This text is taken from my book Ideology of the Tarot.
If you want to buy this book, write to dorijan.nuaj@gmail.com
In the search for the Kabbalistic sources of
tarot, we cannot overlook some well-known figures. As is known, Giovanni Pico
della Mirandola was the first in the Christian West to write about Kabbalah,
relying on translations of Hebrew texts into Latin done for him by the learned
Jewish convert Raymondo Moncada (known as Flavius Mithridates). In a way,
Mirandola is the father of the so-called Christian Kabbalah, but its
significant codifier or editor was the famous Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, who
greatly influenced the understanding of Kabbalah among later occultists. It is
also worth mentioning Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, who included Kabbalistic
magic in his famous and influential book De Occulta Philosophia (Antwerp,
1531). However, it should be noted that neither Mirandola nor Agrippa mentioned
tarot even once. Lastly, in the context of the development of Christian
Kabbalism and the general opening of Kabbalah outside Jewish initiatory
circles, Johannes Reuchlin, a Catholic humanist and follower of Mirandola, is
worth mentioning, as well as Francesco Giorgi (who influenced the work of
Athanasius Kircher and his understanding of Kabbalah, as Kircher's schemes were
derived from Giorgi's book De Harmonia Mundi (1525), Balthasar Walther, whose teachings
influenced Jakob Böhme, and the famous Christian Knorr von Rosenroth, author of
the influential Kabbala Denudata (1678), among others. At that time, among
European occultists, Kabbalah was already inseparable from Hermeticism,
astrology, and magic.
At this point, I would like to highlight the Hermetic "memory
theater" of Giulio Camillo. It is a beautifully decorated, picturesque
didactic mnemonic mechanism in the form of a theater, made of wood, designed
for one or a few viewers. Frances Yates described Camillo's memory theater as a
structure meant to reflect the order of eternal truth, where the entire
universe can be memorized through the organic interconnectedness of all its
parts with the eternal order upon which they are based. Similarly, we might say
that the creators of the tarot also wanted their work to reflect the order of
eternal truth. Camillo's theater is too complex to be given the space it
deserves hherere, but I encourage readers to explore this concept and understand
its Kabbalistic-Hermetic foundation and study its similarity to the Mantegna
Tarocchi and the Visconti-Sforza tarot system. These are all visual systems for
memorizing the principles of the universe and developing an analogical way of
thinking, connecting phenomena, beings, and processes within a unified symbolic
whole. In Camillo's theater, as Yates emphasizes, the idea of memory
organically connected with the universe is presented. His theater is based on a
system of forty-nine images, with the observer, standing at the center of the
theater like an actor on a stage, being the fiftieth element. The number
forty-nine is the squared expression of the seven planetary principles. In
Camillo's theater, each planet has seven forms of manifestation represented by
appropriate images, arranged in a specific order. It is a mental machine for
mapping the universe. Camillo's theater, like Kircher's scheme, is divided into
seven main levels, each containing seven sections. The Promethean level
includes skills, science, religion, and law. The Banquet level represents the
separation of elements from water. The Cave signifies the merging of elements.
The creation of the human spirit is set at the level of the three Gorgons. The
level of Pasiphae and the Bull involves the merging of the human soul and body.
The sandals of Mercury describe human natural activities.
In The Art of Memory, Yates points out a
significant change in the art of memory that occurred during the Renaissance.
According to her, although this art still uses loci and images according
to established rules, there was a radical philosophical and psychological
change in its background; it was no longer scholastic but Neoplatonic.
Similarly, Camillo's Neoplatonism was fully infused with Hermetic influences.
Hermeticism, as Yates says, was introduced into the heart of the Renaissance by
Marsilio Ficino. Pico della Mirandola added elements from his popularization of
Jewish Kabbalah in a Christianized form to this foundation. These two types of
cosmic mysticism are related, Yates writes, and thus merged into a form of
Hermetic-Kabbalistic tradition. According to Frances Yates, this sparked a new
direction in the art of memory. From that moment, the human mind and memory, in
a sense, become "divine," as they have the power to grasp the highest
levels of reality through imagination driven by magic. The Hermetic art of
memory thus became occult, becoming a magical instrument. Yates concludes that
only the occult tradition re-embraced the art of memory, expanding it with new
forms and breathing new life into it.
All these
ideas influenced the subsequent development of the tarot, culminating in the
creation of the so-called occult tarot in the 19th and 20th centuries, which is
completely Hermetic-Kabbalistic and astrological. Here lie the roots of modern
occult tarot ideology. This ideology is simultaneously a form of an emerging
speculative and ideological worldview. This worldview took the glittering
symbolic forms that attracted it from the fragments of older perspectives,
embedding them into a completely new and different structure whose purpose was
to indicate a clear and undeniable discontinuity with any old tradition.
