mmfilesi wrote
Without documents, no history. There is science fiction, which it does Gebellin or Jodorowsky. If you show me a document where is a relationship between Isis and a pope, then I change my opinion. Until then, I think the Popess is not Isis... Much less the Virgin Maria. If you say in my village (Calabria, Italy), playing cards with the Virgin, somebody shot you with a pistol.
And:
Lo que yo digo es que. desde la contrarreforma, la papisa Giovanna era una herramienta publicitaria de los protestantes y la Iglesia católica condenó y desmitificó su historia, como se muestra en el documento que os enseñaba antes.
Si la Papisa hubiera representado a la Papisa Giovanna (y no hay ni un solo documento que atestigüe esta hipótesis de Dummett), NO se habría dejado ni en Francia, ni en la Lombardía controlada por España. Por el contrario, se habría dejado en los tarots del área protestante. Sin embargo, fue precisamente en el tarot de Besancon y el tarot belga donde se quitó (además de las Minchiate y en el tarochino bolognes por otras razones que no vienen al caso)
Sumary in English:
a) Not exists documents mentioning the popess of tarot as the pope Giovanna.
b) The Catholic Church condemned the popess Giovanna. Protestants used Giovanna as an advertising tool to condemn the Church of Roma. The popess disappeared from the Protestants decks and the stayed in Catholics decks.
Translation of your Spanish:
"What I say is that from the counter-reformation, the papisa Giovanna was an advertising tool of the Protestants, and the catholic Church condemned and demythologized her history, since she appears in the document that I showed you before.
"If the Papisa had represented the Papisa Giovanna (and there is no document that testifies to this hypothesis of Dummett), she would not have been left either in France, nor in the Lombardy controlled by Spain. On the contrary, she would have been left in the tarots of the Protestant area. Nevertheless, it was precisely in Besancon's tarot and the Belgian tarot where it was removed (besides the Minchiate and in the tarochino bolognes for other reasons that do not enter the case)."
What I (mikeh) say:
For Pope Joan, I gave you the quotation from Aretino. It's about as clear-cut a reference as can be, referring back to the Boccaccio Joan's actual virtue, in contrast to what the other prostitute heard was her haughtiness. Read the Aretino again, perhaps it is not well known in the tarot history community:
viewtopic.php?f=23&t=385&start=20#p8528. Do you need it to be in the original language, for it to be a "document"? If so, I'll try to get it. I doubt if I can get a photo of the original page.
Documents and images of any interest are almost all subject to interpretation, some more and some less. You give me images that you say show Popess = Church. I say that they use the Popess image, but meant as images of the Pope depicted as the whore of Babylon. I see no labels on them saying "Popess," or other indications that such is their title or content. They are Protestant propaganda about the Pope, I say.
I also say that the places that produced Fracasse and Juno were Catholic at the time. I produced clear unbiased evidence of the Catholic orientation of Brussels at the time Fracasse was introduced, which you misinterpreted. But let that be. I don't dispute that the Popess was associated with the Church in Catholic places, c. 1600, because Ross gives a Catholic image from 1615 showing a popess figure labeled "Church." What you say is that Church = Popess even in the 1400s, long before 1615. The only pre-1500 documents you cited--for a different purpose, admittedly, but it's all I could find in your posts--are these:
Dante. Paraiso, XXVII.
Boccaccio. Decameron. First day, second tale (Gianotto de Civigní)
Petrarca. Canzonero, CXXXVIII
In
Paradiso XXVIII I looked for reference to the Popess as the Church. I found nothing. All I find is St. Peter talking about "the spouse of Christ," i.e. the Church, in these terms (
http://italian.about.com/library/anthol ... quote]"The spouse of Christ has never nurtured been
On blood of mine, of Linus and of Cletus,
To be made use of in acquest of gold;
But in acquest of this delightful life
Sixtus and Pius, Urban and Calixtus,
After much lamentation, shed their blood.
Our purpose was not, that on the right hand
Of our successors should in part be seated
The Christian folk, in part upon the other;
Nor that the keys which were to me confided
Should e'er become the escutcheon on a banner
That should wage war on those who are baptized;[/quote]
Etc. Plenty about popes, negatively, and the Church as wife of Christ, which we know from Augustine. Nothing about a Popess.
The tale in the Decameron (
http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Italia ... y&lang=eng) says much about the degeneracy of the clergy in Rome, including the Pope, but says nothing about any Popess and ends by praising the Church, when Abraham the Jew says, for why he has decided to be baptized after all, that the Church must be powered by the Holy Spirit if it can grow and thrive despite such evils:
E per ciò che io veggio non quello avvenire che essi procacciano, ma continuamente la vostra religione aumentarsi e piú lucida e piú chiara divenire, meritamente mi par discerner lo Spirito Santo esser d'essa, sí come di vera e di santa piú che alcuna altra, fondamento e sostegno.
[ 026 ] And because I see that what they so zealously endeavour does not come to pass, but that on the contrary your religion continually grows, and shines more and more clear, therein I seem to discern a very evident token that it, rather than any other, as being more true and holy than any other, has the Holy Spirit for its foundation and support.
And here is Petrarch:
138. ‘Fontana di dolore, albergo d’ira,’
Fountain of sorrows, house of anger,
school of errors, and temple of heresy,
once Rome, now a Babylon of deceit,
from which come so many tears and sighs:
O smithy of deceptions, O prison,
where good dies, and evil is nourished,
a living hell, a miracle indeed if Christ
is not wrathful against you in the end.
Founded in chaste and humble poverty,
impudent whore, you raise your horns
against your founders: where is your hope?
In your adulterers? Or in the evil born
from such riches? Constantine will not return:
but take them to the sad world that creates them.
Translator's Note: The Emperor Constantine the Great (d337AD) was wrongly thought in the Middle Ages to have granted the Papacy temporal power in the West, by the document
called the Donation of Constantine.
Here what we have is the comparison of the Papal court in Avignon, including the Pope, to the Whore of Babylon, very much in the style of the Protestants later. Again, nothing about either the Church as such or the Popess.
So do you have any documents at all, ones stating, or images showing, Church = Popess in the 1400s, or in earlier texts read then? I don't think it's fair for you to hold me to a standard of evidence if you don't follow it yourself. (I do concede, let me remind you, a loose association between the Popess and the sponsa of the Song of Songs, just because she is female and the beloved (sponso?) is male, and both are in a religious context.)
You are a hard taskmaster, Marcos, but I think I can provide that type of document myself, similarly general, linking Isis with both the Popess, as the Two, and the Empress, as divine mother. Hadot gives some in
The Veil of isis: An Essay on the History of the Idea of Nature (in Google books). I was going to save this quote for a post on the Empress, but I might as well give it now; it pertains to both:
Since the end of antiquity there had been a tendency to identify the Ephesian Artemis with Egyptian Isis in order to personify nature. For instance, Macrobius describes the statue of Isis as follows: "Isis is the earth or beneath the sun. This is why the goddess's entire body bristles with a multitude of breasts placed close to one another [as in the case of Artemis of Ephesis], because all things are nourished by earth or by nature." (Footnote: Saturnalia I, 20, 18.) In arithmology, that is, the discipline of Pythagorean origin that established a correspondence between numbers and metaphysical entities and the divinities that symbolized these entities, the Dyad was identified with Isis, Artemis, and Nature. (Footnote: Iamblicus, In Nichomachi Arithmetica Commentaria, pp. 13, 12. [Iamblicus], Theologoumena Arithmetica, p 13, Il. 13, 15. See R.E. Witt, Isis in the Graeco-Roman World pp. 149-150.)
In the sixteenth century, Vincenzo Cartari, in his handbook of iconography titled Images of the Gods, published in 1556, cites this text by Macrobius to prove that the ancients liked to represent nature with the features of Isis/Artemis. He specifies that a statue of this kind was found in Rome, and that he himself has seen an analogous figure on a medal of the emperor Hadrian. He might also have recalled, so far as the identification of Isis with nature is concerned, how Isis presents herself in the Metamorphoses of Apuleius: "I come to you, Lucius, I mother of all nature, mistress of all the elements." (Footnote: Metamorphoses XI, 5.)
From the sixteenth century to the nineteenth, there was a perfect awareness of this confusion between the two goddesses...(p. 236)
From this quote you can see how different the later humanists (from Ficino on) were from the earlier ones, a syncretism that affects (or infects) everything--including, I believe, the tarot, at least in those circles. (The references are not in Google Books; for those, I had to get the book from the library.) These documents have the same general relationship to Isis as Popess, for some, as Petrarch's and Boccaccio's diatribes against the clergy might in an earlier age, for some, have had for Church as Popess.
Artemis would not have been as good a fit to the Empress as Isis, because she did not have a child; she is more of a universal nurturer, or perhaps mother in the sense of "mother nature" (I don't know, I haven't studied Artemis much). Hadot is concerned with nature, not mothers of children, whom I think are more relevant to the Empress. But what he says about Isis clearly fits the Popess as the Dyad, the Two (in a philosophy that was everywhere, especially France, by the 16th century), and is one way of seeing Isis as mother, hence Empress. (I will quote more of Hadot on the Empress thread.)
Hadot gives other examples from the 16th-18th centuries. One that I find striking for one visual parallel to the Noblet Popess is a painting by Rubens and Jan Breugel the Elder, called "Nature Adorned by the Graces." It shows the Isis-Artemis figure as a statue, as in Plutarch's description of the statue of Isis at Sais, with the "veil" in part suggested by the curtain behind and above her, I think, and in part suggested by the action of the Graces, as though unveiling her.
I include the original Noblet Popess rather than just Flornoy's restoration because I just realized, looking at the Noblet, why her face is so white and so oddly shaped. It is that way to suggest (although not quite be) a mask, Noblet's version of Isis's veil, covering her real face! We can even see a bit of the other face on the right behind the first, the mask-like one, in flesh tone. The relevant detail is below, from
http://www.tarot-history.com/Jean-Noble ... pesse.html. Either that or, less likely, there is an unseen actual veil, as de Gebelin says, removing the color and darkening the face a bit. We today aren't used to seeing masks or veils in pictures; then they were probably more common.
So now I have four visual suggestions of Isis in the Noblet: the conspicuous book (perhaps even earlier, in the Cary Sheet), the stole, the curtain, and now the mask or veil.
Hadot says of the Rubens/Breugel:
In other representations, by contrast, there is only a fleeting allusion to unveiling, and the respectful attitude predominates instead. It is perhaps in this sense that we must understand the picture by Rubens, painted before 1648, in which the three Graces are adorning the statue of Nature, designated as Cybele, but in conformity with the traditional representation of Isis (Fig. 11.) (p. 240)
Cybele is not, as such, Greco-Roman like the Graces. Her Greek equivalent was Rhea, whom I have discussed as another association to the Popess, whom the Greeks also identified with Isis. The whole painting is at
http://www.lib-art.com/artgallery/16356 ... ubens.html. The title "Nature Adorning the Three Graces" is surely an error, although it is perpetuated even on Wiki. The websites date the painting to 1615-1625; one even lists its British owner of 1625.
The Noblet Popess, admittedly, does not expose multiple breasts; that only suggests that she was not intended in the tarot to represent Nature. These breasts were not part of Plutarch's description anyway. The breasts, taken from statues of Artemis at Ephesus, were part of Artemis's attributes, at least as early as Raphael 1509, as another example of Hadot's shows (image from
http://www.usna.edu/Library/Philosophy/Philosophy.html).
But Macrobius, and the medal of Hadrian's reported by Cartari, showed Isis similarly; so in her capacity as Nature, that is the way she was shown. Another of Hadot's examples (just before the Rubens, p. 240) is a clearly Egyptianate Isis, from the frontispiece of Leeuwenhoek's [/i]Anatomia seu interiora rerum[/i] of 1687 (copied here from
http://www.tooveys.com/lots.asp?WEBLOTI ... LOTID=3287).
As wife of Osiris, mother of Horus, and devotee of Thoth/Hermes with supernatural powers, however, she was shown differently, an example of which I have already shown from Cartari, with the X on her front. It is more in that way that she is associated to the tarot Popess--although, as we see in Rubens, there might also be a suggestion of the other.
I think what I am presenting here is in part historical data, in part interpretation from historical data. It is very rarely, and usually uninterestingly, that one can do without interpretation. And I am not trying to say "who the tarot Popess was" in France of the 17th century, for which I can find no definite answer; I am only dealing with probable associations to the card, of which "Church" is another, more in line with Church dogma, and so the answer to give the tax-stamp people when they do their inspections.
P.S. You asked (
viewtopic.php?f=23&t=385&start=20#p8544) about the reference for the Church - Empress picture posted by R.A. Hendley. Ross posted it on the Empress thread last February. He dates it to 1727 (
viewtopic.php?f=23&t=386#p6516). That seems to me about right for the style. He notes in an earlier post another pairing, of "Potestas Imperialis" with "Potestas Ecclesiastica" in 1524, where the latter does not have the papal tiara. To me that might suggest non-association of Popess with Church then.