinities of all the gods.Bacchus should be understood as the spriti of the world which, although it is divided into members throughtout the bodies of the world, nevertheless seems to reintegrate itself when emerging from bodies, reforming itself, always remaining unique and the same, not suffering its single nature to be subdivided.
(ibid, V.25.24, p. 719)