A10: The other cards, and an objection

I have so far only talked about the Matto card. For there to be a "path of the Matto" there must also be Dionysian interpretations for the other Triumphs, leading in the direction of the Holy Fool. It seems to me that in 1505 this would have been a project rather than a complete interpretation. People would have played with the idea. The tarot was not originally designed for such interpretation. The early cards, with the exception of the Fool cards I have mentioned and maybe a few more, do not reflect such an interpretation, which would have to be made without regard to pictorial details. With the Cary Sheet triumph cards, anticipating the later "Marseille" pattern, more details emerge consistent with the theme; and there is also the shift to what has been called the "C" order of the cards to consider. I do think it can be shown that a Dionysian interpretation of the sequence was possible, and one that influenced the design of some cards and also their order, terminating in the design known as the "Marseille II", of which the Conver of 1760-61 is the best known.

But before embarking on that project, I need to discuss one objection to what I have been saying. If there was a Dionysian interpretation of the cards, so much so that the name itself may have derived from his myth, then, one might wonder, why did no one writing about the cards, until 1781, ever mention the slightest connection to Dionysus or Osiris, or anything else, when anything was written, but good Christian meanings?  My answer is that it took that long before the power of the Church, both Protestant and Catholic, was broken enough for it to be safely in one's interest to say anything else.

On this subject my information, unless otherwise stated, comes from Wikipedia. Plethon was accused of having a pagan mystery school in Greece; the only copy of his major work, the Laws, was burned by the Patriarch of Constantinople, so that all that survives is quotes in the polemics written against him. His follower Sigismondo Malatesta, for building a temple in his spirit designed by Alberti (in which Plethon was buried, his body exhumed from Greece), was excommunicated in 1460. In the 1460s, a group of humanists led by Julius Laetus took Latin names as part of a secret society called the Roman Academy; soon they were accused by the Pope of paganism, imprisoned, tortured, and then, belatedly, released. Pico's work, the 900 Theses, was condemned by the Pope, who ordered all copies burned and its author brought up on charges of heresy (see Farmer's Syncretism in the West for details). In the ensuing Interrogation, only 13 of the 900 had to be retracted. In 1493 that Pope died and copies from the original printing could safely surface. In 1494 Pico and Poliziano died suddenly, after the same dinner, in 1494; a recent exhumation  found traces of arsenic in both bodies..Although nothing traces their deaths to the Church, the fear would have remained. Reuchlin, who had ruled against burning all Jewish books. in 1513, was put on trial by the Roman Inquisition for heresy; it took him years of trouble and expense before the Inquisition dropped his case. Cornelius Agrippa was hounded all his life for being a "Judaizing heretic" and a black magician. Just before 1600 Giordano Bruno thought Venice would be safe, but was taken to Rome and burned at the stake. Even in 1750s Paris, a few women who tried to tell fortunes were vilified and imprisoned, according to an account approved by Etteilla. (Wicked Pack of Cards pp. 96-97, quotes from some version of this 1791 source but not mentioning the prison terms, which I get from its reprint in the booklet that accompanies France Cartes' Petit Etteilla deck.) Without some very high-up assurances, such as de Gebelin probably had, one had to act cautiously and never say or picture anything that could not be adequately defended as orthodox. One would be mad to do otherwise. Yet we know that the Renaissance delighted in double meanings. Dummett, Depaulis, and Decker spell out the issue (Wicked Pack of Cards pp. 33-34):

People of the Renaissance reveled in hidden symbolism, and the occult sciences enjoyed greater prestige in the Christian world than at any other time before or since. Any theory to this effect must pass a severe test, however. It must depend, not on any direct evidence that can be cited, but on the intrinsic plausibility that of the particular interpretation proposed, which must draw on nothing that was not available at that time and place. But it ought not to be too plausible; it cannot be anything which, if present, would leap to the eye of a man of the Renaissance looking at the cards.

The reason they give for the symbolism not being too plausible is that otherwise we would know of it, from people ridiculing the cards. (Another reason, it seems to me, for restraint might be that silence was deemed better than publicity. And if people on their deathbeds finally wrote the truth, no doubt anxious heirs burned the essay, for fear of besmirching the family name.) The problem is that interpretations not spoken of get forgotten. And so, like fools, we are left with hypotheses--and cards, like some of the Leber, that look more and more as though being bent in a certain direction. In this situation, all we can do is put ourselves back into those times and think about the associations that, it seems to me, people of a certain type, reading literature that was publicly available, could hardly have avoided making.