Sunday, November 6, 2016

Tower

This is an expanded version of "The Tower Card: Some History," which appeared (without images!) in Numen Naturae: Dismantling the Tower, edited by Casandra Johns (House of Hands, 2017), 95-105. The current post was done in May 2018 and expanded further in Dec. 2022.


1. The early card variations, in image and title

In the earliest list of tarot subjects, the Sermo de Ludus of c. 1500, NE Italy, the card was called La Sagitta (The Arrow), meaning a lightning bolt.[1] Other names were Il Fuoco (Fire) and La Foudre (Lightning).[2] It was called Magione di Plutone (House of Pluto) by Pietro Aretino in 1543, Casa de Diavolo (House of the Devil) by G. Bertoni in c. 1550, and Casa del Danato (House of the Damned) by Paulo Giovo in 1559.[3] Imperiali in ca. 1550 called it Cielo, Sky or Heaven, as did an anonymous treatise of ca. 1565.[4] In mid-17th century France, it was called Maison-Dieu or Maison de Dieu (House of God), by which it is still known in the so-called Tarot de Marseille (TdM).[5] In late 18th-century Italy, card makers in Bologna (and probably Lombardy) started using the Tarot of Marseille designs, including the French titles at the bottom. Around the beginning of the century, the “ancient tarot of Lombardy” was translating the titles into Italian. For “Maison-Dieu” they substituted “La Torre.”[6]

The visual imagery on the cards shows comparable variation. In the center at left is the oldest extant card, the only one unquestionably of the fifteenth century. It is a hand-painted deck probably from Florence that shows a massive tower being struck by lightning while building-stones tumble down one side.[7] As with all the early cards, there is no title. On the far left is a card of c. 1500, from the so-called Rosenwald sheet; it adds little flame-like objects next to the tower, as though from the sun, which is pictured above them.[8] Another, on the right above, is from a sheet of the same period in the Rothschild Collection at the Louvre sheet and almost identical in imagery to that of 17th-century Bolognese decks; its tower shows two men in front who have lost their footing, one in the act of falling and the other already down.[9] Fire emanates from the building; there is no lightning, although two suns emanate their rays from the upper corners. It is at least an earthquake.

In another card of around the same time, far left (fragment of the "Cary Sheet, c. 1500), small globes fall from the sky, while a cow looks on.[10] In the 2nd left, from around the same time in Ferrara or Venice, a tower is struck by lightning that emanates from a sun in the upper left corner.[11] In 1650s Paris, in a deck by Jean Noblet, stylized lightning hits a tower, and small globes again float down; two men are shown, one falling head first from the top and the other lying next to the tower.[12] This card, the first in the TdM (Tarot de Marseille) tradition, is also the first with the title Maison-Dieu. Around the same time, also in Paris, is a deck by Jacques Viéville, where the card is called Foudre, Fire.[13] A shepherd looks up from his sheep (barely visible on the lower right of the card) and sees little globes fall from the sky. Here there is no tower at all, and lightning strikes a tree. Instead, the lightning and tree seem borrowed from one printed sheet, while the farm animal and globes seem borrowed from the other.

What is the meaning or meanings? I will proceed historically.

 

2. The Card in the Context of the Medieval Cosmos

In most of the early cards where fire is shown, it is either in a high place (the top of the tower) or coming down from a high place (as lightning). In the medieval worldview, the spherical earth was surrounded by a series of other spheres (at right, L'image Du Monde by Gossuin de Metz, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, 13th century).[14] First was earth, then water (in the seas, etc,), then the air, then a sphere of the fourth element, fire (in red at right), and after that the celestial bodies, starting with the moon.

Francesco Piscina in 1565, in one of two commentaries on the card from the early period,[15] refers precisely to this concept. He sees the air as the place where the "demoni" fly about, according to the Platonists, "sons of the gods but neither earthly nor celestial." So they say that the demons "are spirits that fly in the air and are somehow in the middle between gods and men."
Then he adds:[16]

Dietro i Demoni viene il Fuoco per debito mezo fra le stelle cose celeste, & le mondane per essi si come i Naturali o Filosofi affirmano elemento che prima si trovi della Luna, Sole, o d'ogni altra Stella.

After the demons comes Fire, as the due mean between the stars, which are celestial, and mundane things. It is, as affirmed by naturalists or philosophers, the element that is found before the Moon, the Sun, and every other Star.

So naturally, when there is fire from heaven, it would be that sphere it comes from. However, some of the cards show the fire emanating from the sun, which of course is in a higher sphere than that of Fire.

In medieval imagery, the most common depiction of fire from above is that of the Apocalypse, as told in the Bible's Book of Revelation, chapter 16, where seven angels pour vials "full of the wrath of God," we were told in Rev. 15:7. The fourth angel pours out fire. Below is the version then used, the Vulgate, followed by its translation in the Douay-Rheims English version:[17]

16:8: et quartus effudit fialam suam in solem et datum est illi aestu adficere homines et igni.

16:8: And the fourth angel poured out his vial upon the sun. it was given unto him to afflict men with heat and fire. 

From Pinterest on the internet, I found an illustration of this verse, said to be from Normandy c. 1320-1330 (at right above).[18] The angel seems to be tipping his vial onto the sun, which then pours fire onto the earth. The post does not say what manuscript it is from.

I found another image from around the same time and place, at right, identified on the website of the Morgan Library in New York as from "England and France" --i.e. probably again Normandy--of 1255-1260. The inscriptions are Rev. 16:8 and 16:9, the Morgan website says. The angel tips his vial "upon the sun," and fire sweeps down, but mostly not from the sun itself, or the vial, but from someone else, apparently holding out a finger of admonishment.[19] 


More details on the cards can be interpreted in relation to this manuscript's illustration of Rev. 16:17-21.[20] There is again an angel dipping from above the blue border, while fire spews below over a tower, apparently representing the Babylon of verse 19. Its top, bearing a cross (like a church steeple) is broken in just the way we would like to see. The inscriptions are verses 17-21 of the chapter:

17: et septimus effudit fialam suam in aerem et exivit vox magna de templo a throno dicens factum est
18: et facta sunt fulgora et voces et tonitrua et terraemotus factus est magnus qualis numquam fuit ex quo homines fuerunt super terram talis terraemotus sic magnus
19: et facta est civitas magna in tres partes et civitates gentium ceciderunt et Babylon magna venit in memoriam ante Deum dare ei calicem vini indignationis irae eius
20: et omnis insula fugit et montes non sunt inventi
21: et grando magna sicut talentum descendit de caelo in homines et blasphemaverunt homines Deum propter plagam grandinis quoniam magna facta est vehementer.

17: And the seventh angel poured out his vial upon the air. And there came a great voice out of the temple from the throne, saying: It is done.
18: And there were lightnings and voices and thunders: and there was a great earthquake, such an one as never had been since men were upon the earth, such an earthquake, so great.
19: And the great city was divided into three parts: and the cities of the Gentiles fell. And great Babylon came in remembrance before God, to give her the cup of the wine of the indignation of his wrath.
20: And every island fled away: and the mountains were not found.
21: And great hail, like a talent, came down from heaven upon men: and men blasphemed God, for the plague of the hail: because it was exceeding great.

Verse 18 gives the lightning, along with an earthquake, of the sort that seems to cause the men in one card to lose their footing. Verse 21 explains the little globes, at least the white ones. 



In a manuscript known as The Cloisters Apocalypse, of c. 1330 Normandy, similar globes representing hail fall from the sky, along with tongues of something, and what might be stars of fire on the other.[21] So the red globes that we see in the Noblet are likely fire, even if fire is not represented that way in the manuscripts. That a tower would crumble from the onslaught, including horrible winds, is suggested by the bent tree in the illumination. Also, the fire emanates from a red line separating the air from the celestial region (in blue). Below is the lower part of this illumination. Above it are the "woman clothed with the sun" of Rev. 12:1 and her child.


While Revelation chapter 16 is the only place in the Bible I have found that has all the elements of the early Tower cards, there are other examples of fire from heaven. Most notably, there is the burning of Sodom and Gomorrah, described as caused by fire from heaven.
Gen. 19:24 says:

igitur Dominus pluit super Sodomam et Gomorram sulphur et ignem a Domino de caelo.

And the Lord rained upon Sodom and Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven.)

Although a tower is not mentioned specifically, one would seem to be implied in an illumination of around 1250 by falling pieces that look like the tops of towers.[22]

Although late enough to have been inspired by the Tower card itself, the Nuremberg Chronicle's depiction of the same scene, 1496, provides an ample number of such towers (at right below, from its folio 21r).[23]


Otherwise, there is also Satan's tormenting of Job, with God's permission, to test his faith.[24] In the book of Job, Chapter One, servants come running up to Job with terrible news. The first tells of a murderous attack by the Sabeans. Then:

1:16: cumque adhuc ille loqueretur venit alter et dixit ignis Dei cecidit e caelo et tactas oves puerosque consumpsit et effugi ego solus ut nuntiarem tibi

1:16: another servant came and said, “Lightning struck the sheep and the shepherds and killed them all. I am the only one who escaped to tell you."

Although the lightning on the card hits only the tree, this shepherd, lightning, and sheep may well have been an inspiration for the c. 1650 Viéville card shown previously (at right; the sheep are on the lower right of the card, Barely distinguishable from the rest of the scene in dark gray). A later version of this scene is in a Flemish card of the 18th century, whose title translates as "Fire."[25]

Job's house is also destroyed, but by wind, as another servant relates:

1:19: repente ventus vehemens inruit a regione deserti et concussit quattuor angulos domus quae corruens oppressit liberos tuos et mortui sunt et effugi ego solus ut nuntiarem tibi:

1:19: A violent wind came on a sudden from the side of the desert, and shook the four corners of the house, and it fell upon thy children, and they are dead: and I alone have escaped to tell thee.

After such disasters Job falls to his knees and says his famous "The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away." He has achieved a higher order of faith. There is no tower here, but perhaps a house will do.

So now we have all the elements of the early cards: sun, fire-flash or lightning, a ruined tower, and people caught up in the devastation. The card does not have to be the Apocalypse, as there are other examples in the Bible, some expressing God's wrath, others, as in the case of Job, simply his power and that of the other immortal beings who act with his permission. Still missing are the two people actually falling from the tower, first seen in the Noblet of 1650s Paris.

In fact, there is precedent for those two figures in images going back to the Renaissance. One is in relation to the very famous tower of Genesis 11, whose construction is thwarted by God, i.e. the Tower of Babel, no doubt the predecessor for that of "Babylon" depicted in the illumination of Rev. 16:17-21 shown previously. In Genesis 11:4 we read of its builders:

11:4: et dixerunt venite faciamus nobis civitatem et turrem cuius culmen pertingat ad caelum et celebremus nomen nostrum antequam dividamur in universas terras

11:4: And they said: Come, let us make a city and a tower, the top whereof may reach to heaven, an let us make our name famous before we be scattered abroad into all lands.

God’s response is to cause the people to speak in different tongues, so that instead of one people they will be numerous peoples. No fire from heaven.is mentioned, or even any destruction. But according to extra-biblical legend, God also caused the instigator and his workmen to be thrown from the tower. The English author John Lydgate, in accord with that tradition, in his Fall of Princes describes the builder Nimrod as falling from the tower due to God’s wrath (line 1167 of the poem).[26] The artist of one manuscript added an assistant for good measure, and other accompaniments of God's wrath, the fire and lightning as his customary means to deliver judgment.[27] The result is strikingly like the "Tarot of Marseille" (TdM) version of the card. While the poem was written around 1450, no one knows when the illuminations were added, as blank spaces were typically left for that purpose.[28] The central image is clearly the Tower of Babel, since it is preceded by Adam and Eve and followed by the Flood.

The builders' sin was to "make our name famous," as we saw from Gen. 11:4; but in addition, considering that there had just been a great flood, they sinned by arranging for at least some people to be above it if it happened again. In other words, they put themselves above God and thought that by their own efforts they could make themselves safe.

Before Lydgate, two men falling upside down from a disintegrating tower appeared in a 12th-century relief at Amiens Cathedral in Northern France, at first misidentified as at Reims[29] but yjrm identified correctly by tarot researcher Jean-Michel David.[30] David reports that it depicts pagan idols falling down in temples as the Holy Family passed into Egypt, as described in the medieval Golden Legend. The relevant passage is in the chapter on the "Holy Innocents," as follows:[31]

And after the prophecy of Isaiah, at the entering of our Lord into Egypt, the idols fell down, for like as at departing of the children out of Egypt, in every house the oldest son of the Egyptians lay one dead, in like wise at the coming of our Lord lay down the idols in the temples.

I would have thought "idols" were statues, while here they have their legs bent rather than broken; nor are they inside a temple. However, I find the same interpretation in a rather learned essay on the cathedral by Professor Stephen Murray, Professor of Medieval Art History at Columbia University.[32] Also, a tableau in the Moissec Abbey Church near the Spanish border, photographed by David, shows the Holy Family on their donkey passing by a similar temple, with at least one falling figure, although in this case seemingly a statue broken at the waist.[33]

As an account of how the card with the crumbling and burning tower first arose, the image at Amiens is a dubious source, in that no early card shows figures falling from a tower. But it could well have been the source of the detail of the two figures that we see in the Lydgate illumination and again in the Noblet tarot of 1660s Paris and thereafter.

 

3. The Tower in 16th-century fortune-telling

Andrea Vitali, in his iconological essay on the Tower, from which I will be taking quotations and images, observes that in Sigismondo Fanti's Triompho di Fortuna of 1527, the image of a lightning-truck tower appears several times, each with a slightly different fortune.[34] Three verse examples illustrate three meanings he gives to the image. They are all in section 52 of the work, described generically as:

in che luogo daranno quest’anno i fulgori: dimostra L’Auttore in questo luogo, che Dio acciochè gli huomini si r’avvedano de loro errori, lassa alcuna volta incorrere, che i folgori diano in alchuni luoghi. Onde il Fanti minaccia molto ogni generatione di persone, ma sopratutti coloro che tengon poco conto del colto divino”

where lightning will strike this year; in this place, the Author shows that God, in order to make men repent of their errors, sometimes allows lightning to hit certain places. Therefore, Fanti [the author speaking in the third person] greatly threatens [or warns] every generation of people, but especially those who take little heed of divine worship.

Then the lightning-struck tower is seen in the middle of a horoscope, presumably one relating to the prediction, and we have:

Nanti che s’empia della Luna i corni
Da dieci fiate i celesti fulgori
Ne i letti caderan di gran Signori
Se tirannia non scaccia in brieve giorni.

Before the Moon fills its horns (i.e., becomes full)
From ten points in the sky the celestial lightning
Will fall into the beds of great Lords
If in a few days they do not break out of tyranny [i.e. cease to be tyrants].
So it is not the act of worship alone that people must do, but proper Christian conduct: great Lords must cease to be tyrants. 

A second is more than a warning:

Marte furioso se ben fisso miri
Le saette dimostra a cascar hanno
Ne i feminili monestier quest’anno
Pel disordine: che fa i ciel se adiri

If you look carefully at furious Mars
The lightning bolts show that they fall
This year in female monasteries
Because of the disorder that makes the heavens angry.
In other words, these nunneries are just too offensive to be tolerated. Some writers at this time considered some nunneries to be little more than brothels. They are "houses of the damned," as Vitali puts it.

A different interpretation is found in another fortune associated with this image:
Non ti curar gia per te far redire
In casa liè caduta Pietra Santa
Che di tal Sacrilegio niun si vanta
Puoterlo in gaudio gran tempo fruire.

Do not worry about telling people
That the Holy Stone has fallen into your house,
Although nobody usually boasts of such a divine manifestation,
In order to enjoy it as long as possible.
The lightning is in this case auspicious, a gift from God. Vitali writes:
The idea that lightning could be of two kinds, one destructive, the other benevolent, is already in Pliny, who divides lightning stones into black and red in his Naturalis Historiae (XXXVII, 134). The round black ones were sacred and called Bethels, and could be used to conquer enemy towns and fleets, while the red ones were normally called simply lightning bolts. In popular tradition, any stone coming from the heavens was called a Bethel (the term comes from the Hebrew Beth-el = House of God).
The ancient term was Baetylus, from "Beth-el."[35] There is also the stone of Jacob, at Genesis 28:22, "this stone, which I have set up for a pillar, shall be God’s house," i.e., Beth-el.

In modern terms, such a stone would be a "bolt from the blue," that is, an idea that was not anticipated, perhaps that shakes one up, and increases one's understanding in some significant way. Later we shall see an illustration of this point from the Jungian writer Sallie Nichols. It could be something said by another person or something welling up from one's own unconscious, like a disturbing but beneficial dream.

That stones falling from heaven (meteorites?) were called "Bethels" leads into our next topic.

 

4. From "House of the Devil" to "House of God"

The 15th- or 16th-century woodcut card, in the second set I posted earlier, might have something in the doorway of the tower. It may have been more legible earlier, or perhaps it was left to the imagination. That doorway can be seen in terms of the Lydgate illumination. Enlarging the doorway on the card (center and far right) and comparing it to the doorway in the book illumination (near right), there may be something there corresponding to the red devil of the illumination. Oddly enough, the impression is stronger from the black and white image in Kaplan's book than in the colored scan from Budapest.  [36]  In any case, if something is there, it would be natural to make the association. The card of Ferrara or Venice would seem to be a "house of the devil."

In the Lydgate illustration, the tower looks like a Moslem minaret, as it does in the relief at Amiens. To some Christians, that would also have qualified it as a "house of the devil." They were destroying minarets in formerly Muslim Spain (unlike Muslims’ toleration of Christian places of worship). To other Christians, more ecumenically minded, the minaret might just signify another “house of God.”

The 15th, 16th and 17th centuries were times of great religious turmoil and warfare between those of different beliefs, starting with Hus in Bohemia and continuing with the followers of Luther and Calvin. By 1650, Europeans had gone through a century of destroying each other’s churches, in the wars between Protestants and Catholics.[37] There were more than enough houses “of the devil" and "of God" to go around. Hieronymus Bosch, c. 1504, in the background of The Temptations of St. Anthony, shows a church being destroyed by devils; but the scene is also like his visions of hell or the conflagration by fire that the Bible predicted for the end-time, or so it must have seemed.[38]

The image of the tower hit by God's wrath, whatever specific other interpretations are made, also corresponds to one of Giotto's vices in the chapel he decorated in Padua, ca. 1305, far right. It is the vice of Inconstancy, which he represented as a woman trying to stay upright on a floor that has suddenly tilted or shaken, as though hit by an earthquake; her loss of footing is similar to that of the men in the Bolognese version presented at the top of this essay. The building, and consequently the lady, are shaking and unsteady, like someone's inconstant faith in the face of temptation or adversity.[39]

At some point, the Florentine expanded tarot known as minchiate developed its version of the card, which remained stable for centuries. In the center above is an example from around 1850-1890, although the template goes back earlier, reportedly to 1664.[40] It shows a distraught woman leaving the tower, followed by a man with his hand on her head. Her pose is similar to a famous Florentine fresco by Masaccio of c. 1428 depicting the expulsion from Eden (detail, left above). [41] Given that the fresco was done in the mid to late 1420s, and that Masaccio’s younger brother nicknamed "Lo Scheggia" (the Splinter) was a known card maker, it may be that the borrowing was not only intentional but goes back that far.[42]Whenever it happened, the scene is different from Masaccio’s. The Tower behind the woman is not the Garden of Eden; in fact, in minchiate the card was known as “The House of the Devil.” So she must be trying to escape. 

In France the "House of the Devil" became the "Maison-Dieu," changing the Devil to God. How did this happen? According to Andrea Vitali, the expressions "House of the Devil" and "House of God" have the same colloquial meaning in Italian, in each case a place far away.[43] So an easy confusion, going from one country to another. Other possibilities are a derivation from "Bethel" (literally, "God-house"), the word for stones fallen from heaven. Also, the minchiate tower might have been misinterpreted as a gate to the Garden of Eden, by someone who knew the Masaccio image but not the card's real title, since it wasn't written on the card.

Tarot history pioneer Gertrude Moakley speculated that perhaps the title “maisondefie,” which she found listed in an 1886 German catalog, had led to the name “Maison-Dieu."[44] Noblet had used the latter term in the 1660s, long before 1886, but perhaps the word Moakley saw was the corruption of a previous term that somehow survived. Similarly, Thierry Depaulis proposed that perhaps it had been “Maison De Feu,” House of Fire, misread as “Maison-Dieu.”[45] 

Whatever the explanation, I don't think we can just write off the title "Maison-Dieu" as a mistake; it was used repeatedly and so acquired a life of its own with its own contribution to the card's meaning.

In medieval France, the term maison followed by dieu did mean something besides the card. As "maison de Dieu"(at right, from the Grande Robert dictionnaire de la langue française, 1986) it referred to the Temple of Jerusalem ,[46] which God allowed to be destroyed twice; at the crucifixion, moreover, its veil was rent in lightning and earthquake. It also, by extension referred to any church, sanctuary, or temple. Another dictionary gives "maisun dieu" as "temple, tabernacle" (https://www.cnrtl.fr/definition/maison, search "dieu").

Also, the term "Maison-Dieu" was equivalent to "Hotel-Dieu," as can be seen at the end of the top dictionary entry at right, and also in the online entry just linked to. The bottom entry at right tells us that a Hotel-Dieu was a hospital or hospice, that is. a place where people were cared for until they either got better or died, a kind of Last Days scenario on a personal level. The term meant the same in England, as can be verified in the Oxford English Dictionary.[47]

In this connection there is a sixteenth-century depiction of the twelve astrological houses utilizing scenes that suggest the tarot, far right.[48] For the sixth house, that of sickness, it has a man in bed being visited by two others, while a dog, probably belonging to the man in bed, looks on mournfully. That scene of personal catastrophe, requiring a renewal of faith, seems to explain, in the Noblet Maison-Dieu (near right), why smoke from the tower seems to reach up toward the source of the lightning. In this version, the tower seems an image of the mortal human as a House of God. The Viéville (center) can be seen similarly. The shepherd's upraised hands as a pleading to God, not merely to be spared but to be accepted into the New Jerusalem.

The horoscope designer might have had the phrase "Maison-Dieu" (even at this early date) and not the image. If so, a man in a sick bed being visited by two others and his dog would fit. It is at such times that one gets a message from one's body: death is not so far away as you think. So repudiate the Devil now and be saved. In Jesus, the light from above, the Devil is defeated, if one chooses in time.

The choice, before death, is the Christian response to the first of the “four last things,” death, judgment, heaven, hell.[49] It is the flame reaching toward heaven. The two figures that we see outside the tower are not necessarily souls damned for eternity: one may be falling into water; Flornoy's restoration colors the bottom of the image blue (near right). In Dodal's card, c. 1708 Lyon (center), and that of Conver, 1761, he falls onto hard ground, but his fingers penetrate the surface as though it were water. The other may not have fallen at all, but crawled out of a door that we do not see. There is hope.[50]

The motif of the deathbed repudiation of the devil was not uncommon in art in Schoen's time. For example, there is Bosch's famous painting Death and The Miser, of which the relevant detail is at right.[51] A devil seems to be offering the man some kind of deal, such as recovery and the opportunity to make even more money, while the angel is counseling him to consider his immortal soul. In this interpretation, "Maison-Dieu" is both the hospice and another God-House, the human body, made by God in his own image.

In the Noblet and other Tarot de Marseille Maison-Dieu cards (above), the tower has three windows. With the title “Maison-Dieu” one would think immediately of the Trinity. These windows also associate the card with the story of Saint Barbara. In the legend, her father kept her locked in a tower, but also commanded that a bathhouse be built for her.[52] A devout Christian, in his absence she had three windows put in it, representing the Trinity. Her pagan father had her dragged before the authorities, where she was tortured and thrown into prison, which was filled with light during the night. Her father carried out her sentence of beheading personally, but on the way home he was killed by lightning.

This story has four images related to the card: the tower that was her home, the bathhouse with its three windows, her prison filled with light, and her lightning-struck father. Of these the three windows of the Trinity make the bath-house tower a House of God; the light does the same for the prison. turning a place of suffering into a holy temple as well, when Barbara is in it. The tower struck by lightning is in this story the father, a kind of “House of the Devil” whose suffering will presumably continue in hell. Such an outcome is suggested in the minchiate card designed by Giuseppe Maria Mitelli, originally 1664 Bologna.[53]

In one way of seeing the card, then, the fire is a lightning bolt sent by God and the Universe to punish sinners, who have made themselves a "house of the devil", a precursor of the hell to which they are in danger of being sent. Such an example on a card warns others to repent of their ways. On the other hand, as in the case of Job and his servants and shepherds, it can a test of faith for those who remain and a warning that death can come at any time. In Job's case, the more reason to despair, the more the merit in faith. One’s soul thereby becomes a “House of God.” In the Apocalypse, similarly, fire from heaven afflicts good people and evil people alike. For the bad, it is punishment and a warning to repent. For the good, it is a test of their faith.

The Catelin Geoffroy card of 1557 Lyon, with Orpheus losing his Eurydice (far right), is perhaps an example of a test of faith failed.[54] Leaving Hades, Orpheus could not trust that Eurydice was still behind him, and that Hermes was fulfilling his part of the deal. He had to turn around and see for himself, and so she was lost to him. There is not much of a tower, just smoke pouring from either a window or a stack; but it is a “House of the Devil.”

In an Anonymous deck of around 1625 in Paris (near right), there is no tower at all, just a hell-mouth.[55] People seem to be carried off to Hell, the punishment of evil-doers. Or, in the case of the maiden Persephone, daughter of the earth-goddess Demeter abducted by Hades, it is just that the Lord of Hell wants a certain person's company.

Finally, the fire can be seen as a means of purification, an illustration of how we must throw off all our attachments to earthly things. In this case, the falling figures are themselves devils, personifications of these attachments, so that the soul will be light enough to rise to heaven. This interpretation is suggested in part by a comparison of the Tower to the furnaces by which impurities are burnt off raw ore so as to obtain the pure metal, which corresponds to the "athanor” of the alchemists, by which a similar purification was obtained for the "philosophical" metal, as well as for the soul of the alchemist.[56] 

It can also be that the two men are not devils, but rather the purified soul, now escaping the tower of attachments. I get that from a suggestive alchemical drawing in which a living humanoid being is in the air.[57] It may be that he will stick to the side of the flask and be gathered as a precipitate; that is suggested in another alchemical work of the same period, which looks like a devil in the process of transformation. I have put a translation of the Latin beside each of the successive images.[58]

A purifying role is also suggested from its interpretation as the sphere of fire between the air of demons and the celestial bodies, as we have seen advocated by Piscina.[59] Again it burns off attachments that would make the soul too heavy to rise.

In this regard, there is a certain similarity between the tower of the card and the Mount of Purgatory in Dante's Divine Comedy, which had a perpetual fire burning at the top.From very close to the time of the first known card is this fresco in the cathedral of Florence, done in 1465,[60] of which a detail is at right. The fires of Purgatory purify the souls of sinners, so that they will be ready to enter Paradise, which Dante places in the region of the seven planets, of which the first, the Moon, is visible in the detail below.

True, the mountain is hardly crumbling, nor is it struck by lightning, nor do the people on top (Adam and Eve in the terrestrial paradise) show any fear of being thrown off. It is only the mountain's size, the place of the fire, and its position in Dante's story that recommend it as a parallel to the card. Just as the Mount of Purgatory comes immediately after Dante visits the Devil of Hell, so the Tower card is next after the Devil card. And just as at the very top, once past the ring of fire, Dante finds himself dipped in two streams watched over by the lady Mathilda, with the celestial regions overhead, so the Star card, which follows the Tower, shows a maiden pouring out two streams of water beneath the stars.[61]

In the Renaissance and after, there was another account of the journey of the soul that probably seemed like a Platonic predecessor to that of Dante, in one of those precious Greek texts that came from Byzantium, namely Plutarch's Moralia. The last few pages of the essay On the face that appears in the orb of the moon describe the life of the soul after death as an ascent through the space between the earth and the moon, until the lucky ones finally arrive on the surface of that body. He puts Hades, the Greco-Roman Hell, in that space. He says:[62]

All soul, whether without mind or with it, when it has issued from the body is destined to wander in the region between earth and moon but not for an equal time. Unjust and licentious souls pay penalties for their offences; but the good souls must in the gentlest part of the air, which they call "the meads of Hades," pass a certain set time sufficient to purge and blow away the pollutions contracted from the body as from an evil odour. Then, as if brought home from banishment abroad, they savour joy most like that of initiates, which attended by glad expectation is mingled with confusion and excitement.

A footnote refers us to Plutarch's De Genio Socrates, another essay in the Moralia. There we see this "region of the air" described in terms of thunder and lightning:[63]

As the Styx draws near the souls cry out in terror, for many slip off and are carried away by Hades; others, whose cessation of birth [footnote 127: release from the cycle of birth and death] falls out at the proper moment, swim up from below and are rescued by the Moon, the foul and unclean excepted. These the Moon, with lightning and a terrible roar, forbids to approach, and bewailing their lot they fall away and are borne downward again to another birth, as you see.

Those that survive the ascent, however, "go about like victors crowned with wreaths of feathers called wreaths of steadfastness, because in life they had made the irrational or affective element of the soul orderly and tolerably tractable to reason."[64]

It is not hard to see how the above description would work as a Platonic interpretation of the spheres of air and fire, parallel to the Christian Hell and Purgatory, after which come the heavens. Such an interpretation, to be sure, replaces the sun with the moon as the source of the lightning. It is its place in the sequence in the journey of the soul, between Hades and the celestial bodies, that speaks in its favor. So in a sense, from the perspective of Dante and Plutarch, to leave the "House of the Devil"--interpreted broadly to include Purgatory--is the first step in the return to Paradise.

 

5. From de Gébelin to the Occultists

Court de Gébelin, in his famous Egyptian interpretation of the cards, called it "The Castle of Plutus," i.e. the god of wealth.
He comments:[65]

Pour le coup, nous avons ici une leçon contre l'avarice. Ce tableau représente une Tour, qu'on appelle Maison-Dieu, c'est-à-dire, la Maison par excellence; c'est une Tour remplie d'or, c'est le Château de Plutus: il tombe en ruines, & ses Adorateuers tombent écrasés sous ses débris.
A cet ensemble, peut-on méconnoître l'Histoire de ce Prince Egyptien dont parle Hérodote, qu'il appelle Rhampsinit, qui, ayant fait constraire une grande Tour de pierte pour renfermer ses trésors, dont lui seul avoit la clef, s'appercevoit cependant qu'ils diminuoient à vue d'oeil, sans qu'on passât en aucune maniere pat la seule porte qui existât à cet édifice?

This time we have a lesson contra avarice. This tableau represents a Tower, which one calls the House of God, that is to say, the House par excellence; it is a Tower stuffed with gold, it is the Castle of Plutus: it collapses in ruins, and his Worshippers fall crushed under the debris.
In this ensemble, can we ignore the History of that Egyptian prince about whom speaks Herodotus, and whom he calls Rhampsinitus, who, having constructed a great stone tower for holding his treasures, & for which he alone had the key, noticed nevertheless that it diminished before his eyes, without someone passing in any way through the sole door that existed in this edifice?

This story is indeed in Herodotus,[66] about two thieves, sons of the tower's architect, who had provided for them a secret entrance. But unlike in de Gébelin's telling, they did not fling themselves off the tower. One, caught in the Prince's traps, had the other cut off his head to prevent his identity from being known. The other ends up marrying the Prince's daughter. It is only a tale about keeping one's wits about one, whether in thievery or in love.

Herodotus has another story with a tower that I think fits the tenor of the card better, namely his account of the deaths of Cambyses and Prexaspes.[67] Cambyses, king of Persia, conquers Egypt but then commits many atrocities, one of the worst, in the eyes of the Egyptians, is the sacrilege of killing the Apis bull to show his contempt for the Egyptian religion. He then goes mad and, among other things, has his trusted friend Prexaspes kill his brother Smerdis. Leaving Egypt, Cambyses dies of an infection caused by carelessly cutting himself with his own sword in the same place he had stabbed the Apis bull. On the card, he would correspond to the man lying on the ground. Meanwhile, another Smerdis has taken the throne, pretending to be Cambyses' brother. Back in the capital, the false Smerdis calls upon Prexaspes to testify that he is the real brother, counting on him because he was the murderer of the true Smerdis. With the people assembled beneath the highest tower in the city, Prexaspes confesses his crime, denounces the false Smerdis and his supporters, and jumps to his death.

This story, besides fitting the two men, makes them appropriate wearers of the Pharaonic crown. In Noblet's card, the two globes closest to their heads have been transformed into crowns of the typical upper Egyptian shape. In the Dodal, as restored by Flornoy, center, there is only one, less pharaonic, but suitable for Cambyses. By the time of Conver, 1761, both have disappeared.[68]

A short time after de Gebelin, in 1783, came Etteilla:[69]

Nº. 19. La Maison-Dieu. Comme on voit que cette Maison ressemble à la Tour de Montgommery, que l’on vient d’abattre, ou au petit Châtelet que l’on abat, il est bien juste de n’en pas faire, comme les ignorants, le Temple de l’Eternel. Ainsi, comme l’ont témoigné les Egyptiens qui ne l’ont jamais nommée Maison-Dieu, mais Maison des châtiments de Dieu . . . elle signifie Prison, misère.

No. 19. The House of God. As we see that this House looks like the Tower of Montgommery, which has just been knocked over, or a small Castle that has been knocked over, it is very correct not to make it, like the ignoramuses, the Temple of the Eternal. So, as shown by the Egyptians, who never named it Maison-Dieu, but House of the punishments of God . . . it means Prison, poverty.

Etteilla has taken the old meaning of "house of the devil" and put it in the context of the French Revolution, with its storming of the Bastille. It is simply a secular rather than other-worldly place of punishment. That lightning strikes the tower on the left side of the card may suggest the French people as the agents of destruction, perhaps even agents of Providence.

In 1856 Eliphas Lévi gave his short interpretation of the card:[70] 

ע Le ciel de la Lune, altérations, subversions, changements, faiblesses. Hiéroglyphe, une tour frappée de la foudre, probablement celle de Babel. Deux personnages, Nemrod sans doute et son faux prophète ou son ministre j sont précipités du haut en bas des ruines. L'un de personnages, en tombant, représente parfaitement la lettre ע, gnaïn.

ע The heaven of the Moon, alterations, subversions, changes, failings. Hieroglyph, a tower struck by lightning, probably that of Babel. Two persons, doubtless Nimrod and his false prophet or minister, are precipitated from the summit of the ruins. One of the personages in his fall perfectly represents the letter gna'in [Ayin].

This expresses what must have already been obvious, except for the association with the letter Ayin, the 16th letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and the "heaven of the moon." Why the card should be associated with the Moon is not clear, except that since the Death card he has been going down the order, starting with Jupiter and Mars (both) for that card and skipping Venus.

Lévi's disciple Paul Christian is consistent with what came before. For him the key concept is "Ruin," and signifies that[71]

dans le Monde divin, le châtiment de l'orgueil. - Dans le Monde intellectuel, la défaillance de l"Esprit qui tente de pénétrer le mystère de Dieu. - Dans le Monde physique, les écroulements de fortune.

in the divine world the punishment of pride, in the intellectual world the downfall of the Spirit that attempts to discover the mystery of God; in the physical world reversals of fortune.

At the end he adds:[72]

tout épreuve de l'infortune, acceptée avec résignation à la supreme Volunté du Tout-Puissant, est un progrès accompli dont tu seras éternellement récompensée. Souffrir, c'est travailler à se dégager de la Matière, c'est se revêtir de l'Immortalité.

the ordeals of fortune, 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; it is the putting on of the robe of Immortality.

This is the advice that the parable of Job seems to imply.

Papus in 1889 had a slightly different emphasis. The card represents "the invisible or spiritual world, incarnated in the visible and material world" He compares the falling figures to the "materialization of Adam-Eve, who have been spiritualized until now." It is also the "Materialization of God the Holy Spirit . . . the Holy Spirit acting like the God of matter."[73] He assigns the card to Capricorn, but not for any symbolic significance; it is simply the assignment given to that letter by the Sefer Yetzirah, which he had just translated into French.

Oswald Wirth drew the card designed for Papus's book, at far left (the book also came with a set of all 22 cards, in color). As can be seen even in the book’s black and white, there are a couple of innovations. One is the title, "Fire from the Sky" (Ciel, also meaning Heaven), which returns to the previous title of "foudre" and "sagitta," thereby emphasizing the lightning and the medieval sphere of fire. He also turns some of the globes of the TdM card into little yods. As the first letter of "Yod-Heh-Vau-Heh," this might suggest that they represent precisely illumination from God. And one figure is crowned, while the other has his legs more in an "Ayin" shape than in the TdM version, which is perfectly standard except for giving along with the Roman numeral, its Arabic and Hebrew equivalent.

Waite in 1909 (at right) turns all the globes into yods, gave the tower a king’s crown, and said that the scene was that of “the materialization of the spiritual word.”[74] In that case, he added, the two human figures, both falling on his card, represent "those who deny the spiritual word and those who give it a false interpretation." In other words, they are atheists and heretics. On this interpretation, the little yods suggest the Word of God. That they hover next to the two falling figures seems to emphasize that the rays have been sent by God for their salvation. This interpretation is reminiscent of the miracle at Pentecost, in which tongues of fire descend from the sky and the apostles, taken temporarily by the Holy Spirit, speak in strange languages.

Wirth, writing his own book in 1927 about his 1889 card, now augmented with glyphs along the margins, compares the tower to the human body in the context of human society. Hence the flesh-colored bricks. "It is less a house of God than a sacred building of a body mistakenly identified with God."[75] He likens one of the two men on the card to the idealist who attempts “fanciful enterprises,” perhaps “sensitive to feminine charm,” in other words a Don Quixote. He does not realize that “heights attract lightning.”[76] The lightning-bolt, from the sun of reason, brings him
down to earth. Wirth compared the other to the tower’s architect, whose structure collapses with him. It is the self-creation of the individual biologically and socially, which nonetheless must yield to "the service of our spiritual kingdom."[77] The expulsion of the two figures from the tower is then a disaster only for those aspects of the personality, followed by a new beginning, more humbly, with what Wirth called “the wisdom of Sancho Panza.”[78]

Among those dedicated to fanciful ideas he includes the magus who seeks to bend spirits to his will, even in a good cause: “Woe to the vain occultist who imagines himself to be served by invisible entities! His uncertain servants live at his expense and have a hold on him in the same proportion as he has a hold on them.”[79] The card is also a warning against “intolerant Churches that proclaim themselves to be infallible.”[80] That remark seems a jab at Waite, since he made the lightning bolt into the Word that wreaks vengeance on those who distort that Word.

Like others in the French tradition, Wirth associates this card with the sixteenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet, Ayin,
ע. Like Lévi, he sees this letter as resembling a somewhat twisted Y, corresponding to the position of the falling figure on the card. He says that originally the letter had the form of a circle, and so connoted the serpent biting its tail, which in turn connoted both the serpent of the Garden of Eden and that of Asclepius, Greek god of healing.[81]

The Golden Dawn, in contrast, associated the card with a different Hebrew letter, Peh, the seventeenth letter (the first, Aleph, being associated with the Fool); it meant “mouth.”[82] The word suggests communication or, more generally, consumption. Either fits Waite’s characterization of the card, already mentioned, as “materialization of the spiritual word,” as communication or consumption from a spiritual source.[83]

The Golden Dawn associated this card with the planet Mars - an association also seen in one of the Fortues devised by Fanti. It was also the twenty-seventh “path of wisdom” (out of thirty-two), that of “active or exciting intelligence” (from the Sefer Yetzirah), and on the “Tree of Life” the path between Hod and Netzach, as in the example at left.[84] Mars is appropriate in the sense that the lightning flash on the card is full of destructive energy. The path Netzach-Hod is that between "Victory (Endurance, Eternity) and Splendor (Majesty, Glory)" and also, in terms of the planets assigned to them, between Venus and Mercury. With With three planets in play (including Mars), each of which has a variety of interpretations, there is considerable latitude in interpretation, even if the result is usually, somehow, the destruction (Mars) of the old (the tower) and the communication (Mercury) of something new (Venus).

Like Waite, Paul Foster Case was in the Golden Dawn tradition. The tower has 22 rows of bricks, he says, for the 22 Hebrew letters, the basis of speech. It is a “structure of human error and ignorance, yet it is still a House of God.”[85] It is constructed on the basis of “the influence on subconsciousness of our wrong thinking, expressed by erroneous use of words.”[86] The lightning then comes “comes to us when we have faced our problem boldly … with the full force of our attention, and the Life-power does not disappoint.”[87]

The crown at the top of the tower is broken because, although on the Tree of Life it is Kether, the Primal Will, but on this tower it is “a false crown, a symbol of mere usurpation. The primal Will is expressed in the Mars energy of the lightning flash:[88]

Right knowledge begins with a flash of perception which makes us realize that our personal experience is part of the total expression of the Life-power’s activity. However brief this flash may be, it overthrows the notion of a separate personal will; and it also disrupts mental structures based on the error that we are living our lives in perpetual antagonism to the universe and the lives of our neighbors.

Case also comments on the shape the lightning takes: “The Lightning-flash is drawn so that the bolt traces a path down the Tree of life.”

 The Yods floating in air “represent the sum-total of cosmic forces. They also symbolize the Creative Word and the powers of human personality.“[89] That they hang in space symbolizes that the one Life Power is the true cause of all material manifestations.

As for the two individuals, “the man is self-consciousness, the woman is subconsciousness.” And their clothing indicates that ”they hide their true nature from each other.” [90] The Tower is in darkness, because the lightning has revealed their ignorance. But knowing that ignorance, they can remember what they have seen and create “a radical change in their fundamental conception of life.”[91]


6. Two Jungian Amplifications


Sallie Nichols quotes Jung to the effect that "Lightning signifies a sudden, unexpected, and overpowering change of psychic condition."[92] She gives an example from her own life. She was at a conference, and in the morning a small group of them, including "Dr. X," became involved in a discussion of new techniques in cancer therapy. At lunch, she asked Dr. X to comment further on her work. Dr. X replied that she didn't want to talk about it just then and immediately joined some pleasant banter at the other end of the table. Nichols said that the speaker's remark left her "stunned and shocked, exactly as if I had been hit by a bolt of electricity."[93] However, it turned out that the afternoon session began with this Dr. X talking on the same subject. Nichols then understood that Dr. X needed something light before her very heavy presentation. In relation to the Tower card afterward, she noticed that the lightning isn't aimed at the people, but at the tower. Then she could see that if Dr. X had tried to explain herself to Nichols at the time, it would have been like attacking a "fortress," one of her own making, that of her focus on the topic that she wanted to pursue, as though "peering out through tiny slits."[94] In fact, that's why the remark had felt like a lightning bolt; it disrupted her own defensiveness and ego-centeredness, which the tower on the card now symbolized.

Nichols identifies this attitude with the tower rather than with the falling figures. However, it is precisely they who are overpowered, falling from their great height because of their inflation. It is that inflation that in Nichols' example gets punctured like a balloon, in the sense of not taking into account the speaker's own needs. So the falling figures are in fact being liberated from that castle. So far there is nothing of the "divine Word" in this experience; it is, after all, merely the speaker’s own act of self-protection that stuns and humiliates Nichols What it is, however, is a broader picture in which both wills have a place. In that way it leads to a “reconciliation of opposites” capable of being generalized to many such clashes of will. It is not Case’s “one Will,” but a conscious reconciliation of multiple wills.

Nichols does not go on to examine Jung's own amplification of his statement about the meaning of lightning, which goes in a direction more easily related to the tarot theorists. In a footnote, he points to Luke 17:24: "as the lightning that lighteneth . . . so shall the Son of man be in his day." There is also Lactantius: “The light of the descending God may be manifest in all the world as lightning." [95] So far, this is precisely Waite's view. that the lightning is "the materialization of the spiritual Word." However, the context shows that Jung does not have words in mind. 

Jung makes these remarks in the course of discussing the second in a series of spontaneous paintings done by an American woman in analysis with him during the 1920s. She was well-educated in psychology but with no previous inclination to paint. The first in the series showed a woman as though stuck to a rock formation in front of an empty sea.[96]

The second goes about liberating her from those egg-like rocks. She reportedly "had no notion of what picture she was going to paint."[97] It shows a powerful lightning bolt dislodging a round piece of rock from its place in the rock formation. What is just below it is a rock in the shape of a pyramid, which seems to me not far from a tower.

In the next painting, the rock is floating in an empty sky, and the lightning bolt is replaced by a serpent floating nearby.


In Picture 4, the serpent pierces in a phallic way the round rock, whose insides resemble a vaginal canal and uterus. 

In both 3 and 4, there is a red border to the sphere. The patient interpreted that as her defensiveness against change. However, the serpent has been able to penetrate that wall, just as the lightning freed the spherical rock from the rest of the formation.

After that, the serpent goes its own way. In the rest of the series the serpent no longer appears, and paintings focus on development inside the sphere.

It is tempting to give a sexual meaning to the image in Picture 4, with the sphere as the patient and the serpent as Jung. Jung says as much. He starts out by saying that in her first session, she described a fantasy she had had while working on a landscape:[98]: "She saw herself with the lower half of her body in the earth, stuck fast in a block of rock. . . . Then she suddenly saw me in the guise of a medieval sorcerer. She shouted for help, I came along and touched the rock with a magic wand. about which Jung comments:[99]

The sexual symbolism, which for many naive minds is of such capital importance, was no discovery for her. She was far enough advanced to know that explanations of this kind, however true they might be in other respects, had no significance in her case. She did not want to know how liberation might be possible in a general way, but how and in what way it could come about for her.

Hence the series of paintings, in which, yes, "just as the magician has been replaced by the lightning, so the patient has been replaced by the sphere."[100] But what Jung is struck by, in her Picture 2, is the parallel to the 17th-century mystic Jacob Boehme, whom he quotes at length (seven pages, of which I give here just the beginning):[101]

"The flash is the birth of the light." . . . It has transformative power: "For if I could in my Flesh comprehend the Flash, which I very well see and know how it is, I would clarify or transfigure my Body therewith, so that it would shine with a bright light and glory. And then it would no more resemble and be conformed to the bestial Body, but to the angels of God." . . . "The triumphing divine Birth lasteth in us men only so long as the flash lasteth; therefore our knowledge is but in part, whereas in God the flash stands unchangeably, always eternally thus."

Jung is quite clear about the equivalence of the lightning flash in painting 2 to the serpent in painting 3: ". . . the lightning has the same illuminating, vivifying, fertilizing, transforming and healing function that in our case falls to the snake."[102] We can see these changes inside the sphere in the rest of the sequence. But besides all these nice things, there is another side. Jung quotes Boehme's alchemically-tinged comments on Mercurius, the "source-Spirit" that "arises in the fire-flash": [103]

"Mercurius is the animal spirit," which, from Lucifer's body, "stuck in the Saltniter [Note 13: Saltniter = Saltpeter, like salt, the prima materia] of God like a fiery serpent from its hole, as if there were a fiery Thunder-bolt into God's nature, which tyrannizes, raves, and rages, as if it would tear and rent Nature all to pieces."

In the footnote Jung says:[104]

Here the lightning is not a revelation of God's will but a Satanic change of state. Lightning is also a manifestation of the Devil. (Luke 10:18).

Luke 10:18 reads: "I saw Lucifer fall like lightning from heaven." Besides Lucifer, we might think also of the fallen angels that mate with the daughters of men, Satan's cruelties to Job, and of course the snake in the garden.

So a blast from the unconscious is not necessarily the "materialized Word," or even the voice of reason, as Wirth stipulated. Lightning and serpents can represent wisdom and healing (e.g. the serpent on the wand of Asclepius), but also the Devil. In any case, the lightning is very personal, directed only to the one receiving it, and may come only as wordless pictures. It is then up to the rational ego—corresponding to the circumference of the circle of the patient’s picture 3, with the whole circle as the Self--to explore further, get more flashes, i.e. spontaneous visions or images, and try to understand. This is part of what Jung called the individuation process.



7. Conclusion


It is possible for the viewer to identify with several aspects of the card: the tower as the human body, the smoke as the desire to connect with the divine in times of trouble or poor judgment. One can also identify with the two figures expelled from the tower as a kind of coming down to earth after exercising unrealistic or otherwise unfortunate ideas, harmful to oneself or others, and with the tower itself,\ as a defensive attitude. One detail of the card, however, remains an object for the ego not to identify with too closely, namely the lightning bolt itself. The lightning may or may not be inspiration/warning from a higher/more powerful source, or better yet, an opportunity to exercise compassion and integrate the goals of others. As a revelation from the totality of one's being, the Self, it may also be an unconscious impulse of a primitive and unthinking nature, or just another megalomania, which in either case needs taming by reason, like the dark horse of Plato's Charioteer.



[1] Stuart Kaplan, Encyclopedia of Tarot, vol. 2 (New York: U.S. Games Systems, 1986), 186. Also at https://archive.vn/sNZCt.

[2] Ibid., 189, 195.

[3] Pietro Aretino, Le Carte Parlante, ed. Giovanni Casalegno and Gabriella Gioconne (Palermo: Sallario, 1992), 60; Kaplan, vol. 2 (see here note 1), 187; G. Berti and A. Vitali (eds.), Le carte di corte. I tarocchi. Gioco e magia alla corte degli Estensi (Bologna: Nuova Alfa Editoriale, 1987), 108.

[4] For Imperiali, see Franco Pratesi, “Ferrarese Tarot of the 16th century: Invective and answer,” p. 4 at http://naibi.net/A/03-FERRARA-Z.pdf, originally The Playing-Card 15:4 (1987), pp. 128. For the mention in the anonymous Discorso, see Ross Sinclair Caldwell, Thierry Depaulis, and Marco Ponzi, Con gli occhi e con l’intelletto: Explaining the Tarot in Sixteenth Century Italy (lulu.com, 2018), 62 (original) and 63 (trans.).

[5] Kaplan, vol. 2 (see here note 1), 307-309 (Jean Noblet), 191 (Maison Academique).

[6] For Italian examples with French titles, see online “ancient tarots of Bologna.” With Italian titles, see “ancient tarot of Lombardy.”

[7] Kaplan, Encylopedia of Tarot, vol. I (New York: U.S. Games Systems, 1978), 115. Image from Brian Innes, The Tarot: How to use and interpret the cards (London: Black Cat, 1987), 50.

[8] Kaplan, vol. 1 (see here note 7), 131.

[9] Ibid., 129.

[10] Kaplan, vol. 2 (see here note 1), 125.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Jean-Claude Flornoy at http://www.tarot-history.com/Jean-Noblet/pages/la-maison-diev.html. The dating is from Thierry Depaulis, Le Tarot Révélé (La Tour-de-Peilz, Switzerland: Swiss Museum of Games, 2013), p. 39.

[13] Flornoy of preceding note.

[15] Discorso dil S. Fran. Piscina da Carmagnvola, delle Figure de Tarocchi (Discourse of Mr. Francesco Piscina of Carmagnola, on the Order of the Figures of Tarot) in Ross Sinclair Caldwell, Thierry Depaulis, Marco Ponzi, con gli occhi e con l’inteletto (see here note 4), 10-29.

[16] Ibid., 22 (original), 23 (trans.).

[19] Morgan Library MS M.524 fol. 15v, ica.themorgan.org/manuscript/page/30/110814

[21] The Cloisters Apocalypse (Normandy, France:, c.a. 1330), folio 20r. Metropolitan Museum Collection Records, http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/471869, 40th image

[24] I owe this association to Andrea Vitali at http://www.letarot.it/page.aspx?id=128.

[25] Viéville: see here note 1. Flemish card. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tower_(Tarot_card)

[26] Henry Bergen, ed., John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, Part IV (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1927), with frontispiece, http://archive.org/stream/fallofprincesedi04lydguoft#page/n7/mode/2up. Nimrod falling, line 1167 of the poem.

[27] Color image, from ms. Bodley 263, Bodleian Libary, Oxford. My source is Michael J. Hurst, "Pre-Gébelin Tarot History" blog for Fe. 13, 2013, at http://pre-gebelin.blogspot.com/2013/02/lydgate-mans-lot-in-life.html

[28] Illustrations added later:

[29] Innes (see here note 7), 50, note 6.

[30] Jean-Michel David, “Tarot’s Expression of the Numinous,” in the Tarot Studies Newsletter, July 2014, as accessed March 3, 2017: http://newsletter.tarotstudies.org/2014/07/tarot-expression-of-the-numinous/ This is no longer online (as of May 2018). But the photo at Amiens is still online at http://blog.fourhares.com/10/05/2010/conversation-with-enrique-enriquez/, as well as one showing it in the context of other quatrefoils there. The quatrefoil is also in the book of note 33.

[33] Jean-Michel David, Reading the Marseille Tarot (Melbourne, Association for Tarot Studies, 2011). My source is the online course on which this book was based. The line through the middle is from a scratch on the scanner that I used.

[36] See here notes 12 and 27 and associated text.

[41] Masaccio, "Expulsion from the Garden of Eden," https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_from_the_Garden_of_Eden

[42] Franco Pratesi, "Around 1450 - Lo Scheggia's Many-Sided Production," 2013, at http://trionfi.com/evx-lo-scheggia

[43] Andrea Vitali, “The Tower” trans. rev. Michael S. Howard. http://www.associazioneletarot.it/page.aspx?id=128&lng=ENG. Originally "Il Torre," http://www.associazioneletarot.it/page.aspx?id=128&lng=ITA

[44] The Tarot Cards Painted by Bonifacio Bembo for the Visconti-Sforza Family: an Iconographic and Historical Study, (New York: New York Public Library, 1966), 99.

[45] Tarot, Jeu, Magie (Paris: Bibliotheque Nationale, 1984), 36, 64.

[46] Grand Robert Dictionnaire de la Langue Francaise, (Paris: Robert, 1986), s.v. “maison-dieu.”

[47] Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd edition (accessible online at many library sites).

[48] Ernst and Johanna Lehner, Astrology and Astronomy, p. 160

[49] Wikipedia, "Four Last Things," https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_last_things

[50] Noblet: Flornoy (see here note 12). Dodal: http://www.tarot-history.com/Jean-Dodal/pages/16.html. Conver: reproduction of 1761 card, published by Heron, Paris, no date.

[52] The connection is made by “Corsufle” at https://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?p=6245#p6245, March 7, 2010. For the legend, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Barbara

[53] Dating by Kaplan vol. 1 (see here note 7), 53. Reproduced by Dal Negro, image from "Mitelli Tarot," http://www.tarotpassages.com/mitelli.htm

[55] Ibid.

[56] Altus, Mutus Liber (La Rochelle, 1677). In Stanislas Klossowski de Rola, The Golden Game (London: Thomas and Hudson, 1988), 276. Noblet image, Flornoy (see here note 12).

[57] Folio 40 of Ms. 29, Wellcome Institute, London, as reproduced in Laurinda Dixon, Bosch (London, Phaedon Press, 2004), p. 256. Noblet image, Flornoy (see here note 12)

[58] Johann Daniel Mylius, Anatomia auri (Frankfurt, Lucas Jennis, 1627). In de Rola, 203, note 51, with inscription translated on 207.

[59] For Piscina, see here note 15.

[61] Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio, Canto 28, lines 126ff, in English at http://www.italianstudies.org/comedy/Purgatorio28.htm. A good explanation is at .https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eunoe.

[62] Plutarch, Concerning the Face which Appears in the Orb of the Moon, in his Moralia vol. xii, 1957 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press ), 201, at 943D. Online at http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Moralia/The_Face_in_the_Moon*/D.html

[63] Plutarch, De Genio Socrates, in his Moralia, vol. VII (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), 469-471, at 591B, online at http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Moralia/De_genio_Socratis*/B.html#ref124

[64] Plutarch of note 62, 203, at 943D.

[65] http://www.tarock.info/gebelin.htm. Trans. from J. Karlin, Rhapsodies of the Bizarre: The Tarot Essays of Antoine Court de Gébelin & M. le Comte de Mellet (jk@jktarot.com, 2002), 29, from original on Gallica (Gebelin, Le Monde Primitif, vol. 8, p. 376 ).

[66] Herodotus, Histories, 2.121. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhampsinit

[68] Noblet: Flornoy, see here note 12. Dodal: http://www.tarot-history.com/Jean-Dodal/pages/16.html. Conver: reproduction by Heron, Paris, no date, from original in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.

[69] English translation from "Etteilla's Third Cahier and Supplements: Translation & Commentary", blog by Michael S. Howard, http://thirdcahier.blogspot.com/. French original, from Etteilla, Manière de se récréer avec le jeu de cartes nommées Tarots, pour servir de troisième cahier à cet ouvrage par Etteilla (Paris, 1783), at http://tarotforum.net/showthread.php?t=180963

[70] Eliphas Lévi (aka Alphonse Constant), Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, Parte 2 (Paris: Bailliere, 1861), 352-353; trans. Waite as Transcendental Magic: Its Doctrine and Ritual, 368, both in archive.org.

[71] Paul Christian (aka Jean-Baptiste Pitois), L’Histoire de la Magie du Monde Surnaturel et de la Fatalité a travers les Temps et les Peuples (Paris: Furne, Jouvet & Cie., 1870), 125 ; trans. James Kirkup and Julian Shaw as The History and Practice of Magic, New York: Citadel Press, 1963), 107, both in archive.org.

[72] Ibid.

[73] Papus, Tarot of the Bohemians, trans. A. P. Morton, revised and with a preface by A. E. Waite (reprinted New York: Arcanum Books, 1958), 168-169. Originally Tarot des Bohemiens, Paris 1889. Both in archive.org.

[74] E. A. Waite, Pictorial Key to the Tarot, Part II, section 2, http://www.sacred-texts.com/tarot/pkt/index.htm.

[75] Oswald Wirth, Tarot of the Magicians (San Francisco: Weiser, 1985), 128. Originally published as Les Imagiers des Moyen-Age, Paris 1927.

[76] Ibid, 129.

[77] Ibid.

[78] Ibid, 130.

[79] Ibid, 129

[80] Ibid, 130.

[81] Ibid.

[83] See here note 74.

[84] There are many websites with these assignments; I have not yet traced them to an authoritative source. The one where I got the diagram is http://yetzirahgames.com/blog/2017/11/15/the-differences-between-lurianic-kabbalah-and-hermetic-kabbalah.

[85] Tarot Fundamentals (Los Angeles, Builders of the Adytum, 1936), lesson 36, p. 2.

[86] Ibid.

[87] Ibid., p. 1.

[88] Ibid., p. 3.

[89] Ibid.

[90] Ibid.

[91] Ibid., p. 5

[92] Sallie Nichols, Jung and Tarot (York Beach ME: Weiser, 1980), 29. The quotation is from Jung's essay "A Study in Individuation" in Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, vol 9i of the Collected Works (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), 295 (paragraph 533), online in archive.org. Originally "Zur Empirie des Individuationprozesses," in Gestaltungen der Unbewussten (Zurich, 1950), an enlarged and revised version of a lecture in the Eranos-Jahburch 1933, published 1934, translated by Stanley Hall as part of Jung's Integration of the Personality, New York, 1939.

[93] Nichols (see here note 92), Ibid.

[94] Ibid., 292.

[95] Jung (see here note 92), p. 295, note 7.

[96] Ibid. The paintings are presented as color plates inserted between pages 292 and 293

[97] Ibid., 294

[98] Ibid, 291.

[99] Ibid., 291-292.

[100] Ibid, 301.

[101] Ibid, 295-296.

[102] Ibid., 314.

[103] Ibid., 296.

[104] Ibid, 296 note 14.

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