CARTOMANCERS, SORCERESSES AND COURTESANS
Nigel Jackson
In the 18th century, out of the milieu of French Freemasonry, with its quest for emblematic survivals of ancient wisdom, the Protestant theologian Antione Court de Gebelin, an initiate of the Lyons lodge of the Rite of the Pilatheses with its twelve grades (itself a successor to Don Martinez de Pasqually’s theurgic Order of Chevalier Masons of the Elus Cohen), advanced his theory that in the quaint and curious images of the old game of ‘Les Taraux’ (Tarot) was preserved nothing less then the remnants of the hieroglyphic Book of Thoth, containing the esoteric wisdom of the Egyptian temples. Promoting this theory in his multi-volume work Le Monde Primitif (The Primitive World), an encyclopaedic attempt to trace the putative primordial tradition of antiquity, de Gebelin also presented an essay by the Comte de Mellet, who opined a connection with the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Thus in 1773 the edifice of what playing card historians are pleased to term the ‘occult Tarot’ was raised. A structure to which the occultists of the 19th century, beginning with Eliphas Levi, would enthusiastically add their own phantastical reveries, embellishments and arcane elaborations. The official line is that the playing cards had no ‘occult’ connotations until Court de Gebelin invested them with his speculative content and that they were not used for sortilege or divination before the 18th century.
Yet Antione de Gebelin’s influential theories, largely tendentious as they might have been in a direct matter of historical fact, seem to reflect an impulse within the esoteric higher grades of so-called ‘Red Masonry’ in 18th century France to decipher the remnants of hieroglyphic knowledge and unearth the mysteries of the fabulous ages of antiquity that the Masonic Craft laid claim to as its heritage. The possibility that de Gebelin was picking up on symbolic speculations regarding the Tarot that were circulating in the occult-tinged Freemasonry of his day remains plausible.
However, it would seem that elusive hints of the magical application of the humble cards before the 18th century may have provided grist for the mills of these learned gentlemen of the ‘Siecle des Lumieres’ and set the course for their occultist successors such as Ettiella, Eliphas Levi, Papus and Oswald Wirth. In 1577 the French Protestant theologian Pierre de Primaudaye had written of card play in his era, which he said was initiated by the player kissing the card representing the Roman god Mercury, the inventor of the cards, and pouring a splash of wine as a libation, doubtless to bring luck to the mercurial fortunes of the gamester. One might surmise that the card representing Mercury was trump one, ‘Le Bataleur’ or ‘The Magician’. In any case de Primaudaye regarded these practices with some disfavour in the light of their connotations of pagan idolatry.
It is worth noting that in the English translation of Henry Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim’s De Occulta Philosophia (The Occult Philosophy), published in 1651, we find a passage in which it is asserted that the ‘demon Theutus’, the Egyptian Thoth-Hermes no less, ‘taught cards and dice’, an opinion actually derived from Plato’s notions about Thoth having invented dice. And just as dice are used in divinatory practise the world over from Central Europe to the Himalayan plateau so we find that the cards lent themselves very well to divining the future – after all both gaming and divination depend upon the unfathomable cycles of fate and fortune and the mysterious whims of Lady Luck. The term ‘sorcery’ (Old French’ sorcellerie’) itself derives from ‘sortilege’ and ‘sortes’, the practice of casting lots. Giovanni Francesco Pico della Mirandola, the nephew of the celebrated Renaissance magus Pico Della Mirandola, took a hostile stance towards astrology and all variety of divinatory methods and amongst those mantic techniques that earned his censure he condemned ‘painted cards’.
Robert Chambers has stated that ‘In the museum of Nantes there is a painting, said to be by Van Eyck, representing Phillipe le Bon, Archduke of Austria, and subsequently King of Spain, consulting a fortune-teller by cards.’ According to Chambers, this painting dates from the 15th century. A 14th century poem called Spagna Istoriata features an episode in which the warrior hero Roland divines the location of the forces hostile to Emperor Charlemagne of the Holy Roman Empire. He does it in a ritual that involves laying out a pack of cards around a magical circle, which Tarot writer Paul Huson has said is our ‘first literary allusion to divination by playing cards.’
From evidence cited in Witchcraft and the Inquisition in Venice 1550- 1650 by Ruth Martin (1989) we can see that magical usage of the cards was present in certain cases pursued by the Inquisitors in 16th century Venice. We find the recorded use of the Tarocchi cards by sorceresses and courtesans such as Isabella Bellochio who in 1589 was accused of having lit a holy votive lamp before the card ‘Ill Diablo’ (‘The Devil’) in her house as part of her magical shrine, which burned continuously before ‘the Devil and the Tarocchi.’ The agents of the Holy Office in Venice were also hot on the heels of another sorceress called Angela, who had said to her client that “You need to adore the Devil if you want help.” She advised her to use the Tarot trump ‘Ill Diablo’ in the performance of the required spells.
These practices of Venetian folk sorcery find an echo some centuries later in the charms used by the witches of Tuscany in northern Italy recorded by Charles Godfrey Leland in his Etruscan Roman Remains in Popular Tradition (1892) and also noted by Paul Huson in his work The Devil’s Picture Book (1972): ‘Jano is a spirit with two heads, one of a Christian (i.e. human), and one of an animal, and yet he hath a good heart, especially that of the animal, and whoever desires a favour from them should invoke (deve pregarle) both, and to do this he must take two cards of a tarocco pack, generally the Wheel of Fortune and the Diavolo Indiavolato, and put them on the iron (frame) of the bed and say:-
Diavolo che sei capo,
Di tutti i diavoli!.
La testa ti voglio stiacciare,
Fino che o spirito Jano,
Per me non vai a pregare!
( Thou devil who art chief,
Of all the fiends!
I will crush thy head,
Until the spirit of Jano,
Thou callest for me.) ‘
Jano is here plainly enough Janus, who was of yore a god of chance and fortune, and who was descended legitimately and naturally, as surveying the past and future, to association with cards.’ As an appeal to Janus, Lord of the Gates, to ‘open the way’ to magical success or any attempt to attract the proverbial ‘luck of the Devil’, this Tuscan spell chimes curiously with the sorceries of Isabella Bellochio among the courtesans of 16th century Venice, whose other divinatory speciality was the use of beans drawn at random from a bowl to generate a geomantic chart. We might also note that in Leland’s Aradia-the Gospel of the Witches (1899) that in the ‘Vangelo della Strege’ one of the powers that the goddess Aradia bestows upon her own is the skill ‘ to divine with cards’. Leland furthermore describes a spell invoking the old Latin goddess Larvena in which forty cards, probably the forty trumps of the Minchiate deck, are laid out on a table with the words: “ I spread before me now the forty cards/ Yet tis’ not the forty cards which I here spread/ But forty of the gods superior…” These indicators seem to point towards a persistent use of the cards in Italian folk magic, witchcraft and sorcery as part of the traditional impedimenta of the wizard or sorceress.
As the earliest Tarot decks appeared in Lombardy, and the four-suited ‘Quartes Sarrasines’ (Saracen cards) derived from the Muluk-wa-Nawwab decks of the Mamluk Middle East and North Africa were likely adopted by way of Venice, we see a pragmatic early adoption of cards as a highly utile instrument of prophecy and magic, already intimately associated with the imponderable mysteries of Fate and the capricious powers of Mercury, their mythic inventor, divine trickster and master of the hidden magical arts. It might be worthwhile to note that in the famous engraving entitled The Sorceress by Jan van der Velde (1626) at the foot of this wild scene of midnight nigromacy, beneath the enchantress pouring strange philtres into her cauldron amid grimoires and skulls, there sits a pipe-smoking demon handling a pack of cards.
Furthermore we might also note an association between cards and sorcery was seemingly well established in parts of Europe. The Slovanian word ‘vedavica’, for instance, denotes both a witch and a fortune-teller by cards. In contemporary Romania (Transylvania) the connection between witches and cartomancy continues among the gypsy community. One contemporary Romani witch called Margareta in the town of Targu Jiu is famous for reading fortunes with playing cards and also for spells and exorcisms using holy water, herbs and a magical knife, services that draw crowds of clients. According to the Bucharest journalist Silvia Radan, who interviewed her in 2001: ‘She says that thirty years ago she had a dream: an old woman came to her and told her she would finds a pack of playing cards in her husband’s fur coat and she should take it. The next morning she did search the fur coat and, indeed, found a pack of cards.’ Her divinatory method involves the querant making a cross three times with his right hand on the pack of cards while a rhyming incantation referring to the querant as the ‘Red King’ is intoned. Interestingly, Robert Chambers had asserted in the 19th century: ‘The smallest village in England contains at least one ‘card cutter’, a person who pretends to presage future events by studying the accidental combinations of a pack of cards.’
The mysterious Tarot cards, from their passage from the Far East through Central Asia into the Islamic world of the Mamluk and Ayubbid dynasties, their adoption from the Moors via Saracenic contacts into medieval Europe and their expansion in Lombardy, with twenty-two trumps depicting a hierarchic ‘imago mundi’ (world image) and ‘via salvationis’ (way of salvation) of Catholic and Neoplatonic stations of the soul, incorporating the Stoic cardinal virtues and classical number symbolism, eventually became a fashionable game among Renaissance nobility. Thus they were diffused throughout Europe as a method of obtaining oracles by sortilege and as an instrument of magical practises. All these phases form the fascinating tale of the cards as a symbolically rich and highly flexible medium of spiritual and mantic technique that spans both the learned culture of the High Middle Ages and the Renaissance and the popular methodologies of European folk magic alike. Their profound spiritual content as religious and allegorical images and inherent cosmological structure naturally lent itself to magical and divinatory practices at the highest and inmost levels in a wholly pragmatic manner.
Biographical note: The writer is a magus, taromancer and artist and the author of books on celestial magick, the runes, vampires and traditional witchcraft. He produced and illustrated The Nigel Jackson Tarot and is currently developing his own version of the Moroccan Tarot for publication. He is a regular contributor to TC.