2. The Oracles and the Marseille trumps

In this section I want to draw comparisons between the tarot trumps and the imagery of the Oracles, mostly in Plethon’s edition but also the complete version that would have been available in the 16th century if not earlier, by those who looked in Proclus's commentaries. In many cases, I will be proposing an esoteric interpretation of the card as suggested by the verses; in other cases, I will be finding particular details that may have been added under the influence of these verses.

Here is Plethon’s edition, including the "Brief Explanation", which I take from pp. 51-54 of Woodhouse's Gemistos Plethon. Since I will be going on quite a while about it, jumping often from one part to another, it might be good to have these lines available in a separate window.):

The first three lines are about the descent and ascent:the ascent is in the same order as the descent, the same "channel," provided you have "the sacred word" (l. 3)--the Logos, in Greek--"the holy watch-word" (l. 12), of which you can find "symbols" in your own soul (l. 49), I suspect that the word for "symbols" is the same as that applied to Pythagoras's obscure sayings. symbola. These representatives of the Ideas have thoughts and life, all from the Father, moved voicelessly (l. 56). The theurgist has tools by which to send the soul in the right direction, using the iynx, English "jinx," translated by Woodhouse "spell," actually a rotating wheel used by witches, but here a metaphor for the whirling outpouring of Ideas as they reach our souls (references and quotations to follow later in this post). In the tarot, the cards are such tools and tokens; if it is magic, its goal is not magical influence over material circumstances, but rather reunion with the divine.

In life one spiritual danger is of descending even further, past the "sevenfold steps" (l. 5) of the planetary spheres, through which one passed in coming to this world, entering the world of Fate, yet going still further, to the “throne of dread Necessity,” (l. 6) here I think meaning Hades, complete captivity, no free will. It is here that one is dominated by the “beasts of the earth” (l. 7). Among others, these are the “dogs of the underworld” of line 32. In advising, “Do not enlarge your Fate” (l. 8) the Oracles caution not to become captured still further by the world of matter, thus enlarging Fate's power.

In the tarot, Fate is represented by the woman with a distaff of yarn, on the 15th century Florentine and Bolognese Suns card and the Vieville Moon card. She is one of the three fates, as Andrea Vitali has pointed out (http://www.letarot.it/page.aspx?id=130&lng=eng), Clotho in fact.

The sevenfold steps could be seen as the seven smaller stars on the Marseille card, or the five small stars (including the one on the jar-person’s sleeve) on the Cary Sheet card, representing the five star-like planets. The large star represents the transcending of Fate, accomplished in the ascent.

In this framework of ascent, the Hanged Man can be seen as someone in a trance, induced by hanging upside down. Bosch’s Garden of Heavenly Delights, middle panel, shows a number of such tranced-out individuals, e.g. below.

Plethon says in his Commentary (Woodhouse p. 57):

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What men see in religious rituals, such as fire and lightning, are only symbols, not the nature of God (l. 44). Draw towards yourself in simplicity and purity the ‘reins of the fire’ (l. 45), which you see in religious rituals. When you see the ‘formless fire of God’ (l. 46) leaping about everywhere, hear its voice,, ‘which carries the truest foreknowledge'.

Rituals are one way of inducing the trances that produce such visions. Hanging upside down, perhaps hyperventilating at the same time, is another, perhaps also a ritual. In today’s world, there is a branch of yoga exercises dedicated to hanging upside down, like the Hanged Man, called “aerial yoga”; Googling that phrase will bring up many images.

What must first be achieved is the "loosing" of the soul from the body, a voluntary Death which is also a kind of birth. And so the Oracles say:

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Those who thrust out the soul and inhale are easy to loose” (l. 16).

This suggests the separation of soul from body, a symbolic death, the soul inhaling the divine fire and ascending “towards the light.” The Death card in this perspective initiates the ecstatic visions being recorded (or simulated) in the Chaldean Oracles. In the the Marseille Death card, there is also the suggestion of rebirth, such as the sprout-like heads from which Death is clearing the weeds.

In what follows, we may expect to find descriptions of ecstatic visions from beyond this world. But first a few words about the body, lest we hold it in too much contempt. So we see lines 28-31:

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Do not leave behind the dung of matter for the precipice. Do not draw it forth, that it may not suffer in going out. By extending the fiery intellect To the act of piety, you shall also save the liquescent body.

Here the word “precipice” might be significant. It occurs also in line 4. The PMB second artist’s cards all, except for Fortitude, have precipices at the bottom, extending a practice that the first artist also engaged in, but less prominently. In illuminated manuscripts, it was already a conventional sign of death or danger; its appearance in the PMB 2nd artist’s cards merely emphasizes the theme, but given the precipice in the Oracles, now not of death merely but of a particular destination, Hades or perhaps dissolution into soulless matter.

The general theme of the lines I just quoted is that of treating the body respectfully, as Plethon says in his “Brief Explanation” (p. 54):

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By the ‘dung of matter’ they [the Oracles] mean this mortal body. They bid us not to neglect it, though perishable, but to preserve it so far as possible.

In other words, the lines advocate Temperance (and perhaps something more, actually saving it in some form). Of course the imagery of the tarot card is totally conventional; but it is nice to know that Temperance was part of Zoroaster’s ancient teachings. In the PMB, it is this card that has the biggest and most obvious precipice, as Huck once observed (in the "Precipice" thread on THF).

Now lines 32-36.

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Then from the depths of the earth leap forth the dogs of the underworld Showing no true sign to mortal man. Nature gives proof that there exist pure daemons And that the fruits even of evil matter are worthy and good. The penalties are constrainers of men.

Plethon says of the dogs, in the “Brief Explanation” (Woodhouse p. 54):

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By the ‘dogs of the underworld’ (l. 32) they mean certain insubstantial visions arising from the passions of our mortal nature, which are seen during rituals by those who have not yet rightly ordered their soul, signifying nothing true.

I think we have here an interpretation of the dogs that were added to the Moon card at some point after the Cary Sheet. To be sure, dogs are associated with the Moon anyway: they bay at the moon, and Diana has her hounds. But the Cary Sheet Moon card has distinctly Middle Platonic features: the two towers are the two gates on the Moon that Plutarch said admitted people to different destinations, depending on how they had conducted their lives: to Hades, which Plutarch located between the earth and the moon, or toward a kind of lunar Paradise. Vitali applies Plutarch (On the Face in the Orb of the Moon) in his essay on the card:

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In this constant coming and goings, the two towers define the space that divides the kingdom of the Moon governed by Persephone from the one of the earth ruled by Demeter. A limit that cannot be crossed by no one but by the renewed souls or by those who leave their body, except demons who descend from the Moon to earth “to take care of oracles, to assist and participate to supreme mysteries, being guardians and to revenge injustices and shine as savers in battles and on the sea” (Plutarch, op. cit., page 112). Therefore, the two towers become, as Porfirius writes, the doors of the descending and the ascent of the souls towards and from the generation: Cancer is the way from which the souls descend and Capricorn the one from which they go up again.

On the moon is also a big area, says Plutarch, called "the Gulf of Hecate." It is where daemons give and receive punishment; the name suggests a body of water such as we see on the card (the Loeb Library translation, 944c, has ”recess of Hecate”; I get the translation as "gulf" from Johnstone p. 36). Since the Chaldean Oracles are nothing if not Middle Platonic (despite their allegedly ancient pedigree), it makes sense for the dogs to be part of that Middle Platonic moonscape. Vitali suggests that the dogs on the card are Plutarch's "guardians" as daemons descended from the moon to help us. I see no reason to think that daemons incarnating as dogs is what Plutarch meant by their becoming "guardians," but it is possible. From the perspective of the Oracles, the dogs are false images, illusions "arising from the passions of our mortal nature" as Plethon says, or worse, evil daemons. The Oracles caution against seeing the dogs as helpful. (On some Moon cards, one dog is dark and one light; by such coloration, perhaps one could be a helpful guardian and the other a phantom.)

The two lines following extend the positive evaluation of the body to the daemons as well: Plethon explains them in his Commentary (paraphrased by Woodhouse p. 57):

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If even the fruits of evil matter are good, how much more so must be the daemons, since they possess rational nature unmixed with mortal nature. Even their terrible aspect is beneficent. ‘Penalties’ (l. 36) are the avenging daemons who restrain men and divert them from evil, compelling them towards virtue.

Plethon does not explain what the “fruits of evil matter” are. Perhaps they include the dogs of the preceding line, products of our attachments to the ephemera of this world. The "vengeful daemons" could then be the daemons who "revenge injustices" in Plutarch, like the Furies of Greek myth. They also "restrain" evildoers, as in the work of devils in the Christian Hell. They "constrain" those who do evil and thereby also "constrain" those who wish to avoid their fate. Fittingly, the devil on the Devil card is often shown restraining human souls, putting them in his basket on the Cary Sheet and holding them fast by ropes or chains around the neck in the Marseille-style cards. The platform on which the Devil is standing, in these cards, is then the “throne of dread Necessity” of line 6.

Let us go to the epiphany that is the object of the theurgist’s practice, the vision of things beyond, lines 37-48:

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For then the curved mass of heaven is not visible. The stars do not shine, the light of the moon is veiled. The earth stands not firm. All things appear as lightning.

Earthquakes and lightning are typically the sign of the presence of a god, e.g. in Euripides’ Bacchae, (http://records.viu.ca/~johnstoi/euripides/euripides.htm, lines 4, 724, 728, etc.). They are also usual features of the Tower card, then called “Fire,” probably meaning Lightning. If the stars do not shine and the moon is veiled, that is because the Sun has risen, overshadowing all else. Perhaps that is why the lady on the PMB Moon card looks unhappy: she is being superseded. There is more (lines 44-48):

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Do not call upon the self-revealed image of Nature. Draw tight from all sides the reins of the fire with an untouched soul. When you behold the most holy fire without form Flashing with quivering flames through the recesses of the whole world, Then hearken to the voice of the fire.

By the “self-revealed image of Nature” the human body might be meant, or even the Moon, but I think it is more likely the Sun itself, which is only an image of the true, formless fire, which has a voice. In the Judgment card, trumpets sound. That is not speech, but their tone comes from the mouths of the angels on top of the card. Well, the imagery of the card was already fixed before anyone knew of the Oracles.

I have mentioned the castle or city on the PMB World card as an image of the archetypal world of the Father, with the two children as good daemons pointing the way. In other versions of the card, there is a lady, either holding the world or inside an oval, surrounded by images of the four elements. Who would she be?

In the Platonic tradition, as others have pointed out in relation to the tarot, there was a feminine-imaged goddess called the Cosmic Soul, also translated as "World-Soul." Plutarch and Macrobius identified her with Isis. In the Oracles, she is Hekate. When the Oracles speak of the “soul,” they are sometimes referring to that great Soul, sometimes to the little souls of humans, and sometimes to both at once. She is an unspoken presence throughout the poem, mediating between human souls and the Father.

Hekate is only called by name once in the verses that Plethon includes (although five times counting all of them), in a word mutilated either by Plethon or some scholar who edited a text he inherited. Line 17 says

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In the left flanks of the couch is the source of virtue.

What is this "couch"? Plethon seems not to know. In Psellos, the word is “Hekate,” as opposed to the similar word koites, meaning “couch” (http://ku-dk.academia.edu/DylanBurns...os_and_Plethon, p. 171f).

Psellos’ version was perhaps known to Ficino. Kristeller refers to it in footnote 29 of p. 155 of Renaissance Thought and its Sources. I give the entire context, including the text footnoted:

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The Corpus Hermeticum, as it has come down to us in Greek, is perhaps an edition or anthology due to Psellos, who added a commentary to it. (28) This commentary was known to Ficino, who also translated part of Psellos' treatise On Demons, and to Francesco Patrizi, and it was printed in the sixteenth century. (29) (28) Hermes Trismegiste, ed Nock and Festugiere, vol. 1, pp. xlix-li (where Psellos' editorship is discussed but doubted). (29) Oracula magica Zoroastris cum scholiis Plethonis et Pselli, ed. Johannes Opsopoeus (Paris, 1599, first printed in 1589). For Ficino's translation, see his Opera vol. 2, pp. 1939-45.)

If Ficino also had the title, “Oracula magica Zoroastris cum scholiis Plethonis et Pselli[/i]," it would appear that he translated Psellos. In any case, the text was certainly known by the time of Patrizi’s version, 1591.

So at some point Renaissance humanists knew that it was Hekate, not a couch, who was the passive (left-hand) source of virtue, providing the archetypes, those “inflexible intellectual upholders” (l. 57), of virtue, which are then imprinted on our souls. Even without the word “Hekate,” anyone versed in Middle Platonism (such as Ficino or Filelfo) or Plato's Timaeus and Philebus, would have recognized the dual significance of “soul” in Plethon’s Chaldean Oracles: the Cosmic Soul was part of the system, holding up the archetypal virtues. In that role we see her also on the tarot Justice, Fortitude, and Temperance cards. She is then the one speaking through the angel on the Temperance card when the poem says “Do not leave behind the dung of matter” (l. 25, 28). The angel is a daemon in a symbol.

For Plethon, ascent is not simply a matter of recognizing divine archetypes. There is also action, the “right side” of the soul (Woodhouse’s paraphrase, p. 55, of Plethon’s Commentary): descent is into “sins”, and ascent is out of “iniquity." This ascent requires “daring” (l. 39). Plethon explains (Woodhouse’s paraphrase, p. 57), that

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Man is called the ‘contrivance of all-prevailing nature’ because of his capacity for daring ventures (l. 39).

Woodhouse adds that

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In this case Gemistos departs slightly from the text, which calls nature, not man, ‘most daring.’

If nature is said to be daring, that perhaps is a reference to Physis in the Poimandres, which daringly entices Anthropos into her arms, or to the “audacious” Dyad in Neopythagoreanism (Theology of Arithmetic, attributed to Iamblicus but actually from the same era as the Oracles, Waterfield translation p. 42); she daringly separates from the One and becomes the principle of matter. So humans inherit daring from their material origin. In the cards, it is the virtue of Fortitude, shown as a lady putting her hands on or in a lion’s mouth; the lion is associated with the element of fire.

It is also the Cosmic Soul who is the “mistress of life” (l. 23; Johnstone p. 64), corresponding to the Empress in tarot; it from her that all other soul derives, as Plato taught. As mediator between worlds, she is Popess (or the deity whom the Popess serves), while the Pope is a representative of “the second intellect, which the race of men call the first” (l. 54) i.e. the biblical creator-god. The Cosmic Soul also turns the Wheel of Fortune; in Middle Platonic theurgy, the wheel is the “iynx” (English “jinx”) which Woodhouse awkwardly translates as “spell” (l. 55 and footnote 41). It is actually a wheel spun by the theurgist, representing the Ideas being spun out by the Father (Johnstone chapter VII, “Hekate’s top and the Iynx-Wheel”; also p. 161 of the Dylan Burns link above). In Alexandrian/Persian magic, the Magus would have one of these tools, for the purpose of love-spells, seeing into the future, etc.. But in Middle Platonism Hekate has been recruited for a higher purpose, in which the goal is ascent to the divine.

Plethon himself is clear about the "iynx" (Woodhouse's paraphrase, p. 58):

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The 'mental spells' (l. 55) are the intelligible Forms, 'conceived by the Father and themselves conceiving and moved toward conceptions by unspoken and voiceless wills'.

In this context, Hekate, the Cosmic Soul, is also the force leading Love to shoot the arrow of the Word into the human soul, casting a spell on the one whom the arrow has pierced. Plethon says, in his 'Brief Explanation" (Woodhouse p. 53):

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They [the Oracles] call "spells" (iynx) (l. 55) the intellects linked to him and the separated Forms, which they also cll the 'inflexible upholders of the world' (l. 57). They call them "spells" because of the erotic attachment of things in this world to themselves which the name of the iynx (spell) indicates.

Woodhouse says that "iynx" was the name of a bird that was attached to a rotating wheel, often as a magic charm to control men's hearts. A ldevice for working love-magic now stimulates Platonic Eros.

This Cosmic Soul is “fire...luminous through the power of the Father” (l. 22), like the Moon by the Sun; so when the Old Man’s hourglass is changed to a lantern, perhaps he is holding an image of her and the Father’s light; some Marseille versions of the Hermit card inscribe the arc of the sun on the folds of his robe. And when the soul is enjoined to “draw tight...the reins” (l. 45), we might think of the Charioteer, who normally would have reins, except that in the CY and PMB she was made feminine, for whom it would be undignified for her to manage the horses.

I think I have covered all the cards except the Bateleur, the Emperor. and the Fool. The Bateleur would seem to be the Magus himself, the Zoroastrian theurgist, who, like the Chaldean Second Intellect, creates a world from the raw materials of his cosmos, in his case the four-element-like objects that are the tools of his trade. If a dealer of cards, including the four suits, he would create an imaginary play-world--or perhaps an intelligible pattern of archetypal images, to guide the soul.

For the Fool, all I see is the line near the end of the Oracles, "The Father has snatched himself away" (l. 58). The unnumbered Fool is outside the sequence, just as the Father is removed from the Cosmos. If the Fool's number is 0, that puts him before the Cosmos, just like the Father. The Fool doesn't think logically; the Father doesn't think discursively, i.e. in logically ordered sequences in time. The “fool for Christ” was a Renaissance commonplace (e.g. Erasmus In Praise of Folly, who ironically calls Jesus a fool, taking his cue from St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 4:10). The d'Este and Charles VI Fool suggest Renaissance portrayals of Saturn, who was "snatched away" by his son Jupiter and put in the Elysian Fields, away from the Cosmos, and who as Jupiter's father might qualify as "first intellect." As for the Emperor, I don't see anything in Plethon's Oracles that corresponds. In Zoroastrianism, Pythagoreanism, and Plato, the religious head is also the governmental head. So the Pope and the Emperor are the same. The most we could have is more than one, as in some decks there in fact were (the "four papi" in Bologna).

So that is how, I hypothesize, Plethon might have influenced the tarot as seen by devotees of his Chaldean Oracles in the later 15th century and after. The Oracles could well have been the stuff of lot-books, too, ancient and otherwise; but that would be a degeneration into lower magic from what was meant as theurgy or higher magic. As theurgy, the cards would serve as images to stimulate the archetypes latent in the human soul, to lead one forward to salvation and the divine. The Chaldean Oracles are in that way, I propose, one text among many to which the cards might have been associated.

ADDITIONAL MATERIAL FROM KWAW (STEVE M)

Kwaw wrote

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: Zoroaster (the first of the Theologos of the prisca) = Er (after Eros - according to the Oracles the First to 'leap from the Paternal Intellect' and the binding force of the universe and of the (tripart) soul). Fits in somewhat by analogy with what I have posted elsewhere in the past re: the (TdM) Fool, Magician: ...according to Agrippa the Pythagoreans attributed One to Eros ~ "Why is love called a magician?" asked Ficino. "Because" he replied, "all the power of magic consists in love." "And what is this magician `love'? The mediating power uniting heaven and earth, gods and men." Or as Diotima replied to Socrates question [in Plato's Symposium] he is like his Mother (Poverty) and Father (Reason / Zeus) "And as his parentage is, so also are his fortunes. In the first place he is always poor, and anything but tender and fair, as the many imagine him; and he is rough and squalid, and has no shoes, nor a house to dwell in; on the bare earth exposed he lies under the open heaven, in-the streets, or at the doors of houses, taking his rest; and like his mother he is always in distress. "Like his father too, whom he also partly resembles, he is always plotting against the fair and good; he is bold, enterprising, strong, a mighty hunter, always weaving some intrigue or other, keen in the pursuit of wisdom, fertile in resources; a philosopher at all times, terrible as an magician, wizard, sophist. He is by nature neither mortal nor immortal, but alive and flourishing at one moment when heis in plenty, and dead at another moment, and again alive by reason of his father's nature. But that which is always flowing in is always flowing out, and so he is never in want and never in wealth; and, further, he is in a mean between ignorance and knowledge." end quote from Symposium by Plato. We may make an analogy I think to both the fool/madman and to the magician. 'Poverty' represents the soul as lover, always in need, wanting and seeking for the beauty and goodness of the beloved' and in relation to the fool or madman we may see him as representing the soul as a pilgrim of love. ... "And what is he [love]?" "He is a great spirit, and like all spirits he is intermediate between the divine and the mortal." "And what is his power?" asked Socrates. "He interprets," she replied, "between gods and men, conveying and taking across to the gods the prayers and sacrifices of men, and to men the commands and replies of the gods; he is the mediator who spans the chasm which divides them, and therefore in him all is bound together, and through him the arts of the prophet and the priest, their sacrifices and mysteries and charms, and all, prophecy and incantation, find their way. For God mingles not with man; but through Love."

Yes indeed, a good Platonic analysis of the Magician, the Lover, and the Madman. I like it. And I can see how the Chaldean system, with its various complexities, developed from this. The deity representing magic becomes Hecate rather than Eros, and Eros becomes a transcendent figure, an initiation-master for the Empyrian world (see below).

Kwaw wrote,

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Too which we may note too that there are three virtues in the oracles that bring one back to god - Truth, Faith and Love - to which could we draw analogies with the triad of the TdM Lover card?

Very interesting, Kwaw (Steve Mangan). I presume that Truth is the woman on the left, with the laurel wreath on her head, and Faith the one on the right, putting her hand on the Lover's heart. It is as in Alciati's emblem 9, the "image of faithfulness," (http://www.mun.ca/alciato/e009.html)

except that on the right we would have "fides" (faith) instead of "honos" (honor).

The Oracles associate Truth, Faith, and Love with the three cosmic "teletarchs," one for each of the three realms in the Chaldean cosmos. Majercik comments, pp. 11-12 (and here I do my best to transliterate the Greek words, as I don't know how to make the keyboard type Greek):

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Beneath the Iynges and Connectors are located the Teletarchs (teletarchai, lit. "masters of initiation"; see fr. 85 and 86), divine entities which are assimilated to the cosmagoi as rulers of the three worlds of Chaldean cosmology... The Teletarchs are also associated with the Chaldean virtues of Faith (pistis), Truth (aletheia), and Love (eros; see fr. 46), which function as faculties of the three rulers; Faith is connected with the Material Teletarch; Truth with the Ethereal Teletarch; Love with the Empyrean Teletarch. (A fourth virtue, "fire-bearing Hope"--Elpis purnoxos--is also mentioned; see fr. 47.) As such, these virtues are not to be understood as spiritual qualities (as is the case with the Pauline triad of Faith, Hope, Charity), but as cosmic entities involved in the very creation and maintenance of the Universe: "For all things," says the oracle, "are governed and exist in these three (virtues)" (fr. 48)... In addition, Faith, Truth, and Love are also understood in a theurgic sense, as it is through these three virtues that the theurgist is said to unite with God (see fr. 48 and notes).... This last emphasis again connects these three virtues with the Teletarchs, as these three rulers are responsible for both purifying the ascending soul of material influences as well as guiding its journey upward. (As noted supra, it was through the medium of the Teletarchs that the rays of the sun--or "Material Connectors"--were conducted downward. It was on these rays, then, that the soul ascended, guided by the Teletarchs.) Further, all three Teletarchs have additional solar connections: the Empyrean Teletarch is associated with Aion (the transmundane sun) as the intelligible source of light, the Ethereal Teletarch is associated with Helios (the mundane sun) as the direct source of the earth's light; the Material Teletarch is associated with the moon and, as such, rules the sublunar zone traversed by the rays of the visible sun.

I think we have here an explanation for the sunburst that frames Cupid in the Marseille Love card: he is the Chaldean Eros coming forth from the transmundane Sun.