B1: Bagatella

So now I will proceed through the rest of the trumps, just to show some of the associations that would likely have been made by a literate  person, as an ongoing project from the late 15th to the early 18th century. I am greatly indebted to Daimonax at http://www.bacchos.org for his presentation of this interpretation several years ago; here I will go in my own way, with many additions and some subtractions (for citations that were known only after the 18th century, such as things at Pompeii). Let me make it clear that I do not believe that an initiation into the Mysteries of Dionysus was the original impetus or meaning of the cards; nor is it the only way of seeing the cards, or the only influence on the cards once Dionysus might have started being a factor. It is also important to remember that in this period educated Europeans would have followed the lead of the ancient writers in considering Dionysus and Osiris two forms of the same god in different countries, with similar rites.

Although the Matto was sometimes given the number 0 (explicitly so in the Sola-Busca of c. 1491), the card known in English as the Magician was fhe first numbered card.  In the earliest lists, from Ferrara and Venice, he was called the Bagatella. Occasionally he is called the Bagatino; for Alciati, 1444, unusually, he is the Innkeeper. In France he was the Bateleur.

To all appearances this figure is merely a common street conjurer. In the myty of Dionysus, however, however, he would be Dionysus himself, who as the "stranger" in Euripides' Bacchae who concocts illusions to deceive Pentheus, his opponent. Dionysus is also the master of real magic, As a child he turned pirates into dolphins, and his fennel stalk thyrsis is the prototypical magician's wand; here is an illustration from the 1647 edition of Cartari's Images of the Gods of the Ancients, which was first published 1556.

The Bagatella's table suggests the trays of sacred objects seen on Dionysian sarcophagi:

These are described by Clement of Alexandria (http://www.theoi.com/Text/ClementExhortation1.html):

And it is worthwhile to quote the worthless symbols of this rite of yours in order to excite condemnation: the knuckle-bone, the ball, the spinning-top, apples, wheel, mirror, fleece!

The knuckle-bones, at least, are often seen on the Bagatella's table in the form of dice (at left below, Noblet c. 1650).

The d'Este Bagatella (at right above), is shown surrounded by children:  This figure might correspond to the Titans as described by Clement:

He was yet a child, and the Curetes were dancing around him with warlike movement, when the Titans stealthily drew near. First they beguiled him with childish toys, and then, - these very Titans - tore him to pieces, though he was but an infant.

In this context, the Bagatella is a nefarious seducer to be avoided.

By the time of the Noblet (at left below), there was a purse with something like a knife sticking out of it. As Daemonax has pointed out (http://bacchos.org/tarothtm/1bat2.html) it resembles the snakes emerging from the basket on Roman-era Dionysian sarcophagi.

Both suggest the "virilia of Dionysus" (Clement of Alexandria's phrase) hidden in the chest, or the phallus on the tray in Roman friezes, as does the bush between the Bateleur's legs and his finger parallel to the object above it.

Now I want to turn to the left-hand jug in Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne (http://www.cgfaonlineartmuseum.com/bellini/p-bellin15.htm). It is the jug on the far left of the painting, held by a satyr and steadied by Silenus. You are free to deny the comparison, but after all, it was a Dionysian painting done for Alfonso d'Este, with many exposed breasts, in the center a god putting his hand between a goddess's thighs, and on the far right a man with an erection looking down at a reclining goddess or nymph!

Compare it to the sacred "virilia" on the trays of Dionysian initiations, i.e.(from http://www.bacchos.org/tarothtm/0et9mathermite2.html)

Be sure to notice who is carrying the tray, not only here but on the other sarcophagi a few paragraphs above. It is that same Silenus who Lorenzo described as fat and lumbering,so drunk as barely able to stay on his ass. In the myth he was Dionysus's teacher. On the sarcophagi, he is the initiation-leader in his mysteries.

Since the initiate is blindfolded, I suspect that the test here was for him to identify the objects on the tray by feel in mythical terms, having never actually seen them. Then when the veil is lifted he will perhaps see them face to face. Well, yes, it is not hard to do as Clement did, and make fun of such secrets. Perhaps one has to have been there.

Now let us turn from Greece to Egypt. In Egyptian-style imagery, it is the fact that the Bagatella card was number one, i.e. the chief god, or the one who begot the others, that would have been important, plus the broad-brimmed hat on the Sforza Bagatella (at right above), which the tarot of Paris and Marseille later favored (e.g. Noblet at left above). The Egyptian Zeus mentioned by Herodotus (http://perseus.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/GreekScience/hdtbk2.html, chapter 42) and worshiped by the "Ammonians", i.e. the followers of Ammon, had the horns of a ram. For Diodorus, this Ammon most likely merely had a ram-head shaped helmet (http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Diodorus_Siculus/3E*.html, sec. 73).

Although at first glance it is perhaps not easy to see the hat in terms of horns, those of the Ammon-ram were unusual. When people of the Renaissance saw the "Bembine Tablet", an Egyptian-style artifact of ancient Rome. acquired by the famous humanist Pietro Bembo after the 1527 sack of Rome, they would have seen horizontal horns extending on both sides of the ram's head, and not only on them but on many other figures, no doubt in emulation of their chief or primal ancestor.

Such a ram, for readers of Herodotus and Diodorus, thus would have represented Ammon, whom Diodorus (sec. 68) identified as the father of Dionysus according to the Libyans. The Bembine Tablet image of the horizontal horns is thus another reason why the broad-brimmed hat versions of this card would have been favored by those wishing to project the Dionysian myths onto the card.

As early as the card for the Sforzas, 1450s, the design of the hats suggests the wavy horns of the god. The parallel is particularly striking when compared with an Egyptian relief that may or may not have been known at that time (it is from Aswan, at the first cataract, which marks the beginning of the Nile Valley. It is of Khnum, the god sacred to that place3 also the god who created human beings on his potter's wheel, although I doubt if that was been known in the 15th century.

Other images of the god with the wavy horns were in the zodiacs at Dendera. These were Greco-Roman syntheses of the Greek zodiac signs and Egyptian images, in a temple that was above ground and accessible to any enterprising Egyptian (or possibly European traveler) who could get in and copy what he saw . The ram-god was Aries, first sign of the zodiac. The center one, with the curved horns, is another way that Ammon was represented in Egyptian temples. (These images come from French Egyptologist Christiane Desroche-Noblecourt's Le Fabuleux Heritage de l'Egypte, p. 311. The last one is incomplete, cut off by the edge of the page of her book.)
 

In Plutarch (On Isis and Osiris 12, http://thriceholy.net/Texts/Isis.html), the first magician, and the ancestor of at least Isis, was the deity Plutarch called the Egyptian Hermes. Plutarch relates that it was through a game that this Hermes played with the Moon goddess that the gods were able to descend into this world. As the father of Isis, he taught her his magic. Plato called him "Theuth" (Phaedrus 274d) and said he was the inventor of games and letters. As both hieroglyphs, a game, and possibly an instrument of magic, the tarot, with him on the first card, could easily have been credited to him as well. So the "Book of Thoth" (de Mellet 1781 and Etteilla 1785) potentially goes back to c. 1500.

The Bagatella's broad-brimmed hat might for some have associated him with Hermes, Thoth's Greek equivalent. In Cartari, 1647 edition (p. 165), Hermes' hat has horizontal wings sticking out on both sides, making his hat similar to the Bagatella's. This trickster-god Hermes is another exemplar for the small-time conjurer known as the Bagatella.

Hermes had the job, in the Greek stories about him, of escorting people to the land of the dead and also, as in the case of Orpheus and Eurydice, of bringing them back. Notice the stream between the Noblet Bateleur's legs, repeated in the "Chosson" of somewhat later. (The date for the "Chosson" might be 1672, based on the date on tits Two of Coins, which also has the name "Chosson"; but since that particular cardmaker wasn't in business then, it might well be early 18th century; or else the design was initiated by someone else. I will refer to it as the "Chosson" of the late 17th or early 18th century.) In classical literature, there was the River Styx separating our world from Tartarus. In Dante's Divine Comedy, streams were also at the boundary between Purgatory and Paradise. In Renaissance art, likewise, streams also represented the separation from this world and the next. For example, in Bosch's Wayfarer, c,  the main figure faces a rickety bridge over a stream.

With his staff, already present in the card for the Sforzas in the 1450s, the dog, already in the Tarot of Mantegna Misero (both below, first image), and  his pack, added in the Cary Sheet card  (below left, second image), he suggest the tarot Matto, on the "fool's journey" through life to the hereafter.

The Cary Sheet Bagatella is worth recalling again for his three-tiered hat. Like the Cary Sheet Matto, he recalls that other Egyptian Hermes, another follower of Isis's magic, Hermes Trismegistus, the thrice-great.

One final association to the Bagatella is to Dionysus's son by Venus, the god Priapus. We have already met him in the Bellini's Feast of the Gods for Alfonso d'Este, as the one who hides a perpetual erection in the folds of his robe, also the figwood scarecrow god of the Priapus poems. Here is the way he is portrayed in Cartari 1647 (p. 230).

The Magician's wand bears some resemblance; and in the Noblet there is again the phallic finger, paralleling the phallic knife (at left below) and perhaps referring also to the plant between his legs. The small amulet, identifiable by the hole in which a string would have been passed to make a necklace, is another representation of his distinguishing feature. Such amulets were still used in 15th-16th century Europe, for example the one below right found in Bosch's hometown of 'Hertogenbosch (image taken from Laura Dixon, Bosch p. 231).