Thanks for the clarification. In my post preceding yours, I had also looked at Laurent de Premierfait and found where he did mention lightning - just not in the same place as Lydgate had put it, but in the moralization addressed to princes that followed (in Premierfait), still referring to the Tower of Babel. So the lightning is not Lydgate's invention, but, in relation to Boccaccio's, Premierfait's interpretation of Boccaccio's "hand of God." I also showed an illumination from ca. 1350 Naples in which the tower of Babel is shown with both lightning and figures falling from the tower. Comparing the Tower of Babel with the "as it were tongues of fire" descending at Pentecost that made the disciples speak in tongues was a popular medieval theme, with several examples in the link I provided, albeit not otherwise with fire or falling figures. But given the theme's popularity, it seems to me that Premierfait was probably drawing on an existing tradition, for the lightning and perhaps also the falling figures (although I do not see Lydgate specifying that they are falling from the tower, as opposed to falling from being hit by falling stones), as well as (clearly) Lydgate's illustrator. That there was a tradition in northern France for falling figures is suggested also by the Tower of Babel pictured in a Book of Hours acquired by the Duke of Bedford around 1420. So a 50% probability for falling figures as an original feature is reasonable enough.
What may well be Lydgate's illustrator's invention is putting a dragon, if that it is what it is, inside the tower entrance and on its outside while the building is still being constructed. Lydgate says nothing about dragons being in the Tower, or even being in the area then. And thanks, Ross, for identifying it as a dragon rather than a devil; I had not figured out what those odd black things on the tower were: they seemed too small to correspond to Lydgate's "gret dragouns," which he said infested the area, but said nothing about being in the Tower, much less when it was being constructed. However, if the people were giants and the tower very large, "gret dragouns," I suppose, could be like large lizards to us.
So Boccaccio adds serpents to the story, from an unknown source, perhaps Jewish, but referring to the place as it became after it was abandoned rather than in Nimrod's time. Premierfait preserves this detail. Lydgate adds "gret dragouns." The illustrator then puts them in or on the tower itself, perhaps reducing them in size, and makes them contemporary with Nimrod.
A dragon is not yet a devil. It becomes a devil only by association. There is the "great dragon" of Rev. 12. The concurrence of the two words suggests that perhaps Lydgate was making that association, and the red color the illustrator gives it fits that specified there. In any case, there is an association of dragons with devils: St. George's killing of the dragon has visual parallels to the archangel Michael's attack on Satan, for instance. In Latin, "draco" applied to both dragons and snakes, and we know the devil takes the form of a snake. One might even think, unless one noticed the other dragons in the illustration, that the Illustrator of Lydgate put a devil in the entrance. That this idea would get from London to Italy in time to make it into the "original" tarot, or have been part of a larger tradition as yet unknown to us, or have been invented independently in Italy then or earlier, without further evidence seems to me improbable but not impossible.
Re: The Tower
82I was just discussing The Tower last night with a group of friends and was reminded again of a discussion I started way back on Aeclectic regarding baetyls, thunderstones, Beth-el and the “house of god” and the possibility that it was Jacob on the Vieville tarot. There still feels like there is something there to me.
Re: The Tower
83Welcome back, Robert! I recalled older mentions of the idea, but I didn't remember your posts on Aeclectic. All I found were Andrea Vitali's, first noted in the 1987 Ferrara exhibition catalogue.
Here is what I posted on the Facebook Tarot History group that Nathaniel refers to a few posts back. It was accompanied by five illustrations, which I can't upload for the moment because I've been locked out of my image-storage place and can't recover the randomly-generated password. Is there a way to host them here?:
"The Thunderstone in Perugia
The "Rosenwald sheet" in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., is of unknown provenance, but it has a heavily damaged twin in the Deutsche Spielkartenmuseum in Leinfelden-Echterdingen. In 2016 Franco Pratesi looked into it and its origin, and found that it was discovered together with pages from a book printed in Perugia in 1501. Therefore the cards themselves were most likely printed in Perugia as well. See F. Pratesi "Il terzo foglio Rosenwald" at https://www.naibi.net/A/516-ROSEN3-Z.pdf; Mike Howard's English translation here https://pratesitranslations.blogspot.co ... ne-27-2016... )
I have long been struck by the Rosenwald's "Tower" card (which they would have called it Fuoco (Fire) or Saetta ((Thunder-)Bolt), which has a large arrowhead stuck in the destroyed side of the tower. Other cards show a blast of light or lines of lightning, with the attendant fire, but in Rosenwald the lightning is not just flying through the air, but actually stuck in the building. I thought it was a poetic depiction of the name "saetta", since that is the name for a striking lightning bolt as well as an arrow. I hadn't looked much further for why lightning was called "arrow" in the first place, and didn't realize that it was literal - before the electrical nature of lightning was understood, well into the 18th century, people believed that lightning bolts were literal fire-arrows, of divine or at least celestial origin. It was obviously fire, but it struck hard like a physical object. Because of its destructive force, the celestial fire had to become a hard physical object. It turns out that it is not just a literal interpretation, but the actual explanation of the name - they believed that the thunderbolt had a stone arrow or spearhead at its tip, which, when found afterwards, was the "thunderstone." People often found lying on the ground stone-age arrowheads, speartips, or stone axeheads; they didn't have a concept of pre-history, let alone a "stone age", and, since antiquity, they thought they were the remains of lightning strikes. The stones embodied the lightning, and were sometimes called simply "fulmini", thunderbolts.
This belief is pan-European; every European language has the equivalent of the term "thunderstone". E.g.
English: Thunderstone
Latin: Ceraunia
French: Pierre de foudre, pierre de tonnerre, (or "céraunie")
German: Donnerkeil or Donnerstein
Spanish: Piedra de rayo
Italian: Pietra del fulmine, pietra della saetta, or Ceraunia
Dutch: Dondersteen
Swedish: Åsksten
Danish: Tordensten
Norwegian: Tordenstein
Finnish: Ukkosenkivi
Polish: Kamień piorunowy
Czech: Hromový kámen
Slovak: Hromový kameň
Hungarian: Villámkő
Russian: Громовой камень (Gromovoy kamen)
Portuguese: Pedra de raio
Catalan: Pedra de llamp
Welsh Carreg daran, carreg taran
So the arrowhead in the Rosenwald Saetta card represents the thunderstone. The connection with Perugia is fortuitous, since a native son of the city, Giuseppe Bellucci (1844-1921), who taught chemistry in the Università degli studi di Perugia,also spent much of his time as an ethnographer and local folklorist. Bellucci gathered a large collection of amulets and fetishes, including dozens of thunderstones, now displayed in the Museo Archeologico Nazionale dell'Umbria (MANU) in Perugia. Here is how he described the display of thunderstones, pietre del fulmine, in an exhibition catalogue of 1898:
"The amulets contained in this display are generically referred to as THUNDERSTONES, believed to be the material, lithic part that lightning strikes bring to the ground when they hit buildings, trees, animals, or humans. The shape of these stones can sometimes resemble the arrowhead used by the savage men of the Stone Age. Thunderstones can also be more simply referred to by the names: LIGHTNING, BOLT, THUNDERBOLT, and sometimes by DEVILRYor CURSE.
La virtù generalmente attribuita a queste pietre del fulmine, è quella di preservare dalle fulminazioni ulteriori, edifici, alberi, animali, persone ; e, cosa singolare, si dà ad ognuno di codesti amuleti un raggio di azione abbastanza esteso, poiché si ritiene, che il fulmine conservato in una casa, salvi non solo l’edificio in cui si trova, compresi gli animali e le persone in esso raccolti, ma sette case all’intorno. L’amuleto addiventa quindi un PARAFULMINE, la di cui protezione o zona d’ influenza è tanto più estesa, quanto più le sette case si trovan discoste le une dalle altre. Il fortunato possessore di un oggetto così efficace, lo impiega poi con risultati benefici, anche in circostanze di malattie, di sospetti di azioni malevole, singolarmente per opera delle streghe. - Giuseppe Bellucci, "Amuleti italiani contemporanei. Catalogo descrittivo della collezione inviata all'Espozione Nazionale di Torino"; Perugia, 1898, p. [7])"
This was followed up by another post two weeks later:
"βαίτυλος - Maison Dieu- בֵית־אֵל?
Andrea Vitali's comment in the Thunderstone in Perugia thread here
https://www.facebook.com/.../posts/3859290507617242/...
led me to look up the first writer to connect the thunderstone, sometimes called a "baetyl" (French bétyle), to the Maison Dieu card. The author was "Auriger", nom de plume of the alchemist Georges Richer, in "L'Alchimie devant le Tarot", ("Le Voile d'Isis" nos. 104-105, 1928, p. 578):
16. La Maison Dieu. - This arcanum has stimulated the sagacity of many commentators because there appears to be no obvious link between its title and its imagery. Is there not, however, a remarkable analogy between "la Maison Dieu" and "the divine dwelling", the translation of the Hebrew word Bethel (Genesis 35:15)? This is the name that Jacob gave to the stone upon which his head rested during his vision (Genesis 28:11-19). (See also the 1st figure of "Mutus Liber"). Indeed, it seems that a relationship exists between the hail of stones which surround the Lightning-struck Tower and the word Bethel, the divine abode from which baetyls, a word that Semites use for aeroliths or thunderstones, are derived. If this interpretation of the sixteenth leaf - which I believe is my own - is already known to my readers, I would be grateful if they could tell me in which works they found it.
Thus Auriger takes credit for the idea, and I have found nothing to contradict him (Attached is the first image of the Mutus Liber to which he refers, showing Jacob's vision of the ladder to heaven. For Jung's personal copy, see https://www.e-rara.ch/cgj/content/titleinfo/1350330 ).
But I also wanted to know how far back the derivation of βαίτυλος from בֵית־אֵל could be traced, to see if the people who named the card "Maison Dieu" could have known of, or even possibly intended, this association. The name is first documented in the Rolichon and Vachier Tarots, so 1620s-1630s. That בֵית־אֵל = Domus Dei = Maison Dieu is clear, but I am interested in whether the more obscure link with the thunderstone is plausible and could help explain the name which, as Auriger points out, does not seem to accord with the image."
Here is what I posted on the Facebook Tarot History group that Nathaniel refers to a few posts back. It was accompanied by five illustrations, which I can't upload for the moment because I've been locked out of my image-storage place and can't recover the randomly-generated password. Is there a way to host them here?:
"The Thunderstone in Perugia
The "Rosenwald sheet" in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., is of unknown provenance, but it has a heavily damaged twin in the Deutsche Spielkartenmuseum in Leinfelden-Echterdingen. In 2016 Franco Pratesi looked into it and its origin, and found that it was discovered together with pages from a book printed in Perugia in 1501. Therefore the cards themselves were most likely printed in Perugia as well. See F. Pratesi "Il terzo foglio Rosenwald" at https://www.naibi.net/A/516-ROSEN3-Z.pdf; Mike Howard's English translation here https://pratesitranslations.blogspot.co ... ne-27-2016... )
I have long been struck by the Rosenwald's "Tower" card (which they would have called it Fuoco (Fire) or Saetta ((Thunder-)Bolt), which has a large arrowhead stuck in the destroyed side of the tower. Other cards show a blast of light or lines of lightning, with the attendant fire, but in Rosenwald the lightning is not just flying through the air, but actually stuck in the building. I thought it was a poetic depiction of the name "saetta", since that is the name for a striking lightning bolt as well as an arrow. I hadn't looked much further for why lightning was called "arrow" in the first place, and didn't realize that it was literal - before the electrical nature of lightning was understood, well into the 18th century, people believed that lightning bolts were literal fire-arrows, of divine or at least celestial origin. It was obviously fire, but it struck hard like a physical object. Because of its destructive force, the celestial fire had to become a hard physical object. It turns out that it is not just a literal interpretation, but the actual explanation of the name - they believed that the thunderbolt had a stone arrow or spearhead at its tip, which, when found afterwards, was the "thunderstone." People often found lying on the ground stone-age arrowheads, speartips, or stone axeheads; they didn't have a concept of pre-history, let alone a "stone age", and, since antiquity, they thought they were the remains of lightning strikes. The stones embodied the lightning, and were sometimes called simply "fulmini", thunderbolts.
This belief is pan-European; every European language has the equivalent of the term "thunderstone". E.g.
English: Thunderstone
Latin: Ceraunia
French: Pierre de foudre, pierre de tonnerre, (or "céraunie")
German: Donnerkeil or Donnerstein
Spanish: Piedra de rayo
Italian: Pietra del fulmine, pietra della saetta, or Ceraunia
Dutch: Dondersteen
Swedish: Åsksten
Danish: Tordensten
Norwegian: Tordenstein
Finnish: Ukkosenkivi
Polish: Kamień piorunowy
Czech: Hromový kámen
Slovak: Hromový kameň
Hungarian: Villámkő
Russian: Громовой камень (Gromovoy kamen)
Portuguese: Pedra de raio
Catalan: Pedra de llamp
Welsh Carreg daran, carreg taran
So the arrowhead in the Rosenwald Saetta card represents the thunderstone. The connection with Perugia is fortuitous, since a native son of the city, Giuseppe Bellucci (1844-1921), who taught chemistry in the Università degli studi di Perugia,also spent much of his time as an ethnographer and local folklorist. Bellucci gathered a large collection of amulets and fetishes, including dozens of thunderstones, now displayed in the Museo Archeologico Nazionale dell'Umbria (MANU) in Perugia. Here is how he described the display of thunderstones, pietre del fulmine, in an exhibition catalogue of 1898:
"The amulets contained in this display are generically referred to as THUNDERSTONES, believed to be the material, lithic part that lightning strikes bring to the ground when they hit buildings, trees, animals, or humans. The shape of these stones can sometimes resemble the arrowhead used by the savage men of the Stone Age. Thunderstones can also be more simply referred to by the names: LIGHTNING, BOLT, THUNDERBOLT, and sometimes by DEVILRYor CURSE.
(Gli amuleti contenuti in questa tavola sono designati col nome generico di PIETRE DEL FULMINE, ritenendosi che le scariche elettriche, che colpiscono gli edifici, gli alberi, gli animali, gli uomini, conducano al suolo una parte materiale, litica, la forma della quale può essere talora, quella della cuspide di freccia, adoperata dagli uomini selvaggi dell’età della pietra. Le pietre del fulmine possono anche più semplicemente designarsi coi nomi seguenti : FULMINE, SAETTA, FOLGORE, e talora con quelli di PORCHERIA o SPORCIZIA."The virtue generally attributed to these thunderstones is the protection against further lightning strikes for buildings, trees, animals, and people; and, curiously, each of these amulets is believed to have a fairly extensive range of action because it is thought that lightning kept in a house not only saves the building it is in, including the animals and people within it, but also seven houses around it. The amulet thus becomes a LIGHTNING ROD, whose protective or influence zone is all the more extensive, the further apart the seven houses are from each other. The fortunate possessor of such an effective object then uses it with beneficial results, even in instances of illness, suspicions of malevolent actions, particularly those caused by witches."
La virtù generalmente attribuita a queste pietre del fulmine, è quella di preservare dalle fulminazioni ulteriori, edifici, alberi, animali, persone ; e, cosa singolare, si dà ad ognuno di codesti amuleti un raggio di azione abbastanza esteso, poiché si ritiene, che il fulmine conservato in una casa, salvi non solo l’edificio in cui si trova, compresi gli animali e le persone in esso raccolti, ma sette case all’intorno. L’amuleto addiventa quindi un PARAFULMINE, la di cui protezione o zona d’ influenza è tanto più estesa, quanto più le sette case si trovan discoste le une dalle altre. Il fortunato possessore di un oggetto così efficace, lo impiega poi con risultati benefici, anche in circostanze di malattie, di sospetti di azioni malevole, singolarmente per opera delle streghe. - Giuseppe Bellucci, "Amuleti italiani contemporanei. Catalogo descrittivo della collezione inviata all'Espozione Nazionale di Torino"; Perugia, 1898, p. [7])"
This was followed up by another post two weeks later:
"βαίτυλος - Maison Dieu- בֵית־אֵל?
Andrea Vitali's comment in the Thunderstone in Perugia thread here
https://www.facebook.com/.../posts/3859290507617242/...
led me to look up the first writer to connect the thunderstone, sometimes called a "baetyl" (French bétyle), to the Maison Dieu card. The author was "Auriger", nom de plume of the alchemist Georges Richer, in "L'Alchimie devant le Tarot", ("Le Voile d'Isis" nos. 104-105, 1928, p. 578):
https://archive.org/.../1928-le-voile-d ... 9/mode/1up"16. La Maison Dieu. - Cet arcane a excité la sagacité de bien des commentateurs car il ne paraît point de lien apparent entre son titre et son imagerie. N'y a-t-il pas, cependant, une analogie remarquable entre "la Maison Dieu" et "la demeure divine" traduction du mot hébreu Béthel (Genèse, chap. XXXV, vers. 15). C'est le nom que Jacob à la pierre sur laquelle reposait sa tête durant sa vision (Genèse, XXVIII, vers 11 à 19). (Voir aussi la 1re planche du "Mutus Liber"). En effet, il semble qu'une relation existe entre la grêle de pierres qui entoure la Tour foudroyée et le mot Beith-el, demeure divine dont on fit bétyles, mot dont les Sémites désignaient les aérolithes ou pierres de foudre. Si cette interprétation de la seizième lame, qui m'est, je le crois, personnelle, est déjà connue de mes lecteurs, je leur serai reconnaissant de me citer dans quels ouvrages ils l'ont trouvée."
16. La Maison Dieu. - This arcanum has stimulated the sagacity of many commentators because there appears to be no obvious link between its title and its imagery. Is there not, however, a remarkable analogy between "la Maison Dieu" and "the divine dwelling", the translation of the Hebrew word Bethel (Genesis 35:15)? This is the name that Jacob gave to the stone upon which his head rested during his vision (Genesis 28:11-19). (See also the 1st figure of "Mutus Liber"). Indeed, it seems that a relationship exists between the hail of stones which surround the Lightning-struck Tower and the word Bethel, the divine abode from which baetyls, a word that Semites use for aeroliths or thunderstones, are derived. If this interpretation of the sixteenth leaf - which I believe is my own - is already known to my readers, I would be grateful if they could tell me in which works they found it.
Thus Auriger takes credit for the idea, and I have found nothing to contradict him (Attached is the first image of the Mutus Liber to which he refers, showing Jacob's vision of the ladder to heaven. For Jung's personal copy, see https://www.e-rara.ch/cgj/content/titleinfo/1350330 ).
But I also wanted to know how far back the derivation of βαίτυλος from בֵית־אֵל could be traced, to see if the people who named the card "Maison Dieu" could have known of, or even possibly intended, this association. The name is first documented in the Rolichon and Vachier Tarots, so 1620s-1630s. That בֵית־אֵל = Domus Dei = Maison Dieu is clear, but I am interested in whether the more obscure link with the thunderstone is plausible and could help explain the name which, as Auriger points out, does not seem to accord with the image."
Re: The Tower
84Thanks for catching me up Ross!
Beaten again by the experts. Would be so much easier to read these things than to discover them oneself (but possibly less rewarding?).
Here's the thread from 2006: https://www.tarotforum.net/threads/hous ... tes.58298/
(I can't believe this is almost 20 years ago!)
Beaten again by the experts. Would be so much easier to read these things than to discover them oneself (but possibly less rewarding?).
Here's the thread from 2006: https://www.tarotforum.net/threads/hous ... tes.58298/
(I can't believe this is almost 20 years ago!)