Re: The Moon
Posted: 14 Mar 2010, 19:59
Thanks Corsufle - reading Lambspring and looking at the images I can't help being reminded of tarot and astrology as well as alchemy. Too many directions, too little time....
Pen
Pen
The spiritual side of Alchemy is set forth in the much stranger emblems of the Book of Lambspring, and of this I have already given a preliminary interpretation, to which the reader may be referred.[1] The tract contains the mystery of what is called the mystical or arch-natural elixir, being the marriage of the soul and the spirit in the body of the adept philosopher and the transmutation of the body as the physical result of this marriage. I have never met with more curious intimations than in this one little work. It may be mentioned as a point of fact that both tracts are very much later in time than the latest date that could be assigned to the general distribution of Tarot cards in Europe by the most drastic form of criticism.
They belong respectively to the end of the seventeenth and sixteenth centuries. As I am not drawing here on the font of imagination to refresh that of fact and experience, I do not suggest that the Tarot set the example of expressing Secret Doctrine in pictures and that it was followed by Hermetic writers; but it is noticeable that it is perhaps the earliest example of this art. It is also the most catholic, because it is not, by attribution or otherwise, a derivative of any one school or literature of occultism; it is not of Alchemy or Kabalism or Astrology or Ceremonial Magic; but as I have said, it is the presentation of universal ideas by means of universal types, and it is in the combination of these types--if anywhere--that it presents Secret Doctrine.
[1. See the Occult Review, vol. viii, 1908].
2.1 The Doctrine Behind the Veil: The Tarot and Secret Tradition
The figure on the Charles V1 Sun card is spinning - the spindle is on her left and she's drawing the yarn out into a thread and twisting it with her right. There should be a weight on the end of the thread to make this easier.Here it is the Goddess Diana who holds up the crescent moon in one hand, while in the other she carries a broken bow in her characterization as huntress.
There's a picture of the Leber Tarot #16 at the link above.The long spindle held by the woman in the Moon card of French origin and in the Sun card of the tarot of Charles VI may in fact be a graphic corruption of Diana's long arrow: in particular, the detail of its rear end. This can be easily understood from a card belonging to the Leber tarot (16th century, from northern Italy, but kept in Rouen, northern France), a non-standard pattern whose trumps had Latin mottos instead of names. The subject no.16 features a rather similar allegory, a female figure standing in the sea below an 8-pointed star, with a long arrow pointing downwards; its rear part, i.e. where the feathers are, is indeed very similar to the aforesaid spindle.
I am puzzled by this statement by Moakley. I don't see any bow in the Visconti-Sforza moon card (and I don't think a broken bow is a common attribute for Diana). From what I see, the girl is simply holding her waistband.Pen wrote:
This what Gertrude Moakley says about the PMB Moon card in The Tarot Cards Painted by Bonifacio Bembo for the Visconti-Sforza Family:
Here it is the Goddess Diana who holds up the crescent moon in one hand, while in the other she carries a broken bow in her characterization as huntress.
The Leber Star card represents Venus, and an arrow is a common attribute for her. This allegory does not seem to me to be very similar to the Charles VI Sun card.Pen wrote: The figure on the Charles V1 Sun card is spinning - the spindle is on her left and she's drawing the yarn out into a thread and twisting it with her right. There should be a weight on the end of the thread to make this easier.
This is what Andy says here: http://l-pollett.tripod.com/cards62.htm
The long spindle held by the woman in the Moon card of French origin and in the Sun card of the tarot of Charles VI may in fact be a graphic corruption of Diana's long arrow: in particular, the detail of its rear end. This can be easily understood from a card belonging to the Leber tarot (16th century, from northern Italy, but kept in Rouen, northern France), a non-standard pattern whose trumps had Latin mottos instead of names. The subject no.16 features a rather similar allegory, a female figure standing in the sea below an 8-pointed star, with a long arrow pointing downwards; its rear part, i.e. where the feathers are, is indeed very similar to the aforesaid spindle.
http://www.unizar.es/departamentos/filo ... /troy.htmlmarco wrote: If we take the woman on the Charles VI card to represent Diana/Artemis, I think there is no need to think of a corruption from a quite different allegory of Venus. We could simply refer to a definition attributed to Homer himself: “Artemis of the golden spindle” (Odyssey IV 122; Homeric Hymn "To Artemis").
PS: this definition has been translated in different ways, so I am not sure that in ancient times it was taken as a reference to a spindle (other translations give "golden shaft", "golden arrows").
*(There's a prounciation? symbol above the final 'u' in 'cufu' - a tiny 'v'.)XV11 LA LUNA (The Moon)
The Moon triumphs over the Star because she is bigger and brighter. Sforza's De Sphaera manuscript says of her:
The Moon greatly cheers the sailor,
And in fishing, fowling, and the chase
To all her children she opens the door,
Also to entertainment and other pleasures.
Here it is the Goddess Diana who holds up the crescent moon in one hand, while in the other she carries a broken bow in her characterization as huntress. The broken bow is a sign of her defeat, for she, like the Star and the Sun, is a captive in the triumph of Eternity. In the timelessness of eternity, the heavenly bodies are no longer needed as measurers of time. That is why, in the illustrations of Petrach's Triumph of Eternity, the sun and moon often appear in the sky as sad faces. The Triumph of Time, in Petrach's poem, immediately precedes the Triumph of Eternity, so the Triumph of Eternity over Time is represented by the sadness of these servants of Time.
The Moon was called Luna when she shines in heaven, and Proserpina when she is below. The poets say she was the daughter of Hyperion and sister of the Sun. According to Ovid her car had two wheels and was drawn by two horses, one black and one white.
NOTES LA LUNA
The disconsolate faces of the sun and moon appear in illustrations of Petrach's Triumph of Eternity. See Masséna (Pétrarque), passim, also Bulletin of The New York Public Library, LX (Feb 1956), whose frontspiece reproduces two miniatures from the Library's fifteenth-century ms copy Petrach's Rime, showing the Triumph of Cupid and the Triumph of Eternity.
The names, ancestry, etc of the Moon are taken from Ambrogio Calepino's dictionary, art. "Luna." Calepino was born at Bergamo in 1435. The new York Public Library has a Latin-Japanese dictionary based on one compiled originally by him. In the light of the recent interest in Zen, the following definition in that dictionary is of interest: "Meditatio, -onis. Consideratio, Xian, cufu*". "Xian" probably approximates the sixteenth-century proununciation of "Zen".
http://www.associazioneletarot.it/page. ... 31&lng=ENGIn the card from the Tarots of Charles VI, as in the one from an Ancient Italian Tarot, the Sun shines high, lighting up a girl who is spinning. This is a reference to the Fates who supervise the unravelling of human life, a myth closely related to the Sun, in that they carry out the same task, dispensing life and distributing it to every living being until its death.