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Phaeded: I can't address all the images you presented, but it seems to me that the first one, with the hoof,
Image
needs to be seen in the light of this one, a motif that became quite common in succeeding centuries, even used by Etteilla on his Temperance card. It starts, as far as I can determine, with this one, by the Mantegna school, 15th century (https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occasio_e ... tentia.jpg):
Image
Edgar Wind (Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, p. 101) had analyzed this as an illustration of "festina lente": a youth is being restrained by Wisdom from chasing after Opportunity, the first being on an elongated cube, the stablest of solids, the other on a sphere, the least stable, hence slow vs. quick. In that context the hoof represents a rider out of the frame chasing after Opportunity (or Fortune, if you wish). I can't make out the pine tree. I will take your word for it. My guess would be that it would be the dark woods she is leading him into. Dark woods in allegorical literature are generally where one loses one's way. That the castle is hard to make out suggests the elusiveness of the goal.

Allegorical painting became different in the 17th and 18th centuries than formerly: just one meaning, even if not easy to discern instead of the tendency toward ambiguity and open-endedness of former times (On which see The Cambridge Companion to Allegory).

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Mike, when I read your posts, I sometimes get the sinking feeling that you and I are speaking totally different languages, rendering effective communication impossible...

The big problem, as I see it, is that you willfully ignore the whole basic mechanism by which the designs of playing cards evolve over time, which I described in detail in my "Telephone game" post in this thread. You always talk about the design of every card as if it were created from scratch, not influenced by any preceding cards, except in the choice of the subject it was intended to depict (and even then, you sometimes take the view that the card designers "changed the allegory" that was depicted on the card).

So you look at every individual card and try to interpret the design as if it sprang entirely from the mind of the designer. But in reality, the designs of the cards were always largely based on the designs that came before, and they must always be interpreted in that light.

You ignore this because you want to see everything in the imagery on all the cards as symbolic and meaningful and deliberate, solely the result of the card designer's coherent creative vision—but if one recognizes the basic mechanism of card design evolution, one is then forced to acknowledge that that is very often not the case at all. So you never want to talk about that mechanism of iconographic evolution; instead you talk as if it just didn't exist. It's an inconvenient truth that you seem very reluctant to confront or admit.

You also refuse to accept even what the names of the cards themselves (as recorded in various sources from the Steele Sermon onward) are telling you, namely that the symbolic meanings of several of the cards (such as the Old Man, World, Angel, and Tower, as well as the Chariot) were not very important to anyone at the time. This is confirmed by the considerable variation in the symbolic imagery on those cards over time. As you no doubt recall, I discussed all of this in an earlier post.

So all of your speculations about allegorical meaning would have been of very little practical interest to the vast majority of the tarot players who played games with those cards in the fifteenth century, and they are of little interest to me either.

What I'm interested in is how the deck and the game evolved over time, and how they spread out from their point of origin to the rest of Europe (especially in the first couple of centuries). The symbolic meanings of the imagery on the cards are not wholly irrelevant to that story, but they are only relevant when considered in the light of the incremental, evolutionary nature of playing card design.

Another consequence of your desire to believe that each card's design was solely determined by its designer's personal creative vision is that you are not sufficiently interested in the standard contemporary iconography used for the subjects you are discussing (which is something you share with Huck). Instead of comparing the cards you think represent Puciditia or Fame with other representations of Pudicitia or Fame from the same era as the cards, you cast about wildly, catching bits of symbolism from here, there, and everywhere, and then trying to piece them together somehow to make the cards say something you find appealing. None of this is ever very persuasive.

The artists of the time did not usually invent representations of particular allegorical figures from scratch. The reason why is obvious: if they did, no one would recognize the resulting image—especially in an age of limited literacy, where it was not common practice to label images with captions telling the viewer their intended meaning. So they had to follow the established iconography for whatever subject they wanted to depict. They were not free to innovate to anything like the degree that your theories would require them to have done.

This was even more true in the case of playing card design, because there the artists were constrained not only by the established iconography of the various subjects, but also by the established designs of the preceding cards. The players needed to be able to recognize each card, and that meant the design of the cards in each new deck had to resemble the design of the cards in the preceding decks in various essential respects. The card designers did have a certain limited freedom to add ornamentation or to "enhance" the design in small ways, but mainly they had to stick to the existing image fairly closely. This was especially true for card subjects like the Chariot or the World, which were not identified on the basis of an allegorical figure which was commonly known to all like Love or Death - in the case of the latter subjects, the artists could theoretically have changed the depiction considerably while still being confident that the players would be able to recognize the card; they could not do that with cards like the Chariot or the World. And in practice, even the Love and Death cards usually remained fairly similar from one deck to the next, which simply underlines how important and fundamental this rule of playing card design was (and still is today): the artists generally adhered to it instinctively, even when they didn't really need to.

mikeh wrote:
It seems to me that the "Charles VI" image was inspired by the guide in Boccaccio's Amorosa Visione
The designer of the Charles VI card did not invent that image from scratch. What it must have been "inspired by," above all, is the design of the World card in the preceding decks, which in this case effectively means the design of the World card in the earliest standard tarot deck, i.e. the deck that became wildly popular around 1450. That design almost certainly must have featured a woman holding an orb and scepter standing on top of a globe (which we can infer by comparing all the World cards from that era). That standard card would in turn have been largely "inspired by" something like the CY World, i.e. a card showing the landscape-world and the female figure above it decked out with symbols of sovereignty. Once we get back to that era—the earliest tarot cards that have come down to us—it does make legitimate sense to start talking about the innovative creative vision of the card designers and the intended symbolic meanings of all the cards, because that is the time when the cards were first invented. The designs must still have been based to some extent on the standard iconography used by artists at the time, of course, but not on the specific design of preceding cards, so those first card designers would have had significantly greater freedom in their work than all those who came after them. As for the CY World card in particular, it was almost certainly intended to represent Petrarch's Triumph of Eternity, not Boccaccio's guide.

But this is a thread about the Chariot card, so that is what I will talk about here, and I'll save further discussion of World for another day.

Mike, I'm not going to address your renewed attempts to establish a link between Chastity/Pudicitia and the various Chariot cards, as there is nothing there that I find persuasive and I have already made my own interpretation of those cards clear in my earlier posts. People can read my interpretation and your interpretation and decide which one they prefer.

I have nothing more to add to the discussion, except for one thing:

My view of the PMB Chariot card has changed somewhat. Looking at it again, I'm now inclined to think that it's no more likely that its designer understood its subject as Fame than that the designer understood it as Chastity/Pudicitia.

It depicts a woman portrayed as a sovereign, with a crown, orb and scepter, in a chariot pulled by winged horses. Only the female figure, the wings, the orb, and the chariot were typical of the standard iconography of Fame at the time, and I'm no longer convinced that this is enough for a reliable attribution. The figure does seem allegorical, at least: It is female, and its chariot and winged horses are like those seen in some contemporary depictions of allegories such as Love or Time. However, I'm not aware of any typical allegorical image from the time that fits this iconography. Chastity/Pudicitia certainly doesn't fit, because the standard contemporary iconography of that subject relied on attributes such as a palm branch, a shield (sometimes with a pillar), white garments on the figure, and unicorns, none of which appear here.

I don't believe a satisfactory explanation of this image's intended meaning has yet been offered, and until such time as we find a contemporary Italian image depicting something significantly similar, I don't think one will be forthcoming.

However, the PMB Chariot is still very useful to us in one way, and that is in helping us to reconstruct the appearance of the Chariot card in the first standard tarot deck, the deck on which all subsequent cards were ultimately based. As I have said numerous times, I think it's fairly clear that only the CY and BB decks represent an earlier pattern, one that was not influenced by that first standard deck; everything else must ultimately have evolved from that deck. So, by looking at the Chariot cards that survive to us from the other early decks and comparing them with each other and with the earlier CY Chariot, we can get some idea of what that very first standard Chariot card must have looked like.

Before the standard deck was first established, we have the CY Chariot card:
Image
.
After that, there are six Chariots in total that have been fairly reliably attributed to the fifteenth century:
early chariots.png early chariots.png Viewed 26895 times 243.43 KiB
(see also http://cards.old.no/t/ - click the individual cards for high-resolution images)

Based on these cards, we can say with considerable confidence that the image on the first standard Chariot card would have featured the following:

- A chariot, most likely presented face-on (not in profile as on the earlier CY card), pulled by two horses, which were almost certainly white and wingless
- A female figure as the charioteer, as this is a feature of both the earlier CY card and two of the earliest of the later cards (both usually dated to about 1450-1465)
- An spherical, orb-like object held in one of the figure's hands, most likely the right hand, because that is where it appears on three of the six cards above, versus only one where it is in the left hand; furthermore, the presence of the orb in the right hand rather than the left on the Issy card (top center in the above image) is the only way in which that card's image deviates from the standard iconography of Fame (which was probably the Issy card designer's understanding of the image, as I argued in my earlier posts here). The easiest explanation for this unusual deviation is that this detail was adopted from the standard card.
This object was probably colored gold (or at least yellow) and was probably merely a sphere on the original standard card; it almost certainly would have lacked the cross that surmounts it on the PMB card, as that is the only one of these cards which shows the orb as a classic globus cruciger.
The orb/sphere was probably also being held up for prominent display by the figure, much as the shield is held up on the CY card, as that is the case with all four of the charioteers here who are holding orbs, and on the Rosenwald card (bottom center), it is the only thing the figure is holding.
- A baton or scepter held in the figure's other hand
- No crown on the figure's head, unlike the PMB card and Rosenwald card

From this, two points follow:

1. The first standard card seems to have been very much like the CY Chariot, with the only significant deviation being the sphere in the place of the shield. This is why I think the orb that we see on the later cards was the result of someone not realizing the meaning of the shield and misreading it as a sphere, as I discussed in my first post here. The standard card was evidently not understood as representing Chastity, neither by its designer nor probably by those who saw it—and certainly not by the designers of the later cards. In all likelihood, the designer of that first standard card—probably an engraver of a cheap woodcut deck for the masses—had no clear understanding at all of exactly what it was meant to depict, and was just copying what they (mistakenly) thought they saw on an earlier card.
(Something makes this mistake even more understandable is that by the end of the 1440s, there was an established iconographic tradition for Chastity/Pudicitia, and it didn't usually involve her holding a shield or a baton. It normally showed her with a palm branch and dressed in white, neither of which is the case on the CY Chariot card. So it's very easy to imagine the artist failing to spot the card's intended meaning.)

2. The PMB card must have looked rather different from the standard card.
I think the reason why the PMB card is so difficult to interpret is because it wasn't based on any standard iconography of any subject, but resulted from the designer having to emulate an earlier design that no longer really made any allegorical sense. Like the designer of the Issy card, the PMB card's designer seems to have attempted to address this by deviating significantly from the earlier design in order to depict an allegorical figure of some sort, but the result ended up being quite strange and hard to interpret (unlike the Issy card, where the designer changed the baton to a sword to create a fairly standard depiction of Fame).

So we may never know exactly what subject the PMB card designer thought they were depicting. Both Fame and Chastity/Pudicitia seems quite unlikely, but we probably can't entirely rule out either of them.

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Let me try to fill up the gap of the PMB card. I think all cards contain esoteric knowledge of the process of spiritual awakening. Knowledge that could not be communicated in public. Knowledge that was guarded by the freemasons, amonst others.

The PMB card communicates dominion over matter (duality) and the animal nature.
Het hexagonal shape of the chariot refers to duality merging to divine oneness (the universal meaning of the hexagram).
download/file.php?mode=view&id=2271

The woman sits between two spiraled pilars. This refers to the two energy channels, running along the spine, that merge during a spiritual awakening.
download/file.php?mode=view&id=2270

The horses refer to the animal nature that has been purified (white) and sublimated (wings).

Iconographic references to Fame and Chastity fit in with this esoteric meaning.

(Sorry again for any errors, English is not my native language)
http://www.anne-marie.eu/en/

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A couple of slight corrections to my last post:

I said that the orb was the only thing the Rosenwald charioteer was holding: I have no idea why I overlooked the sword in the figure's other hand when I wrote that, as I certainly noticed it many times before (and even mentioned it in one of my earlier posts in this thread). But it's nevertheless true that the figure is holding the orb out very prominently, just like the other charioteers do.
I also forgot that all the Rosenwald cards were created by someone tracing the images from an earlier woodblock—this is evident because the Roman numerals on a few of the cards appear inverted (e.g. "IIX" for twelve)—which means that the charioteer was originally holding the orb in his left hand, not his right, as I erroneously suggested in my post. So this means that out of the four charioteers shown holding an orb in their hands, half of them were holding it in their left hand. However, this practice of creating new woodblocks by tracing an older one also places a significant limitation on our ability to come to any reliable conclusions based on which hand the figures appear to be holding the objects with. I still think the Issy card would have been based on an earlier card where the charioteer was holding the orb in the left hand, but I have to admit that this doesn't tell us anything much about which hand it would have been on the very first standard Chariot card.

Another point that has occurred to me is an argument in favor of the Chastity interpretation of the PMB card (an argument that someone has probably made on this forum before): The PMB deck was apparently made by the same workshop that made the CY deck, and was probably ordered by and/or for the ducal court of Milan. This means that at least a few people seeing the deck (presumably including Bianca Maria Visconti, and probably Francesco Sforza too) would have been aware that the Chariot card originally represented Chastity, and the workshop's artists may have been trying to somehow reconcile that earlier signification with the new design from the standard deck. So they kept the orb, but changed it to a globus cruciger (symbol of dominion) and upgraded the figure to a sovereign to represent dominion and sovereignty over the passions of love. And in keeping with that, maybe those winged horses were indeed taken from the Phaedrus myth—I was reluctant to accept that before because of the lack of classical references anywhere else in the deck, but if one views the card as a messy ad-hoc solution to this difficult problem (of reconciling the earlier meaning with the later standard image), then it seems a lot more plausible.

Re: The Chariot

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Thanks, A.M. The problem with esoteric knowledge is that without some reference in text or imagery of the time, just about any interpretation could be justified in that way. (For an example that does use texts of the time, although perhaps a bit freely, see Decker's The Esoteric Tarot Your interpretation fits the Platonic interpretation, more or less (except for the pillars on the side; I cannot find reference to the spine in Plato), and that's a text that was widely discussed by the humanists of the era.. You might want to say that it was from a hidden esoteric tradition that was later revealed, but it might well be that this tradition was gradually built after the time of these cards.

To Nathaniel and others who might read this: On the dating of the Rosenwald, see Pratesi's article (2016) which I translated at http://pratesitranslations.blogspot.com ... sheet.html. The earliest date for this sheet is 1501. On the reversals, see (2017) http://pratesitranslations.blogspot.com ... rugia.html.

Nathaniel, I am naturally glad to see your second thoughts on the PMB card. It shows your reflectiveness and openness. We are (at least I am) not posting in order to be applauded, but to get criticism and different points of view on which to reflect.

I don't object to interpreting later cards in terms of earlier ones. In fact I insist upon it, to the extent that reasonable interpretations of the imagery match (I say "interpretations of the imagery" rather than "imagery", because there are different ways of conveying an allegory, for example Time by wings or an hourglass). Also, different cities may prefer different allegories for the same visually dominant subject. That is part of studying the changes over time.

When I said that the Charles VI image looks "inspired by Boccaccio" I didn't mean that particular painting on paper, but that particular combination of shapes and colors, wherever it occurred in tarot decks causally linked with that one.

What I am trying to account for, as I think you appreciate, is why the Chariot - and just one - is in the sequence at all and in the particular place, or range of places, that it is. I say "range" because while between Love and Hanged Man, it is everywhere in that space. That Hanged Man is not an original card and Petrarch's poem seem to account for that. The CY Chariot seems to portray Petrarch's allegory, because of the jousting shield and the female protagonist. it does not portray the fight that Petrarch describes. Nor the captive Cupid or the chains she bound him with. And Petrarch never had a chariot, nor a groom to manage the horses. From Petrarch, the card only portrays Pudicitia's victory, by virtue of a stout defense (the shield). That is enough. And there is still a problem fitting the other cards into a Petrarchan mold.

If the chains and bound Cupid are missing, and a male present with the horses, it could be a more general victory, not just against cupiditas but against the supremacy of instinctual attachments and pleasure. For this, it does not matter whether the person on top is male or female. Also, managing the horses counts for something, I think. It is believably the chaste Bianca Maria Visconti triumphantly entering her dowry city, with her future husband making it possible.

The hand-painted Florentine versions of the Chariot and all of the printed ones are different from the Lombard hand-painted, and I can't see trying to come up with a "standard Chariot", or even an "original Chariot". Counting male vs. female heads ignores the accidents of preservation. At least two of the females are for the same family (I say "at least" because it may be that the third is, too, but from a different commissioner, given that Bianca Maria's favorite color was red, as Ross reported in this thread). And you have left out two printed designs, from other centers: the Cary Sheet and the BAR/Bolognese. These are arguably as old as the fairly reliably dated Rosenwald, of c. 1501 or later. We have no idea how old the various designs are ("designs" as opposed to "extant specimens"). The hand-painted cards were made for specific occasions or families, and we have no idea what the "standard" design was corresponding to them was, even in any one city, if there even was one. In such a situation, all we can do is try to develop characterizations that will work for all or most of the ones we have (I except the Metropolitan, which has some unique features). The main point is to see whether Petrarch still works as an explanation.

There is no precise following of Petrarch in any case. The Florentine cards exemplify Petrarchan love better than the CY; and none of them has Petrarch's horse-drawn chariot, of course. We won't find his description of Eternity on any of the cards. Yet the triumph over Time is there in the call to Judgment.

Since the Florentine cards have a male on top, with military accoutrements, it is not chastity. But it still the victory over instinct and pleasure, in particular the warrior's fear of death and instinct for self-preservation. These cards are more removed from Petrarch's "triumph of Pudicitia" and closer to the surviving depictions of the "triumph of fame". There are different ways of characterizing the difference. Maybe it is the male form of pudicitia, martial excellence. Alternatively, it is the triumph of earthly fame, put before Death to distinguish it from heavenly fame. But if so, it is not just any fame - not the fame of a famous lover or of wealth or wisdom, but specifically that supported by arms. That comes to the same thing as male pudicitia, or even female pudicitia in a woman's duty to support her husband. Despite being more removed from Petrarch than the CY, they are still related to his poem by virtue of the different things required for male and female Pudicitia and the corresponding Fame, qualified as Worldly Fame.

As for the orb, there are different ways of explaining it. You say it is a misperception of the shield. It is true that the sunburst design on the shield could be seen as a golden disc or ball on the Florentine cards. But there were already Florentine triumphs before the CY; so perhaps there were Lombard triumphs before the CY, too. We don't know what either looked like, and how easy it would have been to mistake a shield on them for a disc or ball. It seems to me at least as likely that the latter is a symbol of supremacy, like the golden globe held by the emperor and empress, but away from the body as though to be given to somebody else. Gold is the highest of metals, also a symbol of immortality, or at least long life without deterioration, since it doesn't tarnish. Ercole d'Este on his death bed drank a gold dust concoction (he was dead by morning). In alchemy red was even higher. The usual offering, in 14th century triumphs of Fame, was an olive branch, as in the Greek Olympics, but at some point it changed, we don't know why. It doesn't matter if a previous image was misperceived or a deliberate change in line with literary sources like Boccaccio. The orb is about supremacy, in particular supremacy over instinct and pleasure, the subject of the Love card.

As far as the two 1450s cards with women on them, it looks to me like they are the one the card honors, so feminine Pudicitia, as in Petrarch, is possible. Worldly Fame is also possible, for victory in something else. Pudicitia for a married woman is being a faithful wife and mother, and a wise administrator helping her husband. I don't know what more can be said.

I cannot conclude from this that the tarot originated in Milan. We don't have any examples of pre-CY Florentine triumphs. We know they existed, because of the 1440 report. We don't know how long before 1440. The Charles VI Love card is closer to Petrarch than the CY, in that it seems, like Petrarch, to portray emotional attachment and instinct rather than the contractual handshake. The CY Chariot is closer to Petrarch than the Florentine cards. Both vary from Petrarch's conceptions. We don't know what the cards looked like before the CY, or even what the Chariot card was called (or for that matter, even what the game was called). But both the extant Florentine cards and the CY Chariots reasonably fit Petrarch's "Pudicitia", the one as male Pudicitia and the other as female, regardless of how else they may be characterized. Petrarch offers the required structure either way.

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mikeh wrote: 24 Mar 2020, 21:46 Thanks, A.M. The problem with esoteric knowledge is that without some reference in text or imagery of the time, just about any interpretation could be justified in that way. (For an example that does use texts of the time, although perhaps a bit freely, see Decker's The Esoteric Tarot Your interpretation fits the Platonic interpretation, more or less (except for the pillars on the side; I cannot find reference to the spine in Plato), and that's a text that was widely discussed by the humanists of the era.. You might want to say that it was from a hidden esoteric tradition that was later revealed, but it might well be that this tradition was gradually built after the time of these cards.
I have collected dozens of renaissance paintings that have pillars on them with an esoteric meaning. These are two examples of paintings that want to express that Jesus had a kundalini awakening (with involves three energy channels/pillars).
For some reason images do not show in my posts. They appear when you click on the link.

Last supper fresco in Oratorio del Gonfalone by Livio Agresti (1505 - 1579) Rome
Lucas Cranach d.J. Das Dessauer Abendmahl, 1565
http://www.anne-marie.eu/en/

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I have the same problem with images. I don't know how to fix it. With a link from another source, you can put
Image
on the other, or else click on img below the text space, to make the image show. But I can't get that to work by uploading an image directly. By the way, your English is very good. Only one slip, "het" for "the", which does not seem to be a typo. "Het" is Dutch/Flemish for "the".

In the Cranach, I would say that the straight column indicates fortitude - backbone, yes, but not Kundalini. The column was a symbol of that cardinal virtue, as can be seen in emblem books and some Tarot or Minchiate cards.

As for the other, I don't know. On the card, it is a vine around a pole with flowers, possibly roses, if we are talking about the same thing. I do not know the symbolic value, I admit. Vines around poles occur on the Rothschild cards, too, as the borders along the sides (e.g. http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-a5V-e-fuGnM/V ... mperor.jpg). I hate to say "just decoration".; the serpent in the Garden of Eden comes to mind, especially in regard to the Last Supper. But Kundalini is an idea from India. To say it was known in Milan of 1450, there needs to be more evidence.

I have one question regarding your previous post, about the hexagon. What I see on the card is a triangle made by the two horses and the lady, which indeed could be duality and unity merging (or expanding, or both, in a hexagon). I do not see the hexagon on the card,

I need to add something to my previous post. I did not answer my own question, about why there is a chariot card in the sequence, precisely where it is, and only one. Of course more than one would make it hard for the players to identify, since it is the most prominent feature. But why there, after Love and before Death, the two Petrarchans on either side of Pudicitia? In Petrarch it is Love that has the chariot, not Pudicitia. In Boccaccio, it is "worldly fame" that has the chariot, as the third allegorical lady, after the guide and wisdom. But the CY has Pudicitia with a chariot.

It seems to me that the answer is that the chariot is an image of the human soul, and Pudicitia is the only one of Petrarch's triumphs that is a direct result of the action by an embodied human soul. Love is the result of an arrow, or an instinct. Death happens to one. Time is a fact of life. Eternity, the result of the last judgment, happens to the soul, although the result, if God is merciful, is indirectly affected by the soul's actions in life. Fame is also indirectly a result of the soul's action in life: worldly fame, as the mastery of certain social ideals for men and women, needs its worldly trumpeters, and Petrarch counts himself as one of those, for Laura's fame. Fame in heaven is more reliable, and doesn't need trumpeters, since God knows everything we do (although angels and saints can help). So it is fitting that in these cases attributes of earlier depictions of fame are borrowed. Likewise the Angel card borrows the trumpet, if used for a different purpose. These cards, but especially the Chariot, have to do with the embodied soul and its choices, an image which I only know, in literature read or art seen at the time, from Plato's Phaedrus.

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mikeh wrote: 25 Mar 2020, 21:55 I have the same problem with images. I don't know how to fix it. With a link from another source, you can put
Image
on the other, or else click on img below the text space, to make the image show. But I can't get that to work by uploading an image directly. By the way, your English is very good. Only one slip, "het" for "the", which does not seem to be a typo. "Het" is Dutch/Flemish for "the".
Hi Mike, Thanks for the compliment. The reason I excused myself is because of the high level of discussion here. I did not want to appear illiterate and therefore not taken seriously. :-)
mikeh wrote: 25 Mar 2020, 21:55 In the Cranach, I would say that the straight column indicates fortitude - backbone, yes, but not Kundalini. The column was a symbol of that cardinal virtue, as can be seen in emblem books and some Tarot or Minchiate cards.
One of the reasons why I think the pillar behind Jesus on the Cranach painting is a reference to his spine, is because he is making, what I call, the "sign of the sacred marriage'' (2=1) with his left hand. This gesture is commonly interpreted as a blessing, but in esoteric circles it stands for the merger of duality. The painting does not capture the moment of the blessing of the bread, but Jesus just told them someone will betray him.
mikeh wrote: 25 Mar 2020, 21:55 I have one question regarding your previous post, about the hexagon. What I see on the card is a triangle made by the two horses and the lady, which indeed could be duality and unity merging (or expanding, or both, in a hexagon). I do not see the hexagon on the card,
The platform on which the woman sits has a hexagonal shape. On a number of visconti PMB cards hexagons are printed on the clothing. For instance, on the Lovers card, which is also about the merging of duality. And a spiraling pillar is standing between the two lovers. The woman on the PMB chariot also wears a dress with hexagons
http://www.anne-marie.eu/en/

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A-M wrote: 25 Mar 2020, 07:51 I have collected dozens of renaissance paintings that have pillars on them with an esoteric meaning. These are two examples of paintings that want to express that Jesus had a kundalini awakening (with involves three energy channels/pillars).
I can't identify " three energy channels/pillars" on your pictures.
Image

I count one ....
Image


... and I count many (actually 10).
And I don't know, what you want with the word Kundalini in 16th century Catholism und Protestantism in Italy and Germany.
Huck
http://trionfi.com

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Huck wrote: 26 Mar 2020, 12:31
A-M wrote: 25 Mar 2020, 07:51 I have collected dozens of renaissance paintings that have pillars on them with an esoteric meaning. These are two examples of paintings that want to express that Jesus had a kundalini awakening (with involves three energy channels/pillars).
I can't identify " three energy channels/pillars" on your pictures.
Image

I count one ....
Image


... and I count many (actually 10).
And I don't know, what you want with the word Kundalini in 16th century Catholism und Protestantism in Italy and Germany.
Hi Huck, I don't know where to start if I am asked to prove that European countries were aware of the concept of kundalini in the 15th and 16th century. They named it different probably: Sophia, Mercury, Azoth, for instance. I have studied the Bible, alchemy and renaissance art, and proof is everywhere! I have written four books about it. One is translated in English (its on my website, with free pages to read), with many examples of renaissance art. If you take just one painting it is hard to prove the pillar(s) on it refer to a kundalini awakening, but if you have seen thousands of paintings, as I have, you get an eye for patterns and hidden symbolism. It's also a matter of being willing to see it....

About these two paintings. A kundalini awakening involves three energy channels. The outer two represent inner duality. They flow on the left and the right of the spine. These two energy channels merge during a kundalini process. The channel in the middle flows through the spine and contains the kundalini itself. On the painting of Cranach the pillar behind Jesus refers to the energy channel in the middle, that flows through the spine.

On the painting of Livio Agresti there are indeed many pillars. This is a way of expressing the importance of the pillars: they mean something. There should have been three pillars to be exact, but then they would not stand out the way they do now. Its just an exageration to get the message accross: Jesus was not born as the son of God, he was a human being that had a kundalini awakening. On this painting Jesus is pointing with the middle finger of his left hand to the head of John, to indicate that the Last Supper is an event that takes place in the head during an awakening (I know, making big leaps now...) :-)

Here's another painting: the well known "Mary with the long neck" of Parmigianino https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madonna_w ... _Long_Neck
The pillar behind Mary is a hint that her exceptionally long neck refers to her "awakened" spine.
She's pointing at her spine also
Again: you need a certain willingness to see it (not many people have...)
http://www.anne-marie.eu/en/