This text is taken from my book Ideology of the Tarot.
If you want to buy this book, write to dorijan.nuaj@gmail.com
Although altered by later interventions from
occultists and trendsetters, the tarot still holds its secret and watches over
its alchemist. It is evident that the fervor and fanaticism of revolutions and
the Enlightenment did not suddenly emerge in 18th-century Europe but have their
origins in the decadence of the Middle Ages and the tide of the Reformation. Ioan Culianu wrote in his book Eros and Magic in
the Renaissance that modern Western civilization is a product of the
Reformation in Europe. Although stripped of religious content, Luther’s and
Calvin’s Reformation retained its conventions and rituals. On a theoretical
level, Culianu states, the censorship of the imaginary resulted in the advent
of modern exact science and technology. Practically, this led to the
establishment of modern institutions. On a psychological level, according to
Culianu, the consequence of this process is evident in the chronic neuroses of
modern Westerners, caused by the entirely unilateral orientation of Reformation
culture and its principled rejection of the imaginary. Based on these insights
from Culianu, among others, we can conclude that the predominant civilization
of today, which is modern Western, is actually a secularized form of the
Reformation movement, its values, and mentality. The Reformation is its mother,
not humanism and the Renaissance, whose basic assumptions it refuted in concert
with the opposing Counter-Reformation forces of papal Rome. Catholics and
Protestants unexpectedly found themselves in a natural alliance against the
last glimmers of ancient times, embodied in figures and works such as Marsilio
Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Giordano Bruno, and others.
Culianu states that the revolutionary spirit and
customs of the Reformation led to the destruction of Renaissance ideals. The
Renaissance worldview perceived the entire universe as a spiritual organism
where a constant movement of phantasmic messages occurred. The Renaissance
inherited a magical and erotic view of the world because, as Culianu asserts,
Eros itself belongs to the magical. The Reformation, according to Culianu, did
something different. He explains that when the religious values of the Reformation
lost all their effectiveness, its theoretical and practical opposition to the
spirit of the Renaissance gained cultural and scientific interpretation. Since
then, Western humanity has taken as fact that the imaginary and the real are
two separate and distinct spheres. In this sense, magic became a form of
absorption into fantasy as an escape from reality. The fate of Giordano Bruno
is a clear indicator of the triumph of the Reformation's rationalist mentality.
Regarding Bruno’s fate, Culianu said that he was far from being a man of the
future misunderstood in his time. Bruno, as Culianu asserts, was misunderstood
precisely because he belonged to a subtle past, too complex for the new,
rationalist spirit. Bruno was a follower of those who inherited the most
elusive secret of the phantasmic era – mnemonics and magic. Giordano Bruno is
suitable to the modern mentality mainly because the obscurantism of his time
burned him at the stake and because he defended Copernicus, linking
heliocentrism with the idea of an infinite universe. Most of his work today is
incomprehensible and incompatible with the mental schemas and standards of the
current dominant thought.
The magical worldview is now unacceptable and
incompatible with the prevailing intellectual and ideological order. In fact,
even in Bruno's time and before, the magical worldview was deemed unacceptable
and considered a superstitious remnant of the Middle Ages by many spirits
inclined toward the emerging perspectives of secularism and atheism. For
example, many humanists, especially Erasmus of Rotterdam, held such a view. To
understand this, we must consider the general state of mind of that time. György
Endre Szönyi, in his book John Dee and the Doctrine of Exaltation, pointed out
that early 16th-century Renaissance magic was unacceptable to Christian
humanist philologists from the Protestant North, like the aforementioned
Erasmus, because the proponents of that magic inherited a specific, syncretic,
and scholarly worldview devoid of dogmatism. As such, they were like free
radicals, lacking foundation in the current political-ideological moment.
Szönyi says that reformers, like Luther, Calvin, or radical anti-Trinitarians,
were firmly tied to their communities and always acted as their representatives
against other clearly defined groups. In contrast, mystically-oriented
humanists awaited the end of all doctrinal divisions and aspired to a
universal, syncretic religion. In the activities of mystical humanists, we can
find the seeds of secret societies like the Rosicrucians, but, as Szönyi notes,
we never encounter mass movements or tightly organized groups as is the case
with clearly defined Reformation movements. Furthermore, Szönyi emphasizes that
individuals dedicated to heterodox mysticism always troubled those in power.
Therefore, they could not find peace either in their communities or among their
rivals. Why did these brilliant Renaissance mystics provoke so much
hostility? Szönyi explains that the reason lies in the individualism emanating
from the magical-esoteric mindset, particularly its universalism. This
universalism disrupted the interests of various groups and communities.
Additionally, the secrecy and language shrouded in dark allegories and
mysteries aroused fear of conspiracies.
Explaining why a genius like Isaac Newton never
published his alchemical works, despite dedicating most of his time to them,
Ioan Couliano highlights that the psychological and even physical repression
imposed by the Church Reformation was of the same magnitude as the terror of
the French and Soviet revolutions. The Reformation associated the ancient
mnemotechnics, the art of memory that is fundamental to the magical worldview,
with Catholicism and paganism, as mnemotechnics often relied on the creation of
certain imaginative images, which largely followed the zodiac. Therefore,
Protestants adopted a poorer concept of the art of memory without images,
seeing imaginative images as phantasmic idols, a form of idolatry prohibited by
their dry interpretation of the Bible. Everything created in the imagination,
everything envisioned, is an idol, entirely contrary to Aristotle’s view that
understanding means observing phantasms. The Vatican also adopted this view for
opportunistic reasons, leading to the essential victory in building the new
world we live in today being claimed by Protestantism, namely Luther, Calvin,
and their later ideological descendants. The Reformation did not bring about
the liberation and revival of the ancient science nourished by the new enthusiasm
of an extraordinary generation of geniuses but rather a new form of suppression
and loss in specializations. This led to one-dimensional rationality.
Magic was initially associated with the devil,
and today with madness or irrationality. Magic has been pushed to the margins
but has managed to find its way into the very center of the civilizational
complex, entering film, art, literature, music, and even fashion. We witness a great hunger for
the occult and the phantasmic. This hunger is what tarot owes its popularity
to, even though the predominant spirit of today views tarot cards as the
artistic expression of superstition. What is tarot but condensed codes in the
form of images, mnemotechnical aids whose purpose is to remember the forces and
relationships in the universe. They are symbolic elements of mapping the microcosm and the
macrocosm and the connections between them. Knowing these cards is the basis
for a large and complex superstructure of associative connections and
correspondences that reveal the mechanism of nature, linking everything to
everything else. Tarot is a complete phantasmic mechanism, a collection of
images that cover the universe. The same can be said for zodiacal images,
representations of individual degrees of the zodiac circle, images of planetary
gods, astrological decans, magical images of Kabbalistic sephiroth, and so on.
Phantasmic images are reflected in the mirror of
the mind, in our inner vision, on the mental screen—however we may call it.
Without these images, we are unable to understand. Reflection is at the very
essence of understanding. This aligns with Aristotle’s principles, but also
with the Kabbalistic idea of the sefirah Binah, which means understanding and
is associated with the nature of Saturn. According to Kabbalistic
understanding, Binah is the "great motherly sea," or the great mirror
on whose surface we observe reflections of things. Thus, our soul, which is
deaf and blind to the external world, observes this same external world through
the mirror of the mind, which is connected to the physical senses, but not
directly—rather, through phantasms. The mind creates phantasms, or
"interprets" immediate light and other impressions from the external
world, turning them into images that the soul then understands through inner
vision by observing them in the mirror of the mind. Phantasmic images are the
language of the soul. Hence, imagination rules over reason because the soul
rules over the mind, and through the mind, over the body, making it alive. The
body transmits the absorbed light through the senses to the mind, which then
shapes this light into a phantasmic image, forming the basis of perception.
Thus, the principle of Reason’s dominance is, in a way, an absurd stance and
represents the expression of the historical victory of Reformation Reason over
ancient and Renaissance Imagination. Instead of aspiring to the principle of
Imagination’s rule, the world has stepped into the abstract dominance of
Reason, which has led to the replacement of phantasmic images with purely
rational concepts. Interpretations have taken the place of visual perceptions,
and relativization has replaced clarity. Abstract principles are easily lost
from view since they lack a form that would be more easily engraved in the
mind. Images, once well engraved, remain there forever. Hence, the impression
that the modern world is soulless, but this is the price of advanced
civilizational progress.
However,
magic has survived, manifesting itself in today's world wrapped in many secular
activities and principles. I am not talking here about some magical revival and
the accompanying faddism that has seen a real boom in our time, but about
deliberate and targeted actions on individuals and masses that can be described
as magical. Principles of political, ideological, and economic propaganda,
influence on consciousness through media and internet content—all these are
forms of direct action based on magical principles. Magic, says Ioan Culianu, is aimed
at the imagination, seeking to leave lasting impressions. Exposed to an endless
flow of images and accompanying sounds, today's generations have been shaped in
a systematic and, I would say, insidious manner. Through manipulation of Eros,
an invasive phantasmic erotization, human consciousness is steered in the
direction desired by those who carry out the manipulation. Although it is hard
to say whether the manipulators themselves are victims of their own manipulation,
or if they are, it is even harder to say whether they know what the ultimate
consequences will be. I think that, even if they know or suspect, they simply
do not care. Their primary interest is immediate gain and the maintenance of
already established patterns to secure current and short-term future benefits
and advantages, resembling kicking a can down the road. Their power speaks
through their actions. The aim of power is control, and to succeed in this,
power must transform people into a crowd. As social psychology pioneer Gustave
Le Bon says, from the moment individuals become a crowd, both the ignorant and
the knowledgeable become equally incapable of observation.
