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Two Esoteric Tarots

a reading: a frame built by named hands — the tarot, the lineage claimed for it, and the authority over what the cards are, which is a dispute you can check from outside.

The full post

← home · a reading of one book, with notes
Contents 10 sections
  1. 1. What the book is, and why it needs a reading rather than a quotation
  2. 2. The frame in a hand — the correspondence, the positions, the reader
  3. 3. The claims, and who makes them
  4. 4. The check: a dispute that can be audited from a library
  5. 5. The lineage, and the warrant of an artwork
  6. 6. Counterweights, in the body
  7. 7. The negative finding: safeguard, metered pace, clinical referral
  8. 8. The correction the blog owes
  9. 9. What a reading is for
  10. Notes

Seventh of the readings, one book at its own scale — the first frame the corpus has been asked to read that fits in a hand, two researchers each arguing from their own book, and a centuries-old dispute that can be audited from a library by anyone with no stake in the answer

Seventh of the readings, and the first whose unit is not an argument but an object. The frames series — the frame is a variable through the cosmos that refuses — is about cosmologies: what a culture takes reality to be, whether a frame names an endpoint, whether it leaves a seat. This book is about two decks of cards, and a deck is a frame of a different shape — a fixed table of correspondences, a set of positions, and a reader who supplies the reading. It is a frame you carry in a pocket, lay out on a table and read aloud: the first frame in the series that fits in a hand.

Status. This post reads one source. The quotations are verbatim from the digital text, checked character for character against the file, and cited in the notes by part and by speaker — because this book is a recorded conversation, not a monograph: every claim in it belongs to the person who made it, not to “the book”. Typographic quotes are rendered here as straight ASCII, and dashes are given as em dashes except inside numeric ranges (which keep the file’s en dashes); the spaces the file’s italics markup leaves around punctuation are closed; a quotation’s opening capital is normalised to its position in the sentence; and the source’s footnote numbers are dropped from quotations. The reading of the quotations is an inference, offered as one. The book’s cosmology is not endorsed — nothing here claims the cards carry real magical power, and nothing claims they do not. No living author or scholar is diagnosed, the Dummett-Yates dispute is described as a structure and not adjudicated, and nothing here validates, disqualifies or restricts anyone’s practice.*

1. What the book is, and why it needs a reading rather than a quotation

Two Esoteric Tarots is by Peter Mark Adams and Christophe Poncet, “Convened & with a foreword by César Pedreros”, published by Scarlet Imprint in 2023.1 Its front matter says what it is in the convenor’s own sentence:

“A conversation was convened for the Sagittarius Full Moon of 3rd June 2023. This is the record of that meeting of minds.”2

That sentence governs this reading. The book is twelve parts long and every part opens with a question from Pedreros — a diffident, well-read interviewer in Santiago de Chile, who ends his foreword with a proverb: “Tell me and I’ll forget, show me and I may remember, involve me and I’ll understand.”2 Adams is the author of The Game of Saturn: Decoding the Sola-Busca Tarocchi (2017); Poncet of a forthcoming The Tarot of Marsilio.1 Both have brought a thesis; the convenor has brought a question.3

The blog owes this one a reading because the corpus has never read the tarot, and the tarot is a frame. Every case study in this series has been about an environment: something a person is inside, which supplies the meaning of a state that cannot read itself. A deck of cards is not an environment. It is a thing, and it is used — and because it is a thing it can be exhibited, dated and checked, which is what §4 is about. Two absences belong at the top: the file carries no page numbers, so every reference here is an offset into a 153,097-character text; and this reading never saw the cards.1

2. The frame in a hand — the correspondence, the positions, the reader

Here is the post’s central reading, and it is an inference from the book’s descriptions.

The owned cosmos distilled the series into three questions: does the frame name the endpoint? Is it checkable by someone who does not benefit? And does it leave a seat? A tarot deck answers all three — by being built out of three parts that are not a cosmology at all.

One: a correspondence system — a fixed, finite table in which each card is an attribute. Poncet states one with unusual precision, working from a passage in Ficino’s commentary on Plato’s Timaeus in which the soul is “compared to a triple septenary, so a three times seven structure”:

“A three times seven grid has twenty-one cells, so one for each arcanum of the tarot, given that two of the trumps form a single arcanum: the one that has no name (Arcanum XIII) and the one that has no number (The Fool), forming together the inferior arcanum of Saturn. In this way, the grid could be seen as the hidden structure of the Tarot de Marseille, within which all the trumps could be ordered.”4

That is a table: three levels of being by seven planets, twenty-one cells, one card each — and a closed one, since “If we think of the game as a combinatorial system, you need every part to make it work. So, it’s a complete system and each part has its function.”5 A complete system in which each part has a function is a vocabulary. The cosmos that refuses described “The frame with a correspondence and no endpoint”; this one has both, and the endpoint is small.

Two: a set of positions, described from the far side while Adams decodes an unrelated deck: “Considered in isolation, the cards are inherently polysemous. We therefore need to assemble a group of cards in order to understand how they function together”,6 and again, “The recovery of the ‘sense’ — the cards’ deeper narratives — requires that these figures be grouped together in specific combinations.”5 That is the spread, stated as a requirement: the positions are not in the deck. The deck supplies a vocabulary, the deal supplies the grammar, and the grammar is the part nobody owns.

Three: a reader — and the book’s most exact account of that reader is Adams’s definition of the esoteric, which he grounds not in doctrine but in an occasion: “The ‘esoteric tarot’ rests fully upon a performative occasion; one in which there is a distinct experience of some degree of automatism — whether conceived as entering a state of flow, intuition or external facilitation.” And then this:

“Therein, for a space of time, the reader and the reading appear to occupy two different worlds, the reading appears to have taken on a life, and a direction, of its own.”7

So the deck has a table, a set of positions, and a person who speaks. Does it name the endpoint? Yes — but the endpoint is an utterance. A cosmology names where you are going; a deck names what is the case, now, about a question the querent brought. It is a smaller claim than any frame in the series, and a stranger one: it is made in the first person by someone in the room.

Is it checkable by someone who does not benefit? Here the object does what no cosmology could: it splits the question in two. The table is public, fixed and inert — anyone can check whether a card sits where a table says it sits, and the check changes nothing. The utterance is not checkable, and is issued by someone who benefits from its holding. The owned cosmos required a single check; the deck hands the corpus a checkable component and an uncheckable one welded into one object. Which of the two has been argued over is §4’s answer: the table.

Does it leave a seat? Yes, and this is the reading’s sharpest point — because here the seat is visible. The owned cosmos’s seat is inside the frame and has to be inferred; a deck puts its mediator in the chair opposite you with the cards in their hands. The series’ finding was that “the frame is not the harm. The closed seat is.” A reading is a seat open by default — and it closes at one moment, which Adams’s sentence names exactly: when the reader reports that “the reading appears to have taken on a life, and a direction, of its own.” That is the structural shape of the machine said so: an authority that cannot be argued with, because there is nobody to argue with — except that here there is somebody present, and the automatism claim is what removes them from the line of responsibility. The move which closes this seat is a claim about who is speaking.

And the book supplies the corpus with the adjective. Adams describes time in the Sola-Busca’s ritual programme and reaches for the word twice: “we encounter time in its most instrumental sense”;5 “we find ourselves at a very instrumental end of the spiritual spectrum, one more usually associated with goetia than with classical theurgy.”5 Instrumental is the right word for the whole object. A cosmology is a frame you are in; a deck is a frame you operate. And Adams’s account of the art of memory gives the mechanism by which an operable frame can also be durable, because a transient experience must be encoded so it can be re-run:

“Because of the transience of these experiences, imagistic modes of religiosity require that their core ritual processes, iconic imagery and visionary outcomes — rather than a body of fixed doctrine — be encoded in a form that allows the restitution of the ritual and verification of its efficacy and visionary outcomes.”8

Read that as a specification and it is a specification for a carrier: not a doctrine but a re-runnable apparatus — and a deck of cards is its smallest working example.

3. The claims, and who makes them

The book’s headline sentences are not the researchers’. They are in the Foreword, and the Foreword is the convenor’s:

“Scholarly research has firmly maintained that the tarot had no spiritual, esoteric or divinatory dimension before the mid-eighteenth century. However, two independent experts have shattered that consensus with their original research.”2

(the file sets the opening in small capitals; the reading is the same). Then three claims in order, with the second of them the sentence this book is known for:

“The evidence he presents unequivocally challenges the notion that the tarot served as a mere game of chance; instead, it is an artefact imbued with a magical purpose. It is evident that this tarot, dating back to c.1490, predates the commonly accepted time frame of esoteric use by almost three centuries.”2

and, “simultaneously, akin to a Jungian synchronicity”, Poncet “had discerned unmistakable traces of Platonic philosophy within the imagery of the Tarot de Marseille”, unearthing “connections between the Florentine aristocracy, the Medici family, Marsilio Ficino, Botticelli, and the heretical philosophical underpinnings of the Italian Renaissance.”2

Note the address, because it is the finding. “An artefact imbued with a magical purpose” is César Pedreros, in a foreword, summarising Adams’s book for a reader he is inviting in. It is not a sentence Adams writes about his own research, and §6 reports what the two researchers write instead. The strongest sentence in the book is written by the person with the least to lose.

Adams’s claim is about the Sola-Busca tarocchi, an engraved fifteenth-century Ferrarese deck, whose isolation he establishes first: it “appears to have been preserved within titled circles until its purchase by the Italian state in 2009 — a period of some five hundred years”, and “only appeared in the public domain on four occasions”.9 The list prints a first (Cicognara, 1831), a second (Arthur M. Hind’s photographs at the British Museum, 1907) and a fourth (Wolfgang Mayer’s reproduction, 1998) — and no third. That is a file-level observation, reported as one.10 Then the claim itself:

“At the deepest level I found that the Sola-Busca’s iconographic programme was structured around two key rituals. The first was an extremely archaic ritual, one attested as early as 700 BCE and still practiced by occult groups today. It is called ‘Drawing Down the Moon.’”6

the first of which, in his reading, “is creating a magical child or homunculus that will then be ‘sacrificed’ by immolation in the next stage of the ritual as part of an invocation of the saturnian deity or current (whether encompassed under the name of Ammon, Kronos or Saturn)”,6 and the second of which is the deck’s real purpose: “It is a rite of theurgical invocation whereby the operator seeks to become imbued with the draconian energies of the deity.”6 The implement on the card he can name — “known as Hekate’s Top”, “described in the principal text of theurgical practice, the Chaldean Oracles” — and about it he makes the strongest evidential claim in the book: “As far as I know, this is the only depiction of a theurgical operation in the entire oeuvre of both esoteric and Renaissance art.”6 The summary: “Uniquely, the Sola-Busca appears to have embodied the actual ritual processes for performing theurgy.”11

Two features of the claim’s form belong here. The first is that the designer is said to have hidden it deliberately, and the hiding is part of the argument: “The designer has sought to hide the ritual intent through the use of additional references that draw our attention away from the performative ritual narrative being enacted.”6 A claim in which concealment is a prediction can be strong evidence; it can also absorb counter-evidence. The second is Adams’s own marking of its status — “My suggestion is”, “a reasonable conjecture” — with the date resting on an attribution he does not make: “assuming that De Marchi is right about the engraver’s identity”.9

Poncet’s claim is about the Tarot de Marseille, and it begins in a bedroom: “On my nineteenth birthday, my girlfriend gifted me a tarot deck. A Tarot de Marseille. I was amazed by the images of the trump cards.”12 His method is a dating argument by costume, since playing cards are perishable and he has only the images: the “Authorities” (Popess, Pope, Emperor, Empress, Justice) are “inspired by a single series of etchings by the Florentine engraver Baccio Baldini, the Prophets and Sibyls, dated circa 1471”, putting the prototype in northern or central Italy around 1471.12 Then Plato — “Plato’s chariot of the soul, for instance, is obviously reflected in the Chariot card of the Tarot de Marseille, in a spectacular way”12 — and then the intersection of the two, which produces the thesis:

“Someone, it may have been Ficino or a member of his Academy, figured out that images can convey Ideas. The game of tarot was popular at that time, so they imagined using its structure and figures to embed philosophical images and concepts.”13

with the refinement that keeps it from being stock Platonism — “I discovered that the images of the tarot are not so much Plato’s, but rather Ficino’s interpretation of Plato’s images, and it’s noticeably different”12 — and the date: “My research shows that the Tarot de Marseille was designed between 1470 and 1475.”5 He then declines the definition the book was convened to supply:

“I cannot give you a definition of the esoteric or occult tarot. What I believe for certain, however, is that, very early in the history of the tarot, some decks had uses other than gaming.”14

The shared claim, in Poncet’s words, is the sentence the two researches are joined to:

“In this way, two different decks of the fifteenth century revealed themselves as spectacular examples of esotericism in tarot, more than three hundred years before the earliest date previously accepted by academic consensus.”14

One small thing worth reporting rather than smoothing: the Foreword says “almost three centuries” and Poncet says “more than three hundred years”. The gap proves nothing, and it is the kind of arithmetic a reading should not tidy on the author’s behalf.

4. The check: a dispute that can be audited from a library

This is the part of the book the corpus has direct use for, because the corpus’s test arrives here as an actual dispute between named people, in a public record, with a stated standard of evidence.

Pedreros’s question frames it: “Or was Michael Dummett right when he insisted that there was no such thing as an esoteric tarot before the French occultists ‘discovered’ it in the eighteenth century?”15 Adams answers by naming what the disagreement is about, and quoting his opponent:

“The central issue rests on Dummett’s claim that ‘no occult significance was attached to the cards, nor any use made of them save for playing games, until the intervention of Court de Gébelin in 1781.’”15

That sentence is the whole of the negative position, and it comes with a date and a citation. So does the dispute it belongs to: Yates’s review of Dummett’s The Game of Tarot in the New York Review of Books for 19 February 1981, Dummett’s reply on 14 May 1981, and at the end of it the terminal condition:

“Rather than rehearse the intricacies of this exchange the issue rested, finally, on Dummett’s appeal for, and openness towards, evidence overturning his statement.”15

Read that sentence twice, because it is the finding. Dummett’s claim, as the book reports it, named its own falsifier: it asked for the evidence that would refute it. That is the opposite of a closed seat, and it is the property the owned cosmos asked of every frame and almost never found.

Then the evidence, in two kinds. The first is a document: “The first piece of evidence comes from the records of the Inquisition. A Venetian courtesan, Isabella Bellochio, was stated to have ‘worshipped an image of the devil by kneeling before it, with her hair loose, while maintaining a lantern alight before it day and night … a light which burned continuously in the kitchen in front of a devil and the tarocchi …’”15 Adams reads it as use rather than design, and then offers a physical observation, marking its ceiling in the same breath: the card “appears to have been thumb-marked … which is not, of course, evidence of ritual use but it certainly points towards prolonged and sustained contemplation of the image.”15 The second kind is iconographic:

“Today, the evidence for the existence of occluded subtexts deliberately hidden within the pre-Gébelin tarot is threefold. It comprises the detailed analyses of the iconography of the Sola-Busca (Adams); the early Tarot de Marseille (Poncet); and the Noblet Tarot de Marseille (Appel).”15

with Adams’s conclusion and Poncet’s echo: “So the answer to the question about the ‘missing evidence’ is that it was never missing. Some of it existed in official records; the rest, by far the more impactful portion, was hidden, rather artfully, in plain sight for these last five hundred years.”15 — “The cards themselves were the ‘missing evidence.’”15

Now the reading, and it is not a verdict on the argument.

The strongest thing in this book is not that either side wins. It is that the dispute is checkable. Every item in it is a dated, third-party-readable object: Dummett’s The Game of Tarot (1980); the review and reply of 1981; Decker, Depaulis and Dummett’s A Wicked Pack of Cards (1996); Martin’s Witchcraft and the Inquisition in Venice (1989); and the deck itself, held by the Italian state since 2009 and, since the Brera’s digitisation, available as images.9 A person with no stake in either outcome can read all of it. That is “a check that does not benefit from the answer”, supplied not by a frame but by a record — and one that cannot be converted into a credential, the way the owned cosmos found the checks of a named-endpoint frame can: “rites, lineages, initiations, proofs of access”. Bibliographies do not convert, and the object cannot be argued out of the museum.

The boundary of this reading has to be stated as plainly as the finding. I have not read Dummett, Depaulis or Yates. Everything above about what they held is a quotation or citation given by this book, and the book’s own characterisation of them — Poncet’s, in Part II — is a summary this post repeats as a summary: “For them, the occult or esoteric tarot could only be an invention of the French occultists.”14 What can be verified here is the shape and the addressability of the dispute — that its items are named, dated and public — not its resolution, and not the fairness of this book’s account of Dummett. The post takes no side.

Two further things the book puts in the record. Poncet’s characterisation of Dummett — “He was a very intelligent man. … but he seems not to have been familiar with the culture of the Italian Renaissance”15 — is a claim about a scholar’s competence made inside a conversation, quoted here as Poncet’s characterisation, not as a finding. And Yates’s contribution is given as a word choice: “To name the capacity of the cards to embed deep performative knowledge, Yates chose the word ‘hieroglyph.’”15 The word is the argument: a Renaissance hieroglyph is an image that embeds ideas and power.

5. The lineage, and the warrant of an artwork

The environment’s inventory has a lever for this: “A pre-certified frame — the warrant is issued by the host, not the group, and scrutiny reads as bigotry.” In the case studies the host was a culture and the frame was a teacher’s. Here the warrant is claimed for an artwork, by two named living researchers, and the certifying authority is a name and a tradition. Same lever, different carrier.

Adams lays out the lineage in Part VI. Its content is a transfer: “Giovanni Aurispa returned from Constantinople in 1423 and again in 1427 … bringing hundreds of Hellenistic texts with him”;11 Plethon is present in the Italian city states; the result is “a second Hellenistic Renaissance”, grounded in practice rather than doctrine, since “their significance — especially the works of Proclus and Iamblichus — was the performativity that was fundamental to their approach as practicing polytheistic Hellenists.”11 Then the mechanism — the bridge that would make a card operative at all:

“The fact that these beliefs threatened to undermine the institutional power of church and state meant that they could only be preserved by being occluded within other media. From the proactive perspective enjoined by theurgists, such as Proclus, the influence of higher order energies, or deities, could be embodied via their geometrical forms in artworks that would, henceforth, emanate their distinctive presence into the world.”11

And the warrant’s own shape, named with its Latin term: the texts “were conceived as emerging from a fount of pristine wisdom (prisca theologia) at a time close to the act of creation, and were thereby thought to be imbued with far greater depth, wisdom and verisimilitude”.11

The structural point is this: the authority being invoked is also the object of the study. Ficino is both the evidence and the credential. In the certified frame the warrant arrived from a host culture that had not scrutinised the teacher; in Star.Ships it was self-issued in the first person. Here the researcher’s subject supplies the warrant — the one warrant no amount of scrolling in the source will separate from the source.

And there is a brake to apply immediately, which is this series’ own. The lever the environment named is about predation — the price a predator does not have to pay. There is no predator in this book: two researchers have written about two decks, and nobody is recruiting anyone. What the corpus owes is the lever’s shape and not its charge — not “is this being used on someone” but “who issued this warrant, and would the issuer recognise the use it is being put to”. Applied here the second question has a checkable answer, because Ficino’s own position on planetary influence is in the file:

“I don’t think the planetary divinities mentioned in most of Ficino’s astrological writings, and thus the grid I just described for the Tarot de Marseille, should be understood as referring to celestial bodies acting on things and people.”4

For Ficino, on this account, “the planets have no influence on the sublunar world”, and astrological allusions are “analogies put at the service of the description of souls.”4 So the warrant and the claim are not the same claim: Ficino certifies the design, not the operation. Adams’s Sola-Busca, by contrast, is explicitly a matter of forces and their timing — “Mars, Saturn and chthonic Mercury under the influence of the most malefic of fixed stars, Algol”, and “a technocratic, astrologically-driven vision of the universe as a collection of manipulable forces.”5

What would count as evidence for the continuity claim is also stated, as an absence, in the exact form a document would have had to take: “Such writings do not state ‘I have created a tarot deck that embodies my ideas and theurgical practices,’ as the followers of Dummett seem to expect, because their authors couldn’t express themselves openly.”15 That has a shape this series has seen: the document that cannot exist because writing it was dangerous is the document that cannot falsify anything. It is also a historically ordinary situation — Renaissance heretics were burned — and this post does not adjudicate between the two readings of the absence. Adams then reports the modern tradition in the first person — “Twenty-five years ago, I met a tarot teacher who enlightened me as to the existence of an initiatory tradition in relation to the tarot … accompanied by ‘signs following’ that serve to confirm the validity of the transmission”7 — and the check it names, signs following, is exactly the class of check the owned cosmos found converts tests into credentials.

6. Counterweights, in the body

First: the strongest language in the book is not the researchers’. It is the convenor’s, and the counts make it plain. The Foreword runs from offset 4255 to 6997 — 2,742 characters of a 153,097-character file, 1.8 per cent of the text. In it are the sentences quoted at §3: “firmly maintained”, “shattered that consensus”, “unequivocally challenges”, “It is evident that”. Across the entire file the word “unequivocally” occurs once, and it is there.10 Now the other half: in the remaining 150,355 characters, a test list of fourteen hedge markers returns 64 occurrences and 0 of them fall in the Foreword — “probably” 20 times, “seems” 10, “likely” 8, “may have” 7, “apparently” 4, “perhaps” 3, “to my mind” twice, and the singletons “I guess”, “I gather”, “tentatively”, “My suggestion” and “conjecture”.10 That is not deception: a foreword is a recommendation, written in the register of recommendation. But the paragraph with the least hedging in the book is the one a reader is most likely to quote.

Second: the dating rests on named conditionals, and the book names them. The deck’s date is not read off a document. It runs an engraver attribution (De Marchi’s, with Adams adding “I personally find his attribution convincing based upon stylistic comparisons”),9 a date string “encoded” on trump XIIII Bocho and connected to a reparations payment, and the c.1490 or 1491 window — “assuming that De Marchi is right … a reasonable conjecture.”9 The evidence for a c.1490 magical purpose is an inference from pictures, made by the person whose book argues for it.

Third, and this is the central counterweight: a complete secular account of the same artefact sits inside this book, and the artefact cannot choose between them. On Adams’s own reading of the deck’s political context, the occasion is the Salt War: “The 1482–84 Salt War with Venice had essentially bankrupted the state and destroyed a large portion of her agricultural economy.”9 The arms on the cards are those of “the Venetian patrician Venier-Sanudo family”; the initials and the date point “towards the Venetian patrician, Marin Sanudo, as their intended recipient”, who was Venice’s rapporteur on Ferrara’s reparations claim; and the date “also marked the date at which Ferrara received the first tranche of reparations from Venice”, about which Adams asks, “A coincidence?”9 His conclusion is a gift hypothesis: “The cards may well have served as a ‘reward’ for Sanudo’s support since they are precisely the kind of unique, expensive, visually engaging artefact that he, a celebrated bibliophile, would subsequently have displayed in his house.”9 In terms of what a third party can check, the political account is the stronger: it has dates, names and a treasury entry, and the magical one has the design.

So the same deck has, in one book, a documented diplomatic occasion with an encoded date, and a claimed magical purpose read from its pictures — and the pictures are the evidence for both. A reading cannot choose, and this one does not. What it can report is that the stronger of the two claims, in terms of what a third party can check, is the political one, because it has dates, names and a treasury entry, and the magical one has the design.

Fourth: both speakers are arguing for their own prior work, and neither is an academic — one of them says so. Poncet: “I note in passing that none of us three is an academic”.16 Adams is the author of the book under discussion and Poncet of the forthcoming one that closes the Marseille argument: self-interested frame claims, made by interested parties, in a Scarlet Imprint edition. That is a structure and not an accusation — a claim’s interest does not make it false, and §4 is about why it does not need to be taken on trust either. And the evidence chain has two interpreters at the end of it, both of them the authors of the theses being tested: of the threefold evidence at §4, two of the three analyses are by the two people in the conversation.15 That is not a fault of the book — but it is why the blog can read this book and cannot rest on it.

7. The negative finding: safeguard, metered pace, clinical referral

The series reports the presence or absence of a safeguard, a metered pace and a clinical referral as search results, scoped to the file. This book’s results are unambiguous, and each is a different kind of absence.

“Safeguard” occurs once, and it is not a safeguard of the reader. It is the convenor’s framing of a question about transmission (offset 130093): “Throughout history, there has been a prevailing belief that esoteric teachings should be safeguarded and transmitted orally, exclusively to those prepared to receive them.”8 The word belongs to the protection of knowledge, held by an institution against the wrong people. It is not a protection of a person from an experience, and the two are not the same instrument.

There is no metered pace. “Pace” returns six hits in the file and not one of them is a rate: every occurrence is inside the word “space” — a space of time, a ritual space, the twenty-two spaces of the trumps, a political space, the efficacious space of the convenor’s dreams.10 Nothing in the book says how often, how much, or how fast. And here a distinction the previous six readings did not have to make: this is not a book with no practice. It states that a deck was an operative ritual apparatus, describes the operation, dates its apparatus to “as early as 700 BCE” and notes that it is “still practiced by occult groups today”.6 A reader who took any of it as a manual would hold a manual’s shape and none of a manual’s fences. The nearest thing to a discipline in the book is a discipline of work — “you would need to be an astrologer to make all of the calculations”, “highly disciplined — which is, of course, a highly Saturnian quality.”5

There is no clinical referral at all, and the vocabulary of risk is almost wholly absent. A case-insensitive search returns 0 hits for “danger”, “warn” and “warning”, “doctor”, “therapy”, “therapist”, “psychiatric”, “psychiatry”, “psychotic”, “clinical”, “hospital”, “crisis”, “suicid”, “mental health”, “breakdown”, “seek help”, “professional help”, “self-harm”, “mentor” and “dose”.10 Four terms do occur and none is a referral: “risk” once, a historical risk the source names without a date; “precaution” once, and it is Ficino’s; “careful” five times, every one about reading images; and “madness” twice, once as Neoplatonic doctrine.10 Not one is addressed to a person’s safety.

Read as a structure rather than a gap, that is a different result from the last two readings. Undreaming Wetiko named psychiatry as an adversary; Star.Ships named it not at all, and had no practice to fence. This book is the third case: it issues no instruction, and it does describe an operative ritual — so the absence here is not merely the absence of a subject that never arose. It is a shape without its fences: a book that has told the reader that a deck was built to perform a rite, and that has nothing to say about what happens to anyone who tries. The honest reading of that is limited — a search shows only what it indexes, and a conversation between two researchers about fifteenth-century artefacts is not the genre in which a route to a clinician would be expected.

8. The correction the blog owes

One correction, stated once, and then its second clause.

The corpus’s frame inventory has been a list of environments, and it now needs an object. A tarot deck is not a cosmology: it is a fixed correspondence system, plus a set of positions, plus a reader who supplies the reading, and it is carried, dealt and read rather than lived in. It supplies the series with a frame type the case studies could not reach — a frame made portable and instrumental — and it splits the corpus’s single test in two, because the table is public, fixed and checkable while the utterance is issued in the first person by someone who benefits from it. The corpus had one question for a frame. An object asks two, and the history has been argued on the half that can survive being checked.

The clause that follows is about the environment’s fourth lever — “a pre-certified frame”. That lever was written about a culture supplying the warrant for a teacher, and the corpus has never had to carry it into a case where the warrant is claimed by named living researchers for an artwork. Here it is, and the carrier is different in a way that matters: the authority invoked is the object of study. So the second correction is narrower than the first and sharper:

The warrant lever has a second carrier — a researcher claiming a warrant for an artwork, with the certifying authority being the very material under investigation — and the corpus should carry its shape without importing its charge. There is no predator in this book. What the lever is good for here is a question, not an accusation: does the authority cited certify the claim being made with it? In this book the answer is checkable, and it is no — Ficino’s planets do not influence the sublunar world, on the book’s own account of him, and the deck that needs them to is not his.

Neither correction touches anything the corpus has argued about frames, seats or checks. Both change what the blog may say it read: a series about cosmologies has just taken an object as a source, and a series about warrants has just found one issued for a picture.

9. What a reading is for

A reading holds one source whole and asks what a blog that has quoted sources for years now has to change. This one returns a convergence, a correction and a gap.

The convergence is that the corpus’s test arrived as a real dispute, and survived it. The series’ requirement — a check that does not benefit from the answer — has been found missing in six successive readings, in every cosmology it has examined. Here the corpus’s question about frames is being fought over by named people, in dated, public, third-party-readable documents, over an object that sits in a national gallery, with one of the parties on record as asking for the evidence that would refute him. That is a frame being checked by someone who does not benefit — not by an insider’s rite, not by a lineage, not by a credential of any kind.

The correction is an inventory correction with a hypothesis inside it. The series has four frames, all cosmologies, and its rule about frames was written at cosmological scale: keep the endpoint unnamed, keep the route plural, keep a check that does not stand to gain. A deck is the first frame the corpus has met that names its endpoint, has a single fixed route, and sits in a hand — and it is not a failing frame, because it is not claiming to be an environment. It is an instrument, and an instrument’s check is whether the thing works: a different question from whether a cosmology is true, and one the corpus has never asked in this register. That does not weaken the rule. It locates it: the rule about frames is a rule about environments.

And the gap is the one the corpus keeps finding. Two researchers, each the author of the thesis he is defending, are the only interpreters at the end of the evidence they have assembled; the strongest sentence in the book is the convenor’s; the dating is an inference from imagery, marked as such by the person making it. This book supplies a public record and not a second reader of the object — and the record, unusually, is enough for the one thing the corpus needed, which is that the argument be auditable. The corpus can cite the dispute. It cannot cite either party to it.

Which leaves the reading’s own bottom line, handed over almost unrepaired by the researcher who has spent the most years with a deck bought for him on a nineteenth birthday: the Tarot de Marseille “with its multilayered content and combinatorial structure, is a fantastic instrument to produce unique experiences in the reader, and in this way excludes any form of literality.”8 The corpus has been saying a version of that about frames at every scale — that the frame supplies the reading, and that whoever supplies the reading holds the lever. It now has it from inside the trade, in a sentence that does not know it is a finding: an instrument produces experiences. It does not certify them.

Notes

Marking: a reading. Documented — every passage in quotation marks, taken from the digital text of Two Esoteric Tarots by Peter Mark Adams and Christophe Poncet, convened and with a foreword by César Pedreros (Scarlet Imprint, 2023, eISBN 978-1-912316-92-2), checked character for character against the file and cited in the notes by part and by speaker, because the book is a recorded conversation and its claims belong to the person who made them. Address: the file’s typographic quotes are rendered here as straight ASCII, and its dashes are given as em dashes except inside numeric ranges (which keep the file’s en dashes); the small-caps opening of the Foreword is quoted in lower case with the rendering noted; the stray spaces the file’s italics markup leaves before punctuation are closed. Absences reported as search results, scoped to this file: no safeguard of a reader (the single occurrence of “safeguarded” concerns transmitting knowledge); no metered pace (all six hits for “pace” are inside “space”); and 0 hits for the clinical and risk vocabulary listed in note 10, with “risk” once, as a historical danger the text leaves undated. Inferred, as this post’s contribution: that a tarot deck is a frame made portable and instrumental — a correspondence system plus positions plus a reader — and therefore a frame type the corpus’s cosmological inventory does not contain; that it splits the corpus’s single frame-test into a checkable table and an uncheckable utterance; and that the closing of the seat in a reading is a claim about who is speaking rather than a claim about the deck. Not adjudicated: the question whether the tarot was esoteric before the mid-eighteenth century; the book is read as showing that the dispute over it is checkable — dated, named, public and third-party-readable — and this post takes no side in it, and has not read Dummett, Depaulis or Yates. The gap, stated: the two interpreters at the end of the book’s evidence are the two authors of the theses it defends, the strongest sentence in it is the convenor’s, the dating of the Sola-Busca is an inference from imagery that the book itself marks as a conjecture, and the criterion of adequacy on offer is explanatory completeness rather than falsifiability. No cosmology is endorsed — nothing here claims the cards carry magical power and nothing claims they do not — and no living person is diagnosed.

  1. Peter Mark Adams and Christophe Poncet, Two Esoteric Tarots, convened and with a foreword by César Pedreros, Scarlet Imprint, 2023; eISBN 978-1-912316-92-2. Read from the digital text of that edition: 154,542 bytes on disk, 153,097 characters with whitespace collapsed, which is the file every quotation was checked against. Front matter (line breaks shown as ” / “):”Peter Mark Adams & Christophe Poncet / Convened & with a foreword by César Pedreros / SCARLET IMPRINT MMXXIII”; “© Peter Mark Adams & Christophe Poncet 2023”; “Edited by Peter Grey / copy edits by Paul Holman / design & typography by Alkistis Dimech”. The image credits are a separate “Illustrations” list citing the Pinacoteca di Brera, Milano for the Sola-Busca, the Bibliothèque nationale de France for the Noblet Tarot de Marseille, the Musée Français de la Carte à Jouer for the Chariot of Issy, and the Szépművészeti Múzeum for a Ficino medal. The file contains no page numbers; its twelve parts are headed “PART I” to “PART XII”, the contents listing naming them “Two journeys into the tarot”, “Occult, esoteric and performative”, “Decoding the Sola-Busca”, “How the tarot became esoteric”, “Of libertine aesthetics: the grotesque and the abject”, “The Hellenistic revolution and the second renaissance”, “Tarot designers”, “The Dummett-Yates controversy”, “Cyphers and time”, “The seven planets”, “Orality, writing and the art of memory” and “The esoteric call”, then “Bibliography” and “Index”. Both authors’ own books are named in the text and notes: Adams, P. M. (2017) The Game of Saturn: Decoding the Sola-Busca Tarocchi, London: Scarlet Imprint, listed in the bibliography alongside Mystai (2019) and Hagia Sophia / Sanctum of Kronos (2023); Poncet’s The Tarot of Marsilio, footnoted in the file as “to be published by Scarlet Imprint in 2024”; and Poncet’s articles, including “Ficino’s Little Academy of Careggi”, Bruniana & Campanelliana XIX, 67–76, and “Le triomphe de la vie”, Bruniana & Campanelliana XXIII, 505–512.↩︎

  2. Two Esoteric Tarots, Foreword, by César Pedreros (June 2023, Santiago de Chile), offset 4255. “SCHOLARLY RESEARCH HAS FIRMLY MAINTAINED THAT THE tarot had no spiritual, esoteric or divinatory dimension before the mid-eighteenth century. However, two independent experts have shattered that consensus with their original research.” (the file sets the opening in small capitals; the phrase “the tarot had” is lower case in a run of capitals). “Peter Mark Adams has traced the origins and meaning of the fifteenth-century Ferrarese Sola-Busca tarocchi. … The evidence he presents unequivocally challenges the notion that the tarot served as a mere game of chance; instead, it is an artefact imbued with a magical purpose. It is evident that this tarot, dating back to c.1490, predates the commonly accepted time frame of esoteric use by almost three centuries.” (offset 4752). “Simultaneously, akin to a Jungian synchronicity, the researcher Christophe Poncet had discerned unmistakable traces of Platonic philosophy within the imagery of the Tarot de Marseille. This revelation propelled him into a profound historical investigation, unearthing connections between the Florentine aristocracy, the Medici family, Marsilio Ficino, Botticelli, and the heretical philosophical underpinnings of the Italian Renaissance.” (offset 5107). “A conversation was convened for the Sagittarius Full Moon of 3rd June 2023. This is the record of that meeting of minds.” (offset 6284). “Tell me and I’ll forget, show me and I may remember, involve me and I’ll understand.” (offset 6865; the file’s italics markup leaves a space before each comma, closed here).↩︎

  3. On attribution, because the corpus’s proven failure mode is address. This is a recorded conversation among three named participants, and the file labels turns by first name: “César” is César Pedreros, the convenor; “Peter” is Peter Mark Adams; “Christophe” is Christophe Poncet. The Foreword is signed “César Pedreros / June 2023, Santiago de Chile” (line break shown as ” / “) and is attributed here to Pedreros alone — which matters, because the sentences the book is known for are in it. Every quotation was located by character offset in the collapsed text, and the speaker established by finding the last turn label before that offset, distinguishing a label from a mention: Poncet’s Part II speech contains the phrases”Peter and I, and probably others” and “Peter analysed the very elaborate and specific imagery of the Sola-Busca”, neither of which is a turn, and a naive search for the names attributes his words to Adams. Turn labels used here, by offset: Part I — César 7054, Christophe 7380, César 14404, Christophe 14898, César 16268, Peter 16332, César 20125, Peter 20220; Part II — César 24562, Peter 24748, César 31130, Peter 31283, César 35086, Christophe 35148 (through the end of the part); Part III — César 39760, Peter 40054; Part IV — César 48892, Christophe 49137; Part V — César 59331, Peter 59865; Part VI — César 67003, Peter 67153; Part VII — César 73483, Peter 73574, César 78085, Peter 78263, César 87143, Christophe 87289, Peter 92996; Part VIII — César 98544, Peter 98929, Christophe 102055; Part IX — César 104799, Christophe 105057, Peter 106028, César 106465, Peter 106578, César 109850, Christophe 110405, César 119746, Peter 119928, César 122300, Christophe 122482; Part X — César 125387, Christophe 126424, César 129153, Peter 129277; Part XI — César 130087, Christophe 130490, César 133128, Peter 133215; Part XII — César 135289, Christophe 135583, César 137440, Christophe 137543, Peter 138122. A quotation whose speaker is not established by this method is not attributed to a speaker in this post.↩︎

  4. Two Esoteric Tarots, Part X (“The seven planets”). Christophe Poncet: “In Ficino’s commentary on Plato’s Timaeus, there is a passage, about one page long, in which the soul is compared to a triple septenary, so a three times seven structure. … The seven planets all appear in it, and we understand that the structure of the soul has three levels — the superior, the inferior and the intermediary — and seven columns, one for each planet of the Ptolemaic system … The sentences in which the planets are mentioned make no sense in themselves. However, when I tried to compare these sentences with the trumps of the Tarot de Marseille, I realised they were puns or wordplays or clues hinting at the arcana. A three times seven grid has twenty-one cells, so one for each arcanum of the tarot, given that two of the trumps form a single arcanum: the one that has no name (Arcanum XIII) and the one that has no number (The Fool), forming together the inferior arcanum of Saturn. In this way, the grid could be seen as the hidden structure of the Tarot de Marseille, within which all the trumps could be ordered.” (offset 126424). “To give a precise answer to the question, I don’t think the planetary divinities mentioned in most of Ficino’s astrological writings, and thus the grid I just described for the Tarot de Marseille, should be understood as referring to celestial bodies acting on things and people. For him, the planets have no influence on the sublunar world. They are signs that reveal the universe … In the Tarot de Marseille, astrological allusions should most probably be seen as analogies put at the service of the description of souls.” (offset 128380). Peter Adams replies from offset 129277: “Yes, it’s a much more minimalistic situation with the Sola-Busca because the only celestial … and sidereal bodies … that can be discerned, are all malefic.”↩︎

  5. Two Esoteric Tarots, Part IX (“Cyphers and time”). Christophe Poncet: “If we think of the game as a combinatorial system, you need every part to make it work. So, it’s a complete system and each part has its function.” (offset 105410). “My research shows that the Tarot de Marseille was designed between 1470 and 1475. The Sola-Busca was probably created about ten years later in reaction to Ficino’s deck, proposing in similar ways an opposite ideology.” (offset 114838); and, on Ficino’s doctrine of the incarnate soul: “For him, the journey of the soul during physical life necessarily leads to a state of madness. The soul becomes crazed when it is incarnated because, being immortal, her natural state is not to be imprisoned in a body, it is to be united with God.” (offset 116277). Peter Adams: “What I perceive with respect to the Sola-Busca is that each of the trumps, and certain of the suit cards, form an elaborate cypher composed of some combination of historical or literary references, astro-alchemical allusions and ritual postures, gestures and magical implements. That being said, the recovery of the ‘sense’ — the cards’ deeper narratives — requires that these figures be grouped together in specific combinations.” (offset 106089). On time: “These operations depend upon drawing in very specific forces — the energies of Mars, Saturn and chthonic Mercury under the influence of the most malefic of fixed stars, Algol — at the time of their maximum strength. There’s a high degree of precision in the calculations required to achieve this. You would need to be an astrologer to make all of the calculations … All of the other operations would require equally precise timing — the collection of the menstruum, the preparation of the ritual space, garments, implements and the person of the Mage. With the Sola-Busca, therefore, we encounter time in its most instrumental sense” (offset 119928). “The whole operation functions like a very complicated, intricate timepiece … In other words, we find ourselves at a very instrumental end of the spiritual spectrum, one more usually associated with goetia than with classical theurgy. This is a technocratic, astrologically-driven vision of the universe as a collection of manipulable forces. Ritually, the deck does not pose a question, it instructs us on how to draw this power down in its rawest form and manifest it into the external world. It is highly disciplined — which is, of course, a highly Saturnian quality.” (offset 121429).↩︎

  6. Two Esoteric Tarots, Part III (“Decoding the Sola-Busca”), Peter Adams, throughout: “At the deepest level I found that the Sola-Busca’s iconographic programme was structured around two key rituals. The first was an extremely archaic ritual, one attested as early as 700 BCE and still practiced by occult groups today. It is called ‘Drawing Down the Moon.’” (offset 42300). “In effect what the ritual is doing is creating a magical child or homunculus that will then be ‘sacrificed’ by immolation in the next stage of the ritual as part of an invocation of the saturnian deity or current (whether encompassed under the name of Ammon, Kronos or Saturn).” (offset 42688). “The designer has sought to hide the ritual intent through the use of additional references that draw our attention away from the performative ritual narrative being enacted.” (offset 43035). “The second ritual encompasses the main objective of the entire ritual sequence. It is a rite of theurgical invocation whereby the operator seeks to become imbued with the draconian energies of the deity.” (offset 45421). “He is shown using a globular ritual implement that we find described in the principal text of theurgical practice, the Chaldean Oracles, and known as Hekate’s Top.” (offset 45815); “As far as I know, this is the only depiction of a theurgical operation in the entire oeuvre of both esoteric and Renaissance art.” (offset 46319). “My suggestion is that only one reading — that identifying a deeply heretical theurgical ritual — reflects the intent of the designer since this alone is consistent with the deck’s other ritually-infused imagery.” (offset 46748). “Considered in isolation, the cards are inherently polysemous. We therefore need to assemble a group of cards in order to understand how they function together and this allows us to begin to recover the deck’s deeper levels of meaning.” (offset 45014). On method, from the same part and cited in the body as the four named steps: the deck’s “celestial and sidereal symbolism — references to the solstices, planets, fixed stars and constellations”; the “surplus imagery left over after accounting for the other elements”, which yielded “a distinctive postural and gestural grammar — what I have called a ‘ritual grammar’”; and the gesture “known as aposkopein; a characteristic gesture made in the presence of an epiphany of a deity. We find this gesture attested from at least the second millennium BCE in the context of Minoan and Mycenaean iconography.” (offset 42173).↩︎

  7. Two Esoteric Tarots, Part II, section “On the Performative”, Peter Adams from offset 31283: “My own conclusion is that the ‘esoteric tarot’ rests fully upon a performative occasion; one in which there is a distinct experience of some degree of automatism — whether conceived as entering a state of flow, intuition or external facilitation. Therein, for a space of time, the reader and the reading appear to occupy two different worlds, the reading appears to have taken on a life, and a direction, of its own.” (offset 31679). “Such is the archetypal nature of its imagery, the tarot has the capacity to act as a container for a broad range of spiritual impulses.” (offset 32824). “Twenty-five years ago, I met a tarot teacher who enlightened me as to the existence of an initiatory tradition in relation to the tarot (whether bestowed ‘in spirit’ or through a lineage holder) and accompanied by ‘signs following’ that serve to confirm the validity of the transmission. On occasion, tarot rituals may be empowered by such a tradition. This is seldom spoken of, or even alluded to, within the vast corpus of tarot-related literature.” (offset 34466, 34819). César Pedreros opened the part at offset 24562: “Since we’re framing our conversation with the term ‘esoteric tarot’ it is important to address what we understand by esoteric”.↩︎

  8. Two Esoteric Tarots, Part XI (“Orality, writing & the art of memory”). César Pedreros asks: “Throughout history, there has been a prevailing belief that esoteric teachings should be safeguarded and transmitted orally, exclusively to those prepared to receive them. This exclusivity was supposed to maintain the integrity and sanctity of the knowledge.” (offset 130093). Christophe Poncet: “The Tarot de Marseille, with its multilayered content and combinatorial structure, is a fantastic instrument to produce unique experiences in the reader, and in this way excludes any form of literality.” (offset 132925). Peter Adams: “The concept of the art, or theatre, of memory informs everything I’ve written over the last twenty-five years. The reason is simple enough. There are two distinct modes of religiosity: a ‘doctrinal mode’ and an ‘imagistic mode.’” (offset 133215); “Because of the transience of these experiences, imagistic modes of religiosity require that their core ritual processes, iconic imagery and visionary outcomes — rather than a body of fixed doctrine — be encoded in a form that allows the restitution of the ritual and verification of its efficacy and visionary outcomes. The ideal form with which to capture these essential elements is that of the Theatre of Memory.” (offset 134124). The “doctrinal”/“imagistic” distinction is there credited to Whitehouse, H. (2002), “Modes of Religiosity”.↩︎

  9. Two Esoteric Tarots, Part VII (“Tarot designers”), Peter Adams except where marked. “The Sola-Busca appears to have been preserved within titled circles until its purchase by the Italian state in 2009 — a period of some five hundred years. Prior to that, to the best of my knowledge, it only appeared in the public domain on four occasions.” (offset 73580); “The first was when some of the cards were described in Count Cicognara’s memoire on intaglio printmaking in 1831; the second, when art historian and curator Arthur M. Hind arranged an exhibition of black and white photographic images of the cards in the British Museum in 1907, and then included some images of the cards in his catalogue of early Italian engravings.” and “The fourth exposure of the cards was via a limited edition reproduction of the entire deck by Wolfgang Mayer in 1998, though I can find no further information as to how or why he undertook this project.” (offset 74205). “I personally find his attribution convincing based upon stylistic comparisons with the artist’s other works” (offset 75651). “Now, assuming that De Marchi is right about the engraver’s identity, and given the generally accepted dates during which he was active as an artist (1472–1501), then a date for the engraving work roughly concurrent with the ostensible production date of 1491 is a reasonable conjecture.” (offset 80997); “Since the colouration of the deck’s figures corresponds to the theurgical energies to which the ritual processes depicted within it relate, then we can assume that the theurgical knowledge encoded in the cards was also current at the d’Este court in the same time frame.” (offset 81118). The political account: “The 1482–84 Salt War with Venice had essentially bankrupted the state and destroyed a large portion of her agricultural economy.” (offset 84851); “the presence of the initials ‘MS’ and the encoding of the date 1491 points towards the Venetian patrician, Marin Sanudo, as their intended recipient” (offset 85542); “The date encoded on trump XIIII Bocho (fig.16), 1491, also marked the date at which Ferrara received the first tranche of reparations from Venice. A coincidence?” and “The cards may well have served as a ‘reward’ for Sanudo’s support since they are precisely the kind of unique, expensive, visually engaging artefact that he, a celebrated bibliophile, would subsequently have displayed in his house.” (offset 86253). And, in Christophe Poncet’s turn from offset 87289: “Ficino takes the precaution of introducing each and every work of Plato with a commentary.” (offset 89782).↩︎

  10. Reported as a search result, and scoped to this file. Case-insensitive counts against the whitespace-collapsed digital text (153,097 characters). Length: the Foreword runs from offset 4255 to 6997 — 2,742 characters, or 1.8 per cent of the file; the remainder is 150,355 characters. Strong epistemic markers: “unequivocally” occurs 1 time in the file, at offset 4777, inside the Foreword; “firmly” 3 times (offsets 4287 in the Foreword, 62371, 75279); “shattered” 2 (4444 in the Foreword, of the scholarly consensus, and 71943, of the medieval worldview); “evident” 4 (4925 in the Foreword, 51851, 84655, 109017). Hedge markers, case-insensitive substring counts across the whole file, the Foreword’s count in brackets: “probably” 20 (0), “seems” 10 (0), “likely” 8 (0), “may have” 7 (0), “apparently” 4 (0), “perhaps” 3 (0), “to my mind” 2 (0), “I guess” 1 (0), “I gather” 1 (0), “tentatively” 1 (0), “My suggestion” 1 (0), “conjecture” 1 (0), “possible” 4 (0), “possibility” 1 (0) — 64 across the file, 0 in the Foreword. Safeguard: “safeguard” returns 1 hit, inside “safeguarded”, at offset 130182, in the convenor’s question about transmitting knowledge. Pace: “pace” returns 6 hits and 0 as a word of its own; every hit is inside “space” — offsets 31916 (“for a space of time”), 34068 and 120739 (“the ritual space”), 51235 (“twenty-two spaces”), 68324 (“this turbulent political space”), 138902 (“the efficacious space of your own dreams”). Clinical and risk vocabulary returning 0 hits: danger, warn, warning, doctor, therap-, therapist, psychiatr-, psychiatric, psychiatry, psychotic, clinical, hospital, crisis, suicid-, mental health, breakdown, seek help, professional help, self-harm, mentor, dose, safety, ethic. Near-misses: “risk” 1 (offset 138417, the historical risk run by Renaissance practitioners); “precaution” 1 (offset 89799, Ficino’s commentary habit); “caution” 0 as a word of its own and 1 as a substring of “precaution”; “madness” 2 (offset 116354, Ficino’s doctrine that the incarnate soul’s journey “necessarily leads to a state of madness”, and an index entry at 149146); “careful” 5 (offsets 43713, 44871, 61774, 64457, 102613 — all five about examining images or texts); “psycho” 3, all inside “metempsychosis”; “supervis” 1 (offset 83611, Prisciani’s “design and supervision” of a fresco cycle); “discipline” 2 (offsets 52988, the Quadrivium, and 121843, “It is highly disciplined”); “purif” 2 (offsets 119569, 119658, of the soul); “meditat” 8, of which 5 are the title of Tomberg’s Meditations on the Tarot or references to it, 2 are “divination and meditation”/“divination, meditative or ritual use”, and 1 is “meditative ritual”. The word “third” occurs 1 time in the file (offset 40933, “thirdly” in Adams’s four decoding steps) and does not appear in the third element of the deck’s four public appearances. A search shows only what it indexes, so every count here is scoped to this text.↩︎

  11. Two Esoteric Tarots, Part VI (“The Hellenistic revolution and the second renaissance”), Peter Adams, throughout. “Uniquely, the Sola-Busca appears to have embodied the actual ritual processes for performing theurgy.” (offset 67448). “Giovanni Aurispa returned from Constantinople in 1423 and again in 1427, on each occasion bringing hundreds of Hellenistic texts with him. Amongst these texts were the complete works of Plato, Proclus, Plotinus, and most of Iamblichus.” (offset 69790); “Their significance — especially the works of Proclus and Iamblichus — was the performativity that was fundamental to their approach as practicing polytheistic Hellenists.”; “So inspiring were these ideas that they triggered a second Hellenistic Renaissance that fundamentally influenced the subsequent course of European culture for the next three centuries.” (offset 71779). “In addition, this alternative spiritual path was under-written by two sources of authority: firstly, that accorded to ancient texts which were conceived as emerging from a fount of pristine wisdom (prisca theologia) at a time close to the act of creation, and were thereby thought to be imbued with far greater depth, wisdom and verisimilitude” (offset 70947; the italics run is closed up here). “That said, the fact that these beliefs threatened to undermine the institutional power of church and state meant that they could only be preserved by being occluded within other media. From the proactive perspective enjoined by theurgists, such as Proclus, the influence of higher order energies, or deities, could be embodied via their geometrical forms in artworks that would, henceforth, emanate their distinctive presence into the world.” (offset 72735, 72981).↩︎

  12. Two Esoteric Tarots, Part I (“Two journeys into the tarot”), Christophe Poncet: “On my nineteenth birthday, my girlfriend gifted me a tarot deck. A Tarot de Marseille. I was amazed by the images of the trump cards. Before that I had used ordinary playing cards to tell the future, as a fun practice.” (offset 7448). “The earliest Tarot de Marseille cards we know of are a World trump and a few pips found in the Castello Sforzesco in Milan, which could be dated to the second half of the sixteenth century. … So the earliest material samples postdate by almost a century the original deck’s creation.” (offset 9495). “It is not by chance that all these cards represent the same kind of figures, seated on thrones, with symbols of power such as crowns and sceptres. They all are inspired by a single series of etchings by the Florentine engraver Baccio Baldini, the Prophets and Sibyls, dated circa 1471.” “Plato’s chariot of the soul, for instance, is obviously reflected in the Chariot card of the Tarot de Marseille, in a spectacular way”. “I discovered that the images of the tarot are not so much Plato’s, but rather Ficino’s interpretation of Plato’s images, and it’s noticeably different.” (offset 14193). On his criterion: “Well, this is only the obvious reading of the card. I could not accept it, because this interpretation does not account for all its details. In particular, there is a plant-shaped structure running all along the back of the skeleton, with a bulb rooted in the pelvis and a stem with leaves climbing up the spine to the skull. This cannot be meaningless. … As for any enigma, the solution needs to provide the key to all its given elements.” (offset 15526). Peter Adams, later in the same part: “From the beginning, I enjoyed an intense connection with the cards, engaging with the tarot on many different levels: aesthetically, historically, from a literary perspective and — last but not least — performatively; chiefly in acts of divination and energy work.” (offset 17986); “I couldn’t believe that anything that had had this much time and effort expended on it wasn’t possessed of some deeper significance.” (offset 18818).↩︎

  13. Two Esoteric Tarots, Part IV (“How the tarot became esoteric”), Christophe Poncet: “At this point in history, I guess there is no esoteric meaning to these images, they probably just represent what they appear to represent.” (offset 52004). “In this fertile intellectual context, someone, it may have been Ficino or a member of his Academy, figured out that images can convey Ideas. The game of tarot was popular at that time, so they imagined using its structure and figures to embed philosophical images and concepts. It’s not the work of a single man. There are many tasks; so, it probably involved teamwork.” (offset 55672); “they met in Ficino’s house in the hills that dominate Florence, and there they discussed the texts of Plato, shared ideas, drank wine, played the lyre and chanted Orphic hymns”; “Conceiving and producing the game must have been an activity of the Academy in itself.” (offset 57362). “Then they probably played the game, as a serious game, and they might have invented new ways of using the deck. It may already, at this point, have been used for divinatory purposes, and there are several mentions of oracular practices in Ficino’s writings.” (offset 57717). “However, until the death of Ficino, in 1499, I gather it was exclusively reserved for a small circle of initiates.” (offset 58215).↩︎

  14. Two Esoteric Tarots, Part II (“Occult, esoteric and performative”), Christophe Poncet’s answer from offset 35148 to the end of the part. “So, at the end of the twentieth century, when three scholars, Ronald Decker, Thierry Depaulis and Michael Dummett wrote a book on the origins of the occult tarot, they simply set the starting point of their history at the end of the eighteenth century. For them, the occult or esoteric tarot could only be an invention of the French occultists. Before that, they asserted, ever since its origins, the tarot had only been a game of cards, with no other meanings or usages of any kind.” (offset 35923). “In this way, two different decks of the fifteenth century revealed themselves as spectacular examples of esotericism in tarot, more than three hundred years before the earliest date previously accepted by academic consensus.” (offset 37745). “To conclude on that point, I cannot give you a definition of the esoteric or occult tarot. What I believe for certain, however, is that, very early in the history of the tarot, some decks had uses other than gaming.” (offset 38406). This post has not read Dummett, Depaulis or Yates, and its account of what they held is taken from this book and marked as the book’s.↩︎

  15. Two Esoteric Tarots, Part VIII (“The Dummett-Yates controversy”). César Pedreros asks: “Why is it that we cannot find books explicitly explaining the esoteric significance of these images until French occultism emerged in the eighteenth century? Were they destroyed? Were they simply never written? Or was Michael Dummett right when he insisted that there was no such thing as an esoteric tarot before the French occultists ‘discovered’ it in the eighteenth century?” (offset 98544). Peter Adams, from offset 98929: “Unfortunately, for many people it’s as though the clock became stuck back in 1980 when Dummett published his study of the tarot as a game, and has remained so ever since, so that merely referring to Dummett has become a standard response on this issue — as though nothing has changed in the intervening almost half century.” (offset 99314). “To be clear, the central issue rests on Dummett’s claim that ‘no occult significance was attached to the cards, nor any use made of them save for playing games, until the intervention of Court de Gébelin in 1781.’” (offset 99472). “This topic formed the subject of an exchange between Michael Dummett, a professor of logic and expert on tarot games, and Frances Yates, a world-renowned expert on the iconography and ideation of the Renaissance, in the context of Yates’s review of Dummett’s The Game of Tarot.”; “Rather than rehearse the intricacies of this exchange the issue rested, finally, on Dummett’s appeal for, and openness towards, evidence overturning his statement.” (offset 99956). “The evidence that neither Dummett nor Yates had access to in 1980 has only become available over the last ten years or so, and it fundamentally overturns Dummett’s supposition. Frances Yates was right but lacked the specifics to establish her case.” (offset 100120). “The first piece of evidence comes from the records of the Inquisition. A Venetian courtesan, Isabella Bellochio, was stated to have ‘worshipped an image of the devil by kneeling before it, with her hair loose, while maintaining a lantern alight before it day and night … a light which burned continuously in the kitchen in front of a devil and the tarocchi …’” (offset 100440; ellipses in the original, the footnote there giving Martin, R. (1989) Witchcraft and the Inquisition in Venice, 1550–1650, 163). “Surely this kind of dual-use of a portable, highly symbolic source of imagery is only to be expected?” (offset 100731); “In this connection it is interesting that the Sola-Busca’s trump XVII Ipeo is the only card to show signs of wear on the paint surface. It appears to have been thumb-marked by being repeatedly gripped or held at the mid-opposite edges, which is not, of course, evidence of ritual use but it certainly points towards prolonged and sustained contemplation of the image.” (offset 100969). “Today, the evidence for the existence of occluded subtexts deliberately hidden within the pre-Gébelin tarot is threefold. It comprises the detailed analyses of the iconography of the Sola-Busca (Adams); the early Tarot de Marseille (Poncet); and the Noblet Tarot de Marseille (Appel).” (offset 101201); “So the answer to the question about the ‘missing evidence’ is that it was never missing. Some of it existed in official records; the rest, by far the more impactful portion, was hidden, rather artfully, in plain sight for these last five hundred years.” (offset 101802). Christophe Poncet, from offset 102055: “I completely agree with Peter. The cards themselves were the ‘missing evidence.’” (offset 102097); “Such writings do not state ‘I have created a tarot deck that embodies my ideas and theurgical practices,’ as the followers of Dummett seem to expect, because their authors couldn’t express themselves openly.” (offset 102286); “He was a very intelligent man. He was a professor of logic. And he knew a lot about philosophy, but he seems not to have been familiar with the culture of the Italian Renaissance. That probably explains his dry, austere and limited vision of the tarot.” (offset 102816); “She wrote that Dummett should have spent more time looking for the ideas embedded in the cards than to ‘chase obscure card games’. To name the capacity of the cards to embed deep performative knowledge, Yates chose the word ‘hieroglyph.’” (offset 103483).↩︎

  16. Two Esoteric Tarots, Part XII (“The esoteric call”). Christophe Poncet from offset 135583: “As soon as I started investigating the Tarot de Marseille, I felt like I was mysteriously helped every now and then, as if some providential hand was giving me the clues needed to continue my progress.” (offset 135594); “I note in passing that none of us three is an academic” (offset 137239). Peter Adams, closing the conversation from offset 138122: “I hope that our conversation has served to highlight the importance that people have accorded to securing the performative in relation to their spirituality: the ways and the means for connecting directly to the numinous and experiencing the influx of the divine, and doing so despite the risk of being exposed and punished, or even executed, for their non-conformity of beliefs and practices.” (offset 138417); “The fact is, the esoteric tarot is a living reality for the hundreds of thousands of people who daily engage, through the mediation of its imagery, with greatly expanded domains of awareness and understanding” (offset 139205).↩︎