Renaissance Tarot Decks

Transcript (PDF)

Hermetic Tradition (New Series)
Presentation 5 of 13

Renaissance Tarot Decks
Visconti-Sforza, Bembo, Mantegna, and Durer
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, July 31, 1986

Transcript:

We come tonight to one aspect of the Hermetic tradition that has a lot of attention in our epoch – that of tarot cards. But we're dealing with the Hermetic tradition and not with the metaphysical speculations of recent centuries. And in fact we're dealing with the Hermetic tradition which is now about five thousand years old and we are well founded by now and we realize that the presentation of images, sometimes as archetypal – like black cats – and that archetypes are able to meow actually indicating affection and need for milk. Probably the distinction that is easiest for us to bear in mind, or I should be more specific now since we're hermeticist, to bear in consciousness, that is the distinction between seeing something externally and cognizing that in terms of its referential meaning and re-cognizing, or recognizing, an interior meaningfulness which is symbolic and not referential based at all. And this is very difficult to school ourselves to initially, but once we have this knack, as it were, we are able to distinguish quite easily and consciousness between worldly associations and eternal symbols whose presentational mode is not referential at all.

In the Hermetic tradition the exterior cognition is a profane knowledge not to be trusted at all, to be used sparingly to get you oriented until you can mature a life, or as we would say today a life style or a life pattern which allows you to withdraw from that worldliness for several reasons. One is that the world is not trustworthy. It is not worth leaning on. It is brittle. And two that there is an interior development which is appropriate to each one of us which must be tended to and that that interior maturation is all important. And the corollary to the second is a third that the exterior world is transformable and always transformable with the cutting structure of the mind which is symbolically tutored to maturity that we are victims of the world and of conflict as long as we are but an object contained by this world. But that our hermetic liberation is exclusively a property of consciousness which has freed itself from that bondage and slavery, and can instead reshape the world along the structural lines of eternity rather than the mutable lines of an enslaved imitation.

So that the Hermetic tradition constantly is encouraging us not to accept the life of imitation, which is distinctly un-Christian. One should not imitate the life of Christ at all. But this in fact is very un-enlightened. That the recutting of the material world along the structural lines of the interior symbolic understanding transforms nature into magia– into magic. And on the basis of a magical realm, intelligence then may sort out its celestial hierarchy and reclaim itself. Climb out of what was to all appearances an endless round of reoccurring temporal annihilation; to climb out of this closed circle of temporal annihilation, which is inevitable, which is certain. Certain death. Not only that death is inevitably there as a part of the circle but life reoccurs again but then death reoccurs again. And it's not so much the fearsomeness of death but it's the closed mutability of this blind circle that must be exited and one must climb out of this.

So that one of the archaic symbols of the Hermetic tradition is the winged– winged-hatted figure with the caduceus raised up and the other hand reaching down to pull a fellow being out of a hole. Come out from underground. Come out from that earthly prison. You don't have to stay there. That if you do stay there all that happens over and over and over again into blind interminability is a transformation, swallowing, transformation, swallowing, transformation, endlessly that one must rise out of this and above this and that this can be done only through consciousness informed by intelligence, by the intellect.

In our Renaissance tradition we have seen last week with Ficino having established through the good offices and services of Cosimo de Medici up on the hills at the beautiful villa which is still there – painted now I think a bright yellow, a two or three storey structure, rather squared, and the top underneath the projecting roof line has a medieval scallop effect across the whole facades, all four set in a garden – and that from roughly the 1440s until the early 1490s, for those fifty years in Florence the Hermetic tradition came back and reclaimed itself fully. That the finest flower of that whole movement was in 1492, the very year in which Columbus came to the New World, Ficino finished his great translation of Plotinus. So that by 1492, all of Plato, all of the Hermetic Tractates, all of Plotinus, all of the classical Hermetic tradition was in a contemporary language available with all of the backup books and literature needed to study it there in the library that Cosimo also built – San Marco.

It was a signal though of enormous portent. For when consciousness is raised to that archetypal height there is always a polar reaction that comes in and the polar reaction always is in balance to however high consciousness has been raised. And two years after the finishing the translation of Plotinus a terrible religious persecution seized hold of Florence and a religious tyranny was there, only to be weathered through hard years. We saw the same thing in this country with the raising of an archetypal Apollonian reaching out to go to the moon in the late 60s and early 70s. And since then the slow glacial response of the negative to that coming in. So that instead of having an Apollonian step to the moon we have the Strategic Defense Initiative which is certain death for everyone.

These archetypal events are like that and Florence suffered this at the end of the Quattrocento. This was foreseen and understood by persons of great intelligence like Ficino very early on in the game. And in fact by the 1460s, 1470s, they were already paying attention to this and trying to balance out the situation by spreading this learning as fast and as far as they could. And so all through the 1470s and 1480s you find invitations being given out by Ficino in his letters – which we have volumes and volumes of – inviting every major thinker in Europe to either come see us or send somebody. Let us give you what we have and take it back to your own countries. Take it back to your own cities. Back to your own traditions. Because we've rescued this out of a thousand years of oblivion. We will not let it go back again.

And in this concern one of the interesting phenomena that rose, in the late 1460s and early 1470s, was the classical hermetic use of pictorial series to quickly evoke out of populations who would not have time to learn in the slow book maturing process and so that card games, the tarocchi card games, which had been developing since the middle of the 14th century (1300s) and had come into use in the northern Italian cities like Ferrara or Milano by the 1440s, 1430s, in the 1470s would be chosen specifically to be vehicles for archetypal evocative series and one of the great artists of the High Renaissance there in northern Italy – Andrea Mantegna – his tarot deck – which is a marvelous deck which we have in reproduction; we have some of it here and I'll show you some of it, fifty cards.

Why Florence? Why– Why there? And why if the card games were being played in places like Ferrara or Milano. Why Florence? We have to go back to a hundred years before the 1470s. We have to go back to the 1370s in Florence. Dante had been dead for about fifty years. The Divine Comedy had restructured in the most profound way the whole evocative symbolic structure of the interior realm. We have to understand that when someone of the caliber and class of Dante produces a work like The Divine Comedy it isn't just literature, but that it is this interior realm hierarchically organized and expressed and it has a veracity and it changes the world and changes the world by changing, initially, the whole evocative sensitivity of the collective unconscious of a population. And it takes a while for this to– to rise up for the sensitivity because it is so profound to rise into the beginnings of consciousness. And it took about fifty years for this to happen.

And at that time in the 1370s, Petrarch, nearing the end of his life, wrote a series of canzonetta. Six of them, called I Trionfi. And I've looked everywhere. I couldn't find a translation into English and I won't bore you with my horrible Italian pronunciation but I found in the Oxford Book of Italian verse, The Triumph of Death, one of the central triumphs in Petrarch.

This volume, The Triumphs of Petrarch, in the 1370s was what we would call a bestseller. Everyone read it. Everyone was reading it to each other. It was the bedside reading in the evening of all the upper classes, the aristocrats. Petrarch was extremely fashionable and it appealed to the Italian sensitivity of pageantry. The whole idea of a triumph goes all the way back and you can see the archetypal quality, and it goes all the way back to Ancient Rome where a returning conquering consul would have miles long parade coming into the city of Rome and everything would be changed and there would be monuments for– for this and these– this triumphal car in which the council would ride the returning victorious general became the very image of the vehicle of divinity for a human being. And all through the Middle Ages, the idea of pageantries with these triumphal cars kept developing in a folk popular way. And by the time we get to the Late 1380s, 1390s, Petrarchs poem Il Trionfi – working with the structure of the collective archetypal structure sensitized by Dante – and Petrarch appealing to the subconscious structure of the people of that time and a whole series of traditional parades. With these triumphal cars began to appear in the northern Italian cities. In Petrarch there were six triumphal cars. The first triumphal car had to do with love because love is the most interesting the most central experience for human beings and in fact in the tarot deck in the Renaissance the triumph of– of love becomes one of the central cards that comes in and Cupid with his bandana around his eyes and his bow and arrow dominates this car of love. But we'll see how in the tarot, in the tarocchi, in that carnival, a car containing what became the magician, precedes it.

But in Petrarch love is overcome and one has to be aware that there is a limitation with love. And when love is overcome then we have chastity which comes in, and chastity triumphs over love. And in the next car when chastity has triumphed death comes in and triumphs over that. And then after that fame comes in and triumphs. And then time triumphs over fame. And then finally eternity triumphs over time. And in each of these episodes– in each of these presentations of archetypal sets or scenes, they were expressed by the people of North Italy in the late 1300s and the beginning of the 1400s as actual parade cars accompanied by an entourage, sometimes up to several hundred people per car surrounding them, with appropriate costumes and appropriate animals – some were drawn by stags, some were drawn by horses, some were drawn by black oxen. And this tremendous symbolism working up from a folk level, culturally, but being evoked from these deep archetypal levels which had been sensitized by Dante, and arranged into a structure which had been subconsciously thrown out and drawn in together by Petrarch.

So that by the middle of the Quattrocento, by around 1450, this was a very refined pageant and it was this pageantry, with these triumphal cars, that was actually the prototype for these early tarocchi deck. And they were not so much what we would call playing cards, to play card games, although one could do that with them, but they were symbolic forms by which one could arrange and rearrange for oneself conveniently the tremendous pageantry of these triumphal events. And in fact they happened every year and they happened every year just before Lent. In fact Carnival comes just before Lent.

So that this enormous cycle of cultural interest with all of its sensitization and evocative ranges with these dominant archetypal qualities coming into play, when they matured in the 1450s were seen with great understanding by individuals who were studying the Hermetic tradition anew. And they recognized in this presentation in this mass popular movement all of the structures of alchemical change that were there in the old text, all of the basic principles of magia in the grand sense operating there in these festivals.

So that the first tarot deck that we have, the Visconti-Sforza tarot deck, which was painted about 1450 by Bonifacio Bembo. We have reproductions of it and I have a few cards here which I'll show you. I'm going to show you the Wheel of Fortune card, which we have today in the Major Arcana, and the Lovers. Which is still today in the Lovers. We see on the Wheel of Fortune which was a car for Fortuna – Fortuna, the goddess, Fortuna. And we, in examining the iconography for the goddess Fortuna–

If we go, for instance, to a volume like this one published by Harvard in 1927, Chaucerian scholar H. R. Patch, The Goddess Fortuna in Mediaeval Literature, and we look into Patch's work and he tells us in here that the idea of one having a personal fortune is very peculiar. That it seems to have developed and been a favorite during the medieval period. And it's quite interesting because one would think that with the scholastic emphasis upon all kinds of causality and the logical structure of the universe that one would not very easily have a personal fortune. But the quality of the individual fortune was always outside of the rational order, but it was outside of the rational order in a very particular way. There was always a quaternary aspect, a four-part aspect, to the Wheel of Fortune. And at the top of the wheel is always somebody who has made it. And there's always somebody at the bottom who hasn't made it. And there's always somebody coming up who's going to make it and always somebody going down who isn't going to make it.

All of these qualities are always present in the goddess Fortuna so that she is always a fullness. She is always an image of the Pleroma in this sense. So that Fortuna is viewed with all of the psychological ambiance that we would have in facing the world completely unknown except that it follows this dull round this circle. And so associated with the goddess Fortuna always sort of as a corollary is Father Time because the Wheel of Fortune takes place within the temporal order within time. The card that we have now, that would be Father Time as the hermit card, but the hermit card comes much later on. The– the medieval emphasis upon the– the hermit life is– is quite interesting. Hermits in medieval thought are almost always men while recluses are usually the condition of women. If women withdraw, when they withdrew they severed contact with the world. When men withdrew to lead a solitary existence, they always had the freedom to move around in the world to go back to it or come back. And so the hermit is usually a male usually wears a light brown cloak and is free to come and go to mutter to himself as it were but to come and go. While a female recluse usually seals herself off from the world. If men seal themselves off from the world they enter a monastic order and they do it in a communal way. They are sealed off in a communal way psychologically very profound.

But the goddess Fortuna is always associated with Father Time who becomes later on the archetypal image of the hermit. It's very interesting that Father Time is always free to go in the world, but is always a solitary within the world – never really mixes with it, never is a part of the world. And there's one of the keys to the transformability of the world. That time happens in the world but what is in the world is eternal and if it can be taken out of the flow of temporality it no longer need be caught in that dull round. It can be changed from something profane to something sacred. And time is displaced by eternity. And it is the final transformation of the temporal into the eternal order that man is concerned with hermetically. He wants finally to not only free himself from this dull round but to take the entire world with him. To sacralize the world and save it from this dull round of temporality. We today with our– our mega philosophies would say, man has got to save the whole galaxy. Same thing. It's that kind of.

So the goddess Fortuna always is associated then with the wheel and generally a wheel in the sense that she turns it And she turns it without any kind of personal malice. And in the Middle Ages it was– there wasn't anything that you really did. It was just the– the luck that you had. But in the Renaissance is the idea of the perfectibility of man, of the trainability of man, of the educational qualities of man, freeing himself. As this began to permeate the– the society at the time this dull round of the goddess Fortuna began to change. And it wasn't just the mechanical aspect of it. One could do something with this.

So that in the trionfi of Petrarch, and in the session the sequence of the session of the triumphal cars, in between love and death was fortune. The goddess Fortuna had her place. And in fact there is an illustration in Erwin Panofsky’s Studies in Iconology – the earliest one that I could find – he gives us an illustration in here of a triptych which is from Paris in the middle of the 1300s. And in this triptych it shows us three panels. And the first of the panels, this is called in French The Dance of the Blind. And in this first panel there is a figure blindfolded with a bow and arrow who looks very much like Cupid who is sitting talking with a young woman. And then in the middle panel there is the Wheel of Fortune with the goddess Fortuna sitting on her throne in what appears to be a car without wheels. And then in the next one is the skeleton death riding an oxen coming in waving his spear.

This relationship between love and death and fortune is an interesting combine and in fact the whole figure of a blindfolded, archetypal love-God is quite interesting. And in the Visconti-Sforza deck we have here a blindfolded Cupid who is up above the two lovers who are meeting. It's interesting because in classical antiquity Cupid is never blind. Eros is never blind. It's not a quality. The blindness is not a classical quality at all. In fact it doesn't come into play until the late Middle Ages.

In the late Middle Ages the scholastic emphasis upon the irrationality of sensuality that it is blind because it is irrational you see, brings this in. The goddess Fortuna so that, “Fortune and Time,” writes Patch, “are frequently named together and associated. [and] Both give blows,” to man. They raise things and they ruin things. That, “Fortune actually does the work of Time.” And that Time therefore is the– the context and the controlling of movement happens in this way. We have in the tarot sequence, this game of triumphs, and where Fortune comes in, she always appears as a figure standing on a ball carrying a sail, sometimes simply as if she were a ship at sea. And the chief captive there on Fortuna's car is Cupid who was from the previous car. And this will be a motif that runs all the way through the sequence in the Tarot of Arcana. That each sequence will have the previous dominant figure as a captive in its context. So that as one moves on, it's like circles within circles being condensed back into the primordiality. So that finally, in the final transformation, what will be captive in Eternity's car will be Time – Time itself will be bound. And what will appear in the first car captive will be Eternity. And that's why the first car contains the Magician because the Magician who understands hermetically how to bring this sequence back into play so that it actually does occur and actually happens.

So that the hermetic teacher is not so much a magus alone in the laboratory or the library but he is the helper to man to free him from the dull round, to bring eternity back into play in this world so that it alchemically liberates. And in this motion of linking the cars together in the tarot sequence, there is an association between the classical virtues in the Mantegna deck – which was done about 1465, done about fifteen years after the Visconti-Sforza deck. Mantegna, in doing this deck, arranged it so that the first ten cards were the conditions of man, and the first one is il Misero, which becomes later on the Fool. So that in the Mantegna deck, the– the first leader, the one that brings Eternity into play is the Fool. So that the Fool, after Mantegna’s time, begins to be associated with the number zero. The number zero as in an equivalency for infinity. In this sense of zero and infinity are logically interchangeable.

Before that, when we look at the Fool card like in the Visconti-Sforza deck there's no designation. There are no numbers on these cards, no numbers whatsoever. But the first time that there are numbers on cards that we know of is with Mantegna's deck. So that the introduction then of the symbolic presentation of the idea that eternity is introduced at the very beginning of the sequence which is why it is so effective why the transformations are real. They're real all the way back to the recapturing of eternity because it must be so. Because it's present there from the beginning. That when you have introduced zero already in a number system that the number system is infinite then because it has that basic context. And it changes the relationalities that obtain because the ratios – if you were to start with one – the ratios are always fractions then of one. But if you start with zero there are always equivalences because there are fractions of eternity and they are eternal themselves. So that is an illusion to think that one is dealing with fragments because in every case one is dealing with the wholeness of the real. But only by keeping presence of mind, of consciousness, can one attune oneself to the fact that one is dealing with the real all the time. One is dealing with wholeness all the time and that it would be profane to think that at any time we're dealing with fragmented-ness.

Now in Mantegna’s deck of 1465 the first ten of the conditions of man, and the second ten are Apollo and the nine muses. And the nine muses come first and then the classical muses. And out of these muses three of them are of great importance for the– the Hermetic way in which Mantegna was thinking at the time and which passed on into the tradition. The first muse that's listed here is Calliope. Calliope is the muse of epic poetry. But in the sequence of muses the first muse really is Thalia – Thalia. And Thalia has to do with the earth. She has to do with the– with the almost the subterranean qualities on the earth and in the middle. And Thalia is classically the muse of comedy in classical times. And in the middle, with four muses on each side of her, in the middle is Melpomene. And Melpomene was the muse of tragedy. So the muse of tragedy is at the fulcrum of these– of this nine-stringed lyre of inspiration. And Thalia, comedy, is at the beginning, and at the end of it is Urania who is the muse of astronomy. So that one moves from comedy to an apex of tragedy to astronomy – one moves from the earth to the poignancy of man to the eternity of the heavens that the nine muses have this arrangement and that these three then are a triad, a sacred triad, of structure showing the beginning the middle and the end and in interspace between the center the tragic consciousness of man's limited condition from which he can be freed are two triads of three muses each which balance out so that actually with the nine muses you have three triads working together; three groups that are together and then one group that is based, beginning middle and end. So that the image of three women together is very often then a hermetic image of the isolated graces one side or another from the poignancy of consciousness and in fact the the presentation of the Three Graces – like in Botticelli's Primavera or just any place that you see in Renaissance iconography – all of this goes back to that kind of an image base.

I meant to bring Mantegna's card here to– to show this to you. His card on Venus contains, in the upper right hand corner, the same Three Graces that you would see all through Renaissance iconography. I have in the Panofsky volume here, plate forty-eight. This is from The Blind Cupid, Venus, and the Three Graces, Paris Bibliotheque Nationale, 14th century – which you can see later on and it shows the three graces up at the top. It shows Venus being born from water and the blind Cupid with his wings and bow and arrow on on the side. This same kind of emotion the same kind of a presentation is exactly there in Mantegna's tarot card for this quality. This would be in the cosmic, the firmaments of the universe. In the fifth ten, the quintessential ten, in the third place.

So that somehow Mantegna saw this illustration from Paris which had been done about one hundred, one hundred twenty years before him. The iconography is almost exactly the same. Not only that, with just to show you how– how traditional the Hermetic tradition is all during this period I brought another one of Mantegna's cards, Thalia in this case, and on this card you can see Thalia as a muse, as a woman. The muse is a women power than the man. She has an instrument here and she has her head tilted in a certain way. And if you look down she has one bare foot showing. And this is Tyler. And this is Mantegna's presentation of her done about 1465. Done I think in Mantua. Then we have Albrecht Dürer's The Muse Thalia done about 1496 when he was staying with the Balinese who were relatives of Mantegna and Dürer's. Thalia is exactly like Mantegna as Thalia saying what, the same instrument, the same tilt of the head, but done with the Dürer-type hand and style that one can see. And I had a little trouble finding some of Dürer’s other tarot images because they're not recognized as such. And generally, so-called art historians, don't even– they don't even understand what they're seeing. But I show you this to show you that this– it's not a standardization of the images. It's not that they're standardized and then they're learned by rote and then one does it by rote but that these images are evocative and occur. They bring out a meaning pattern within if one is sensitized to a certain level. And when you're sensitized – like Dante or Petrarch or Mantegna or Dürer – you see this. You see this. And it's there. And it has that kind of pristine quality.

In fact the interior symbols are so pristine when they occur that consciousness can recall them with perfect memory. And it's a way of training memory. Memory is the mother of the muses in just this way. Zeus and Mycenae together make the– the muses. And that this progression of the muses, of those nine feminine archetypal steps of recovering one's purity of consciousness, yields the Apollo mind. And so the Apollonian mind is not some kind of Nietzschean shorthand for a well-organized person, but is actually the quality of the sun-being who comes into presence in this world in the person of that human being who has remembered all of it and brought the whole archetypal pattern back into play in his consciousness. This person then becomes, in the Renaissance idea, this person becomes the maker of the world.

The first tarot deck that we have is done for Francesco and Bianca Sforza. Their– One of their sons was Ludovico Sforza who was the patron of Leonardo da Vinci and of Bramante. So it doesn't take very long for the training of consciousness to this level to occur. It takes about one or two generations and suddenly you have somebody like Leonardo who can do anything. Whatever you want to make he can make. He can draw it exactly, even if he hasn't seen it physically, he can see it inside. And he can draw it for you precisely because he has that pristine vision.

This is the hermetic tradition at its most powerful. It isn't an– it isn't a metaphysical dabbling at all. It has nothing to do with that. It is a resuscitation of man's archetypal quality of being able to cut reality in any way that he wants understanding its basic structure. He can make a diamond out of existence where it was nothing but a rock before. He has this capacity.

Well let's take a little break and then we'll come back to some more of this.

Part of the difficulty in, I think comporting to material like this, is that we have such odd skewed metaphysical stereotypes that have been thrust upon us largely since the time of the French Revolution and they've gained currency to the point that everyone assumes that it's got to be true. Now there wasn't any Kabbalistic understanding until Pico and Johannes Reuchlin which is the next generation after what we're talking about. There is no understanding at all of Kabbalah in Western Europe so that what is here is a particularly dramatic instance of archetypal recovery. You have what was for all intents and purposes an aristocratic entertainment. Sort of a portable Mardi Gras festival that they could put on their coffee tables in their palaces as of 1450. Fifteen years later you have intelligence to the extent where the basic quintessential structures of classical Hermetic wisdom are being displayed. And within twenty years of that you have individuals who suddenly can think in this way.

So in about two generations you move from what seems to be almost a popular entertainment to somebody like Leonardo da Vinci – it is an incredible quantum jump. And you have to use that term, quantum jump, because there is no way that this can happen developmentally in a pedestrian mode. You can't do this. But it's always an indication that you have tapped a tremendous resource, not a source so much, but a resource which was there. You invoked it out, you brought it out, brought it into play. This same thing has happened in the 20th century, the very same thing. Two generations ago people were still getting used to not riding horses if you can believe it – three generations. It's an indication that the evocative hermetic powers are in play. But every time that this has happened in history it's polarized the psyche of those who don't comport to it in an interior way and they start making up surrogate mental diagrams to try and corral this energy and that usually means trying to corral those people and it snuffs it out. And it has always happened every single time.

So we're interested in this not just in a flighty sort of way, but in an in-depth way of how do we keep from snuffing this out in our time? Because it's really there and very vital very alive. The painter, who we have almost never ever heard, of who first organized these images take– take them from the carnival and put them into little miniature paintings was not Bonifazio Bembo but an artist named Piero di Cosimo. And this is what Vasari has to say in– just in passing: “Among other things Piero di Cosimo executed the landscape of the picture which represents the preaching of Christ and which is considered to be the best part of the painting at San Sisto in Rome. [And that] this artist took great pleasure in alchemy insomuch that he vainly expended all that he possessed in that pursuit as do all those who are addicted to it which impoverished him while he lived and finally conducted him from a state of ease to one of extreme poverty. Cosimo drew exceedingly well as may be seen from our book not only in the specimen where we have here of the above named preaching in the chapel of Sixtus but also many other drawings.” And that's about all that Vasari has to say about him.

The best illustration that I could find of the way in which an artist archetypally opens himself up and receives these interior symbols intact is– Here's the way William Blake was affected by Dante at the end of Blake's life. And this is one of the last illustrations before Blake died in 1827 from the very end near the end of the Paradiso. The title of it is Beatrice Addressing Dante from the Car. And you look at the work and there it is. In Paradiso Beatrice is in one of these tarocchi triumph cars. and she in fact is in the Triumph Car of Eternity because the Triumph Car of Eternity is pulled by the symbols of the four evangelists, by the four Gospels – the eagle, the lion, the man, the ox. And they're all together here in this one figure. And the wheels of this car is the many-eyed world myth.

So what we're given to understand here is not a theory. We're not talking about art history. We're not talking about metaphysical theory. We're talking about the Hermetic tradition. The way in which spiritual man reinstates himself in reality, comes back full blown, and brings the eternal structure into play again. But because in the profane eyes of the world it is seen to be a mentality rather than a spiritual quality. And so it seemed to be a play of ideas alone. And the ideational content then is abstracted from it and played with and arranged so that you get people who imitate this. And the imitations seem pretty good to the profane because they can't tell the difference. There's no way for them to tell the difference. It's like a magnificent fake. It's like fool's gold. It's like an alchemist who is able to project a little gold veneer onto some electrum – if you don't have a way to put it to the cupellation test you can't tell, you don't know. How can we tell the difference between ten carat gold and twenty-four carat gold? But we can if we know and if we have the technique, if we have the techne.

And so in this way the tarot deck becomes a complete metaphysical scam. For instance, the Court de Gébelin, in seeing a tarot deck, the Tarot of Marseilles in France, started in his great– one of his great volumes on the primitive world (Le Monde Primitif), to describe the– the esoteric way was to work backwards. That one started with the– the world card and worked back through the various numbers back down to one and that this was somehow the esoteric setting to it. And there were all kinds of relationships that were set up. And all of it is interesting speculation and play and none of it has any real bearing or veracity. There is no way to get into the Hermetic tradition. One only learns to style the mind with the latest fad of curling of ideas which last for a year or two or ten years and then something else comes in and there's no real spiritual evocation that happens.

So that the emphasis is always in the Hermetic tradition is upon initiation, in the sense that you will know when it's happening because your participation will no longer be something which you're able to keep track of. You will not be able to keep counting and keep triangulating. You will not know. It will be rational in the nth degree but rational in the sense that you cannot keep track of it. And it's sort of a looking forward, kind of– kind of a way. Casting out before yourself the net of false intelligence that instead then you have to live it through rather than pre-think it.

Now what's interesting is that in the Triumph series in the Italian deck, finally, one comes down to the twenty-two Major Arcana cards arranged with twenty-one that are numbered and one that is not numbered zero. If you have twenty-one cards and you arrange them in a triangle like this. Seven cards on the side. You can lay them out in the triad like that. And the Minor Arcana fourteen cards on a side. And you can get a square of the world and you can get a triangle of the inner realm. And the Fool card, the zero card, placed in the center is a unity. If you have seven divided into twenty-two you have the classical expression of what we come to understand now as the radius of a circle Pi (π) which is a definite number but can never be finished off. It goes on indefinitely. So that when one adds the Fool, the zero, to this psychic inner structure of the Major Arcana one then gets infinity exactly in the numerical ratio that it actually does occur. This is one of the ways in which the Hermetic tradition schools us to see that nature is specific, but magic is more specific and that's why it gets the transformative edge because it goes into through number reality. It goes into the very handle upon which the structure of matter rests. And if one turns that handle, the matter has to turn also.

So that eventually in this tradition starting around the 1470s, 1480s, the development of intelligence in Italy will in about two hundred years yield the development of calculus in the mind of someone like Leibniz or Newton who were hermeticists. And once you get to differential and integral calculus you can handle the mathematics of transformation. Newton called them fluxions. We use rather today Leibniz's notation because it's more accurate. And Leibniz of course, as we'll see later on in the series, inherits the whole history of the Hermetic tradition. He's the– he's the esoteric librarian for the family that receives all of the arcane documents. He will be the one that for forty years has to write the history of his family. And here are all the documents there. And he's the one. Leibniz is the one.

But also we're trying to push this series through to the United States because the Hermetic master in the United States is Benjamin Franklin. And instead of working with mathematics Franklin's working with life, with human personality and life, trying to find as he did what is that hermetic personality that is able to constantly grow and learn, that does not get caught ever in the dull round of things. So that a human being then is educable as long as they're alive and that that education could be passed on to their descendants so that the education of the society continues indefinitely so that there is a maturation that goes beyond the dull round of the limitations in the human psyche that that population then would be free and the most arcane real way imaginable because they would no longer be subject to the limitations in the psychic history of the race. They would be able to develop to wherever they wish to go, whatever they wish to do, but that it would take at least two or three generations to set this in motion enough so that it would happen. And of course that was the great– as we'll see towards the end of this course when we get there, that was the great concern with Jefferson was to make the country free enough long enough so that a population could grow. So that once you get a generation freed once you spent the 40 years in the wilderness then that generation will teach that regardless of whatever conditions happen whatever happens then it's in place and it can be taught indefinitely. And we'll see that that actually did happen in this country.

It's like putting your tradition on a broadcast beam and even if you're killed the broadcast beam sends it out and somebody who's sensitized to it will pick it up and wake up to it. The classic case in point is Thoreau, who never cared a whit about Franklin or Jefferson, was very much the Franklin Jeffersonian man. Almost au natural. He didn't even know that he was working within a hermetic field that had been set up patiently for about one hundred forty years between Franklin and Jefferson. They worked for about one hundred twenty years to make this happen in just that way. So that the alchemy of American Hermetic tradition is with people by the millions and with individuals by the person. Whereas the European Hermetic tradition is in the– the realms of language becoming finely mathematical in its capacity.

All of this happens– All of this comes back in the Renaissance through the Florentine Platonic Academy because it was there that Ficino was able to bring all of the documents into current language and translate them. To make a place where people could come and could stay long enough that they could learn this. I found that it takes a minimum of about two years just to become sensitized to it. And after you go through a couple of two year cycles you can really– you can notice in yourself the– the evocative capacity to start to think– to think creatively. And then you can find out for yourself anywhere.

I teach on Saturday mornings at 9:30 so if you get interested in that it's still happening. Still going on.

The best book available is– on the Bembo cards, is this book called The Tarot Cards, published by the New York Public Library in 1966. This woman is a card cataloger and she didn't know how to catalog tarot decks. She got interested. Why does nobody know? And so she spent a long time and she found a lot of this material to go along with it and to compliment it– and those of you who are European will recognize this as somewhat a made up name: Basil Ivan Rakoczi. The Painted Caravan is an accurate presentation of the old– I'm almost tempted to say the ancient Gypsy tarot technique which I was fortunate enough to receive from my spirit mother. In Rakoczi's book, he writes in here, “The gypsies had another method of refreshing their memories. They had learned from the Egyptians that any given body of wisdom could be enclosed in a simple symbol. Furthermore, that such symbol writing could be given an outer and an inner significance. The hieroglyphics of the Egyptians for example could be read in the normal narrative language way and the uninitiated of those days no more comprehended their inner meaning than does the savant and the Congressional Library of Washington today. Only the priests knew that to those meditating upon each separate sign.” And notice here now the meditation is not directed to the side. The meditation is to clear oneself open oneself up so that the symbol operates upon oneself. Or if you have to think of it that it plays upon your sensitivity. How does Rilke say it in the Sonnets to Orpheus? “When we make ourselves a lyre to God with no melody of our own he will play the real tune on us.” That it’s that way.

So Rakoczi says then that, “in this way a whole body of doctrine is recoverable and it's rather an arcane way of just presenting a few dots, a few symbols.” But if they are highly selected and structured by consciousness so that the meaning is all enfolded in them, then one can unfold them at any time in any place. So that the teaching then is to sensitize the student to their own interior capacities so that if you have metaphysical theories clouding your mind there is no way you can get to yourself. Then whatever happens comes in and translates in terms of the cookie cutters and all you get are these nice little Santa Claus shapes because that's what you're thinking of. Or if you're thinking of making money, then you make money. Or if you think whatever you're thinking of you cut that out of it but the fullness doesn't occur. So Rakoczi then says that, “The Tarot then is a sort of a Baedeker guide to the other world. It's in fact hidden within the fantastic symbols and the magic passwords and invocations and that they initiated them by their capacity to unfold this book of symbols and read it as easily today as it was many thousands of years ago or so a gypsy master will tell you. And the gypsy being an eternal wanderer could not clutter himself up with a library nor conveniently carve his symbols in stone or graft them upon a temple.He couldn't have paintings or manuscripts, so he needed something portable. And so he evolved this set of pasteboard cards, few in number, which could be concealed about his person.”

And of course we saw about three weeks ago how towards the end of the fourth century, the beginning of the 5th century AD, with the destruction of all of the hermetic centers in Alexandria that the wisdom was put into portable ways and taken out into the desert ways and became a wanderer for quite some long while. The first– the first actual home that the Hermetic tradition had after all that time was in the court of Frederick Hohenstaufen. Michael the Scot was an alchemist. He's the original one with the peaked cone hat with the stars and the moon on it and the magician's robe. Yeah, he's the first European who actually could learn to read Arabic and learned the old alchemical traditions even before Raymond Llull.

And so Michael the Scot – it's interesting that it should be an Irishman, you always wonder about these things. And of course his. The person who took it up from there was Robert Grosseteste and then Roger Bacon and then everything got squelched again. But by that time it had spread enough so that Dante could bring it out. You know when they say that the Hermetic tradition seems to be very difficult to trace. It's not so difficult to trace, it's just you look at what really makes world civilization and that's what it is. Homer. Shakespeare. Dante. Michelangelo. Leonardo. That's how it happens. That's how we get to where we are. Without them we would be quite a long way off. So these two books I would recommend, The Tarocchi of Mantegna is pretty good.

I would think that something like Papus’s the Tarot of the Bohemians just isn't very usable at all. He has in here for instance, he mentions the Tarot of Mantegna – page 85 – he gives us an outline here of Mantegna's deck but he– he just lists the cards. He doesn't go– He doesn't have any understanding of the orders here. For instance the– in the Mantegna series notice that there are five groups, five groupings. So always there are four groupings that are arranged in pairs, so that you have a pair of pairs. And then there's a fifth grouping. That's the– that's the quintessence. It's always the center of it so that it operates in– in the center. And that within the center is a hidden center that has no designation. So like the Fool card is a center within the center and it is able to act as a fulcrum between these two orders to relate those two orders together because it does not participate in either of the orders itself, and yet is that mystical third that allows for the two orders to come together. And notice here that it's not so much that what is above is like below in some kind of a profane way is if they're equivalences as if the correspondences are a mental equivalency at all that equivocal mind is profane. That whole structure of thinking is actually idiotic and leads only to a closed circle.

In fact, Father Time, the card in the Visconti-Sforza deck – if you look at Father Time in this deck he has an hourglass in here. If we can find Father time. Here's father time. Father Time has a staff and an hourglass. The staff complements the cup. The staff is a male form, and the cup a female form. But Time in this sense, you just turn it upside down and it works the same way. And you turn it back. And this equivalency of mind is the same dull round. In some of the Renaissance iconography Father Time holds a serpent swallowing its tail. Not so much a symbol of eternity, but a symbol that this is an endless circle. Now the transformation of that image eternal to a hermit who is carrying a lantern you see, that's a major transformation of that. He's no longer carrying the circle, but he's showing the path and the path always is out of the circularity. If– if we work with A = A, if we think that that is the basic form of logical truth we're committing ourselves to tautological short circuits. Really if we introduce zero equals infinity that tautology is very unimaginable. We can't really put that there. It doesn't work with that mental form. Tolstoy when he was working with this, you know he– he faced his own madness and his own death for two or three decades without stint and he finally said the only way that you can work with this is to put zero over infinity and make a ratio like that. He said, then– then he says I can conceive of that and when I can conceive of that he says, then I understand the spiritual voracity of man is in the image of God because that's a correct expressive symbol of man's nature. He is– He is zero over infinity. He has no end to his capacity.

So this– this tradition that we are studying now has this quintessential quality. In the Mantegna deck, the first ten conditions of man, the second ten are Apollo and the muses. So you have conditions of man and then the nine muses. The third ten are the liberal arts which develop man, and the fourth ten are the cosmic principles which develop in the world. So that for instance you can develop man through grammar and logic, geometry, music, astrology, theology. But that has to be complemented by cosmic principles which are like fortitude and justice, charity, hope, the sun, the genius of the sun, the genius of the world, and so forth. And once those quaternary things are arranged, once they're arranged then the interior triangularity – the triad – occurs and the firmaments of the universe are the last ten. And what they are then are the hierarchies leading out beginning with the moon then through the planets and then up when you reach the– the seven planets, the moon, Mercury, Venus, the sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and then the eighth, the octave, the eighth sphere. The eighth reveals the ninth as the Hermetic tractate says, and I have here Mantegna's ninth card, it’s the forty-ninth card of that arcana, and you can see his beautiful graceful presentation that the ninth the premium mobile is not a static universe but in the sense is a graceful femininity holding up pure zero. And that alone, having understood that, having been able to wake up to that, to have that resonating one, then the first cause of the universe occurs. Then the completeness, the divinity occurs. When the half gods go, then God comes. And when we're open to the extent that we have taught ourselves to be sensitive all the way up that ladder of creation out of the self-centeredness of the limited circularity of the profane mind.

We eventually come up and as Dante says in the Paradiso we learn finally not to look with our eyes but that we in our totality constitute a pupil of an eye of a celestial eagle and it's that celestial eagle, whose pupil we are, records the image of the divine just as the divine looks to see us. And this is the liberation that is being talked about – not more money.

Well we'll go into this some more next week.