Warm welcomes
Thank you all so much.
Must say this is such a different reception to that I received on a certain other forum back in 1999.
Also good to see that my arguments about the Almanac in relation to tarot appear not to have been entirely laughed out of court. I will have to go back and see how it has been developed here. I've been entirely occupied with more formal work for a while now, and had all but dropped medieval researches.
Excuse me if I don't use the word Behenian. Never came across it in my own work and don't know how it applies to the '15 stars' of medieval astronomy. Would be glad to know more about the term, though.
About the astronomical identities of the Charles VI cards - two important points. First is that after managing to identify them, I saw that altogether they represent the same spiralling line of stars as that whose star-names were used on an eastern navigational compass, to name the directions.
This maritime link is also, btw, the key to those clear correspondences we find between the packs' structures, emblems and kings used for the arcana minor, and the so-called Atlas Catala, which is really a worldmap and Almanac - of the medieval Islamic sort - now . It is not just the map that's relevant, but also the completing charts.
The other important thing is that our current version of the Charles VI cards is not an original set. This is pretty plain just by looking at them, but internal evidence confirms that this is a second or perhaps even third recension of the imagery, only some left precisely as originally designed. A couple show that their imagery is of equivalent form, extraction, and quality to the original 'core' but there has been some alteration to them, probably to make the imagery more legible to a European audience - as least this is according to my research. What the current cards of the set have all got in common is little more than their borders, backgrounds (more or less) and the method by which they were mounted... but this is heresy, so I'll move on.
What I'll call the 'core' figures are entirely true to their original style and content, and have been designed to form astronomical pairings, except for the Fool, which is meant to be unpaired, since it represents Orion which, as the due east marking star has no pair in astronomy, because it is also the star which sets due west.
The other original pairs are the ones inscribed (later, and in French) as The Hanging Man and Death; The Judgement and the Lovers; The world and the Hermit. They are carefully designed to be paired. I believe that they are better described by their subject-matter than by these conventional tags, since the tags were meant to recall memory of particular astronomical texts, and few people know those texts today.
Hanging Man and Death
The Hanging Man I call "Suspended Gold" - partly because thats what it shows, partly for those who know a bit about Islamic esoteric philosophy, and partly because it probably represented the angel Marut rather than a Judas - in its original form. Marut in near eastern lore is one of a pair of angels, the one who decided to incur God's displeasure by bringing valuable learning down to humankind. He is punished forever by being suspended, and turning, but his tranquil face is because he acted as he did from love of humankind. In the west he is painted, of course, to make the figure more like another traitor, Judas, and that's fair enough. People adapt so that the 'speaking image' speaks to their own time and culture. Overall, the figure is Scorpius. it includes three sets of lunar mansion stars, all of which are within that constellation. The details of the figure enable one to recall the names and the specific traditions surrounding each.
(For people interested in the lunar mansions, I would recommend Emilie Savage-Smith's work above any other. Comprehensive and conservative in the extreme, so you can safely quote it tho' I feel she misses out too much because she wishes to avoid sounding esoteric... just my feeling.)
The astronomical pair for Scorpius/Hanging Gold is the figure usually called Death, but which is better the "Persian Destroyer" - again the image itself tells you what its star is - Perseus, star of the Persian nation, whose Greek name we have kept, and which means exactly that: Destroyer. This identification is confirmed by its internal details - as usual, they are literal representations of the figure's component stars' names, as well as reference to the figures beneath it consistent with the id for the Pope, Emperor etc. in other cards of the series.
The Great Fool is Orion. To get this, you only need to consult the Biblical book of Job, but the person who formed this card used particular works of classical literature too.
(They are all mnemonic figures, meant to assist study of astronomy, and draw upon Islamic, Christian, classical and other standard works that a person in late medieval Europe had to know. Islamic star-names were then becoming the standard in astronomy. I think that rendering the arcana major into pictorial form was mainly done to assist the process).
The Judgement and the Lovers.
Better called 'The brayers' and 'The Guards and Dancers'.
The 'Brayers' I call so, because the Arabs call two stars of the relevant star-figure Himaran or asses, whose "braying" refers in the Qu'ran to the sound of hell and in English to the sound of brazen trumpets. (remember these are intended to be multilingual images, as recommended for education by Quintillian, Erasmus and others).
The entire star-figure is that we call the pointers (Himaran) with Crux (Place of assembly)- our Southern Cross. Near eastern tradition saw the latter as that great Place of Assembly to which all non-believers would be made to assemble on the last day. Believers, it is said, will be clothed. Hence the figures emerging from the underworld, their shamed and distraught gestures. This constellation was quite commonly thought to mark the southern celestial pole. It was also one on which mariners relied heavily in the southern ocean - and still do. Dante speaks of it, emerging himself from the underworld, as 'four holy stars'.
As opposite pair we have another pair of stars, this time within Ursa Minor. They are called in Europe the Brothers, the Guards etc. - and are just so represented on the card. Also called in Europe and Islam by words denoting leaping and dancing - hence inclusion of the leaping dancers below these clearly Twin guards. (This wasn't the first time these figures were known in Europe. We find them in monastic manuscripts as guards above the entry to heaven's celestial city, from as early as the tenth century.)
The Guards circle about the star of true astronomical north, Polaris in Ursa minor. At least this was recognised as the Pole Star by the Phoenicians and until recently by us too.
However, Roman Latin literature speaks constantly speaks of the former north-marker, Ursa Major as the one marking north, and this contradiction for medieval Europe was even more complicated when the use of a magnetic North also became known. Magnetic north is about 17 degrees distant from astronomical north. This is one reason why three Norths are to be found in our arcana major. The other reason is that all three points (Polaris, the twin Guards, and Ursa Major) name points of the navigational compass-diagram.
Polaris alone as the north pole marker is represented in the arcana major by the figure known as 'the world'. How early in the west it was meant to represent an angel of the North I don't know. The usual representation of it in the west as The World is from Manilius, book 1 of the Astronomicon. Most of the 'core' pictures of the Charles VI set draw from Manilius' none but passages from teh Astronomicon's 1st book since this was uncontroversial as pure astronomical imagery, where the rest of the book is astrological. All the core cards, though, contain allusions from a wide range of the best sources known by the late fourteenth century. I think that originally the angelic figure was meant as Sraosha. Not absolutely sure of that. Time to go any deeper ran out. Anyway, the
THe "Roman" North (Ursa Major) is represented by the card called the Chariot. This I believe was in the original set, but has been repainted. It appears to me to be a meticulous rendering of hte passage in Manilius about both Ursae, but has been altered to limit its reference to Ursa Major, with the "Guards and Dancers" now doing duty for the whole figure of Ursa Minor.
....
Where the original series among the Charles VI cards includes several that represent several compass-points in a single card - e.g. Scorpius' card contains 3, and Death's contains 2, Europeans wanted to have a separate card available for each point. So we find that during the recensions, other images are adopted, or copied from other sources and taken to do duty for the 'missing' points. An additional source may have been others among the 3 sets said to have been made for Charles.
The hermit is the star Canopus (alpha Carinae). There is a general confusion in the medieval Islamic sources about whether this star, which proverbs used to mark the lowest south point, really did, or whether the stars of Crux did. In fact neither do, but Canopus was an enormously important star for the ancient world. Meccas' holy centre was formed to align towards Canopus for its north-south axis, and to the line of the moon for its east-west axis.
Canopus also marks a point on the navigational compass, of course, but not the due south.
The character in which Canopus appears on the Charles VI card is precisely in keeping with traditional star-proverbs of the Arabs, brilliantly combined with eastern Christian, and with western Christian source materials. Of course, westerners only knew Canopus' position at second hand until they had access to the three-dimensional celestial globes made by Islamic (not necessarily Muslim) craftsmen. Some astrolabes omit Canopus because invisible at the required northern latitude.
Sorry, time's up. I'll have to come back later and talk about the rest.
Oh - just one thing. The card we call the Tower represents perfectly the composition of Gemini, depicting all the Islamic names for its component stars. However, it does not really belong at all. It is there as a fake (or confused) 'pair' for Orion, but that confusion also exists in the Arabic traditions, for both constellations were called the Jau(w)zah, or 'central one'. There is a reason for this, but one has to go a long way back, into the period of ancient Egypt, to understand how the Arabs developed that confusion. More importantly, it is not one of the compass stars, and even its form lacks the lightness and verve of the other original figures.
Hope I haven't exhausted you.
bientot
Diane
