The next author Dummett discusses is de Gebelin:
L’interpretazione occultistica del mazzo dei tarocchi può essere fatta risalire a una sola fonte, un saggio di Antoine Court de Gébelin, incluso nell’ottavo volume, pubblicato nel 1781, della sua vasta opera incompiuta Le Monde primitif. Gébelin, che pose in appendice al suo saggio una descrizione del gioco, non avanzava alcuna pretesa di dar conto di una tradizione ininterrotta. Al contrario, pare essere convinto che la sua teoria sull’origine delle carte sveli un segreto perduto da secoli. La sua assurda teoria era che il mazzo fosse stato inventato dai sacerdoti dell’antico Egitto come rappresentazione simbolica della loro dottrina religiosa. Da allora era stato innocentemente ritenuto un semplice strumento di gioco da generazioni di giocatori del tutto ignari della vera ragione della sua invenzione. Proprio in questo spirito, solo un anno dopo la stampa dell’ottavo volume di Gébelin, un articolo in una rivista tedesca ne divulgava le teorie 59. Molti di voi, esordisce l’autore, avranno spesso giocato al gioco di Tarok, senza mai rendersi conto che tutti i Taroks — cioè i trionfi — e anzi tutte le carte di qualsiasi tipo non sono altro che raffigurazioni allegoriche, portatrici di un significato morale. In seguito, gli occultisti [end of 138] tentarono di sostenere con prove pateticamente inadeguate che i loro predecessori rinascimentali avevano attribuito il loro stesso significato al mazzo dei tarocchi: ma colui che pubblicò per primo un’interpretazione esoterica non aveva avanzato alcuna pretesa del genere.
(The interpretation of the occult tarot deck can be traced back to a single source, an essay by Antoine Court de Gébelin, included in the eighth volume, published in 1781, of his vast unfinished Le Monde primitif. Putting in an appendix to his essay a description of the game, Gébelin did not advance any claim to give an account of an unbroken tradition. On the contrary, he seems to be convinced that his theory on the origin of the cards reveal a secret lost for centuries. His absurd theory was that the deck was invented by the priests of ancient Egypt as a symbolic representation of their religious doctrine. Since then it had been innocently believed to be a simple tool for generations of game players completely unaware of the true reason of its invention. It is in this spirit, only a year after the release of the eighth volume of Gébelin, an article in a German magazine divulged the theory 59. Many of you, the author begins, will often have played the game Tarok, never realizing that all the Taroks - that is, the triumphs - and indeed all cards of any kind are nothing more than allegories, bearers of a moral significance. Later, occultists [end of 138] attempted to support with pathetically inadequate evidence that their Renaissance predecessors had ascribed their own meanings to the tarot deck, but the one who first published an esoteric interpretation had not made any such claim.
_______________
59. 'Uebcr den Ursprung und die Bedeutung der Tarok – Charten”, Gottingisches Magazin und der Wissenschaftcn Litcratur, 2ten Jahrgang, 1782, pp. 348-77.
What I get out of this (disregarding de Gebelin on the “original” meaning of the tarot) is that one type of “esoteric” or “occult” symbolism in the cards is that of ancient Egypt. It is easy enough to see Egyptian symbolism in the cards. When I first saw the cards, I thought the same thing—not that they originated in ancient Egypt, but that somebody had put Egyptian-style images in them, catering to the Egyptomania of the time (which existed in France throughout the 17th and 18th century, long before Napoleon). I am not talking about the 19th and 20th century versions, but the Tarot de Marseille that de Gebelin saw. This still seems to me true, going back at least as far as the Cary Sheet. The Italian Renaissance courts and humanists could not get enough of ancient Egypt and its so-called “hieroglyphs” (a word that the Anonymous Discourse uses, as well as de Mellet), starting in the 1420s. This is not to say that the cards were originally made with Egypt in mind, just that the card makers might have taken advantage, as much as they dared, of the fascination with ancient Egypt as imagined by Renaissance Italians. I would not actually call it an “Egyptian” interpretation of the cards, but rather part of a Greco-Roman interpretation, which included Greco-Roman interpretations and adaptations of Egyptian mythology as one part.
It is true that de Geblin thought he was the first to see these suggestions in the cards. I find that dubious. He was just the first to be in a position to write about it without danger of persecution. 18th century France was full of material about so-called “Egyptian mysteries”. They were incorporated into the lore of secret societies and became the subject of more than one opera. Since Masons like de Gebelin surely played the game of tarot, it is not surprising that their cards would reflect the same interests.
Dummett goes on:
Nei limiti in cui si può parlare di certezza per un qualsiasi fatto storico, è quindi certo che, nei primi tre secoli e mezzo della loro esistenza, i tarocchi furono usati per un solo scopo, cioè per giocare. Non ne consegue necessariamente che essi non debbano nulla alle scienze occulte dal punto di vista iconografico. Possiamo sicuramente respingere l’idea degli occultisti ottocenteschi che le carte dei semi abbiano significati occulti poiché, a parte l’aggiunta delle Regine, quella sezione del mazzo dei tarocchi non è altro che il mazzo normale con semi italiani. Non è, tuttavia, intrinsecamente impossibile, e neppure improbabile, che i trionfi racchiudessero una qualche sorta di simbolismo occulto: magari nella selezione dell’insieme dei soggetti, o nella loro successione, o forse nei modi convenzionali di raffigurare i singoli soggetti. Questo è possibile perché i disegni delle carte da gioco non riflettono sempre necessariamente elementi caratteristici dell’uso a cui sono destinate. L’esempio più evidente è uno dei più noti tipi di mazzi indigeni indiani, quello conosciuto come Dasavatara. I dieci semi del mazzo Dasavatara rappresentano, come suggerisce il nome, le dieci incarnazioni di Visnù. Per comprendere l’iconografìa del mazzo, pertanto, occorre far riferimento alla mitologia indù; ma questo non ha nulla a che vedere con l’unico uso a cui sono destinate le carte, e cioè a determinati giochi per i quali l’unica cosa che importa è che ci siano dieci semi distinti, ciascuno formato da dieci carte numerali e due figure.
(To the extent that one can speak of certainty for any historical fact, it is thus certain that in the first three and a half centuries of their existence, tarot cards were used for only one purpose, namely to play. It does not necessarily follow that they do not owe anything to the occult sciences from the iconographic point of view. We can safely dismiss the idea of nineteenth-century occultists that the suit cards have hidden meanings, since apart from the addition of the Queens, that section of the tarot deck is nothing more than the normal deck with Italian suits. It is not, however, inherently impossible, or even improbable, that the triumphs racchiudessero some sort of occult symbolism: maybe in the selection of the ensemble of the parts, or in their sequence, or perhaps in the conventional ways of depicting individual subjects. This is possible because the designs of playing cards do not always necessarily reflect the characteristic elements of the use to which they are intended. The most obvious example is one of the most popular of the indigenous Indian types of decks, the one known as Dasavatara. Ten suits of the Dasavatara pack depict, as the name suggests, the ten incarnations of Vishnu. To understand the iconography of the deck, therefore, necessary to refer to Hindu mythology; but this has nothing to do with the only use to which the cards are intended, namely for certain games for which the only thing that matters is that there are ten different suits, each consisting of ten pip cards and two figures.
This last is a good point and shows that he does not reject hidden symbolism out of hand. There is the use of the cards for games, and there is iconography. One can contemplate the incarnations of Vishnu on the cards even if they are used only for playing a game. It is in that spirit that we need to look at de Gebelin and de Mellet. It is in fact precisely because of the association with games and gambling that the tarot was called the “Book of Thoth”: Theuth/Thoth was the legendary inventor of games in Plato’s
Phaedrus.
I want to focus on what would have seemed then—and still is—the relatively unsolved mysteries of the tarot sequence, that is to say, the Popess, the Tarot de Marseille style celestials, and the lady in the World card, plus details elsewhere. De Gebelin argues that the Popess, by analogy to the Empress, cannot be European, because the Pope is unmarried, but in Egypt, the High Priest was married to the High Priest. I think this is correct, but I am not sure. I am also not sure that people in the Renaissance would have had that idea. But a reference to Egypt is one way of explaining that title, surely by the 18th century. In addition, de Gebelin points to visual features on the card. He sees little spikes on the sides of the Popess’s crown. These are similar to the horned headdress of Isis or her priestess. Secondly, the Pope’s staff was a triple cross, the type of cross carried by the High Priest at the letter TT of the Bembine Tablet source. This is a Roman-era engraving that surfaced around 1527, with genuine Egyptian symbols on them (although not genuinely Egyptian, as they do not form sentences.) I myself have never been able to find such a cross in the Tablet, although J. Karlin says it is there, held by Ptah (
Rhapsodies of the Bizarre p. 68, note 13). But the papal staff was already depicted with three cross-bars. The “horns” in the Popess’s tiara can be seen already in the PMB version (center at
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-JuPxu7g5VbI/T ... ustice.jpg), as well as in the Bembine Tablet (
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Lu-6PwakMv0/S ... ineDET.jpg); the horizontal horns on some deities also bear some resemblance to the Bagato’s hat). But crowns in general had such “horns” (at right in previous link), although perhaps not as long. This imagery is consistent with an Egyptianate interpretation, but not evidence for its being put there for that purpose.
Another thing about the Popess, however, is that the representation of Isis in the Borgia apartments is quite similar to what we see on the Tarot de Marseille card. It seems to be Mary of the Annunciation transposed to Pinturicchio’s version of Isis (
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Lu-6PwakMv0/S ... ryIsis.jpg). It also bears some similarity, especially in the face, to the Cary Sheet figure with the crozier.
Another mystery is the sequence Star, Moon, and Sun: why does the Star come first, why do the cards, from the Cary Sheet on, look the way they do, and what are the drops that we see? De Gebelin argues that the Star is the Dog-Star, Sirius, and the lady is Sothis, “Isis’ water-carrier” for Plutarch, whose appearance on the eastern horizon at dawn was a harbinger of the coming Nile flood. There is a distinct similarity between her and Roman depictions of Sothis, identifiable by her star overhead (
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Lu-6PwakMv0/S ... Sothis.jpg). The water-carrier, of course, is also Aquarius; but in Roman Egypt there were both male and female depictions of that constellation (
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Lu-6PwakMv0/S ... r2Nota.JPG, from Desroches-Noblecourt,
Le Fabuleux Heritage de l'Egypte, p. 123). The two streams then could be the two branches of the Nile, one of which came over the plain and the other down from Ethiopia. Correspondingly we have a mountain on one side of the Cary-Sheet Star lady. It took both the nutrient-rich water from the White Nile and the summer torrent from Ethiopia to produce the Nile Flood.
The crayfish on the Cary Sheet Moon card then symbolizes the month of the flood, from June 22 to July 22, and the body of water the flood itself. All of this was well known by Greek-speaking humanists, of which there were a sufficient number in all the places associated with the 15th century tarot. It is particularly clear for Milan, where Filelfo had the complete
Moralia of Plutarch, with its “On Isis and Osiris”. Also, Ciriaco da Ancona, who had traveled to Egypt as far as the Cairo area and sketched ancient monuments there, spent his last days, the early 1450s, in Cremona, where Filelfo and the Sforza family also had stayed in 1452 to escape the plague in Milan (Robin,
Filelfo in Milan p. 248), and where the Bembo artists had their workshop
The Cary Sheet has what I see as Egyptianate details (although others do not see them, I admit). The plants next to the towers could double as obelisks, which came in twos, and whatever is in the middle as a temple (see below). Next to the lake I see two crocodiles, one with something in its mouth. Crocodiles are associated with the Nile, too. What is in the crocodile’s mouth is not in the story that I know of, but it reappears in the Conver version in the crayfish’s claws. I see no Egyptian explanation for this detail.
The Tarot de Marseille adds droplets coming down from the sky, probably taken from the Cary Sheet Sun card, probably solar rays there. De Gebelin associates the droplets on the Moon card, otherwise unexplained, with the “tears of Isis” mentioned by Pausanias (
Description of Greece 10.32.18, at
http://www.theoi.com/Text/Pausanias10C.html), i.e. the rain in Ethiopia. That is as good an explanation as any.
After the Nile flood, if it has been sufficient, the fields are ready for planting, a rebirth of the land that is a cause for celebration. On the Tarot de Marseille there are little pools of water scattered around on the Sun card. But why the Twins, as opposed to a lion? I do not wish to argue that the Gemini were thought Egyptian. Egypt, as it existed in the Roman period, is just part of a general Greco-Roman interpretation. In the Greek myth of the Gemini, one brother is mortally wounded, and the other sacrifices half his immortality for the sake of his half-brother, a kind of precursor of Christ’s sacrifice. This myth fits the Egyptian situation in the month of August. The period at the end of the flood was a time of pestilence, the ancient writers relate. Similarly to the Gemini, the deaths due to pestilence are a necessary sacrifice for the survival of the people. Egyptian imagery can explain why some versions of the cards had a man and a woman. The Greco-Roman era zodiac at Dendera had just such a man and a woman, probably representing Shu and Tefnet, children of the sun god (
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Lu-6PwakMv0/S ... Gemini.jpg). All of this imagery was above ground and quite accessible by the end of the 15th century.Oddly to me, a 1496 zodiac from Troyes also shows a male and female Gemini (
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Lu-6PwakMv0/S ... zodiac.JPG), as well as what might be a female Aquarius.
Finally, for the World card we have Isis again, said by Macrobius to be the Platonic world-soul (Saturnalia, I, c. 20 -21, cited by Vitali at
http://trionfi.com/0/i/c/21/v/F2-bottom.html). Apuleius suggests something similar in saying that Isis is "mother of all things, mistress and governor of the elements" (
Metamorphoses 11, at
http://books.eserver.org/fiction/apulei ... leven.html). So within the oval of the cosmos is the goddess, a little bit of Platonized Egyptian mythology thrown into an otherwise Christian card, or so it surely was thought by some.
Other imagery on other cards is at least consistent with an Egyptian interpretation. It seems to me quite likely that the Egyptian interpretation was not original with de Gebelin (Dummett says something similar for de Mellet, but I cannot find the reference just now) .The 1731 French novel
Sethos was set in Egypt and featured a secret initiation much like Masonic ones (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sethos#The_Terrasson_novel). Rameau wrote an opera about the gods of Egypt (
https://www.kennedy-center.org/events/?event=RPOLA) and of course later there was Mozart’s
Magic Flute, with an initiation in an Egyptian setting.
In addition, we have to take into account the popularity of Horapollo’s
Hieroglyphica at this time, starting in 1430s Florence, Ferrara, and Milan. Decker has shown how different images on the cards can yield different interpretations using this book (see
http://books.google.com/books?id=qW11TC ... hs&f=false). It cannot account for the creation of the cards and their order, nor in most cases even give a more satisfactory explanation for a particular image than without Horapollo’s input (with a couple of exceptions, which I will discuss in a moment). But the correlations that Decker makes do tend to support certain interpretations and not others. An example would be “distant voice” as Horapollo’s interpretation of the meaning of thunder, a phenemonon that would be represented visually by lightning. Decker says that wouls surely be a divine voice. That very much fits an intepretation of the card as the voice of God calling us to rectitude in God’s eyes and disdain for this world.
An Egyptianate slant may account for some particular ways the imagery was changed in 17th-18th century France. So for example we have a sphinx-like figure on the top of the Tarot de Marseille II Wheel of Fortune (compare images at
http://newsletter.tarotstudies.org/2010 ... nd-monkey/); and some of the circles on the Tower card have been turned into Priest of Osiris-style hats (compare
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-3H0XppSR-kc/U ... 0/hats.JPG with the hats on the Bembine Tablet,
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Lu-6PwakMv0/S ... ineDET.jpg). Also, on the Judgment card a hill has been added on the Tarot de Marseille II that together with the tonsured head of the middle figure has an uncanny resemblance to the so-called “eye of Horus”: compare
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Lu-6PwakMv0/S ... Wadjet.jpg with the earlier
http://www.tarotpedia.com/wiki/Image:Je ... rot_20.jpg; in my caption, the name of the deck should be “Chosson", and the 1672 date is controversial; however the card is very much representative of the Tarot de Marseille II standard design.
Likewise, the bird on the Star card (compare
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Lu-6PwakMv0/S ... olChos.jpg) may have been added for the purpose of providng a phoenix, the well-known bird (Marziano’s deck had a suit of them) who died and was reborn at the rising of the sun in Egypt. That there is no fire in the tree is no obstacle. The bird was often presented without a fire under him. In fact, Horapollo himself makes no mention of it in his discussion. Here is the account of its death and birth, which I quote in full (II, 57):
When they wish to indicate a long-enduring restoration, they draw the phoenix. For when this bird is born, there is a renewal of things. And it is born in this way. When the phoenix is about to die, it casts itself upon the ground and is crushed. And from the ichor pouring out of the wound, another is born. And this one immediately sprouts wings and flies off with its sire to Heliopolis to Egypt and once there, at the rising of the sun, the sire dies. And with the death of the sire, the young one returns to its own country. And the Egyptian priests bury the dead phoenix.
The bird with outstretched wings is then welcoming the sun, which has not yet risen. There may be other interpretations, but this one fits Horapollo quite well, and I know of no other. Similar depictions actually illustrated 16th century editions of Horapollo; Marco provided an example (
http://www.emblematica.com/en/cd08-horapollo.htm); his intention was to discount the influence of Horapollo on the Tarot de Marseille, but to me it only strengthens it (his post is at
viewtopic.php?f=12&t=971#p14174). The people rising from their graves on the card is indeed a “long-enduring restoration”.
One other detail pertains to the Devil card. Why does the Tarot de Marseille Devil have long, more vertical than usual horns, like stylized antlers? The Devil of the capital in Venice, the one with ropes to the two captured souls (
http://www.art-roman.net/issoire/issoire31.jpg) has no such things. One possibility is that it may have been suggested by the “Seth animal” depicted in ancient Egyptian stellae accessible then, such as one that was on a causeway at Sakkara, an ancient burial ground for nobles and pharaohs near Cairo (
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Lu-6PwakMv0/S ... erSeth.JPG; unfortunately I can no longer find the book in which its location was given). De Gebelin identified the Devil with Seth. I do not know if he had pictures in
Le Monde Primitif of Seth with his odd head or not. That it looks like stylized antlers may also have something to do with male potency, thought in some cultures (China, for sure) to have been promoted by antler horn powder.
Well, enough on Egypt. I will get to the rest of the section on hidden symbolism later.