Monday, April 2, 2012

A8: The d'Este Matto

So let us start looking at the tarot cards in terms of "hieroglyphs" as the Renaissance understdood that term, starting with the card we call in English the Fool, in the d'Este deck of c. 1473. In all the early lists--which mostly are from around Ferrara or Venice--the card is called Il Matto, the card of the Madman.

Andrea mentions the d'Este card, famous for its exposed phallus toward which a child reaches (at left below)

On the one hand, such exposure was considered subhuman, as those of low intelligence or mad were viewed more like animals than humans and not expected to conform to the dictates of morality.

At least in Florence, they also were not welcome in the city. The more decently attired Charles VI Matto (at right above) shows children throwing stones at him. This is what children were expected to do. Michel Pleasance (Florence in the Time of the Medici p. 181) summarizes a story by Grazzini in which a man is persuaded to pretend he is dead, so he can watch his own funeral. But he forgets he is dead, and "people begin to think that he has gone mad. Children start throwing stones and clods of earth at him, shouting 'mad, mad' and try to catch him. If caught, he would probably be killed. Pleasance says of another such victim, that his pursuers are "children and clerks--who, as Grazzini says, would have killed him had they caught him" (p. 184).

But the children of the d'Este card are hardly throwing stones. It was known then, among humanists, that the cult of Dionysus involved the male sex organ as such a sacred cult object. Roman sarcophagi showed their likenesses on a trays being carried in Dionysian rites and processions. I do not know for sure that these exact sarcophagi were known then, but many were, as I have already indicated in discussing the sources for d'Este artworks, from Mantegna on. For a web-page with good illustrations of these sarcophagi, see http://bacchos.org/tarothtm/0et9mathermite2.html.

But it did not take such sarcophagi. We again have the testimony of Diodorus. First is a general statement, Book IV, p. 6 (http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Diodorus_Siculus/home.html).
Some, however, relate that the generative member, since it is the cause of the reproduction of human beings and of their continued existence through all time, became the object of immortal honour.
Then he goes on, in a passage I have already quoted. Again I highlight the relevant part:
 ...in ancient times the Titans formed a conspiracy against Osiris and slew him, and then, taking his body and dividing it into equal parts among themselves, they slipped them secretly out of the house, but this organ alone they threw into the river, since no one of them was willing to take it with him. But Isis tracked down the murder of her husband, and after slaying the Titans and fashioning the several pieces of his body into the shape of a human figure, she gave them to the priests with orders that they pay Osiris the honours of a god, but since the only member she was unable to recover was the organ of sex she commanded them to pay to it the honours of a god and to set it up in their temples in an erect position.
Thus in the Isaic procession described by Apuleius, which I quoted in the previous section, there was the chest carried with the goddess's secret things. That they would have included an artificial phallus, representing the one not recovered by Isis, would have been clear from the assumed identity of Osiris and Dionysus.

For Dionysus, we have the testimony of Diodorus on his dismemberment, and Clement of Alexandria.for the sacred phallus.

Here is Diodorus on dismemberment (V:74: http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Diodorus_Siculus/5D*.html). I gave this quote earlier; here is a fuller citation:
 As for Dionysus, the myths state that he discovered the vine and its cultivation, and also how to make wine and to store away many of the autumn fruits and thus to provide mankind with the use of them as food over a long time. This god was born in Crete, men say, of Zeus and PersephonĂȘ, and Orpheus has handed down the tradition in the initiatory rites that he was torn in pieces by the Titans
And here is Clement (http://www.theoi.com/Text/ClementExhortation1.html), in the passage I quoted in the previous section:
The Corybantes ...got possession of the chest in which the virilia of Dionysus were deposited, and brought it to Tyrrhenia [Lemnos], traders in glorious wares! There they sojourned, being exiles, and communicated their precious teaching of piety, the virilia and the chest, to Tyrrhenians for purposes of worship.
In looking at the d'Este Matto card, I think we should not forget about the other part of the male genitalia, the testicles, even though they are not pictured. Where you have a phallus, the testicles are not far behind! Their sacredness is attested in the emasculation of Uranos by Cronos, from which beautiful Aphrodite Uranos, of Botticelli's famous painting, was born. There was also the emasculation of Cronos by Zeus, depicted in the "genologies of the gods", with childen shown playing with it from a c. 1420 Fulgentius Metaphoralis, Vat. Apos. Cod. Pal. lat. 1066, p. 226, as reproduced in de Rola's Alchemy the Secret Art). I give the whole illumination at left and the relevant details at right:

Testicles, of course, bear a likeness to grapes on the vine. These are not shown on the d'Este card; we have to wait until Noblet of c. 1650 Paris for that:
The Noblet card, in which a strange animal reaches for the genitalia of the Fool, especially suggests Virgil's 2nd Georgic (http://classics.mit.edu/Virgil/georgics.2.ii.html), In winter the goats and other animals eat the tender bark of the vines, and
        ...For no offence but this to Bacchus bleeds
        The goat at every altar...
        Therefore to Bacchus duly will we sing
        Meet honour with ancestral hymns, and cakes
        And dishes bear him; and the doomed goat
        Led by the horn shall at the altar stand,
        Whose entrails rich on hazel-spits we'll roast
So a young goat is sacrificed to atone for the crime of his siblings, of eating the bark of the vines when they could and so damaging the crop. My knowledge of this Georgic comes again from Cartari, 1551. If Cartari knew it, others did before him. The Getty Museum has a Roman-era statue from Sicily done in archaic style that depicts just this crime, with Dionysus impersonating the grape vine (center and right, below:
Whether such statues were seen in the Renaissance, I don't know. On the left above is another showing Dionysus with horns; in the myths, he himself had taken the form of a young goat, etc. Another example is a Roman mosaic that Daimonax on http://bacchos.org/tarothtm/0et9mathermite2.html says is from the area around Narbonne, France:
To 15th century Christians, this goat-sacrifice would have been an "anticipation", as it was called, of Christ's own sacrifice, for the sake of atoning for humanity's eating of forbidden fruit. It is the sacrifice of the earthly part for the sake of the heavenly.

In this connection it would be of interest to look at the etymology of "matto". I don't know what the Italian etymology books say, but for the English equivalent, "mad", my 1967 Webster's New World Dictionary takes us back to what it says is the Indo-European root:
matt-, to cut down < mai, to hew, cut off; prob. sense development; castrated, crippled--mentally deficient.
I cannot help but think that there is a relationship here to the "mate" in "checkmate", which my dictionary says comes from the Persian shah plus mat, literally, "the king is dead". There is also the word "matador, the one who kills the bull, which my dictionary says comes from the Persian matar, to kill, with similar derivation as for the "mate" in "checkmate". I do not know whether the 15th century made these associations, but along these lines see the Sola-Busca Matto, with its crow, a symbol of death, and dead tree in the background:

Animal sacrifice was clearly mentioned by almost all ancient authorities in relation to the cult of Dionysus, both as his animal and as he himself. Diodorus names the ram as Dionysus at 73:1, the bull at 68:2, and horned animals generally at 64:2 and 73:2, Fools of course had mock-horns on their heads. So the Fool, the Matto, would be the one to be sacrificed; thus later we see the Hanged Man and perhaps other cards after that, such as Death, Devil, and Tower.

Moreover, if castration is part of the root meaning, we are again in the territory of Dionysus/Osiris, as the one whose phallus is missing. In relation to this same dictionary description "castrated, crippled, mentally deficient", I cannot help but also think of Buckert's derivation, as quoted by Andrea in "Tharocus Bacchus Est," of "mania" from "menos," another word for deficiency.

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