Re: Trionfi card poem by Pico de Mirandola
Posted: 02 Aug 2022, 11:42
Phaeded: I doubt if Scholem meant to include Pico in his list of charlatans. Jewish scholars have examined his first set of "Cabalistic theses" (Farmer p. 345 ff: I do not mean the second set, which Huck cites) and found little to complain about. The translations he used were pretty good, despite early suspicions that they were tainted by Christian interpretations, and they enabled him also to consult the Hebrew originals. In fact Pico's manuscripts are a treasure-trove of Jewish Kabbalah, most of which have yet to be translated from the Latin. That said, I have to say that I find Pico's first set of Kabbalist theses, his observations on what the "Hebrew Wisemen" said, more interesting than the second.
Also, Scholem had the erroneous assumption that Jewish mysticism developed independently of mystics in other religions, which Idel among others has shown to be false. There was always much interaction and borrowing among them. For example, the idea that Saturn would be associated with Binah rather than one of the "lower seven" is first seen in Alemanno, whose work shows abundant influence of Florentine humanism, specifically Ficino. There were others, too, whose names I now forget but were examined in the thread I mentioned, on Christian-Jewish interactions.
In the 10th century, Saadia's commentary on the Sefer Yetzirah, the earliest known, is overtly Aristotelian - and written in Arabic (to a Jewish audience, I assume, whose native language was Arabic). There were also various Kabbalists who converted to Christianity: it must not have been a great leap.
Nonetheless it is a good question, what is the goal for us? I would like to suggest something. In my view one goal might be to see how Pico might have wanted gematria with 22 letters to be part of cartomancy, thereby making the Tarot sequence a tool in the quest for mystical vision (and even prophecy: for example there is his date for the end of the world). So far I haven't seen anything in the sonnets that shed light on this issue (or anything tarot-related) except the obvious number 22 and some hint that he attached numerological importance to it and perhaps its relationship to the deck. That is something. It goes along with my fanciful and romantic hypothesis that the star-and-arsenic-crossed lovers Pico and Poliziano (who went together to Venice to examine Bessarion's library but were denied permission, I read somewhere) wrote the program for the Sola-Busca, Pico providing the numerology for the number-cards and Poliziano the Romans for the trumps.
In relation to the "theses" that Huck quoted it is important to read Farmer's footnotes to them, too. They are longer than the text itself, and certainly clearer. Especially the note to 11>2. It is Pico's "magical conclusions" relating to Kabbalah that are most relevant, as Farmer points out; see his pp. 499-503. Pico surely played with numerology and gematria. Neither is exclusively Kabbalist, of course. Parts of the ars combinatoria are not even magic. Ramon Llull (the real Llull, not pseudo-Llull, who was also avidly read in Italy then) popularized it for Christians, and for him it was not magic, just a truth-generator, by means of deductive logic from indubitable postulates. Llull was influenced by the Kabbalist Abulafia. It is perhaps significant that a Hebrew translation of Llull's Ars Brevis came out in northern Italy of the early 16th century, based on a copy owned by students in Padua (where Pico studied Hebrew). I have spelled out as much of the relationship to Tarot as I could in my blog at http://16thcenturycartomancy.blogspot.com/, starting with the section "Llullian wheels" and continuing from there (I have two versions of my essay on that web-page; I am referring to the second, longer version). There is also Lazzarelli, whom I discuss in the section "The Deck as a Golem."
Another goal might be to find evidence of a connection between Tarot and the I Ching, perhaps via the Sefer Yetzirah or works derivative from it. Personally this is to me a pursuit less likely to be fruitful than the other. There is only a little letter-permutation in the SY, none of it binary-based (which is the basis of the I Ching). The SY speaks of 6 permutations, 2 letters each, of the 3 letters Yod Heh Vau, and 6 permutations, 2 letters each, of the 3 letters Aleph Mem Shin. These are base-3. In connection with the latter it does speak of male and female permutations, but this only has to do with the Hebrew words formed from them, Saadia observes, and whether they are one or the other plays no further role that I can see. There are also the 231 combinations of 2 letters each of the 22, but again that is not base-2.
(Incidentally, I recently came across the 1891 French translation of Saadia's commentary on the SY: even after 12 centuries, perhaps because of 12 centuries, it is the clearest and most helpful thing I have ever read about the SY. I am not talking about an ineptly chosen set of excerpts in English translation currently on the web. What I mean is on Google Books (for some reason Google's title is in Hebrew, although there is no Hebrew whatsoever on either of the two title pages), at https://www.google.com/books/edition/%D ... YAAJ?hl=en. The first half of the book is in Arabic and the second half is in French. In the first half there are numerous quotations in Hebrew, mostly attributed to the SY. They were put together and called "the Saadia version," which A. Kaplan translated in his book on the SY. I've translated or paraphrased what I thought were the most interesting parts of the French, but the only connection to Tarot History that I can think of is by way of Paul Foster Case, who cites the SY and seems to have used its two references to a cube (in the commentary, not the SY), and Waite, who ridicules Saadia in Holy Kabbalah (perhaps, in its original printing, where Case got the reference) and does not mention the cube. In my view Waite was nitpicking and Case in part changing, implying he's not, to fit his ideas (on the placement of the three elements). That is more what Scholem had in mind. And a subject for another time.
There is also the perspective that a goal as yet unarticulated will emerge as Huck reviews the literature.
Added later: That Pico is playing with the Tarot sequence in this supposed sonnet sequence might be a goal of Huck's earlier posts. I had supposed that Phaeded's question had to do with Huck's later posts, which interested me more. Perhaps the later posts were only to suggest that Pico also connected the 22 cards of the Tarot with the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Well, I can only say what I find interesting.
One other thing: about the search function. It, along with Farmer's cross-references, is helpful in finding where in the 900 Theses Pico talks about the Kabbalah (spelled "Cabala" by Pico and "Kabbalah" by Farmer). There is a lot.
Also, Scholem had the erroneous assumption that Jewish mysticism developed independently of mystics in other religions, which Idel among others has shown to be false. There was always much interaction and borrowing among them. For example, the idea that Saturn would be associated with Binah rather than one of the "lower seven" is first seen in Alemanno, whose work shows abundant influence of Florentine humanism, specifically Ficino. There were others, too, whose names I now forget but were examined in the thread I mentioned, on Christian-Jewish interactions.
In the 10th century, Saadia's commentary on the Sefer Yetzirah, the earliest known, is overtly Aristotelian - and written in Arabic (to a Jewish audience, I assume, whose native language was Arabic). There were also various Kabbalists who converted to Christianity: it must not have been a great leap.
Nonetheless it is a good question, what is the goal for us? I would like to suggest something. In my view one goal might be to see how Pico might have wanted gematria with 22 letters to be part of cartomancy, thereby making the Tarot sequence a tool in the quest for mystical vision (and even prophecy: for example there is his date for the end of the world). So far I haven't seen anything in the sonnets that shed light on this issue (or anything tarot-related) except the obvious number 22 and some hint that he attached numerological importance to it and perhaps its relationship to the deck. That is something. It goes along with my fanciful and romantic hypothesis that the star-and-arsenic-crossed lovers Pico and Poliziano (who went together to Venice to examine Bessarion's library but were denied permission, I read somewhere) wrote the program for the Sola-Busca, Pico providing the numerology for the number-cards and Poliziano the Romans for the trumps.
In relation to the "theses" that Huck quoted it is important to read Farmer's footnotes to them, too. They are longer than the text itself, and certainly clearer. Especially the note to 11>2. It is Pico's "magical conclusions" relating to Kabbalah that are most relevant, as Farmer points out; see his pp. 499-503. Pico surely played with numerology and gematria. Neither is exclusively Kabbalist, of course. Parts of the ars combinatoria are not even magic. Ramon Llull (the real Llull, not pseudo-Llull, who was also avidly read in Italy then) popularized it for Christians, and for him it was not magic, just a truth-generator, by means of deductive logic from indubitable postulates. Llull was influenced by the Kabbalist Abulafia. It is perhaps significant that a Hebrew translation of Llull's Ars Brevis came out in northern Italy of the early 16th century, based on a copy owned by students in Padua (where Pico studied Hebrew). I have spelled out as much of the relationship to Tarot as I could in my blog at http://16thcenturycartomancy.blogspot.com/, starting with the section "Llullian wheels" and continuing from there (I have two versions of my essay on that web-page; I am referring to the second, longer version). There is also Lazzarelli, whom I discuss in the section "The Deck as a Golem."
Another goal might be to find evidence of a connection between Tarot and the I Ching, perhaps via the Sefer Yetzirah or works derivative from it. Personally this is to me a pursuit less likely to be fruitful than the other. There is only a little letter-permutation in the SY, none of it binary-based (which is the basis of the I Ching). The SY speaks of 6 permutations, 2 letters each, of the 3 letters Yod Heh Vau, and 6 permutations, 2 letters each, of the 3 letters Aleph Mem Shin. These are base-3. In connection with the latter it does speak of male and female permutations, but this only has to do with the Hebrew words formed from them, Saadia observes, and whether they are one or the other plays no further role that I can see. There are also the 231 combinations of 2 letters each of the 22, but again that is not base-2.
(Incidentally, I recently came across the 1891 French translation of Saadia's commentary on the SY: even after 12 centuries, perhaps because of 12 centuries, it is the clearest and most helpful thing I have ever read about the SY. I am not talking about an ineptly chosen set of excerpts in English translation currently on the web. What I mean is on Google Books (for some reason Google's title is in Hebrew, although there is no Hebrew whatsoever on either of the two title pages), at https://www.google.com/books/edition/%D ... YAAJ?hl=en. The first half of the book is in Arabic and the second half is in French. In the first half there are numerous quotations in Hebrew, mostly attributed to the SY. They were put together and called "the Saadia version," which A. Kaplan translated in his book on the SY. I've translated or paraphrased what I thought were the most interesting parts of the French, but the only connection to Tarot History that I can think of is by way of Paul Foster Case, who cites the SY and seems to have used its two references to a cube (in the commentary, not the SY), and Waite, who ridicules Saadia in Holy Kabbalah (perhaps, in its original printing, where Case got the reference) and does not mention the cube. In my view Waite was nitpicking and Case in part changing, implying he's not, to fit his ideas (on the placement of the three elements). That is more what Scholem had in mind. And a subject for another time.
There is also the perspective that a goal as yet unarticulated will emerge as Huck reviews the literature.
Added later: That Pico is playing with the Tarot sequence in this supposed sonnet sequence might be a goal of Huck's earlier posts. I had supposed that Phaeded's question had to do with Huck's later posts, which interested me more. Perhaps the later posts were only to suggest that Pico also connected the 22 cards of the Tarot with the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Well, I can only say what I find interesting.
One other thing: about the search function. It, along with Farmer's cross-references, is helpful in finding where in the 900 Theses Pico talks about the Kabbalah (spelled "Cabala" by Pico and "Kabbalah" by Farmer). There is a lot.