The image is from
1151.
It is part of Hildegar of Bingen’s Scivias. It is not part of any tarot deck -sorry
- although I found remarkable how much alike Lestoille card it seemed in terms of proportion and composition. Many of the drawings she made after her visions have a strong tarot-like flavor. I don’t think that this has nothing to do with the tarot in itself, since she mostly depicted well established Christian motifs. The reason why I have been re-reading Oliver Sacks book (The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat) is because I remembered he wrote about these visions. Years ago I read in another book, whose title I can’t remember, that a common feature in the visions of those who try ayahuasca is Medieval imagery and Medieval characters. Then, reading about migraines and the ‘migrane’s aura’ I became aware of the fact that many patients describe fortifications and castle-like structures. I became intrigued by a question: is there any connection between the Tarot de Marseille visual impact/appeal and some sort of basic brain imagery that becomes evident in hallucinations or in certain disruptions in the brain? Are the images on the tarot part of a dream -a nightmare- our brain dreams without we being aware of it? But further reading on migraines auras proved my question to be a true unicorn hunt. There seem to be reasons to think that the migraine's patterns -dented, triangular, somehow resembling castles- formally respond to part the brain organization but these patterns are a lot more basic, or abstract, that any actual intelligible image. We can only define them as ‘fortifications’ if we knew about fortifications in the first place.
Hildegard wrote:
“I saw a great star most splendid and beautiful, and with it an exceeding multitude of falling stars with which the star followed southwards... And suddenly they were all annihilated, being turned into black coals... and cast into the abyss so that I could see them no more.”
A literal interpretation for such vision would be:
“....she experienced a shower of phosphenes in transit across the visual field, their passage being succeeded by a negative scotoma.”
This took me to some literature on the Virgin Mary’s apparitions, specifically these apparitions reported in Bosnia in relatively recent times. What is usually described by ‘light’ or ‘light’s’ ends up being constructed as a charming little stamp of a beautiful woman wearing a blue robe or as white doves when in truth the phenomena experienced in the first place may have been a lot more abstract.
In any case, It has been fun reading about the visual cortex and its ‘tricks’. But beyond that image of stars being a mere curiosity, it does shows how we go around filling gaps and, by subjective validation, assigning familiar identities to any pattern we perceive. In the case of Hildegard, it comes to show how, when you live within a Christian reality, anything you experience can only be approached and processed in Christian terms.
Best,
EE