Re: The Tower

71
Ross's recent posts on the Tower over on his Tarot History facebook group got me thinking about the Tower again, and led me to wonder:
Was the Tower perhaps the only card that originally bore an image that caused discomfort to early tarot players in the 15th century?

First, let's make it clear that nothing else seems to have made them particularly uncomfortable. They don't seem to have been unduly disturbed by either Death or the Devil, or by the Traitor. The religious figures in the deck (including the angels and the pope) gave great offense to many pious people, as we know from the Steele Sermon and from the various attempts (successful or unsuccessful) to eliminate those figures from tarot decks in the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries. But there's no indication that those who actually played tarot were ever offended by those religious figures, and in any case being offended is not the same as feeling uncomfortable or perturbed: even the author of the Steele Sermon might have felt only outrage, never disquiet.

But the Tower might have been different.

Its earliest known name is the Thunderbolt, and it was probably originally intended to represent God smiting evil with lightning, thus triumphing over the Devil and his works (and thus forming a useful bridge in the trump order: the Thunderbolt beats the Devil but is inferior to the greater celestial light of the Star).

But the card's designer seems to have chosen to represent that with a fairly conventional type of "Tower of Babel" image, showing people falling down towards a devil at the base of the tower—and that devil probably didn't look terribly discomfited.

This reconstruction of the original design is based on a comparison of all the surviving historical cards, which finds that four elements are very likely to have been present on the original card:
- A fortified tower, with crenellations at the top
- Lightning striking it, probably causing visible damage to it
- Human figures (probably two, maybe just one) falling from the tower
- A devil at the base of the tower, maybe depicted only with its head visible, emerging from behind the tower or from its doorway
I'm assuming that all four of these were present originally because:
- They (or likely descendants of them) all appear in different design lineages from different regions
- The first two seem essential because they are present in some form on nearly all cards
- The latter two are present less frequently, but must surely be original because it is hard to imagine that they would have been added in multiple different regions if they were not there to begin with.
The original image probably looked a little like the mid-15th century Tower of Babel that Mike drew our attention to in 2010.
Image
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Villabianca in the 18th century appears to have called the old Sicilian Tower card il novissimo dell'anima = "the last judgment of the soul" (Dummett, Il Mondo e l'Angelo p. 299; Dummett and McLeod, A History of Games Played With the Tarot Deck vol. 1 p. 373 note 3). Given that the sight of that Sicilian card inspired much the same tristezza (melancholy, suffering, unpleasantness) as the Sicilian Devil card did at that time, we can fairly safely assume that it depicted only a soul or souls being damned to hell, and not any souls being raised to heaven. Since this disquieting design was then replaced by a simple tower, it's very probable that the card Villabianca was describing clearly depicted at least three of the elements listed above: the tower, the human figure(s) (although possibly not shown falling) and a devil. It probably showed the lightning in some form too, interpreted as signifying divine judgment.

There were probably a lot of people who similarly saw the Tower card as depicting the damnation of souls, even in the earliest years, regardless of the designer's intention.

The Sicilian deck seems to have been the only one anywhere that preserved the original design elements intact to such an extent as late as the 18th century. The Roman tarot deck almost certainly had a very similar Tower, because the Sicilian deck seems to have been a direct and close descendant of the Roman one, and a Roman name for the card was casa del dan[n]ato (house of the damned). But the Roman deck seems to have died out by Villabianca's time.

In all other regions, at least one of the vital elements was removed much earlier: the Charles VI deck and the Rosenwald deck (both probably descended from a common source) removed both the devil and the human figures already in the 15th century; the Venetian version did the same, either in the 15th or early 16th century. The Bolognese one removed the devil, probably also before the end of the 15th century. On the evidence of the Cary sheet and the Tarot de Marseille, it seems the Milanese deck did that too, and likewise in the 15th century, but in that case a remnant of the devil seems to have stayed for a while in the form of a cow (the early tarot devils nearly always had cow's ears and horns, so this transformation is not too surprising). The Vieville version (which I suspect came from Piedmont but it could have been from another Lombard lineage) took that Milanese development a lot further, turning the cow into a small flock, the exploding tower into a tree, and the human figure into a shepherd. The Minchiate version, probably an offshoot from the same Central Italian lineage that produced the Roman and Sicilian cards, likewise retained nearly all the original elements, but the person (only one now) was no longer falling and the image no longer clearly implied damnation. We don't know what the Ferrarese card looked like but it must have kept the devil like Minchiate did, because the Bertoni poem calls the card Casa del Diavolo and Lollio and Imperiali call it Inferno, but Il Sivello describes it as an infiammata casa, so it could have just shown a flaming building with a devil in it, with nothing obviously indicating the damnation of souls in that version either.

Were all these changes merely the result of the usual process of playing-card design evolution, with people being confused about what they were seeing and/or trying to embellish the design in small ways? Yet all of the changes effectively moved the design in the same direction, namely away from the suggestion of damnation. So maybe a lot of people in the 15th century and possibly the early 16th century disliked that aspect so much that they felt an urge to remove it from the image.

Why should that have made the players so very uncomfortable? Well, the reason might have been all those preachers like San Bernardino, Savonarola and the author of the Steele Sermon, constantly banging on about how people who played cards would go to hell. That might have preyed on players' minds just a little too much for them to feel happy being constantly reminded of it by the image presented to them on this card.
Last edited by Nathaniel on 08 Feb 2025, 15:54, edited 1 time in total.

Re: The Tower

72
When I wrote that post yesterday, I had unaccountably forgotten that a Roman Tower card does survive, part of a sheet fragment from the 16th century, now in the Archivio Colonna at the Biblioteca S. Scolastica. It most likely dates from the mid-16th century, when the use of recycled paper in pasteboard bookbindings was still widespread in western Europe. That is the same period that gives us the Roman name casa del dannato ("house of the damned" or "house of the damned man"). Only part of the left side of the card survives, but it does at least confirm that the card showed a tower and also some form of the thunderbolt, as can be seen from the flames that pass across the top of the structure.
Image

Re: The Tower

73
[The following is quoted from a comment by Ross on his Tarot History facebook group on February 8, 2025]
For the interpretation of the image, I wonder if the Minchiate image is not a classicization similar to Ferrara Sun, with Diogenes and Alexander, and, probably, the Tarot de Marseille's Lover, showing Hercules' choice. In the Casa del Diavolo of the Minchiate, it might then be a depiction of the Rape of Proserpina, making the male figure Pluto.

But I'm not persuaded that this card reflects the original imagery and meaning of the card, which I take to be Saetta. The only things that remain in the Minchiate showing this are the blast of light in the upper right corner, in some designs showing a bolt of lightning, and the building itself.

In terms of the original elements you describe in your THF post:

1. Thunderbolt. 100% This is the meaning of the card.

2. A tower or fortress being struck by said bolt. 99%. The tiny uncertainty comes from the tradition represented by Viéville and the Belgian Tarots. In other words, it could be that even the tower was merely a prop for the lightning to strike in the original, not an essential feature that represented Hell. Of course its proximity to the Devil makes it easy to see why players and interpreters made such a connection.

3. Figures falling. 50/50. The uncertainty here comes from Charles VI and Rosenwald, and even Budapest. No-figures has priority, at least, and at least as much claim to reflect the Ur-Tarot design as the versions with falling/fallen figures, like BAR and Bologna.

4. Devil emerging from the doorway. Unlikely, in my view, given what I've expressed above.

Titles, in the absence of a picture, can be misleading. For instance, Anonymous Parisian is titled "La Fouldre", but there is no lightning to be seen in the picture. It shows a hellmouth, and all the fire is coming from below. If all we had were a list of the titles of the Anonymous Parisian cards, we'd be justified in thinking that it showed something more like the traditional Maison-Dieu, or even like Viéville, who knew the same title but shows a tree being struck rather than a tower.
I'll begin by addressing your comments about the "casa del diavolo" name. Your observation about Pluto is interesting, because in Le Carte Parlanti, Aretino referred to that card of the Minchiate deck as "the house of Pluto" (la magion di [Plutone]). He also then explicitly explained the image as depicting "Pluto" dragging a hapless victim into his "accursed house" (egli trascina a casa maledetta qualunque manca alla prudenzia, alla temperanza e alla fortezza). Thus he confirms my interpretation of the Minchiate Tower card, if we read his "Pluto" as a classicized reference to the devil.

You also have a point when you say that we can't quite be sure that the "casa del diavolo" in the Ferrarese deck actually had a devil on it. It's true that Il Sivello simply described it as a "house aflame" and we have no other clues to its appearance (the Bertoni poem also refers only to the flames, apart from the name it gives to the card). But it's not as if the Ferrarese did not know of any other names that they could have given the card (they could have called it Saetta, like Bolognese did and as the Steele Sermon suggests the Ferrarese themselves had done in earlier years, or they could have called it Fuoco like the Venetians). And the only context I am aware of where the name "casa del diavolo" was otherwise used is the Minchiate card in the 17th century, and the Minchate card evidently did show a devil at that time. So on the whole, I think it is more likely than not that the Ferrarese card did indeed feature a devil, shown in or near the base of the building.

However, as I said in my first post above, I don't think the tower was originally intended to represent Hell or a "house of the devil". But at the same time, I don't think it could have been intended as just a "prop for the lightning to strike" either. The similarity to all those 15th and 14th century images of towers being destroyed by divine force (whether the Tower of Babel or some Apocalyptic scene) is too striking for that. That, together with the ranking of the card just after the Devil, definitely gives the impression that the tarot image must have been intended to recall those other images of divine wrath punishing evil.

I don't see the Viéville/Belgian design as introducing any real uncertainty about the original presence of the tower, because the transformation from tower to tree is all too easy to explain. Indeed, the tower on the Budapest card actually looks like an earlier stage in that transformation, halfway between the Cary Sheet tower and the Viéville tree. The Viéville tree would have simply been a modification of an image something like the Budapest card but with some kind of livestock present, like the Cary Sheet cow.

As for the figures falling and the devil, the test for me in these cases is always to ask
"What is the likelihood of such details being added later if they were not there in the original image?"
And further:
"What is the likelihood of them appearing in multiple design traditions if they were not in the original image that must be the source of all those traditions?"

I think that it's reasonably likely that a falling figure (or two) might have been added to a card that originally just showed a tower struck by lightning, but it is less likely that exactly two figures would have been added in separate design traditions—and that is what we see (Cary/Marseille and also Bologna).

We can assume that there must also have been at least one human figure on the Roman and Sicilian Tower cards too, as the names "casa del dannato" and "novissimo dell'anima" would be exceedingly unlikely without one. However, given the use of singular nouns in those names rather than plural, it's likely that there was just one human figure on those cards, not two.

It's very probable that the human figure on the Minchiate card is derived from the same source as the "damned" human figure that must have appeared on the Roman/Sicilian card, because there are many notable commonalities between the designs of the Roman/Sicilian tarot trumps and the Minchiate trumps.

In other words, we have three design lineages that feature one or two human figures falling (in either the physical sense of falling or the religious sense, or both): Cary/Marseille (which I think of as the Milanese tradition), Bologna, and Minchiate/Rome/Sicily. That's not counting the Viéville/Belgian design, where a standing human figure is present, presumably derived from a falling figure on some earlier card.

The case for a devil being present originally is even stronger: While it's true that a devil was depicted on the Tower of Babel image that Mike found (reproduced in my post above), it still seems fairly unlikely that card designers would have added one to an image of a tower being struck by lightning, even if the image showed people falling from the tower. Yet we have evidence suggesting the presence of a devil on the Tower card in three different design lineages: the Minchiate/Roman/Sicilian lineage (because the earliest Minchiate card shows one and the names of the Roman and Sicilian cards strongly suggest one), the Ferrarese (because the card was called "casa del diavolo" as discussed above), and the Milanese (because of the otherwise inexplicable prominence of the cow's head on the Cary Sheet card).