1. Introduction
The story of the pseudo-Egyptian tarot initiated by Paul Christian (birth name Jean-Baptiste Pitois) has been told in outline by Decker, Depaulis, and Dummet in Wicked Pack of Cards (henceforth DDD), as well as short internet articles by such tarotists as Mary Greer. In this post I want to examine it more thoroughly, in the context of his life and times, and including its reverberations in the Egyptianizing tarot decks that followed and the efforts to document Christian's "Egyptian initiation". Like DDD I want to look at this ideas with a critical eye, but less summarily.
Be that as it may, he was responsible for two books on the subject that can only be read as laudatory in the extreme, especially in the ability of its adepts to divine future events with incredible accuracy (these are L'Homme Rouge des Tuileries, 1863, and L'Histoire de la Magie in 1870. In relation to the 22 cards of the tarot sequence he expanded Levi's very summary comments on the sequence into an entire system. He was the first to give astrological assignments to the cards based on the Sefer Yetzirah--all 78, in fact--and the first to use the decans (so-called because they each applied to 10 days in the astrological year, 3 per zodiacal sign) in astrological assignments of the minor arcana. He was also the first even to use the word arcana as a term for the cards. He took the idea of the tarot's Egyptian origin to extreme lengths, inventing an imagined Egyptian alphabet of 22 letters which could be used instead of Hebrew letters in applying the Sefer Yetzirah and de-Christianizing the cards' interpretations and designs in a more thoroughgoing fashion than Levi--not only de-Christianizing but de-Judaizing-- giving rise to a new style of "Egyptian" cards far in excess of anything that de Gebelin or Etteilla ever dreamed, in a style still popular today. It is a style often taken as suggestions in itself the tarot's Egyptian origin, although in fact it was invented in late 19th century Paris.
In his first presentation, L'Homme Rouge des Tuileries (Red Man of the Tuileries), 1863, Christian presented the relevant material as part of a novel, the point of which was to explain a mysterious man in red who, according to a legend that DDD trace back to 1814, had advised Napoleon; the great man took his advice seriously for the first part of his rule but ignored it later. The man in red, in the novel, is an old Benedictine monk named Bonaventura Guyon who has in his possession the translation of a papyrus originally written in Hebrew supplemented by numerous Egyptian characters; its author, its says, is a certain rabbi in Alexandria. In the middle of the 18th century, it was found in a Vatican attic and given to the keeping of a French orientalist who was also a member of the Benedictines. That work, coupled with another by an astrologer brought to Paris by Catherine de' Medici, Auger Ferrier, enabled the user to predict events in a person's life with incredible accuracy. The "manuscript" portion of the novel is mostly a compendium of astrological lore, but at its head are 78 "keys" for life in this world, a series of 22 followed by four of 14 each. The rest of the book is a series of examples using the book to predict various things, especially about Napoleon and his illustrious nephew.
This book was "too eccentric a work to achieve much success at the time of its publication" (DDD p. 202). In 1870 he repackaged the material, with additions and deletions, and called it L'Histoire de la Magie. In French the word "histoire" can either mean "history" or "story", even "tale". It is indeed a series of stories, but presented as fact. Much of it is fact, more or less, if we count as facts only the long quotations, some rather twisted, from other works, and the historical events allegedly predicted in the various far-fetched tales.
In Histoire he is careful not to give any examples after around 1860. He had not been so careful in the 1863 work, predicting for the reigning Emperor Napoleon III a long life (only half over at age 40) crowned by nothing but success, as well as the establishment of a dynasty. That prediction is removed from the 1870 work. By then the emperor was both very ill and floundering politically. He in fact died at age 65 in exile in England after a disastrous war of his own undertaking. The Emperor's son, still a teenager at his father's death, later joined the British army and died fighting the Zulus in 1879. Christian died in 1877 at the age of 66.
Christian's writings may well have had some influence on Louis-Napoleon and his wife Eugenie. First, there was his 1854 prediction of victory in the Crimean War and the birth of a son at around the same time, both of which came true in 1856 (DDD pp. 195-196; we may wonder what other predictions he made that did not come true but were not publicized by Christian). Another piece of evidence is a book that DDD remark on (p. 197):
In 1862 he brought out a volume entitled Histoires heroiques des Francais (Heroic Tales of the French), as told to His Highness the Prince-Imperial Napoleon-Eugene, then six years old.Perhaps he did actually tell these stories to the boy; it would not have added to his credibility with the Emperor to lie about that. Third, there is "Mage Edmond", a fortune-teller who apparently made for his own use a deck based on Christian's 1863 book, found in the 1960s in a Paris attic and donated to the Musée des Arts et Traditions Populaires in Paris. Neither the museum nor DDD question its authenticity. Of it DDD say (p. 202; by "the Tuileries" they mean the Tuileries Palace, the imperial residence):
An extra card asserts that Edmond was summoned to the Tuileries by Napoleon III, who was anxious to know his future, and that Edmond used his hand-drawn cards for his predictions.I have not been able to verify that claim. A website purporting to transcribe all the words on the cards, including the extra card, does not have anything like the above claim on it. The extra card simply has a passage contained in both the 1863 and 1870 books, summarizing the cards. I cannot see why DDD would have made it up, however. n.
So we can at least raise the question of whether Christian's writings, or excerpts by Edmond, had any effect on the Emperor's various successes and disasters. For example, for card 7, Christian 1863 (1870 is similar) has
In the Horoscope, this arcane responds: The empire of the world belongs to those who possess the sovereignty of spirit, that is to say, the light which illuminates the mysteries of life. You will break through the obstacles, crush your enemies, and your wishes will be realized, if you approach the future with an audacity armed with consciousness of your right.Of which Edmond wrote only (translated at http://www.tarotgarden.com/library/decks/bellinedocumentation.php):
If you approach the future with audacity, armed with awareness of your right, you will break through your obstacles, crush your enemies, and your wishes will be realised.In the 1860s Napoleon III pursued an increasingly destabilizing role in European politics, albeit in favor of Italian self-determination against Austrian rule and the resulting acquisition of Savoy and Nice by France. But by 1870 he was left with no allies at all against Germany. I hesitate to think how such a card might have influenced Napoleon III's decision to go to war against a much stronger foe in 1870, simply because that enemy had sent a telegram with a slight in it designed to provoke just such a war (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon_III). Tens of thousands of lives were lost on account of that decision, and the seeds were laid for more wars to come. The esoteric tarot matters.
The astrological system in which Christian's tarot interpretations were embedded did not survive him. Few people after him did natal horoscopes based on numerical equivalents of a person's name and the year of their birth, nor on the astrological decan (out of 36) or degree (out of 360) corresponding to the date of birth. What has survived are his use of the Sefer Yetzirah and the decans, as well as, in modified form, his interpretations of the 22 major arcana, which he presented as teachings in an ancient Egyptian initiation. This initiation, he claimed in 1870 (revising his 1863 account), was from a work by the ancient philosopher Iamblichus. Christian even gave the name of the work, On the Mysteries, and a reference to the standard bilingual Greek-Latin edition of 1678 Oxford. The work does exist. The problem, as DDD point out, is in finding anything in that work corresponding to Christian's account. Is that any reason to dismiss it? A long line of tarotists ever since have thought not. Whatever its origin, it is both fascinating and of immense influence in the writings on the tarot that followed.
2. Into the Sphinx and beneath the Great Pyramid
In the course of over 50 pages (pp. 98-148 of Histoire), Christian described an alleged initiation ritual into the ranks of the Magi, in which 22 frescoes on the walls of an underground temple beneath the Great Pyramid provide esoteric instruction, preceded and followed by a test of will. The French original, my primary source, is reproduced in toto on Gallica (http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k2029696/f1.item); in quoting from it, however, I will follow the English translation of 1952 (unless, of course, it is inaccurate).
Christian begins by describing the measurements of the Great Pyramid, I expect drawn from French archeological reports, as it is reasonably accurate. Then comes the measurements of the Sphinx. Its height, he says, is about 75 feet, from breast to chin 50 feet and from chin to the top of the head 25 feet. Apparently the Sphinx was only dug out above breast level at the time of measurements.
Christian then gives an allegorical account of the four parts of the sphinx: woman's head, bull's body, lion's paws, eagle's wings. representing intelligence, determination, the strength to fight, and cunning (the Sphinx blends its wings into the body so that they are hidden) with, if needed, "the heights of audacity". These four beasts are also at the origin of another of his slogans, "to will (the bull), to know (the woman), to dare (the lion), to be silent (that is, not reveal your plans ahead of time, just as the eagle hides its powerful wings). He does not say where this allegorical interpretation comes from. He does not mention whether the features of a woman extend down as far as the breasts.
Then comes the account of the initiation itself, which starts by the postulant entering a bronze door at the foot of the Sphinx. From there he will travel to vaults beneath the Great Pyramid. The door can be seen in an engraving in the book, presumably of the Sphinx as it was in the time of the Magi.
I would guess that the engraving is an extrapolation based on a photo published in Paris in 1854, taken by an American who had visited the site (above; the words in red, here and elsewhere in this post, are mine). One could imagine hidden wings along the side, but not breasts. In contrast, the engraving has prominent wings and perhaps just a suggestion of small breasts.
I do not know if any Greek sphinx descriptions had her with a bull's body. From what I have seen, the body is simply that of a lion, as it is in the frontispiece of Kircher's Oedipus Aegyptus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athanasius_Kircher#/media/File:Oed-aegyp.png). It may be that Christian just needed a bull's body so that he could say that all of Ezekiel's animals are represented.
Here, for comparison, is the Sphinx as it can be seen when fully excavated. As you see, no wings, no breasts, no body of a bull.
Of course all this was not visible in Christian's time. For what was lower than in Greene's photo, people had Greco-Roman statues of the god Nilo, god of the Nile, to which a sphinx was usually inserted in one corner. There are many in Italy, some of which surely were known in Christian's time. Most are like the one below, in the Vatican Museum.
Here is another, which I saw lying on the ground at Hadrian's Villa.
On the other hand, one Roman-era Nilo sculpture in the Vatican has a lady with breasts where the sphinx would be.
In this case, however, there are also no paws or anything else that
would indicate a sphinx, other than her placement in the sculpture. There still aren't any wins. She would appear to be a water nymph of some sort, probably pouring out water for a fountain, similar to the depictions of Aquarius. Given the Egyptian setting, perhaps she is meant to be Isis. Pausanias, as de Gebelin observed, had spoken of a belief that the Nile flood was caused by the "tears of Isis" for her husband (Pausanias, Description of Greece, vol. 2, Book 10, Chapter 32, p. 282 of Taylor's translation, here).
Christian's
mentor Eliphas Levi (a neighbor, DDD say, p. 194), unlike Christian, seems to have allowed for both types of sphinx and used both in illustrations of proposed tarot cards. Compare his Chariot (from his
1856 Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, in Gallica) to his Wheel (from the 1861 La clef des grands mystères, also in Gallica). Although Christian may have decided that the sphinx was female and winged, his artist may have preferred the ambiguous portrayal. There is one more sphinx in Christian's 1870 book, in the frontispiece. It is suitably ambiguous, like most of the
sphinxes accessible at that
time. Even the face is androgynous-looking. Its wings must be well hidden indeed.After giving the symbolism of the sphinx's four parts, Christian announces what, in his view, the Sphinx as a whole represented in ancient Egypt:
It was the symbol of the incalculable strength that can be used by the human will when directed by the highest intelligence. It is the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last word of the great initiation.That certainly makes it a suitable object to enter for what he plans next.
3. The "Great Initiation"
From the
Sphinx, according to the document Christian says he is reproducing in
translation, the postulant and his initiators travel through tunnels to
secret vaults under the Great Pyramid. He is first given a couple of
tests of his will in the face of death. He is given to understand at one
point that he is on the edge of a precipice, and they are waiting for
the drawbridge. It is a lie to see if he draws back. Then he encounters a
figure of death wielding a scythe, which it sends
toward his head seven times, but only ruffling his hair .Here the two initiators have a lion's head, representing the Sun, and a bull's, representing the Moon, Christian explains.Another test is to place him in front of a passageway that ends in darkness and narrows to the point where he will not even be able to fit crawling on hands and knees. He is told to enter it. He does so and the door clangs shut. Carrying the lamp he has been given, he crawls on, while a far-off voice declares "Here perish all the fools who coveted knowledge and power!"
Eventually he finds himself in front of a vast pit and a ladder which proves to have 78 steps. Climbing down, he finds that they simply end, with no bottom in sight. He retraces his steps and notices an opening in the wall which he can reach by stepping off the ladder into the crevice, which he does. It leads to a spiral staircase of 22 steps, at the end of which is a grating through which he can see a gallery of wall paintings. A Magus lets him in, saying that these are "symbols the understanding of which creates for the heart of man an invulnerable armor", and while he contemplates them, the Magus will explain them.
There follow the 22 symbols, each labeled with an Egyptian letter of the alphabet, also given phonetically in the Latin alphabet. For each, Christian's document gives an explication, first saying what the image expresses in the divine, intellectual, and physical worlds, then analyzing the symbolism, and finally ending with an exhortation.
In Histoire de la Magie he seems to have realized that he had omitted defining the three worlds. He says the following (translation p. 19, original pp. 20-21):
There is one error in translation. In the 5th line from the bottom: "suffers and links" is not right. The French is "subit ou enchaine"; so the proper translation would be "submits to or enchains".
These definitions are different from what I have deduced from L'Homme Rouge. Here the "physical world" is the objective world studied by physics and chemistry, a world of cause and effect in necessary and sufficient chains. The "intellectual world" is the subjective world as defined by Descartes's "cogito". In the second of his Meditations on First Philosophy, 1641, he had said, famously (http://classiques.uqac.ca/classiques/De ... tions.html ,https://genius.com/Rene-descartes-secon ... -annotated):
This definition does not include anything in the physical world, for example arms and legs, for those could all, in so far as he is certain of things, have been put into his mind by an evil demon. Only his thoughts, intentions, decisions, and perceptions remain as essentially himself.Mais qu’est-ce donc que je suis ? Une chose qui pense. Qu’est-ce qu’une chose qui pense ? C’est-à-dire une chose qui doute, qui conçoit, qui affirme, qui nie, qui veut, qui ne veut pas, qui imagine aussi, et qui sent.
(But what then am I? A thing that thinks. What is a thing that thinks? A thing that doubts, understands, affirms, denies, wishes [or wills], does not wish [or will, and also imagines and senses..)
If this is Christian's definition of "intellectual world", it is not a Renaissance conception, but from the century that followed, the 17th. It has nothing in common with ancient Greek thought either. It is also hard to fit with his examples, which (see previous post) which describe the subject from three points of view: that of the physical world of which man is the thinking part, that of philosophy and metaphysics, and that of theology. .
It will be left to Papus (Tarot des Bohemiens, 1889) to redefine the 22 subjects from Christian's new point of view. Papus will call them the physical world, the human world, and the divine world, where the physical world is that of the material aspect of the world, apart from consciousness, and the human world is that of the point of view of human subjectivity.
.
After the exposition on the 22nd fresco in the hall, the initiation master gives a summary of their main teachings. This summary, which shows the images as steps in an initiation, is unaccountably missing from the English translation of Christian's book. Instead, the words in Italics, or some variation on them, are inserted as part of the teachings themselves, as though they were part of the ancient document which Christian purports to be quoting, and the rest ignored. Not only that, but sometimes the translations are inaccurate. These inaccuracies were unfortunately repeated by DDD (pp. 201-202), leading to some confusion later. In the interest of accuracy I give the French first. You will notice that a few of the titles are different from those he gave in 1863: the Skeleton Reaper is now the Scythe, the Two Urns card is now the Solar Angel, and the Decapitated Tower is now lightning-struck.
The 1st is called the Magus, and symbolizes the Will.These characterizations still survive here and in later appropriations. The question immediately arises, is there anything particularly Egyptian, even Grcco-Egyptian, in them, other than an occasional word, taken out of any Egyptian context? The ideas are all central to Christianity. At most, so far, it is Christian Neoplatonism, or perhaps Stoicism, but replacing phrases from post-classical Western Europe with Egyptian ones: "Isis-Urania" for "Empress", "Themis" for "Justice", "Sphinx" for "Fortuna", "Typhon" for "Devil", and "Crocodile" for "Fool": The term "Magi", while in the Bible referring to wise-men east of Judea, by the Renaissance was popularly extended to Egypt as well.
The 2nd is called the Portal of the Occult Sanctuary, and symbolizes the Knowledge [Fr. science also = Science] that must guide the Will.
The 3rd is called Isis-Urania, and symbolizes the Action that the will must manifest, united to the knowledge [Fr. science also = science].
The 4th is called the Cubic Stone, and symbolizes the Realization of human acts, the work accomplished.
The 5th is called the Master of the Arcana, and symbolizes the Inspiration [published translation and DDD have "Occult Inspiration"] which man receives from the occult Powers.
The 6th is called the Two Roads, and symbolizes the Ordeal [epreuve also = Test], to which all Will is subject in the presence of Good and Evil.
The 7th is called the Chariot of Osiris, and symbolizes Victory, that is to say the choice of Good, which is the fruit of truth and justice.
The 8th is called Themis, and symbolizes Equilibrium, by analogy with the scales which are the attribute of justice.
The 9th is called the Veiled Lamp, and symbolizes the Prudence which maintains the balance.
The 10th is called the Sphinx, and it marks the Fortune, happy or unhappy, which accompanies all life.
The 11th is called the Tamed Lion, and symbolizes the Strength to which every man is called so as to conquer by the development of his intellectual and moral faculties.
The 12th is called the Sacrifice, and symbolizes violent death.
The 13th is called the Scythe, and symbolizes the Transformation of man, that is, the passage to future life by natural death.
The 14th is called the Solar Angel, and symbolizes the Initiative of man through will, knowledge and action combined.
The 15th is called Typhon, and symbolizes Fate, which. strikes us with unexpected blows.
The 16th is called the Lightning-Struck Tower, and symbolizes Ruin in every aspect which this idea presents.
The 17th is called the Star of the Magi, and symbolizes the Hope which leads to salvation through faith.
The 18th is called Twilight, and symbolizes the Deceptions [DDD erroneously have it the same as in L'Homme Rouge, "Deception"] that teach us our weakness.
The 19th is called the Resplendent Light, and symbolizes earthly happiness [published translation and DDD erroneously consider "earthly" as capitalized and highlighted].
The 20th is called the Revival of the Dead, and symbolizes Renewal, which changes Good into Evil, or Evil into Good, in the series of trials imposed on every career.
The 21st is called the Crocodile; and symbolizes the Expiation of errors or voluntary faults.
The 22nd is called the Crown of the Magi, and symbolizes the Reward for everyone who has fulfilled his mission on earth by reflecting some features of the image of God.
The initiation master ("Pastaphore") then gives a second summary, this time using only the keywords of the interpretations. This one is in the book as translated, as follows:
There are a few changes from the account he had just given. The interpretation "Occult Inspiration" is now just "Inspiration"; "Violent Death" has been removed in favor of the title, "Sacrifice"; and number 19 is no longer "earthly happiness", but rather just "happiness", and specifically that "behind the tomb".
After the 22 explanations, the postulant is given two more tests. In one, he has to pass through a curtain of fire. In the second, he has to traverse a passageway filled with water. It gets progressively deeper until with one more step his head will be covered. But then it gets shallower again and he emerges unharmed but soaking wet. He is confronted with a door knocker in the shape of a uroborus (snake biting its tail). Pulling it, a trap door falls open beneath him, and he grabs the knocker for dear life. The trap door quickly closes. He is then led into a vast hall whose walls are covered with astrological symbols and with a colossal statue of Isis behind the Hierophant's throne. He is greeted by the assembled magi and sworn
to eternal silence about his experiences. Then he is given two goblets and told that one of them contains poison that will kill him instantly. He is to drink from whichever he chooses. If he refuses, he is imprisoned for "seven moons" and given another chance, with as many more repetitions as needed. Drinking from one of them shows again that he does not fear death. In actual fact neither contains poison, we are assured.Then he is congratulated, given food and drink, new clothes, and a royal bedroom. Sensuous music serenades him, and a curtain is drawn at the end of the room to reveal young girls, the daughters of the Magi, in short tunics dancing. They scatter, all except two who capture him in a chain of roses and dance wildly around him, "each in turn shaking the chain to provoke him into a choice. The Magi are secretly observing him to see if he betrays the least weakness. If he did, he would be struck dead on the spot. But of course he remains motionless. An engraving in Christian's book illustrates the scene.
With that the postulant is finally declared an initiate, with the rank of Zealot. He is given more instruction, about how in the advanced level if chosen he will learn prophecy and theurgy, that is the ability to discover in the past the reasons for the present and "unveil the future". There follows a procession of all the Magi and one final vision, that of how "perjurers meet their end". First the postulant hears the screams of a man in agony, then silence; then he sees a sphinx tearing at the man's body (at right, p. 143). The postulant almost faints. It is a mechanical sphinx with an artificial victim, we are assured. There follows a "religious banquet", and the account of the initiation is at an end.
4. Enter Iamblichus
Exceptionally in his book, Christian cites a precise source for his account, and in a footnote, even a specific edition. It is "Iamblichus, de mysteriis Egyptiorum, in folio, Oxonii, 1687". He gives the title in both Greek and Latin. But as DDD point out, Iamblichus's book says nothing about any secret passages under the Sphinx or a temple with 22 images under the Great Pyramid: (p. 205):
This passage, which extends over more than thirty pages, cannot be read save as a report of a description given in Iamblichus's famous work, and many unsuspecting readers must have so taken it. In fact, it is Christian's invention from start to finish; not one word corresponds to anything to be found in On the Mysteries.It is quite odd that Christian should give an exact source for something in his "history", otherwise fairly devoid of verifiable references. Iamblichus's work had no French translation at that time, but there was the Latin, as well as one in English, published in 1821 (below right is the title page of the 2nd edition of 1895, online). Perhaps the very specificity of the claim was enough to dissuade people from doubting it. Christian seemed to like playing with his readers about authorship: DDD relate (p. 196f) that he once wrote an eight volume, 400 pages each, Heroes des Christianisme under the persona of a Trappist monk named Dom Marie-Bernard, as Christian, the presumed editor, explained in his fifty page introduction. It was only in the last volume that he revealed that he himself had been the author all along. Marie-Bernard had been his own religious name as a Trappist novice.
On the other hand, perhaps it was actually written by someone else, who had told him it was based on Iamblichus, and Christian misunderstood how much. In fact it is not totally true that "not one word in Christian's account" corresponds to Iamblichus's book. For one thing, Iamblichus, as translated by Ficino (above left, from the Gallica website) has a listing of Greeks who visited Egypt and successfully passed the initiatory tests. Christian gives a list, too, with three of the same people, out of four (translation p. 85):
Thales, Pythagoras, Plato and Eudoxus were the most famous Greeks to pass successfully through all the phases of initiation. ...."Thales" comes from Plutarch (Of Isis and Orisis 10). Since Democritus was a materialist, perhaps Christian thought he was unsuitable to be there.
Also, the section's general framework is a Christianized version of the sort of Neoplatonism that Iamblichus espoused in his work. As I outlined in the previous post, each of the 22 accounts is prefaced with a short statement of its meaning in each of three worlds: divine, intellectual, and physical. At left I give an example, that for the "two roads", card 6, from both the French original and the English translation. Christian's "intellectual" and "divine" worlds might correspond to what Iamblichus calls the "celestial" and "supercelestial" gods, the former governing our sublunary world and the latter allowing humans, through worship and theurgy, to transcend the fate dictated by the celestial gods to souls in the world below. This is in Book VI chapters 7 and 8, in the passages I have underlined below (I am not responsible for the sentence that is crossed out!):
The Triune (and four-lettered) God, and perhaps also the orders of angels, etc., of Christian theology, would be Fludd's "empyrean heaven". The " celestial gods" would be the "celestial heaven". There were also "terrestial gods", not mentioned by Iamblichus. These correspond to Fludd's "elemental heaven". However they are not the same, as we have seen in the previous post, as Christian's divine world, intellectual world, and physical world.
For Iamblichus the goal of theurgy was to attain a liberation from fate. It is not entirely clear what the goal of initiation is for Christian. At a minimum it is to attain experience in overcoming fear while still showing initiative and daring under frightening conditions. It is rather like practice for warfare. Passing is to say, he can be trusted under fire. In that way it is rather like primitive tribal initiations, except that it is not exactly training but more just a test. It is also like basic training in modern warfare.
Is there anything more? Perhaps we can find something by looking at the 22 admonitions that went with the frescoes. Or by looking at other initiations in the classical literature.
In The Golden Ass, Lucius's goal was to be admitted to the priesthood of those who spent their lives in devotion to Isis. It may have also been to gain certain exalted experiences, such as a vision of life after death. That was common to various traditions. The Eleusinian mysteries were said to have removed the fear of death for anyone who participated, as a result of some vision. And various mythological heroes had journeyed to Hades: Ulysses, Aeneas, Hercules, Dionysus, Thseus, etc.
The Poimandres, the first treatise of the Corpus Hermeticum, ends with a visionary ascent through the spheres, starting with Luna and ending with the fixed stars. This idea is also in Macrobius's Commentary on the Dream of Cicero, and in Cicero's Dream itself. From these sources Dante's Paradiso described a similar ascent, by then rather standard in both medieval Christian and Muslim mystical literature. The goal is to attain knowledge of the afterlife.
In the Poimandres, the ascent involves shedding the vice associated with each planet. To that extent there is an ethical component In Dante, the planetary spheres are the places of the corresponding virtue. The two visions are not incompatible: in shedding the vice--which in Dante occurs in Purgatory--one makes room for the virtue, transmitted from above to the corresponding celestial body. Each celestial body has a negative and a positive side, and it is in understanding and overcoming our faults that we master the virtues.
The tarot, however, does not describe an ascent through the 22 spheres in order, as Christian presents it. It is an alternation of planets and zodiacal signs in the order, if Christian and others are to be believed, of the Sefer Yetzirah, which besides alternating planets and zodiacal signs in what seems a random way (assuming that the creation of our galaxy, as it appears from the earth, was not the product of God speaking an alphabet, observing the classification of sounds and order of the Hebrew letters), also presents the planets in reverse order to the Poimandres and Dante. We might say, the Sefer Yetzirah presented the order from the top down, whereas the ascent of the soul goes the other way. If so, however, it should first be the elements, then the planets, then the zodiacal signs. And the planets still don't fit the images on the card.
But even if the Sefer Yetzirah, more or less, determines the order, it doesn't have to make sense in that particular order: for Christian they are all there together, equally, in one "world" made up of four rings, the 7 planets and under them the 12 zodiacal signs, the 36 decans and the 360 degrees. The planets, zodiacal signs, decans, and royal stars get transmitted to the tarot, in the way Christian specifies. Each then represents a specific initiatory task, not in the order of planets and zodiacal signs, but of the tarot. To what end, we still don't know.
5. Some preliminary observations on Christians initiatory tasks
This inquiry can be made more particular to Christian by considering the specific advice given with each card, in order, along with the italicized keyword. .Here is what it comes to (correcting DDD, who in 5 mistakenly say "occult inspiration"; in 18 "deception" and in 19 "earthly happiness"). Occasionally the 1863 version has something omitted from 1870, which I have added in brackets.
The 1st symbolizes the Will. [A firm will and faith in oneself, guided by reason and the love of justice, will lead you to the wish you aim to achieve and will preserve you from the perils of the path.]These are the four basic steps in achieving anything: have an idea of the goal, learn what you need to before acting, go to work, and accomplish the task. However the framework is that of a life-mission: to do good, work meaningfully for truth and justice. Even this early, however, there is recognition of risk: but even in defeat one wins, in the eyes of eternity. I am a little disturbed by the idea that the knowledge is only that achieved looking within, in solitude. I think it is not only ideas that come from within. Knowledge, or at least ideas, also comes from others, and from observation. And in a sense, the realization of an idea is also a test of its truth, as a good to which one is suited to pursue.
The 2nd - the Portal of the Occult Sanctuary,... symbolizes the Knowledge [Fr. science also = Science] that must guide the Will. [If a man possesses a sincere will, he will see the truth and will attain the good to which he aspires. Knock, and it will be opened, but study long and carefully the path you are to tread. Turn your face toward the sun of Justice, and the knowledge of truth will be given to you. Speak to no one of your purpose, so that it may not be given out to the contradiction of men.]
The 3rd - the Action that the will must manifest, united to the knowledge [Fr. science also = science]. [Hope for success in your enterprises, if you know how to unite fecundating activity with rectitude of spirit, to fructify your works."]
The 4th - the Realization of human acts, the work accomplished. [Nothing can resist a firm will that has as its support the knowledge of truth and justice. The struggle to realize these things is more than a right, it is a duty. The man who triumphs in this struggle does no more than accomplish his mission here on earth he who succumbs in his devotion to the cause acquires immortality. The realization of your hopes depends on a being more powerful than you: seek to know him and to win his support.]
The 5th - the Inspiration which man receives from the occult Powers. [Before saying whether a man is fortunate or or unfortunate, one ask to know to what use he puts his will, for everyone creates himself in the image of his works. Your future is in the hands of a good or a bad genius. Collect yourself in silence and solitude. An interior voice will speak to you; may your conscience respond.]Having achieved something, there are temptations on how to use the capital one has acquired.
The 6th - the Ordeal [epreuve also = Test], to which all Will is subject in the presence of Good and Evil. [...the struggle between the passions and conscience. Obstacles bar the road to happiness, contrary influences hover around you; your will vacillates between opposing sides. In all things, indecision is more fatal than the wrong choice. Advance or retreat, but never hesitate..."]
The 7th - Victory, that is to say the choice of Good, which is the fruit of truth and justice. ["By overcoming your obstacles you will overthrow your enemies, and all your wishes shall be realized, if you go towards the future with courage reinforced by the consciousness of doing right."]
The 8th - Equilibrium, by analogy with the scales which are the attribute of justice.[...to be victorious and to overcome your obstacles is only a part of the human task. If you would wish to accomplish it entirely, you must establish a balance between the forces you set in motion. Every action produces its reaction, and the Will must foresee the onslaught of contrary forces in time to lessen or check it.]
The 9th - the Prudence which maintains the balance. [Prudence is the armour of the Wise. Circumspection allows him to avoid reefs or pitfalls and to be forewarned of treachery. Take it for your guide in all your actions, even in the smallest things. Nothing lacks importance: a pebble may overturn the chariot in which the master of the world is riding. "]Here arises the question of just how these predictions are meant. In the 1863 book, it seems that they are just possible outcomes, and which one is true depends on the horoscope that points to it, in the method he uses. It is an apparently random calculation, independent of the will of either the tarot-reader or the consultant, based on one's name and birth year If 7 comes up, you win. If 16 comes up, you don't. In the 1870 book these outcomes are in the context of an initiation. Also, the first four steps do seem to be a sequence to be followed, the 5th and 6th a result of that sequence. Moreover, 8 seems to be a consequence of 7. That is, if you achieve a victory you also have to be mindful of the losers. They will not have given up. So you have to take measures against them, and foresee treacheries. Sound advice, if you are in a win-lose situation. It is the maintaining of power in a hierarchy with much infighting for position, useful for a politician, military leader, or bureaucrat. I could expect it from Julius Caesar, Machievalli, or a Roman historian, not anything out of a philosopical milieu descending from Roman Empire Platonism, in Egypt or otherwise.
The 10th - the Fortune, happy or unhappy, which accompanies all life. [Destiny ever ready to strike left or right; according to the direction in which it turns the wheel the humblest rises and the highest is cast down. ...ability depends on the will; if your will is to be accomplished, you must be daring; and to dare successfully you must be able to keep silence until the moment comes for action. ]This is more about conquest, daring, and the risk of failure due to treachery. But there are many other reasons for failure, some of which could have been meantioned, here or earlier.
The 11th - the Strength to which every man is called so as to conquer by the development of his intellectual and moral faculties. [...emblem of that strength which is communicated by faith in oneself and by innocency of life. deeds necessitate faith in your ability to accomplish them. Proceed with faith : the obstacle is a phantom. In order to become strong, silence must be imposed on the weaknesses of the heart; your duty must be studied, for it is the rule of righteousness. Practice justice as if you loved it.]
The 12th - violent death [1863: sacrifice]. [...violent death will lie in wait for you on your path through life. devotion is a divine law from which none may have dispensation, but expect nothing, only ingratitude, from men. Let your heart be always ready to tender its account to the Eternal... if the world makes an attempt upon your earthly life, do not die without accepting with resignation the will of God and without pardoning your enemies...]
The 13th - the Transformation of man, that is, the passage to future life by natural death.[...the emblem of destruction and perpetual rebirth of all forms of Being in the domain of Time. The dissolution of your visible organs will come sooner than you expect; but do not fear death, for death is only birth into another life. The universe ceaselessly reabsorbs all that is her own that has not been spiritualised. [1863: The voluntary emancipation of the instincts of matter by the free adhesion of. the mind to the laws of the Universal Movement, constitutes in us the creation of the second man, of the celestial man, and begins our immortality.]We get here another intimation of immortality. It would be nice to know more about what exactly is spiritualized and how. "Celestial man" is very odd; usually the phrase is "divine man", or, less daring, "spiritual man". Perhaps it is a declaration that one is not to try attain the heights, i.e. gnosis, but stay on the level of the cosmos and its mastery
The 14th - the Initiative of man through will, knowledge and action combined. [...symbol of the combinations which are ceaselessly produced in ail parts of Nature. Take stock of your strength, not in order to retreat before the works of your hand but in order to wear away obstacles, as water falling drop by drop wears away the hardest stone.] [1863: Thoughtful, calm and persevering initiative will raise you by degrees to the height you want to reach]I like the 1863 idea better than the 1870. Initiative fits with the keyword, and with the idea of considering many combinations of nature, just as nature herself does in the course of the evolution of species. Dripping water is simply repetitive, mindless, and tedious. Also, human obstacles aren't rocks. They move out of the way or build defenses.
The 15th - Fate, which. strikes us with unexpected blows.. ...[1863: the image of Fatality which bursts into certain lives like the eruption of a volcano, and overwhelms great as well as small, strong and weak, the cleverest and the least perceptive, in its equal disaster. Contemplate the ancient oaks that defy the lightning, but which the lightning strikes after having avoided them for centuries.
The 16th - Ruin in every aspect which this idea presents. [It is the symbol of material forces that can crush great and small alike. It is also the emblem of rivalries which only end in ruin for all concerned; of frustrated plans, of hopes that fade away, of abortive enterprises, ruined ambitions and catastrophic deaths. The ordeals of misfortune, accepted with resignation to the supreme Will of the All-Powerful, are the steps in a predestined progress for which you will be eternally rewarded. Suffering is working in order to free yourself from the bonds of material things.] [1863: You march at your loss; it will be the fruit of your imprudence or your voluntary faults.]16 seems like the initiatory turning point, if it is a step in a process rather than the luck of the draw. There is nothing like a decisive defeat to refocus one's goals. This is the first time divine light has been mentioned. The mention of "eternal reward" suggests a change in venue.
The 17th - the Hope which leads to salvation through faith. [... the sign of resurrection beyond the grave. Abandon your passions and your errors and study the mysteries of true Knowledge, and their key shall be given unto you. Then shall a ray of the divine Light shine from the occult Sanctuary to dispel the darkness of the future and show you the path to happiness.]
The 18th - the Deceptions that teach us our weakness. [1863: Everything conspires to your loss, and you alone ignore it.] .. The hostile spirits, symbolised by one dog, wait in ambush; the servile spirits, symbolised by the other, conceal their treacheries with base flattery; and the idle spirits, symbolised by the crab, will pass by without the slightest concern for your ruin. Observe, listen—and be silent.]18 seems a little late; if ruin has already come, the treachery came before tha, causing the ruin. There is nothing in 18 about looking within, unfortunately, more appropriate here than in step 2: some of our greatest deceptions are self-deceptions, projecting onto others our own faults. Step 19 suggests that the ruin was a result of being ignorant or abusive of one's privileged position. That is not always the problem. There is also simple overconfidence in oneself and underestimation of difficulties ("imprudence") or plain bad judgment, as the 16 of 1863 said. On 19, I prefer the advice of 1863, that of appreciating the happiness that comes from withdrawing, at least at this point, from big ambitions.
The 19th - happiness. [...the symbol of happiness promised by the simple life and by moderation in all one's desires. The light of the Mysteries flows dangerously in the service of the Will. It illuminates those who know how to use it; it strikes down those who are ignorant of its power or who abuse it.] [1863: You will be happy, and no one will prevent your happiness, if you know how to enclose it in the circle of the hearth, or in the secret of your heart.]
The 20th - Renewal, which changes Good into Evil, or Evil into Good, in the series of trials imposed on every career. [...a sign of the change which is the end of all things, of Good as well as of Evil. The ascent of the soul is the fruit of its successive ordeals. Hope in the time of suffering, but beware of prosperity. Do not fall asleep in laziness or forgetfulness. The Wheel of Fortune will turn: you will be raised or precipitated.]He makes 20 sound like the Wheel again. It seems a bit late, unless the Last Judgment is what is meant. Notice how even at the end he never gets out of his win/lose mode of thinking. What if it wasn't that, but rather a sense of continuing ordeals, and periods of happiness, at whatever level one left off??
The 21st - the Expiation of errors or voluntary faults.[the punishment following every error] [1863: All sorts of misfortunes threaten you; there is nothing you ought not to dread, and your salvation can only come from the pity of Heaven.]
The 22nd - the Reward for everyone who has fulfilled his mission on earth by reflecting some features of the image of God. [The empire of the World belongs to the empire of Light, which is the throne reserved by God for sanctified Will. . Happiness for the Magus is the fruit of the knowledge of Good and Evil; but God only allows it to be plucked by the man sufficiently master of himself to approach it without covetousness.] [1863: all obstacles will be effaced from his path, and that the ascent to his Destiny has no limits except those of his Will.]
In 22, what is the source of the " knowledge of Good and Evil? Successive ordeals, and a will that is motivated by the desire to reflect "some features of the image of God" rather than the desire to win.
Yet what runs through most of this is having a strong will and an "eye on the prize". It is something that reminds me of Martin Luther King or some other modern social activist.
I am curious: where does this emphasis on having a strong will come from? As far as I can tell, it is not part of the hermetic philosophy, either ancient or Renaissance. Acting morally does require a strong will, but that is to resist the temptation to take the easy road. But Christian goes further than this, toward defeating enemies, all obstacles, including the natural world itself, in an expansion that knows no bounds. My guess is that such an emphasis came in with the Counter-Reformation. Protestantism frequently advocated predestination, to which Catholicism opposed free will. But even more, with the Jesuits and the "Church Militant", it was a militant free will, aimed at domination internally and externally, according to Catholic teachings of right and justice. Then the pro-democracy movement of 18th century America and France picked it up, with a new definition of justice in terms of inalienable human rights.Again there was the need for a strong will against oppression. The 19th century workers' movement adapted the language of will and right to its cause as well, then nationalist movements, movements for civil rights, and so on.
It is not only the need for a strong will, but also the call to heroism. The fight for justice requires that one confront and disarm one's fear, at base the fear of death. Sometimes one's fear is groundless. Other times it is a necessary risk. The Great Initiator in the initiator called life, unlike the initiators under the Great Pyramid, in fact will kill us, sooner or later. We all have to die sometime; the point then is to make it a meaningful death, one which, in Christian's terms, confers immortality. That is the reward.
In philosophy, Immanuel Kant championed the "good will", than which nothing was greater. Such a will, to be good, had to conform to the categorical imperative, that is, that of following no principle that did not apply to oneself as well as others, in short "do unto others as you would be done unto". The problem is that the other may well consider it unjust to be held to someone else's standard, just as one would not oneself want to be held to his standard. The categorical imperative supports aristocracy as much as democracy. Actually, if violence is required to implement democracy, it supports aristocracy over democracy, because no one would want to be killed for upholding the political system they believed in. "But that system results in much injustice!" Yes, but injustice as defined by whom? There is an unavoidable dilemma.
Is there a connection between gnosis and heroism? We have the example of Oedipus, who heroically tried to escape fate and did achieve a kind of gnosis, namely, a humility about heroic striving, that it was absurd. We have the example of Hercules, who after heroic conquests was betrayed by his wife.
"Will", as Christian uses the term, is probably based on Scholasticism's use of the term, as "rational appetite"; but he takes scholasticism to an extreme, even if only as an ideal. The Magus is someone who aspires to "knowledge, wisdom and power", where power is understood as that ideal of "reigning over the material world" and administering justice as one in isolation from others sees it. In that sense he is a typical product of the 19th century, seeking to dominate the world according to his deepest understanding of God's will.
Christian's 1863 book has a sense of being directed in particular to the reigning Prince, Emperor Napoleon III. Both at the beginning and the end there are adulatory references to him, and he had already gotten his attention in an 1854 prediction of a successful conclusion to the Crimean War and around the same time the birth of a son (DDD 196-197). Then just before the publication of L'Homme Rouge, there was the Histoires heroiues des Francais, as told to His Highness the Prince-Imperial Napoleon-Eugene, then six years old. There is also the story, reported on one of the extra cards to the "Grand Tarot de Belline" (published by Grimaud in 1966) and not challenged by DDD, that the maker of this deck, one "Sage Edmond" Billaudaut for his own use sometime between 1863-1870, had used it when summoned by the Emperor to have his fortune told. I hesitate to think that the lives of tens of thousands of French and German soldiers might have depended on whether Edmond drew card 7, predicting that one will "crush all your enemies", or card 16, saying "your march is your ruin"!
In a way, Christian's 1863 sequence of predictions for the cards reflect the Emperor's own life: defeated at first, he persisted and came back in triumph as the new president of the second republic. Faced with a constitutional requirement to relinquish power, he dared to take matters into his own hands, by means of a coup. He was rewarded by strong support. His programs encouraged sources of credit (the foundation of large banks) for various initiatives and undertook great public works (although wide boulevards would also help to control the population). He even supported the right of workers to strike. In 1854 he entered the Crimean War against Russia. Christian had predicted that he would win. Again persistence paid off; when the old czar died, the new one had a different view.It is not even relevant that 70,000 French lives were lost, and the balance of power established in 1815 was upset as well.
In Christian's sequence, initiation takes a different tack in the second half. Unlike in the trials, where the postulant survives by faith that his initiators don't plan to kill him, he now realize that in the initiation of life the higher power does intend to do him in. The dauntless will has no power against Fate; moreover, ruin follows, as a condition of initiation, not only of oneself, but involving "catastrophic deaths" in general.
In life, Napoleon III's self-confident will took the same turn for the worse as that of his illustrious namesake. In defense of what he and all France thought was right, he declared war on Prussia. It had been a trap set by Bismarck, a "hostile dog lying in ambush" as card 18 says, who wanted the war so as to rearrange European resources. More tens of thousands of lives were lost, and the Emperor was even taken prisoner. He spent the rest of his days in exile, in a kind of happiness of the hearth, just as card 19 predicts. But was it worth so many lives just to come to that realization?
Moreover, the stage has been set for more loss of life, as France sets itself the task of winning back the territories Napoleon III lost. And so on indefinitely, with millions of lives lost by the middle of the next century. all in the name of justice won by strength of will. Everyone has a different sense of what justice requires. For some, it is the extermination of the Jews, an inherently evil race. For others, it is the forced end to capitalism in occupied countries, in the most difficult situation; on the other side of that test of wills, it is manipulation of elections (notably Italy), covert intervention (Greece) and resources (Mashall Plan).
If nothing else, technology has advanced to the point where there has to be some other alternative, not the opposite of what Christian envisioned but the integration of it with something else, the opposing will--a. will in the service of the transcendence of the opposites. Sometimes this is an easy "win-win" for all concerned. Other times it takes a radical shift in perspective. This, I think is Jung's teaching of the transcendent function. it is not "peaceful coexistence", which never coexisted peacefully. It is not only the stilling of the will, as Schopenhauer taught, but also the unity of that with the active will.
6. Influence on Papus, 1889
Chapters X through XIII of Tarot des Bohemiens, pp. 97-191 of Waite's translation, are essentially an expanded version of Christian's presentation of the 22 frescoes under the pyramid, recast in Kabbalistic terms. At times he takes whole paragraphs, merely adding his own thoughts in between. I will give one example, that called "The Two Roads", the sixth in the series, on the left below. Above it I have placed Levi's account of the same symbol (from Waite's translation), and then Papus's account that parallels it, from his book Tarot of the Bohemians, 1889. Here I give Waite's translation; the recent Greer-Rikituk translation is less accurate here, translating the word "travail" as "works" when it obviously does mean "toil"; "works" would have been "oeuvres"). You will see that Papus has given Christian's account of the symbolism word for word, while adding his own thoughts in small print. He never mentions Christian as his source.
I assume that Papus means, in accordance with the Renaissance and Enlightenment critique of scholasticism, that man (or perhaps the man, the Magus) unites in himself both the diabolical and the divine in the scope of his will, i.e. his possibilities for choice (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_(philosophy)). It is the "dignity of man" attributed to Pico della Mirandola, to rise higher than the angels or fall lower than the animals--but now extended to the Magus's ability to both receive wisdom and strength from God and summon demons. Papus's formulation clearly departs from Christian's scholastic conception of the will as "rational appetite".L'Homme va d'une main chercher Dieu dans le ciel, de l'autre il plonge dans les inférieurs pour faire monter le démon jusqu'à lui et réunit, dans l'humain, le divin et le diabolique. Telle est la façon dont le Tarot nous montre le rôle d'universel médiateur accordé à l'Adam-Radmon.
Man with one hand seeks for God in heaven, with the other he plunges below, to call up the demon to himself, and thus unites the divine and the diabolic in humanity. In this way the Tarot shows us the role of the universal mediator accorded to Adam-Kadmon.
Papus also utilizes Christian's new definition of the three worlds; he calls them the Divine, the Human, and Natural (p. 110). For example he says of card 6 that it represents in the divine world "Beauty (characteristic of the Holy Spirit)" in the Human "Love (Characteristic of Humanity), Charity" and in Nature, "Universal Attraction. Universal Love" :(p. 130 of Waite translation).
Likewise the Magus in the divine world is "God the Father, Osiris", in the human, "Man, Adam", and in nature "the Active Universe, Natura Naturans" (p. 111). The latter is Latin for "Nature Naturing", the free self-creating activity of nature that the scholastics and Spinoza identified with God.
A dimension added by Papus is to see the cards in terms of triangles, in which one vertex is a thesis, the second is the "reflex" of the first, meaning a kind of antithesis, and the third somehow reflects both of the preceding and reconciles them, a kind of "synthesis". Thus in the "human world" 4, power, and 5, authority, become "the equilibrium of power and authority" in card 6. How that relates to the theme of the card, Love, is not clear to me. He continues the triangles all the way through to the 21st card, the 0 the Fool (illustrated below, my source in red). Then for the 22nd card, 21 the World, he has a circle.
Papus in this work made no mention of Iamblichus, or for that matter Christian. For him the source of transmission was the Gypsies, an idea abundantly refuted long before Papus's time (e.g. La Croix). There were numerous written accounts of the gypsies dating from the 15th-17th centuries, none mentioning tarot or even fortune-telling by means of cards, although their practice of palmistry is regularly included.
Besides his interpretations Papus included new designs for the cards as drawn by Oswald Wirth as well as the traditional TdM images. The Wirth cards combined the TdM with Levi's suggestions and a few of Christian's as well, e.g. in the Fool and Moon cards, as I will show later.
In 1910 Papus wrote a second book on the tarot, The Divinatory Tarot, to go with a deck he designed. There his interpretations of the individual cards are taken verbatim from Christian without any rewriting or adding anything of his own, except to the titles, which are expanded versions of Christian's. After using Christian in toto, he gives a series of words and phrases; these are verbatim from the lists put together by Etteilla and his school.
In this instance he does say in the introduction that he is using Christian and Etteilla's disciple d'Odoucet as his sources. The cards combine elements from the traditional TdM with Christian's descriptions. The titles are mostly those of the TdM. The letters of the "Egyptian" alphabet are from Christian, as is the astrological assignment. I do not know whether the words at the bottom of the card are his or not; I suspect they are.
7. Card makers inspired by Christian: Billaudot, Falconnier/Wegener, and (slightly) Wirth
Before Christian, there was little attempt to make the cards actually look like the art of ancient Egypt. I do not know whether this was because little was known or if people who did know preferred a subtler touch. I cannot imagine that no European had visited the pyramids or the various temples, mostly from Greco-Roman times, that dotted the Nile, nor can I imagine that no one knew anything about the various temples, coins, and other artifacts devoted to Isis in Roman Italy. If nothing else, there were the illustrations in Cartari's Images of the ancient gods, late 16th century, and other works of that sort.
Still, the images of the 18th century tarot look on the surface to be quite Western in content. Below is typical of that time, the "Chosson" tarot, done sometme between 1672 and 1734. The uncertainty is that while Chosson, the card maker indicated on the 2 of Coins, is only verified in Marseille from 1734, the date on that same coin in 1672, and the initials on the Chariot card are not those of Francois Chosson. It may well be that Chosson bought out a previous card maker with those initials, who produced the deck with that Chariot card in 1672.
Likewise, de Gebelin argued, no one but the Egyptians would have been so bold as to put the picture of a skeleton in the game; he apparently did not know the "dances of death" performed in 15th century Paris. He called the Devil card "Typhon", the Greek name for Osiris's treacherous brother; but giving it a name does not make the card Egyptian. He identified the Star card as none other than Isis, called by the Egyptians the Dog-Star, and the drops falling from the moon on the Moon card as "tears of Isis", in the phrase of the Greek travel writer Pausanias. These were cards whose lower scenes on the surface had nothing to do with Egypt and more to do with the Greco-Roman zodiacal signs of Cancer and Aquarius, and whose upper subjects would seem merely the different sorts of objects to be seen in the sky, in order of increasing brightness, with corresponding rays. (I will give a limited defense of de Gebelin in my third post, but even the most sympathetic observer today could not credit these cards as actually establishing an Egyptian origin for the sequence, in whole or in part.)
Before Christian published his descriptions, his mentor Eliphas Levi paved the way with a few drawings of proposed cards inserted in his books, two in 1856 and two, or perhaps three, more later. Of these only two look recognizably, if unhistorically, Egyptian, namely his Chariot and his Wheel of Fortune. His most famous image owes little to Egypt except its title, the "goat of Mendes". Mendes was in Egypt, recorded by Herodotus as worshiping a goat god. This god, although not Levi's rendition, is in fact relevant to the tarot, but to a different card, as I will explain in my third post. The fourth verifiable drawing is of the Magician and He the World, removed the customary sash that offered some covering for the girl in the center, leaving her totally nude. This last suggestion was not followed by those after him. Finally, the site http://www.green-door.narod.ru/levitarot.html reports a sketch of for a version of the Magician, making the infinity sign on the Magician explicit and showing how
his stance resembles the letter Aleph of the Hebrew alphabet.The author of the site says it is taken from the Russian edition of Levi's Histoire de la magie. But he has not found it in Levi's original works, nor have I. 
DDD argue that this deck would have been made between 1863 and 1870, based on the words for the "principal cartomantic meanings" that Edmond put at the top of his major arcana. They say that these words and phrases are "exactly as on the list" from L'homme rouge and "not using any of the revised versions given in the Histoire de la Magie" (p. 203). Their list of the latter such meanings, unfortunately, relied on the published English translation rather than the French original. However the point is still valid, because in the cases where the two lists are different, "wisdom" vs. "prudence", "sacrifice" vs. "violent death", and "deception" vs. "deceptions", the Belline does use the first of these pairs, which are from L'Homme Rouge. The argument is even clearer if we look at the titles in the two books, where there is much more variation. In every case the "Belline" follows the 1863 version: for 13 it has "The Reaper skeleton" instead of "The Scythe"; for 14 it has "The Two Urns" instead of "The Solar Angel"; and for 16 it has "the decapitated Tower" instead of "the lightning-struck Tower". Compare to http://www.tarotgarden.com/library/decks/bellinedocumentation.php.
In 1896 another account of the tarot as "Egyptian mysteries" was published, that by Robert Falconnier, "of the Comedie Francaise", the title page says (at left). On p. 8 he states that he is a "comedien", i.e. an actor with that company. The work owes a great deal to Christian. It is not attributed to Iamblichus; instead, it is "exactly reconstructed after the sacred texts and according to the traditions of the Magi of ancient Egypt", as the title page proclaims. What "sacred texts"? I find the relevant paragraph, on p. 2 (at right below), and give an approximate translation:
Except for the reference to the 22 columns, this is fairly vague. Do these texts contain the tarot as a whole, in order, or just suggestions of particular subjects here and there? In fact Falconnier's text depends on Christian's: the subjects are the same or similar, and even much of the wording. As in Christian, there is very little in the text that follows to suggest anything Egyptian, or even Greek thought adapted to Egyptian conditions. He actually removed all reference to Isis, Osiris, or other Egyptian gods. So "Osiris Triumphant" is simply "The Triumph"; and "Isis-Urania" is now "Nature". The Neoplatonic elements have disappeared as well: no three worlds.Today we find in texts of sacred rituals on papyrus rolls in the Cairo Museum (where I had the translations made), some of the figures of the Tarot as well as in the ruins of the temples of Thebes, in particular on an astronomical ceiling of one of the hypostyle halls supported by 22 columns of the Palace of Medinet-Abouet in a sacred calendar which is carved on the south wall of this monument built under Thoth-Moisis Ill of the eighteenth dynasty.
The most noteworthy thing about the book is the cards that came with it, no doubt the product of a collaboration between Falconnier and his artist Maurice Wegener, the son of a well known society photographer. They do seem to have incorporated many Egyptian elements in the designs. Also, Wegener has captured the Egyptian style, if with a French art deco flavor. Below are "The Magus", "the Occult Sanctuary", "Nature", "The Triumph", and "The Wheel of Fortune". Notice that the Priestess finally has a genuine veil, and that Christian's astrological assignments are on the cards, as well as an added planet in the case of the zodiacal signs (i.e. the last two below). This is something that Christian had done only for the suit cards. There are also other innovations, such as the falling star (a comet, Falconnier says) and Ibis on the Magus card, the removal of the three-stars on the Charioteer's crown. And the design of the Wheel of Fortune clearly did not stick to Levi's imagery.
Also, they misread some images, for example the goddess of protection and fertility Tawaret which they misidentified as Typhon, the treacherous brother of Osiris, in both the Wheel of Fortune and Devil cards. And they used at least one image, that of the butterfly, which had no symbolic value at all in Egyptian art. That mistake, for what in the TdM is a bird (Chosson far left below), had originally been made by de Gebelin and repeated by Etteilla and Christian. These misreadings continue in the deck that can be purchased even today from the Brotherhood of Light, now colorized. As you can see, they changed Falconnier's cat-goddess Bastet (although I cannot find an Egyptian image of her nude) to the more standard Anubis. What either of them had to do with Typhon or a sphinx is not clear.
Falconnier's only specific actual Egyptian reference for his images, contained in the quote above, is to an "astronomical ceiling" from the "hypostale halls" in Thebes, supported by 22 columns. It would seem that he is referring to the palace of Rameses III, which has 24 columns supporting a ceiling (http://www.bluffton.edu/homepages/facstaff/sullivanm/egypt/thebes/medhabu/medhabu2.html). Even if there were 22 columns, that would not show a relationship to the tarot. It might be coincidence, or 22 was a sacred number for the Egyptians, as it seems to have been for the Jews. What is necessary is 22 images that resemble the tarot images.
I can find no mention in the literature about this palace of any astronomical ceiling. I can only think that he must have had in mind the one that in 1820 was ripped out of its place in the ceiling of a temple near the village of Denderah, Egypt, and taken, for la gloire de France, to the Louvre. In Falconnier's time it was thought to be older than the actual positions of the stars on the stone indicate, which is the middle of the year 50 b.c. Thus it was constructed during the reign of Cleopatra. In fact her likeness is even depicted on the front of the building. Below is the reconstruction I showed in my previous post.
8. The Dendera zodiac in relation to Christian's and Papus's theories and Falconnier's designs
One aspect of this ceiling, as I mentioned in my previous post, is the figures along the circumference of the circle, 36 of them (I am not sure whether inside or outside is meant). They are the gods representing the decans, that is, each of the 10 day periods of the regular year, not counting the five intercalary days. This may have been one motive for Christian to construct a divinatory system that included all 36 decans as well as the planets, zodiacal signs, and four bright stars associated with four of the zodiacal signs. At least that is what he did, in 78 distinct assignments.to the cards.
The second ring around the center of the Dendera (assuming the hippopotamus and bull-shank are in the first ring) consists of the zodiac and planets. It looks a Greek attempt to present the figures of their astrology, not well known before the Greeks took over, in Egyptian terms. For example, the Egyptian religion had no equivalent of the Greek Gemini, Castor and Pollux. So instead of Castor and Pollux, they put another similar-age pair that Egyptians could find in their religion, male-female instead of male-male: Shu and Tefnet, Isis and Osiris, Hathor and Horus, or some other. The pair can be seen below, on the lower right, below the bull (Taurus) and above the crab-like creature, their feet toward the right edge of the page. They appear to be holding hands.
The Egyptians did have figures of people pouring water from jugs. So they became Aquarius (upper left, upside down, a figure of indeterminate gender with two jugs and an Egyptian crown). Fortunately rams, bulls, lions, women holding ears of grain, scales, scorpions, archers, and fish were already familiar to Egyptians as sacred symbols (identifiable parts of all of these above, except for the head only for Virgo, a woman holding an ear of grain).
Given that the TdM did have a few images borrowed from astrology, it would be easy enough to insert constellations from the Denderah map into the tarot. Instead of a dragon, which in Judeo-Christian symbolism represented evil, Falconnier put in the hippopotamus goddess that he saw in the Dendera zodiac, wherever Christian had indicated Typhon, the evil principle in Plutarch's Of Isis and Osiris (a work Falconnier cites in his introduction). Plutarch had indeed associated Typhon with just that animal (Of Isis and Osiris sect. 50, at http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Moralia/Isis_and_Osiris*/C.html). Below I give two versions of the goddess Tawerat that he could have drawn from, one from a Ptolemaic relief at Edfu, the one in the Denderah zodiac, alongside the card that Maurice Otto Wegener (son of a famous society photographer) drew for Falconnier. According to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taweret), "mages of protective deities like Taweret and Bes were placed on the outer walls of Ptolemaic temples in order to keep evil forces at bay." Thus the female hippopotamus-goddess, at least, was seen as a positive force.
Likewise, Denderah for Aquarius has a standing figure pouring from two jugs. Falconnier and Wegener chose to keep the kneeling female figure of the TdM (left below), apart from giving her Egyptian-style hair (middle). In this case I think it is worth looking at a high-resolution photo of the part of the zodiac as it exists now, without its coloring. It is a masculine figure with pendulous breasts.
The nearest equivalent in Egyptian mythological art of which I am aware is Hapi, a fertility god associated with the Nile flood, for whom the breasts added to the sense of fecundity. Sometimes there were two of them, functionally equivalent.However he was never shown wearing the pharaonic crown of Lower Egypt, but rather with papyrus plants on his head, usually with the two outer ones bent about a third of the way up. So the figure is most likely a Ptolemaic hybrid. Also, Hapi is not, or not usually, shown pouring water from a jug or jugs. The only example I know of is one also at Denerah in a rectangular zodiac in the same room. The headpiece is more similar to that of a Hapi, but without the bent stems. In this case a second figure is next to the Hapi, this one with a crown but also possibly sexually ambiguous. These figures are not in the right place to be Aquarius, since Sothis, marking the solstice (the cow with a star over it), is to the right of them. Possibly it marks the setting of Aquarius in the west, which happens in August, but this is sheer speculation.
Another interesting aspect of the Denderah Aquaiuris the fish below the water, along with the fish tail of Capricorn next to him. The first known example of the Star card with a figure pouring from two jugs is that of the Cary Sheet, which has an estimated date of 1500, plus or minus a few years. Two fish tails can be seen protuding from the tail.
There is also a question of why two jugs instead of just one, as is more typical. For example, here are two Roman period zodiacs, one of Phanes and the other of Mithras, both with Aquariuses that are shown identically as a man with a jug on his shoulder.
A similar representation, or of a man pouring from one jug, is the rule rather than the exception throughout the Middle Ages and even modern times.
There is only one period, that roughly surrounding the Cary Sheet card, in which there are a few exceptions, and always with androgynous figures, for example in the zodiac above, from 1496. Why only then, and otherwise, why only Egypt?
For the second question, my hypothesis is that the Egyptians, and also their Greek rulers, knew that the fertility of the Nile flood was the result of two factors, corresponding to two distinct branches of the Nile which merged in Nubia, the area just south of Egypt, and became known as the White Nile and the Blue Nile. The White Nile was so called because it had flowed slowly through lands rich in clay and nutrients. However most of the year these nutrients did not reach most of the Nile Valley, outside the delta. But when there were summer rain storms in the Ethiopian highlands, then the Blue Nile, normally with very little flow, became a torrent, and the White Nile's nutrients could reach the croplands on either side of the Nile's banks downriver from the First Cataract, where the Nile Valley began. Plutarch talks about the rains in Ethiopia as part of his discusson of the flood in On Isis and Osiris.
It seems to me that in the late 15th century some people in Italy must have had images from the Denderah zodiac in their possession. It was in a large, high monolithic structure right next to the Nile, with cropland rather than sand around it. It would have been easily accessible, if not by Europeans then by Egyptians whom Europeans paid to go in and make sketches. Egyptians would have known about what was inside, just as much then as they did when Napoleon arrived in 1798. I see no other explanation for either the two jugs or the two fishtails of the Cary Sheet image.
One final piece of evidence is in the difference between the two sides of the Cary Sheet card. One has a large, steep hill and the other a much smaller one. In later cards this turns into a tall tree and a short tree. It seems to me this might indicate the difference in altitude between the two sources of the Nile, one a highlands and the other not.
I turn to another Falconnier/Wegener card that seems to have its source in the Denderah Zodiac. In this case they show a man and a woman holding hands below a stylized sun. This is quite similar to the Denderah zodiac scene for Gemini. There is even an erzats sun, in the scarab above them and to the left. (It is of course the Denderah Cancer, a scarab beetle.)
The Falconnier/Wegener design is also a very different image than seen in the TdM that they were used to, which has two boys, one with his arm around the other, and the other reaching one hand toward the first (an example is at left, the Chosson). They may be embracing, or maybe wrestling. That was the traditinal image of Gemini. Two males can also be seen on the two ancient zodiacs I just showed, with Phanes and Mithras.
In minchiate, not only does the sun card show a man and woman holding hands, but also its Gemini card shows a man and a woman in the act of embracing.
Where did this come from? I know that Gemini is associated with the Lovers card in the Golden Dawn tradition; but this is much later, and a result of applying the Sefer Yetzirah to the cards in the Golden Dawn's special way, a method not known in any way at all until Levi in 1861.To the right of the minchiate examples below I include a high-resolution photo of the Denderah Gemini without colorization.
Looking at the Pierpont Morgan Library's "Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts" page for zodiacs page, I found male/female pairs as early as the 13th century, considerably before the two jugs for Aquarius. I suspect that these have nothing to do with Egypt, as Gemini was associated with love making, due to the time of year. Guillaume de Saluste de Barta wrote a poem with some lines about the zodiac. For Gemini he wrote (The Works of du Bartas, vol. 3, ed. Urban Tigner Holmes, Jr., John Coriden Lyons, and Robert White Linker [University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill NC, 1940], p. 185 [Seconde Sepmaine, Deuxieme Jour, "Les Colomnes", ll. 365-368; my translation):
Et du tiers des Jumeaux, d'autant que la quadrelleAn example in a zodiac is the one below from 1485, which shows a courting couple, for the month of May, beneath a naked man and woman, for Gemini. The only disconfirming thing is that the male-female pair seem to be in a background of pyramids! It is not a hill; they are more rounded. Could the zodiac maker have known the Denderah image?
Du doux-fier Cupidon fait du masle et femelle
Un corps vraiment parfait, les fruits croissent bessons,
Et qu'on voit tout d'un coup fleur et grain es moissons.
(And third the Twins, especially as the quadrille
From the gentle-fierce Cupid makes of the male and female
A body truly perfect, the fruits grow twins,
And suddenly one sees the flower and grain of the harvest.)
There is one final case where Falconnier/Wegener seem to have borrowed from the Denderah zodiac. The Moon card, which Christian called "Twilight" and Falconnier "Night", was, Christian said, a card of deception and treachery. The scarab/crab solar symbolism (see above, for the Sun card) did not fit this interpretation as well as a scorpion, which traditionally stood for the sting that operate by silence and stealth. Since there was one in the Denderah group, he used it in the card of the Moon
(near left below), ignoring the scarab beetle or imagining it as a solar symbol above the couple of the Sun card.In the astronomical ceiling the hippopotamus and the bull-shank are in the center, along with a couple of dogs. We might wonder what a devil-figure would be doing in the center. I do not think that was the intent. Although Plutarch associated the hippopotamus with Typhon, the female of the species was not demonized in the Egyptian religion. It was the form taken by the goddess Tawaret, much loved by Egyptians as a goddess of fertility, childbirth, and protection of the young generally; the latter feature in particular was one the Egyptians observed in that animal. Likewise the bull, although its horns may remind one of the Christian devil, was a sacred animal with its own cult; and among the bull-calves was the Apis, an incarnation of Osiris. So the two animals are in fact holy figures, sacred animals of both genders. However it is clear that Falconnier and Wegener did not consider this possibility, at least in the case of the hippopotamus.
Arithmology.
Other additions by Falconnier are arithmological explanations of the numbers 1 through 10. He says (my translation, excerpting from numerous separate pages; words in square brackets are mine):
Number 1 signifies the divine unity that finds itself again in total when multiplied by itself; it is the synthesis of numbers (p. 12)After that he stops. In regard to the number 10, he observes that the sphinx at the top has symbols of the four forces of the human will: to know, to dare, to do, and to be silent.
Number 2, symbol of tbe union of man and woman and reflex of unity. (p. 14)
Number 3, number of the universal trinity: divine, intellectual [spirituelle, also = intellectual] and physical. (p. 15)
Number 4, number of strength, unity completed by the trinity and giving the perfect square (p. 17)
Number 5, number of faith and of the human hand (five digits). (p. 19)
Number 6, number of the initiation by the ordeal of the knowledge of Good and Evil, is the equilibrium between heaven and earth, the perfect number which results from the assemblage of its parts, the repercussion of the Ternary. (p. 21)
Number 7, sacred number of magic, that of all the Angels [Genèses].".
Number 8, number of Justice and the equilibriating reaction, the harmony in the analogy of contraries, the first number that divides into equal numbers, the number complete by itself. (pp. 25-26) [Actually it is the first number that divides into equal numbers (4+4) which can also be divided into equal numbers (2+2) that divide into equal numbers.(1+1).]
Number 9, number of syntheses, reflex image of the three worlds (3x3=9). (p. 27)
Number 10, number universal and absolute, for it contains all the others, being and non-being (1.0). (p. 30).
It is not clear if arithmology is of Egyptian origin. If Pythagoras was initiated into the Egyptian mysteries, he might have learned it there. In its developed form it is part of Hellenistic philosophy, of Near Eastern origin. In the 19th century and earlier, the Theologumena Arithemeticae, the most important book of ancient arithmology, was attributed to Iamblichus, who was from Syria, and had frequent citations from the Pythagorean Nichomachus of Gerasa, another Syrian. Falconnier's arithmology is mostly traditional medieval Christian Pythagoreanism. He would not have known the original sources, still untranslated, but what he does know was in a variety of writers in Latin.
If you look at the arithmology closely, you will see that Falconnier has identified a pattern in the TdM order: they go in a repeating series of three. The sixth is the "repercussion", i.e. echo, consequence, of the third. So is the ninth, the "reflex image of the three worlds", which also characterized the third. At the same time 8 is a kind of reflex of the 2, another equilibrium of contraries. 4, being the unity that completes the trinity, is an echo of 1. Three numbers have not been fit into this pattern, 5, 7, and 10.
This phenomenon of "repercussion" or "reflex" had been developed by Papus in Tarot des Bohemiens, in geometric form as a series of triangles (see above). He takes this as far as his 21st card, which for him is the Fool. Then for the World he has a circle
A Dutch writer named van den Bosch in 1981 took the next logical "Egyptianizing" step (although modestly but unverifiably attributing it to an 18th century manuscript; I will get tothat issue later): he identified the 1st card of every triple with Osiris, the 2nd with Isis, and the 3rd with Horus. Papus had done this himself for the first three, but then stopped, given that the 5th card is male. This schema, alternating male and female every three cards, works well except for that card and the cards from 18 on.
Falconnier changed the order of the sequence, moving 18 to the 22nd place. Then 19, the boy and girl, work well as the synthesis of 16 and 17, 20 is male (St. Michael), 21 is female (World), and the Fool can be the "repercussion", which in Falconnier's card is a solar eclipse. That way the Fool would still have the letter Shin (or more precisely, its Egyptian equivalent), the second from the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet.
The reduction of the tarot sequence to triangles also, of course, gives it a kind of correspondence to the Kabbalists' "Tree of Life", something Papus may have had in mind in assigning sefiroth to the cards, from the Magus as Kether to the Wheel as Malkhuth. On the Tree, the first three cards get the "supernal triangle", as it is called, with the Empress at Binah. Then the next three start with the Emperor at Chesed and go to the Lover at Tifereth. Then it's the Chariot at Netzach, up to the Hermit at Yesod. Malkhuth is by herself.If the Fool is given Kether, as the Golden Dawn did, the Tree can also be made to work. But in that case an 11th sefira has to be added, Da'ath (unnumbered, but between 3 and 4, with lines from it to 2, 3, 4 and 5), as the synthesis of Hochmah and Binah, and the "thesis, antithesis, synthesis" formula doesn't include Kether. But the second and third sefira are rather elegantly the result of the splitting of the original unity. And the "synthesis", the third member of the trinity, is always in the middle, whereas if one starts with the Magus as Kether, the "synthesis" is at Binah, although in the middle after that.
In my view assignments to the Tree's triangles will also work for cards 12 through 20. Malkuth gets both the 10th card, the Wheel,
with the King at the top as Osiris. Malkuth also gets the 11th card, Strength, and Yesod their result, the Hanged Man. After that the triangles are 8-7-6 and 5-4-3. The only difference is that what was masculine is now feminine and vice verse. Then last triangle, is 2-1-0, where 0 is in the En Sof position, a point perpendicular to both Hochmah and Kether off the page in the third dimension. It gets two cards, just as the sefiroth did, except that for the En Sof there is no "up" or "down".In the Golden Dawn's way of assigning letters to cards, where the Fool gets Kether at the start, and supposing Da'ath included, Da'ath would get the Sun, and the Judgment (Osiris presiding) would start the final triangle at Binah, ending with the Moon at Kether.
Falconnier's cards have on them Christian's astrological assignments and the 22 letters of the "Egyptian alphabet" exhibited by Christian (translation p 147). Christian said of these last that they had been made public (to the Freemasons) by Cagliostro. From what I have read about Cagliostro's "Egyptian rite" it was simply an alchemical version of the standard Masonic killing of Hiram Abiff, substituting Mercury for Hiram. Falconnier's cards, with a few modifications, different astrological assignments, and now in color, can be purchased still today from the "Brotherhood of Light".
9. Christian's sources: some dubious candidates
Both the Egyptianized versions, Christian's and Falconnier's, depend heavily on Levi and before him on de Gebelin, with no actual imagery or interpretations of imagery from Iamblichus. That didn't stop a Dutch publisher in 1981 from printing yet another version of "Egyptian Mysteries". In the U.S. Weiser published a translation in 1988.
Reconstructie van de inwijdingsriten in het oude Egypte.Translation:
Egyptian Mysteries: Report of Initiation: Towards an 18th Century ManuscriptFor the 1988 version, pictured at left, WorldCat has:
Author: M E v d Bosch
Summary: Reconstruction of the initiation rites in ancient Egypt.
Egyptische mysteriën: inwijding in de esoterische tarotTranslation:
Author: M E v d Bosch
Summary: Verslag van een oude Egyptische inwijding in 22 fasen en de samenhang hiervan met de inhoud en betekenis van de 22 Grote Arcana van de Tarot.
Egyptian Mysteries: Initiation in [or into] the Esoteric TarotThen for Weiser's 1988 English edition, WorldCat has:
Author: M E v d Bosch
Summary: Report of an ancient Egyptian initiation in 22 phases and its consistency with the content and significance of the 22 Major Arcana of the Tarot.
Egyptian Mysteries: An Account of an InitiationThere are two WorldCat entries, identical except that the other has "Weiser, 1988" without the "S" and a difference under "Details", which I doubt are by the publisher. One has
Publisher: York Beach, Me.: S. Weiser, 1988.
Author: Iamblichus
All authors, contributors: Iamblichus, ChalcidensisNot a word about Mr. v. d. Bosch, of course.And below that, ater the ISBN and OLCC numbers:
Notes: Iamblichus vermuteter Autor.The other has:
Originaltitel: De mysteriis Aegyptiorum
All authors, contributors: Iamblichusand below that
Notes: Translation of: Egyptische mysterien, which is a Dutch translation of an anonymous 18th century manuscript initiation rite (of the Illuminati?)--cf. Introd.The last sentence is correct. The second sentence is correct only in a very broad sense of "similar", as I will show. The first sentence is only true as a report of what the Introduction says. However that Introduction is highly suspect, as I shall argue.
The text of this translation is similar, but not identical, to that found in book 2, chapters 1-5, of The history and practice of magic / by Paul Christian. London : Forge Press, 1952.
Often attributed, incorrectly, to Iamblichus.
Then we have what the publisher says on the page facing the title page of its 1988 translation.
You will have noticed that the Dutch author's name is omitted. There is only Iamblichus for the "author" information. Now for more details, using the book itself.
Van den Bosch's introduction admitted that the work was not by Iamblichus, but contends that it is by an anonymous writer in German of the 18th century, the original of which, rather longer than Christian's, he was translating into Dutch. Needless to say, the German original has never been produced, nor even a transcription of it or any part of it. Nor are the parts that overlap between Christian and this Weiser publication even very similar to each other. I give a sample for comparison below, from the part on the Lover card.
There are many other discrepancies, even in the imagery. The Priestess of card 2 and High Priest of 5 in van den Bosch both hold two keys, seen first in Wirth's deck of 1789; they are unmentoned by Christian; in card 3, the eagle sits on a rock; Christian's "cubic stone" is not mentioned at all; card 9's lantern is not veiled by his cloak; Card 13 is Waite's knight surrounded by devastation, not Christian's scythe-wielding skeleton; the monster in van den Bosch's card 15 sits on a black cube; card 19 is "a knight on a white horse doing and poweful jump"--the standard 18th century Belgian-pattern image--as opposed to Christian's "two small children, pictures of innocence" (p. 131). But Card 22, the Madman, does have Christian's crocodile, seen first in Wirth's 1889 card. Van den Bosch gives us a melange of different decks, no one of which has all of these cards.
Otherwise, that chapter is about the "secret arithmetic" that reveals connections among cards. I could go on, but someone will just say, "OK, Christian changed it in some places. The 18th century manuscript is describing the cards as known in a certain place and time." Well, there is a limit. The book describes no known deck, and certainly not Christian's. And this is just from where some comparison can be made. The vast majority of van den Bosch's book has no correspondence in Christian whatever. It is about such subjects as astral travel, the spirit world, and how spirit-substance connects with body-substance. Van den Bosch says Christian left out these parts. More likely, Christian, unlike van den Bosch, did not need enough material to fill a book .
Van den Bosch's account, where it actually touches on the cards, may be interesting all the same, since it connects the 6th card with the 3rd, as Papus did, and in fact sees Egypt in every card, something lacking in Christian. It is just Osiris, Isis, and Horus repeating over and over, he says. If you notice, every third card starting with the Magician is masculine, every third card starting with the Priestess is feminine, and every third card starting with the Empress might be construed as combining the two. The only exceptions to the masculine/feminine rule are the 5th card, the High Priest (but "feminine in spirit", van den Bosch says); the 20th card, the awakening (but that, too is Isis in spirit); and the 21st card, the World, which still has its naked lady (but being salvation, it is Horus). He even proves his contention using "secret arithmetic". That is what the chapter on the Sun card is about, and also those dealing with cards 20 and 21.
It is also essentially what Papus says in Tarot of the Bohemians, with his triangular groups of cards--1, 2, 3, then 4, 5, 6, etc.--but shorn of his ill-fitting "Yod He Vau He" formula, which required groups of four in which the last member of one group is the same as the first member of the next group. Also, it applies, such as it does, to no recorded order of the tarot before Catelin Geoffroy of Lyon in 1558. Falconnier's order, interestingly, by putting the Moon card last, manages to reduce the exceptions to just one, the Pope.
These problems did not stop a writer named Lewis Keizer, Ph.D., in the first essay in Christine Payne-Towler's "underground stream", 1998, from treating van den Bosch's book as a kind of "Holy Grail".
Thus Keizer asserts that the document published by Weiser is both authentic and that used by Christian. He appears to be wanting to be speaking of one document under different headings, but perhaps it is two. One is the "illuminist" document of the Weiser publication, which he claims, falsely, is the same as that used by Christian. Another is a "medieval document" falsely attributed to Iamblichus. Perhaps the medieval document evolved into the "illuminist" but still was attributed to Iamblichus. In any case there is no verification of the pedigree of any of these works.
Amusingly, the Weiser book uses the phrase "altered states", meaning of consciousness. I assume that the Dutch is something similar. That seemed to me a phrase more recent than the 18th century, so I checked. "Altered state" is a turn of phrase that can only be dated back to 1892, and was not in common use until after 1969, according to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altered_state_of_consciousness).
"Illuminist" is connected with the colorful Cagliostro, who reportedly was initiated in Germany into a group calling itself "Illuminati". Then he went to France, eventually setting up his "Egyptian Rite". The reports of this rite I have read do not suggest anything remotely like Christian's narrative. It seems to me that there was a fairly thorough summary published recently, but I can't recall enough about it to bring it up on WorldCat.
notation that translates as "former librarian of the ministry of public and parochial instruction" (below, bottom, enlarged from title page). There his job, according to Ross Nichols' introduction to History of Magic, was to sort the duplicate copies of works taken from provincial libraries and monasteries preparatory to redistributing them. But when was that? In 1838 his name appears as co-author with two others on a three-volume work entitled Paris Historique, scanned on Gallica (below). The main author was Paul Nodier, not only a member of the prestigious Academie Francaise, but also librarian at the Bibliotheque de l'Arsenal, which is the library that sent its second copies to the ministry of education. In 1844 or 1845 he published a book of the memoirs of a general in Morocco and Algeria, whose secretary he had been (see below). After that he wrote an impressive number of books: eight 400
page volumes on Christian heroes, one book each for the seven sacraments
of the Church, a Heroic Tales of the French, and some novels. After that he was editor for a couple of Catholic journals and did translations (DDD pp. 204). Most likely he was only at the library for three to four years in the period 1839-1842. I would guess that what he found of value was astrological in nature, specifically the authors he cites in Book Seven of History of Magic: Firmicus Maternus, Ptolemy of Pelusium, and Junctin of Florence. 
We must also bear in mind that he wrote many imaginative works. Early on, he translated the "Tales of Hoffman" into French (scanned by Gallica) and wrote a Merveilles du Monde fantastique (in Gallica). He also published novels, including the 1865 Fulla l'Egyptienne (Fulla the Egyptian girl), set in Mosaic Egypt (below). Here he appears under the name "Charles Moreau" but gives "Christian" in small print underneath. It was perhaps to make fun of Christian that A. E. Waite in his citation of Christian at the end of his translation of Tarot of the Bohemians called him "Moreau", a name he never used except in relation to his novels. DDD quote Waite in The Secret Tradition of Freemasonry (1911, vol. II, p. 429) as saying that Christian "wrote a great romance and called it a history of magic."Looking beyond Keizer's essay into Payne-Towler's contribution (most of the book), I can see only one place where she indicates any evidence for the assumption of a document. She says that one has only to look at the cards, meaning the change in what is portrayed in the 1660s France as compared with the 15th century cards (p. 112-113). The 1660s are of course not "medieval", and if the cards' change in look is due to a document, then of course that means they weren't influenced by it earlier.
It is true that the cards in the 1660s look different from those of the 15th century, at least the middle part of the century, 1440-1475. The only cards she mentions specifically are the ones she calls, following Levi, "The Two Roads" and "Baphomet". How either of these themes is authentically Egyptian, or even Greco-Egyptian, she does not say, nor how the associated images in the 1660s "Marseille" tarot (at left, that of Jean Noblet) somehow suggest Egypt. Even if they did, it would not imply a document. As I hope to show in the next post, the change in the look of the cards started around 1500, in the so-called "Cary Sheet", and expanded gradually over the years, even after 1660. Moreover, the changes are such that people who read the newly accessible Greek writings about Egypt could well have seen hints of that reading in the cards That the change was done deliberately to intentionally Egyptianize the cards is not possible to prove. That the change was gradual rather than abrupt suggests many "documents"--i.e. scattered references in various works, and a use of scattered images associated with Egypt--rather than one document, with or without images. I will develop that point in my next post. The argument, for better or for worse, is indeed in the cards themselves.
Keizer's only other evidence is another unverified source, that of an internet author named Michael Poe, in posts of the 1990s. Fortunately I saved a print-out of what Poe wrote. Here is what he said about his documentation:
Keizer, following Poe, identified the only "Temple of Serapis" known near Naples as one at Pozzuoli, a seaside suburb of Naples, of which little remains.Appparently a statue of Serpis was found near there, but I cannot find any confirmation or more details. Naples was the most heavily bombed city in Italy, according to reports on the Internet. Pozzuoli, being on the sea, would have surely been bombed. I am amazed that as much remains as there is. The site is indeed partially underwater in the photo below
Poe in his posts never actually quotes from what was given to him or provided photos. He has had ample time. As of 2016 he was very much alive and moving from Portland, Oregon, to Albuquerque, New Mexico, according to Adam Forrest of the Portland Hermetic Society, who had dinner with him before he left (personal communication; I myself have never had any interaction with him, despite living in the same city). He did not mention anyreport to Adam. Moreover, even if authentic, the alleged report, as Poe paraphrases it, has many discrepancies with both Christian and van den Bosch, and so cannot be used to support any medieval to 18th century document.
Since the correlations are all to the "modern" tarot, the most it could show was that somehow that tarot--Christian's, perhaps, or maybe Waite's--was inspired by a Roman-era temple since destroyed by bombing. This is a claim that none of these tarot designers have ever made. Nor did anyone ever, before they were destroyed, ever comment on such a temple. Only since all evidence is gone--and since when did World War II conventional bombs totally pulverize their targets?--has such a temple been asserted to exist.
The rest of Poe's communication goes through the images in alleged the report one by one, with 0 as the postulant outside the entrance, and the rest inside (for 21, rather than 20). In that regard, Poe's account is still of interest, if only as an attempt to correlate Greco-Egyptian images known archeologically with the tarot subjects, hypothesizing that somewhere those particular ones or similar were in one place in something like the same order as the cards.
It is all right to hypothesize without evidence; it is another to fabricate evidence, or--like Keizer--to point to an unverified source of unknown reliability as support for one's own theories.
10. Lost Roman-era frescoes or 14th century Italian culture, which is more plausible for instigating the tarot?
The first evidence of the tarot is uniformly in Northern Italy: Milan, Florence, Ferrara, Bologna. That the evidence of Egyptian origin might be in Naples, however, is not contra-indicated by that fact. People in early 15th century Northern Italy had opportunities to examine old ruins elsewhere with an eye to Egypt. When the Hieroglyphica of Horapollo, an authentically Roman-era Greek text purporting to translate Egyptian picture-writing, arrived in Florence, people studied it, translated portions of it, and copied the translations. With or without its dubious benefit, they then went out in hopes of learning from the old monuments in Rome and elsewhere covered with hieroglyphic inscriptions.
The sculptor Donatello and the architect Brunelleschi went together to Rome to study the ruins there, staying so long that Brunelleschi had to find work as a goldsmith to support himself. In precisely 1919, moreover, Donatello, along with the architect Michelozzi, seems to have secured a commission to decorate a chapel in Naples being created out of a building purchased for that purpose by a cardinal now deceased, who had dedicated money for it, in care of the Medici's bank.
Although they did the sculpting in Pisa, they surely would have gone to Naples themselves to see it installed, which happened in the 1430s. This is the right time for the birth of the tarot. An added incentive for their going would have been the name of the district where the chapel was located, the Nilo. district, the area where the Greco-Egyptian merchants and others who dealt with business between Italy and Egypt lived, and which still housed their descendants.
Moreover, right next to the chapel, now called "St. Angelo di Nilo", is a small square where, from at least the 18th century but probably much earlier, is placed an authentic Greco-Egyptian sculpture, that most common of all subjects in Italy, the god of the Nile, Nilo. It is said to have originally been in a building from which was removed when the building was converted to a kind of borough hall. That may have been in the 1100s. Or perhaps the 1400s. Internet reports conflict. At any rate, early on. But when it got there is not really the point; the point is that it was from the district, and so probably one of many such objects.
Both Naples and Rome are built in layers. Modern Rome is built on top of ancient Rome, the space filled in by clutter or sometimes not filled in at all, as for example in the photo below. Houses regularly collapse, too. in some cases the old structures are still in use by the residents above, for storage. In Rome, there is one church, St. Clement's, famous for the excavations that were done below it in the late 19th century. One one level was the ancient basilica; below it was a house used for worship during the time Christianity was proscribed; below it, or perhaps in a basement of the other, is a temple of Mithras. It can still be seen today. Then, for whatever reason, they stopped digging.
Churches often have crypts. St. Angelo's in Naples is not reported to have one. Perhaps below this chapel is some other place of worship. It would have been worth a trip to see. If not there, then somewhere else in the district. There may well still be treasures waiting to be found. However Naples is not Pompeii; in part, people are living above the ruins; in part, it is the property of a Church that is not especially eager to reveal its pagan origins.
In any case, there are numerous problems with the idea that the tarot started because Donatello and Michelozzo, or others like them, found such a temple as Poe describes. If they had found anything, they would not have known then what much of it symbolized. Greek writings about Egypt only came into Northern Italy in around 1430, accessible only to those who read Greek, and even then did not describe such temples. They may have recognized a few images, such as Isis suckling Horus, or a pharaoh in his chariot, but not much else.
Moreover, many tarot images simply had no Egyptian equivalent. I have never heard of any Egyptian "wheel of fortune", for example. There were wheels, for sure, but not of fortune, for example the one below, which is the closest I have found to the tarot image.
One might reply to this objection that the early tarot didn't have a wheel of fortune. That is true for the absolutely earliest; it is either missing or never existed. But those immediately after did have it.
But the main problem is that the early cards, as a unit in anything like the tarot order, simply don't suggest anything like what is found in Egyptian temples.
What the early decks, and the early lists of the titles in their order, do suggest, at least plausibly, is an origin in Italian culture of the time immediately preceding the first known evidence of the cards.
The first documented reference to the game is in 1440 Florence, in a notary's diary, that he purchased a deck of hand-painted "trionfi a naibi" for the use of , "Naibi" is just the old word, before "carte", for playing cards, probably borrowed from the Arabic. "Trionfi" means "triumphs"; what distinguished the deck was its "triumphal" cards. This term could have referred to a wide variety of subjects, from saints famous warriors to the gods of Olympus. However we must also take into account the earliest extant cards and, later in the century and early in the next, the earliest lists. In the Cary Yale deck, probably done around 1441-1444 for Duke Filippo Maria Visconti of Milan, five are precisely on themes that were in fact combined in one sequence, each triumphing over the next, in a poem called "I Trionfi" by a famous poet of the previous century, namely Petrarch, the most revered Italian poet of the previous century.
Petrarch starts by describing a vision of Cupid on a chariot with his famous bow and arrow, accompanied by all the famous doomed lovers of the past. He recalls his own passion for a girl named Laura. In the next section of the poem, he sees the personification of chastity, in the sense of desire renounced, in company of the famous examplars of chastity of history and legend. Likewise Laura refused his love in the name of Chastity, her virtue defeating his desire. Then comes Death, which struck down Laura in the bloom of youth. We see precisely this in the Cary-Yale cards, which were then even called "triumphs". The Chariot card, although long associated with male conquerors, is not in this earliest known tarot, nor the next in Milan. Instead it is a lady in a chariot, here most likely a young lady going to her wedding, with the groom minding the horses.
It is true that what is depicted is not precisely Petrarch's conceptions of love and chastity; instead, it is love satisfied in marriage, and a chastity not given up when a girl marries. Petrarch's title was in fact "Pudicitia", meaning the sense of shame and propriety that a woman is expected to maintain whether maiden, married, or widowed. A chaste wife was simply one who did not flaunt her sexuality or have lovers.
In the Death card, I think that actually there is something Egyptian. Death is not a skeleton, but more a mummy. And while the mummified remains of saints were familiar to Italians, they did not have strips of linen dangling from them. In western Europe, a corpse was given a coarse cloth garment or wrapped in a sheet. Strips of cloth are distinctive of Egypt. In fact Egyptian mummies had been imported into Italy during the late Middle Ages for medicinal purposes. It was thought that there was something in the embalmed flesh that was useful in the cure of diseases. To admit this, however, is not to say that the card itself is of Egyptian origin, as part of a series of Egyptian origin. It is merely a detail that can remind us of Egypt, and perhaps of how the Egyptians were able to maintain the integrity of the individual body even after thousands of years.
In his series of triumphs, what can triumph over Death? In this world, it is Fame, the poet declares, in his "Triumph of Fame". For an ordinary person it might be his or her good nameLikewise we see in the Cary-Yale a lady holding a trumpet, the medieval attribute of fame, looking down on a knight in a scene with castles. He is on a quest for fame.
What can defeat Time? We come to the last of Petrarch's Triumphs. the triumph of Eternity. Correspondingly, there is the card of the Last Judgment (above middle), which is precisely the call to one's eternal fate.
Not only do these familiar tarot subjects correspond to those of Petrarch's poem, but they were depicted in similar terms, in the numerous illustrations of Petrarch's triumphs that flourished in precisely the early years of the tarot in Florence. Here are some examples: above, Death with its scythe, Chastity on her chariot; below Love shooting his arrow, and Fame enclosed in an almond-like aura similar to that of later versions of the World card.
There is one more early "triumph" to include in the early tarot, I think, namely the Wheel of Fortune, seen (second above) in its first appearance, in the so-called Brera-Brambilla, also from 1440s Milan for the Visconti (known because of tis Visconti heraldics in some of the cards). There is a similar one in the PMB that followed. This theme had featured in another poem where one triumph follows another, until all are defeated by the turns of fortune, the Amorosa Visione of Boccaccio. It was this poem that had inspired Petrarch to write his. Boccaccio as a source of subjects for birth trays and wedding chests was even more popular in the early part of the 15th century in Florence than Petrarch.
My reason for adding the Wheel, besides its appearance in other early decks, is that then the total makes seven, which is the same as the number of basic virtues of the Church, the four cardinal virtues and three theological virtues, which were displayed in numerous places in the art of Northern Italy: on public buildings, in illuminated manuscripts, on paintings in churches, on wedding chests, and so on. In the Cary-Yale four of the 14 surviving trump cards are of virtues; they are four of the seven. If these were present, probably there was all seven.
Two other cards were part of the original continent, namely the Emperor and the Empress, each bearing the imperial single eagle which was the insignia of the Holy Roman Empire until some time in the middle 15th century, perhaps even before these cards. But the Visconti had been bestowed the right to that insignia in the previous century, first as Viscontes and then as Dukes of the Empire.
What is there about any of these cards to suggest an Egyptian derivation? It is true that the lion would have represented strength in Egypt, but a woman with her hand in a lion's mouth is not seen. The image is probably based on legends of early Christians who took thorns out of a lion's paw.
It is true that some virtues in Egypt were represented as gods. It is also true that most early tarots lacked the three theologicals. But no such series of Egyptian gods, even three of them in one place, recognizable as such by 15th century Italians, has yet been found, to my knowledge. If so, what is the likelihood of anyone in Italy having been inspired by such a series found in some temple? Not very great.
In contrast, there were numerous representations of such series of personified virtues--as women, not gods, as I have already enumerated.
This accounts for 16 cards, the 11 surviving ones of the Cary-Yale, plus 6 more, 3 virtues, 1 triumphal from Petrarch and one from Boccaccio. I see no reason to suppose there were more in the tarot at the beginning. There were 16 in the other suits of that deck, and 16 in a previous deck with a similar structure but different subjects, those of the Olympian gods plus 4 demigods, in a deck described in documents of around 1420 Milan. Since other decks had 14 cards per suit, there may have been tarots with only 14 trumps subjects.
But even if there were more at the beginning, as many as nine more (subtracting the theologicals from the 16 we have 16-3= 13; subtracting them from 22 we have 22-13= 9), they were all familiar sights in medieval Italy: the Magician was the traveling entertainer who earned his living either by the shell game or by selling patent medicines.The lady Pope, as the card was known until the 19th century, was familiar as a legendary medieval woman who disguised herself as a man and became Pope; or if not that, maybe a personification of Faith or the Church, which was legally the Pope's wife. The Hanged Man was how someone accused of treason was portrayed on Wanted posters; Star, Moon, and Sun are familiar from astrology, astronomy, and religiouis symbolism, arranged in order of brightness. Lightning-struck towers were familiar from the bible: the tower of Babel, son, the destruction of the Last days.
The order is predictable, too, in terms of the beliefs of the time. The virtues are stuck in between the Petrarchan "triumphs" to indicate that they must be practiced in order to get to the desired end. But as the tarot gets to a new city, the order changes. Time as represented by an hourglass would have been moved, when the cards got to another city, to before Death because the Hermit's message is to utilize the time allotted to one on earth. The Pope would have been put in to indicate his superiority to the Emperor. The Star, Moon and Sun are in order of brightness, easy to remember in those days when the place in the order was not printed on the cards. Between the earth of Death and the celestial bodies are the spheres of air and fire; air is where the demons try to pull down ascending souls, and the region of fire was where lightning comes from. This is all medieval cosmology.
Sometimes it is said that the number 22 of the major arcana, show at least a Jewish origin. But there are also 22 chapters in Revelation and 22 books in the Old Testament. Moreover, the Hebrew alphabet was already well known in early 15th century Italy. Again there was no need to resort to Egypt. It tells a story, too, an expanded version of Petrarch's, still that of the progress of the human soul, born in a certain social structure, traveling through life and then beyond through the spheres toward eternity. It might also express various lessons in how to live one's life, varying with the interpreter, of whom Paul Christian would be an example.
I do not say that I have solved the problem of the origin of the tarot. But I think the story I have told is more plausible than that of inspiration from a temple of Serapis or a medieval document describing an Egyptian initiation.
Besides the familiarity of the images, there is also the precedent of earlier games. I have alreaady mentioned the "Game of the Gods" dated around 1420 in Milan. It was commissioned by Duke Filippo Maria Visconti and described in a document sent along with the cards to France in 1449. The cards are lost but the document is in the Bibliotheque Nationale. The references for the trump suit of gods and demigods are all to Greco-Roman mythology.
There was also a game called Karnoffel, documented from 1426 in Bavaria. According to later rules, it was a trick-taking game with a twist involving seven specific cards of low status in one suit that was randomly chosen at the beginning of play. These seven formed a kind of trump suit that made them more powerful than any of the other cards. Three out of the seen had names familiar from the tarot: Devil, Pope, and Emperor, It is not known whether this game reached Italy, but an edict of Duke Filippo Maria Visconti in 1420 forbids any games that are contrary to the natural order of things. Another possibility is games that have Ace high in two suits and 10 high in two suits. But neither of these is unnatural. While 10 is higher than 1, sometimes 1 is higher than 10, in that first prize is higher than tenth prize.
In 1423 Ferrara, moreover, there is a record of payment to an artisan in Florence for a card game called "VIII Imperatori". Karnoffel had sometimes been called "Imperatori". But I would think that"VIII Imperatori" was more likely a game with two extra cards per suit above the King, an Empress and an Emperor.
So there is precedent for a trump suit and some of the later tarot subjects. But that doesn't solve the problem of the origin of the tarot sequence as a whole group of subjects. Yet at that time, educated people preferred to build on the past and not just create something new. They had a respect for "ancient wisdom" and wanted to preserve it.
11. Two more dubious accounts of Egyptian origin.
As Christian's source, another means of transmission from Egypt that might be proposed is Freemasonry. But in the very next section of his 1870 book Christian lambasts Freemasonry as a fantasy created in the 17th century by Elias Ashmole:
About 1646 Elias Ashmole was studying in a library at Oxford. Weary of seeking the philosopher's stone and the elixir of life, Ashmole could think of nothing better than to resuscitate, as he said, the supernatural doctrine of the ancient Magi whose mysteries he had discovered, and of which he would be the new Hierophant. ...Christian goes on to say how a friend got Ashmole into a lodge of building-workers as an honorary member. They had no use for his intellectual theorizing, but he had the title of "Freemason Accepted" that he wanted. Royalists bent on revenge for the execution of Charles I then used "Freemasonry" as a cover for their conspiracy, and Ashmole further put Cromwell's secret police off the scent by concocting some titles, rituals, and handshakes devoid of any resemblance to the profound doctrines of the ancient Magi.
Clearly Christian was no Mason. If, despite this expressed attitude, he did get a document from some pre-masonic secret society, even one whose secrecy was only so as to preserve trade secrets, it is lost in the mists of ungrounded speculation. Again, which is more plausible, that or the culture of early 15th century Italy itself?
That does not prevent Egypt from entering the cards at some point or points in its later development. Here we would have to look at the history of individual subjects. I will do that in my next post
In favor of a direct connection to Egypt, another suggestion I have read (Anonymous, Meditations on the Tarot, p. 196) for how is that the tarot was created via reincarnation. I am not sure he means persons who reincarnate or just the sequence of ideas, put into a kind of hermetic filing cabinet between heaven and earth. Reincarnation is of course an unverifiable hypothesis, at least so far; but are there even verifiable sequences in Egypt or Greater Greco-Egypt in the Roman world that correspond at all to the tarot? Some have proposed the spaces on a Senet board. But only about five of the spaces had symbols, and they are not very similar to those on the cards (http://legacy.mos.org/quest/pdf/senet.pdf).
In regard to reincarnation I have an experience of my own to relate, from I think 1989. It was unrepeatable, and I did not have any means to record it. I was in a tour group seeing Egypt. We flew from Cairo to Abu Simbel at some ungodly hour, arriving just as dawn was breaking. After viewing the famous facade (above), we explored the inner hall (or halls), which were lined with frescoes. A few of us were at the end of a hall, where there are four statues lined up against the back wall, Ramses with three gods: Ra, Amon, and Ptah. It was situated so that only.on two days of the year, a certain number of days before and after the winter solstice (Oct. 22 and Feb. 21), would the statues, or at least three of them, be lit up by the rising sun. We were there in September. The sun had already risen, and the light was sufficient for a good view (below, from a 1968 UNESCO photo).
Suddenly a ten year old boy who was with us spoke up. "I remember this. I was a slave put to work making these. It was very difficult." He explained that the material was somehow hollow, with tubes in the middle of the hollows. It was not that the statue was hollow so that a man could fit in, but something else. I didn't understand and he couldn't really explain. Then he said he knew the ritual for this place and time. He started chanting an invocation and prayer. All I remember is that it was simple and short.
Then we moved on to an auditorium behind the complex, and a rather large empty space, like behind the scenery of a play. The boy was very confused. So was I, briefly, until I remembered that Abu Simbel had been moved to a place behind Lake Nasser. The cliff behind the artifacts was all artificial. When we flew out of Abu Simbel, I made a point of sitting in front of him and his aunt on the plane. He looked down and asked "Where are all the pyramids?" He used the word "pyramids". He was surprised that there was just sand. He also said to her, "Ask me whatever you want now, because I won't remember anything."
Sure enough, at our next stop he spent his time playing in the hotel pool and was totally uninterested in anything having to do with ancient Egypt. He had been that way before Abu Simbel, too. We all wondered why he was even there. Apparently his grandmother, the tour leader, had insisted. He continued to be relatively uninterested for the rest of the trip.
How strange! I still don't know what to make of it. Maybe he had picked up things we didn't know about from his grandmother, so that he could put on an act for us. But it was very uncharacteristic of him. And a slave, of all things! And actually, the place with the four statues is very special, as I read later. The sun shines in only twice a year, at dawn on Oct. 22 and Feb. 22. We were there in mid-September.
So again, I cannot refute the proposal of reincarnation, assuming someone whose memories are kept alive long enough to write them down. But again, which is more plausible? These mysterious, unverifable hypotheses are only attractive if we ignore the culture of the time and place where the tarot arose.
That is not to say, however, that Egypt did not play a part. The idea that Egyptian writing was in pictorial symbols of sacred ideas may have contributed to the idea of an allegorical series of cards, as a kind of narrative, even if many such already existed. And other images associated with Egypt may have crept into the cards. Egyptomania is not a product of the late 18th century. It already existed in Italy of the 1420s, among the humanists, spreading to the courts and those who emulated them soon enough. It is a matter of investigation, and of knowing what counts as evidence. That is a subject for another post, working backwards from Christian, Levi, and de Gebelin, who first proposed and then systemetized the idea of a connection between tarot and Egypt.
12. Better candidates as Christian's sources for the initiatory framework
The Denderah astronomical ceiling, as discussed earlier, is a probable source for Falconnier's images, and may have stimulated Christian to suppose an Egyptian origin for the zodiacal images in the tarot, of which there are only three, and the astrological decans, but that is not much, certainly nothing of an initiatory nature.
DDD (p. 205) have one suggestion:
Christian may have borrowed some details from the imaginary ancient Egyptian texts and ceremonies in the late XVIII-century work Crata Repoa.They refer us to their Introduction and to a footnote for more. It is true that the tone of the Krata Repoa is reminiscent of Christian's. It is a work that had been translated into French in 1821, as Gallica confirms.
Like Christian's fantasy, there are "tests" as part of the initiation. The early ones have to do with not fearing death. An ax is swung at the candidate, then he is wound in cloth strips like a mummy. In another, he is grabbed by others, a noose is put around his head, thunder sounds, and so on. In another he told to walk down a dark passageway and decapitate the person at the end. It is a beautiful woman, whom he decapitates without hesitation. Bringing it back, he is told that he has successfully decapitated the Gorgon, I think meaning the Medusa. We are assured that it was merely a wax model, not a real person. To reach the second highest grade, "demiurgos", he has to watch a grisly drama in which a brute of a man kills a monster with serpents for arms. It is identified as Typhon.
These tests have something in common with Christian's but are not the same. Most importantly, there is no gallery with 22 images.
I would add a couple of other likely sources, again for the frame only. One is the French novel Sethos (title page above; the original edition was 1731), named after its hero (above left). It, too, imagines tests and cites authorities, as though drawn from ancient sources. There are four such tests in the initiation presented there, one for each of the four elements. This novel was immensely popular and is said to have influenced Masonic initiation rites in an Egyptian direction.
Another ancestor is one known in Western Europe since antiquity in many manuscripts, and also one of the first books printed in Italy, in 1469, the Golden Ass, by the second century Latin author Apuleius. In one brief passage he has his protagonist describe his initiation into the mysteries of Isis (Lindsey translation p. 249):
I approached the confines of death. I trod the threshold of Prosperine, and borne through the elements, I returned. At midnight I saw the Sun shining in all his glory. I approached the gods below and the gods above, and I stood beside them, and I worshiped them. Behold, I have told my experience, and yet what you hear can mean nothing to you.It is true that we can't tell much from this account. Moreover, it occurs in a work of fiction. Apuleius personally may have simply applied what he knew about mystery initiations in general to this description, such as that at Eleusis. However it remains as a stimulus to the Renaissance imagination. As such, it
does not seem to have involved any real brush with death, just a journey to the underworld and back. I suppose the sun shining at midnight could be an out of body experience into outer space. But it seems to me he would have mentioned the curvature of the earth, like Jung did in his famous near-death experience. I would think it more likely images of gods, on walls, or perhaps impersonations of the gods by initiates. It didn't take ancient Egypt for such things; they were an everyday occurrence from medieval times to Christian's own time: the frescoes in churches and the actors in pageants both presented the new gods, i.e. Christ, angels, devils, and the saints of the Church. Being "borne through the elements", admittedly is something else, more rarely seen; that is what might have prompted the trials through the elements in Sethos.
Another source for Christian, this time for some of the 22 themselves, are of course Eliphas Levi, 1856, and Court de Gebelin, 178 ( both available online in translation). It was Levi who identified the Magician as an Egyptian Mage. Fro his part de Gebelin saw the horns of Isis on the Popess's crown, making her the High Priestess and her husband the High Priest. Levi then explicitly connected Isis to the Moon. The two pillars behind the Priestess also come from Levi. For him, however, the Empress was "celestial Venus" rather than Isis. The "two roads" interpretation of the Lover card, endorsed by Levi, is found in the Comte de Mellet's companion essay to de Gebelin. Both de Gebelin and Etteilla, in contrast, saw the scene as a wedding. None of them associated the scene to Egypt .It was de Gebelin who identified the Chariot card as "Osiris Triumphant". Levi then drew the card with sphinxes instead of horses. They s were probably inspired by the Belgian standard version of the card, which had horses with human faces. It took Levi to see the sphinx on the Wheel of Fortune; it was actually there already, but de Gebelin didn't notice it. Christian's Devil as Typhon, the evil principle of Egyptian religion according to Plutarch's Of Isis and Osiris, comes from de Gebelin. De Gebelin made several Egyptian associatons to the Star and Moon card, but both Levi and Christian ignored them. None of these tarotists, before Christian, saw the tarot in the context of an initiation.
There is another source, it seems to me, that is generally overlooked: Mozart's opera The Magic Flute. First performed in 1791, it remained immensely popular all over Northern Europe. Mozart had won over the French already by adapting Beaumarchais' play Le Mariage de Figaro. The Magic Flute not only has an Egyptian setting, but has hymns to Isis and Osiris, processions of Initiates, trials by water and fire, and descents into dark pits.
Here is the first act Hymn to Isis and Osiris, from a modern production. I tried without success to find one with statues of Isis and Osiris behind the singers. In this one, it appears to be a priest assigned to conduct the initiation. He seems to have his doubts about the candidates, or at least one of them.
As in Christian's version, the candidates are instructed to have nothing to do with women, on pain of death. The hero Tamino manfully proves himself in that duty, even when his lady-love, wandering into the initiation space, takes his silence as a sign of rejection. Meanwhile in another room his companion Papageno, who wasn't interested in initiation anyway, fails miserably, even though the woman they teted him with was a toothless old hag. Papageno not only talks to her but agrees, with his fingers crossed, to marry her. She is then revealed to be a beautiful young maiden dressed in feathers just like him, but whisked away. He is not worthy.
And below are the trials by water and fire. At this point Papageno has been replaced by Tamino's lady love herself, who has proved herself worthy in trials of her own.
There is no gallery of instructive frescoes, but the characters in the opera are suspiciously like the tarot figures and engage in situations like those on the cards. In the first scene, seen below in an illustration that was part of the program notes, a giant serpent is killed by three ladies using magic. Then a happy-go-lucky figure dressed in feathers comes along and, after initially drawing back, claims to the hero-to-be (reviving after fainting from shock - he is not yet an initiate) that it was he, Papageno, who killed the snake. The ladies, stepping up from the rear, explain that it was they who had done the deed. In the scene as depicted in the 18th century program, they are veiled and stand in front of a temple, just like the veiled priestess at the "Portal of the Sanctuary" imagined by Christian. Papageno, dressed in feathers, is on the right, the future hero Tamino on the left.
Sorastro's temple has engraved on its fronts three virtues, not the same as those in the tarot but at least three virtues.
It seems to me that Mozart's characters go along way toward supplying something like Christian's 22 images in an initiatory context. But then there is the question, what would have inspired Mozart? Mozart and his friends were Masons, a society with secret rituals and initiations, perhaps including ones modeled on those in Sethos. Cagliostro's rite, of which they probably would have known that it included women, would have been another influence. They probably had also heard of de Gebelin, by word of mouth. But that is still not much. I think more can be said, pertaining to a shared culture among educated players of tarock, tarot, and tarocchi. I will get into that in my third post in this series. For now I want to give one clear case where Egypt became inserted into the cards before de Gebelin.
12. The Sphinx on the Wheel of fortune
I want to compare the Wheel of Fortune as depicted by Noblet in the 1660s with a
version a few years later, perhaps as early as 1672. On the left below
is Noblet, and on the right Chosson, which may date from the year on the
deck's 2 of Coins, 1672, but is at least by 1736, when the card maker
Chosson first appears on the register of cartiers in Marseille. Its
details are identical to that of Madenie in 1708, the earliest
definitive dating for the feature I have in mind; however I lack a good reproduction of that card, so I
use Chosson instead. In Noblet, at the top of the wheel there is simply a king with a sword. In the Chosson, however, it is a sphinx. There is the head of a man, the body and tail of a lion, and a suggestion of wings in the curtain behind him. The goatee is similar to the thin, long beard often seen on images of pharaohs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharaoh).
At this time only the head of the Great Sphinx would have been visible, the rest covered in the sand (http://www.freemaninstitute.com/sphinx.htm). But sphinxes in similar style were readily viewable in Italy, usually attached to the Greco-Egyptian deity Nilo. I gave two examples in my previous post. One had breasts, in the other, more typical, appeared masculine. There are never any indications of wings. but since they never show the sphinx's body, it isn't clear one way or the other. Greek sphinxes were female, uncrowned, and winged. Perhaps the ambiguity was meant in some sculptures so as to avoid favoring either Greece or Egypt.
It is not surprising that French tarot cards put what they imagined to be a sphinx, Greek and/or Egyptian, on top of the Wheel. Kings can raise one up, but they can also cast one down; likewise for pharaohs. Egyptomania existed in France long before de Gebelin. In Italy it has begun with Although not as early as in Italy (beginning in Florence of 1418, with the arrival of Horapollo's "Hieroglyphica"), it quickly went to France, in the guise of "Hermetica", by the early 16th century.
The Greek sphinx was not a king but a malevolent demigoddess. Yet she, too, fits the theme of the card in earlier versions. In the famous legend, Oedipus's victory over the sphinx, in answering its riddle, also leads to his downfall (in his case, marrying his mother), just as we see on the card. In between was the "riddle of the Sphinx", one with an unsuspected purpose as well as that which brought him to power. In his fall, when he realizes the truth, he is wiser than in his rise. Then in the next play, Oedipus at Colonus, he can see further (into his sons' natures and their fates) as a blind man than he ever could with eyes.
That had repeatedly been the theme of the card. On the right above is a card from 16th century Ferrara or Venice, from a sheet now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. A man with donkey ears and human below ascends the wheel, saying "I will reign"; at the top is a man who is a donkey both above (ears) and below (tail and legs), saying "I reign". Going down, with the words "I reigned" the head is fully human, if not the lower parts. It is only at the bottom. with "I am without reign", that the figure is human from top to bottom.
This motif occurs even in the earliest known version of the card, the Brera-Brambilla, 1440s Lombardy (middle above). All that is missing is a tail on the one going down. It is added in the next version, the Pierpont-Morgan-Bergamo (PMB) of the 1450s; however the brown on the ears and tails is hard to distinguish against the background. Also, if the one going down lacks ears it cannot be seen on the card, owing to the position of the head. The captions with "I will reign" etc can be seen on the PMB.
The sentiment of the card is expressed in a short poem by the 16th century Ferrarese poet Ariosto, Satires VII, 46-54, (from Andrea Vitali, "The Wheel of Fortune", at http://www.associazioneletarot.it/page.aspx?id=122&lng=ENG, with a few changes in the translation )
Quella ruota dipinta mi sgomentaThe wheel of fortune itself, with men on it, is an image of long before the 15th century. Besides manuscript illuminations, a literary example is in the Carmina Burana of 1230 (words, translated from Latin, cited at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rota_Fortunae; dated in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmina_Burana)).
ch’ogni mastro di carte a un modo finge:
tanta concordia non credo io che menta.
Quel che le siede in cima si dipinge
uno asinello: ognun lo enigma intende,
senza che chiami a interpretarlo Sfinge.
Vi si vede anco che ciascun che ascende
comincia a inasinir, le prime membre,
e resta umano quel che a dietro pende.
(That painted wheel dismays me
that every card maker portrays in the same way:
I don’t think I like seeing so much harmony.
What is painted sitting on top
is a little donkey: everyone understands the riddle,
without calling a Sphinx to interpret it.
We can also see that everyone who ascends
starts to become a donkey,
and the one who hangs below remains human.)
- The wheel of Fortune turns;
- I go down, demeaned;
- another is carried to the height;
- far too high up
- sits the king at the summit -
- let him beware ruin!
- for under the axis we read:
- Queen Hecuba.
Wikipedia says the image of the Wheel is a development from the Greco-Roman idea of the zodiac as the diameter of a globe in the sky being turned by Fortune. But they had no idea of people being turned up and down on this wheel; that was medieval. The only hint of a wheel of fate related to Egypt that I have found is in Hero of Alexandria (cited in Jane Ellen Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, p. 591f):
In Egyptian sanctuaries there are Wheels of bronze against the door-posts, and they are movable so that those who enter them may set them in motion, because of the belief that bronze purifies.How is this related to fate? The action of fate in Greek tragedy was that of catharsis, purification, according to Aristotle. That is a thin thread. Even then, WorldCat has no record of any work by Hero published before 1541, too late for the earliest cards; I am aware of no citations of him by 15th century Italians. The image in the tarot is a product of the Middle Ages, pure and simple.
The only element that might possibly be original to the tarot is that of the donkey ears, tails, and hooves. However even that does not presuppose knowledge of Egyptian symbolism. The donkey probably started out as a symbol of lust (from its long male member) but quickly generalized, thanks to such sources as Apuleius's Golden Ass, to this-world folly of all kinds.
Also in the background of the 18th century card with the sphinx, is Kircher's Oedipus Aegyptus, first published 1652-1654 and often reprinted. Its frontispiece, at left, shows Oedipus challenging the Sphinx. Kircher compared himself to Oedipus, solving the riddles of history and existence, as shown in the Frontispiece of that work. Wikipedia comments, "the Sphinx, confronted by Oedipus/Kircher's learning, admits he has solved her riddle." I can't help wondering if Kircher was aware that many of his "solutions", e.g. his "deciphering" of Egyptian writing, were without foundation and in fact mostly wrong, in other words, that in the eyes of history he would suffer Oedipus's fate.
De Gebelin saw nothing Egyptian about the Tarot of Marseille's Wheel of Fortune, even though the sphinx-like creature at the top is clear enough in the drawing done for his book (below right). Here is what he says (http://www.tarotpedia.com/wiki/Du_Jeu_Des_Tarots):
Le dernier numero de cette Planche est la Roue de Fortune. Ici des Personnages humains, sous la forme de Singes, de Chiens, de Lapins, &c. s'élevent tour-à-tour sur cette roue à laquelle ils sont attachés: on diroit que c'est une satyre contre la fortune, & contre ceux qu'elle éleve rapidement & qu'elle laisse retomber avec la même rapidité.
(The last number on this plate is the Wheel of Fortune. Here human caricatures, in the shape of monkeys, dogs, rabbits, &c., rise in turn with the rotation of the wheel to which they are attached. One may say that it is a satire against fortune, & those that it elevates quickly it lets fall down again with the same rapidity.)For him there was nothing but animals! This shows, if nothing else, how unobservant he was. It also suggests to me that the idea of Egyptian origin was already in his mind before he examined the cards. Perhaps it was something he had heard in his Masonic lodge.
It
was Eliphas Levi in
1856, resurrecting de Gebelin's idea of the tarot's Egyptian origin,
who finally called attention to the sphinx at the top. In his
1861 Keys to the Mystery he even had a drawing. Here "Azoth" is the Arab name for
alchemical mercury, "Hyle" the Greek word for matter, and "Archee" the
Greek word for "first principle". Given the wings and breasts, it is
very much a Greek sphinx rather than Egyptian one.The allegory is different than it was in the 15th-16th century versions. The ascending part is not after fool's gold, as in the earlier cards, but rather, given the Hermanubis and the devil-like "Hyle", an ascent to heaven and a descent from heaven. The sphinx is the divine mystery ruling all things, by which the initiate rises above fate, rather than the agent of fate as in the story of Oedipus. In the original tarot image, the place of wisdom was at the bottom, with the only fully human figure; now it is at the top. What was for Greek tragedy and the early tarot a lesson in hybris, the overweening pride that leads us to make mistake, it is now Kircher's promise that we can indeed learn the divine will by mystical ascent into the heights where the sphinx resides.
The late addition of the sphinx to the TdM, over a century before Levi called attention to it, nonetheless raises the question of what else suggestive of Egypt can be found in the pre-de Gebelin tarot. I do not think there is anything so clear-cut as the sphinx. But perhaps there are other things, details put on the card so as to suggest Egypt to those who know the references in ancient literature and artifacts. Or alternatively, details such taht somebody knowledgeable about Egypt looking at a card and finding in some detail an analogy that suggests an allegory, whether or not the designer intended it as such.
So we have the hypothesis that even if the deck was not originally of Egyptian inspiration, it acquired Egyptian features as it developed, consciously or unconsciously, to satisfy a demand from the public or private commissioners. That hypothesis deserves to be explored further, along with the question of whether the occultists' Egypt was the same as that in the tarot before them.
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