The Devil and the Two of Hearts pt. 1

Teheuti

Ross -

Have you gotten any response from other members of the International Playing Card Society about your article in the journal? Do you see any sign of the history of playing card divination being "officially" revised or are your examples seen only as insignificant aberrations?
 

Ross G Caldwell

Hi Mary,

Teheuti said:
Have you gotten any response from other members of the International Playing Card Society about your article in the journal? Do you see any sign of the history of playing card divination being "officially" revised or are your examples seen only as insignificant aberrations?

There really isn't anything "official" in this subject. Just a body of work and research that has to be addressed before anything one might presume to add to it, if you want to be taken seriously by those you respect. It's still an amateur - or interdisciplinary - discipline, the history or sociology of playing cards. Dummett's research and opinions are no longer the last word - they're just the dominant word, because he cared enough about the subject to comment on it in a systematic way, and collected just about everything known up until 1980. By the same token, if you absorb what he and others have found, and go on to do your own research, then you have a basis for arguing with his conclusions or analysis.

Thierry Depaulis organized the conference that year, and it was he who asked me to speak. He helped me select the topic from among the things I was working on, and saw the draft of the paper. In other words, he found nothing objectionable. He even gave me additional new information, that I reported in the talk. What does he really think? Hard to say. I don't think he cares very much about when and how cards were used for divination - he just loves doing history.

Several members gave me positive feedback, and some additional information (like on the Jungling card, fragments of playing cards and tarot cards in reliquaries and monstrances, other "secondary uses"; one fellow gave me a 2 of hearts from the 18th century). They liked it. One person in particular thought it was refreshing. I got no negative criticism (like "that's nonsense!"), and haven't yet. I don't expect any. My facts were ... facts, and my opinions/interpretations given as such.

Mostly the members of the IPCS are collectors and hobbyists with a wide variety of interests in playing cards. Only a few are particularly interested in Tarots. So the subject of when and how cards were and are used for divination is an obscure subject, and if you are interested in it you go to the few trustworthy sources that discuss it authoritatively (i.e. backed up with primary research and clear reasoning) - Dummett, Decker-Depaulis-Dummett, Berti and Vitali (eds.), and more specific sources for particular traditions like Bologna; not too many overall.

So - there aren't very many people one is knowledgeably addressing when one is addressing the question of "when were playing cards first used for cartomancy?" There isn't an academy one appeals to for official sanction - just a meritocracy based on good scholarship.

On that basis, if you think my work and the discoveries others have made recently and presented here and elsewhere (including Karlin's discovery - for the cartomantic world - of Martin's work, which I credited to him in my talk) somehow change a perceived orthodoxy - I agree with you.

I think the main points to be taken from the recent discoveries are that, in Spain at least, there were professional cartomancers in the 17th century, and they used layouts with multiple cards and positional significations.

Kwaw's discovery of the "Jack the Gyant-Killer" reference shows that layouts were used too, although the play also says that it was a "new" art (in England).

Both cases contradict Etteilla's statement that until his invention, cartomancers only used simple single-card draws as a form of lots.

Kwaw's other discovery, in the Whartoniana (1727), shows that diviners could use the play of a regular game as a form of divination.

For tarot cards, common sense would say that it should exist too, wherever tarot cards were commonly used. In Bologna we have evidence for it from before 1750, but the evidence in France before Etteilla is only late, in 1772, and it is indirect - Cauvin is sentenced with a bonnet of a sieve surrounded by tarots, which are to be torn up after she completes her sentence. The presence of tarots here only makes sense if she used them, like the sieve, for divination.

And in Spain we should not expect Tarot at all, of course. Common sense says that "witches" used everyday objects, especially objects that could be explained away if discovered - Tarot was not common in Spain, while regular cards were. The Venetian examples are to be expected by this logic, because Tarot was common in Italy in the 16th century.

Ross
 

Ross G Caldwell

Isabella Bellocchio and the Devil card

I have found some more information on a case I reported in my talk at the beginning of this thread concerning the Venetian Inquisition's trial of Isabella Bellocchio, a wealthy, if illiterate, courtesan, in 1589. They provide much more detail of the episode.

Readers will recall that Ruth Martin published these records for the first time in 1989, and they were brought to the attention of the online Tarot community by Jess Karlin in 2000 - http://www.tarotica.com/tarmag16.html
Unfortunately Martin did not provide a transcripton of the original language, so it was not completely clear that the documents were referring to a tarot card.

The new sources, in English, make it clear that it was in fact the Devil card, and they also show that Isabella had taught her method to another courtesan earlier, in evidence given at a trial in 1586 (see the very end of the new material).

Here is a recap of what I wrote in 2006, with the new information following.

II. Corona and Isabella Bellochio

In roughly the same period, from 1589, the city of Venice gives two instances in which playing cards, in particular tarot cards, were used in magical rituals.

They come from the investigations of Ruth Martin published in her 1989 book, "Witchcraft and the Inquisition in Venice, 1550-1650" (Oxford, Blackwell, 1989). Martin's discovery was brought to the notice of tarot enthusiasts in 2000 by prolific internet tarot enthusiast Jess Karlin.

Ruth Martin demonstrates that the Inquisition's interest was in heresy, not magic. The latter was mortally sinful and criminal, but not heretical. The heresy, when it is noted, consists in worshipping the Devil, or profaning the sacraments. Magical rituals are only incidentally described.

The first account in which tarot cards are mentioned in connection with a love magical ritual comes from January of 1589. Isabella Bellochio was found guilty of being "formally apostate from God, having with works shown herself to believe that it was permissible to offer reverence to the devil, burning him lamps for several months continuously, and praying to him that he should make (her) lover come, and having a pact, if not explicit, at least tacit with that same devil" (Martin, 163-164). What that worship consisted of was given in a deposition by Bellochio's housemaid Marina, who testified that Bellochio "had worshipped an image of the devil by kneeling before it, with her hair loose, while maintaining a lantern alight before it day and night. '(She had)... a light (cesendello) which burned continuously in the kitchen in front of a devil and the tarots...'" (Martin, 163).

It is startling and incongruous to see "the tarots" mentioned in this context, and we wonder what exactly it might mean. Did she worship the image of the Devil from a tarot pack or was the image a homemade statue, and the tarot pack simply an accoutrement with an unstated purpose? We don't know, and I have been unsuccessful in finding Martin to ask her for more details.

In any case, whatever the purpose of the tarots in this instance, what interested the inquisitors was Bellochio's use of the cesendello lamp, which was the lamp normally kept burning in front of the reserved host, the very body of Christ. This worship, and the tacit pact it implied in the theology of the witch hunters, made her a heretic.

The second mention of tarot cards was recorded in a trial from the same year, in October 1589. In this case, a witch named Angela had apparently "told her client Corona that '... you need to adore the devil if you want to get help', and had suggested getting hold of a tarot card." (Martin, 162). In light of the greater detail preserved in the first case above, it is hard not to think that this card would have been the Devil.


New stuff (I have integrated the footnotes of the first text into the body of the text with double parentheses)-

Elizabeth Horodowich, Language and Statecraft in Early Modern Venice (Cambridge University Press, 2008), (pp. 183-184).

While the terms siren and witch functioned as metaphoric descriptions, witchcraft was a real legal and spiritual problem in early modern Venice and the Holy Office sometimes tried courtesans and prostitutes for witchcraft ((note 47. It is difficult to know exactly how many trials of courtesan-witches the Venetian Inquisition initiated because many trial records are incomplete and have been lost, dispersed, or ruined. However, in the second half of the sixteenth century, approximately 1500 trials took place, and of these, about 150 were for witchcraft, magic, and divination – 98 percent of these witchcraft trials were of women, tried primarily in the 1580s. These trials began with the first trial for witchcraft in 1552 against Lucrezia (bu. 10) and ended with the trial of Angela Manza in 1592 (bu. 69). See Marisa Milani, Piccole storie di stregoneria nella Venezia del ‘500 (Verona: Essedue Edizioni, 1989), 16, and Marisa Milani, ”L’incanto di Veronica Franco”, Giornale storico della letteratura italiana 162 (1985): 251, n. 5.)). Many historians – Ruth Martin and Guido Ruggiero in the case of Venice, Robin Briggs in France and Lorraine, and Lyndal Roper in Germany – have long studied the gendering of witchcraft, emphasizing that most accused witches were women, and many at least in Northern Europe were midwives and healers. The accused in approximately 18 inquisitiion trials for witchcraft in sixteenth-century Venice were labeled cortigiane or meretrice, and trial content reveals additional courtesans who practiced stregoneria. Although this remains a small number, the content of these trials often reveals a perceived cultural connection between courtesans and witchcraft. Some of these trials, such as that of Emilia Catena (1586) and Isabella Bellocchio (1589) resulted in whipping and various forms of public humiliation that would have made a strong impression linking courtesans and witchcraft in the minds of contemporary Venetians.

This linkage is significant because witchcraft was fundamentally a spoken, verbal practice and a crime of language ((note 50. Because the boundaries between saints and heretics or witches were often quite blurry in the early modern world, it is interesting to note the degree to which those supposedly possessed by the devil emphasized orality and spoken language in their revelations. Armando Maggi describes some visionaries and demonically possessed as “obsessed with orality.” See Armando Maggi, Satan’s Rhetoric: A Study of Renaissance Demonology (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001), 144.)). In early modern Europe and Venice in particular, the practice of witchcraft involved a variety of arts ranging from bean-throwing (butta fave), conjuring the devil with tarot cards (il tarocco), boiling bones or making a type of witches’ stew (la pignatta), or seeing the future or past in a jar of holy water (l’inghistara). Though diverse in practice and often focused on the immediacy of material objects, almost all these acts of witchcraft necessarily employed incantations in order to make the magic work. Many rituals involved complex mixtures of words and actions: an object, movement, or gesture whose magical powers were brought to life by an oration. Without these spoken words used to activate the magic, the action or object alone had no effect. For instance, someone hoping to make a fickle lover return might turn to a witch for the tarocco. This required directing prayers and reciting formulas to the tarot card of the devil with a candle lit in front of it, usually at dawn or sunset, so that the devil would enter the heart of an unfaithful lover and convince him to return to his partner. Or, someone like the famed courtesan Veronica Franco, trying to locate a lost or stolen item, might ask for an inghistara.

Guido Ruggiero, Binding Passions: Tales of Magic, Marriage and Power at the End of the Renaissance (Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 96-97

In fact, the Holy Office often found itself involved in convincing the accused that they were rejecting Christ in accepting the Devil – that is, explaining to people that they must choose between the two. The long, complex case against Isabella Bellocchio is especially revealing in this context. A courtesan as well as a powerful woman with important friends (she regularly ate with friends while held in the Holy Office’s jail and even received a proposal of marriage from one of her noble lovers while there), Isabella nonetheless eventually confessed to practicing a wide range of magic in order to win and at times free herself from the love of a young man named Milano. Among other things, she lighted a holy lamp before a tarot card with a Devil on it, boiled holy water in a new pan, prepared a magical potion to put on the door sill of a rival, put salt under the coals of the fire while saying special prayers, buried an enchanted egg, touched Jews with pork in the Ghetto, cast beans, measured cords, and threw chains. Clearly, her magic was nothing if not eclectic.

But her lighting of a holy lamp before a picture of the Devil on a tarot card seriously troubled her inquisitors. They returned repeatedly to the matter, trying to force her to admit its implication – that she had worshipped the Devil and rejected Christ. The give-and-take of her testimony is most suggestive. Her interrogators asked, “To what end did you light that holy lamp before the tarot card?” She replied, “So that Milano [her lover] would come to me, that was my intention that he come.” They pressed: “Tell us clearly who made this Milano come.” She answered. “Because I lit this lamp before the Devil, in this way Milano would have to come.” Trying to close their logical trap, the inquisitors concluded, “You should decide to explain who would make this Milano come and your true intentions in lighting this lamp and if you lit it to honor and pray to the Devil so that he would make the said Milano come.”

Perhaps cleverly, Isabella sidestepped the inquisitors’ logic. Yet her testimony suggests that she did not see the matter in as dialectical terms as they. “I never understood”, she claimed, “that one had to pray to or honor the Devil but only that one must light a lamp to him in order to have that which one desired, that is in this case my lover. Thus I did not light it with the intention of worshipping or praying to him, but with the intention that my lover be made to come.” She conceded immediately, however, “I did light it for evil.” But this admission did not mean for Isabella that she had rejected Christ for the Devil. “I lighted the lamp before the Devil because I had the will to honor him so that he would make Milano come to me, but for only this fact and not for any other [italics mine]. For if I had intended to honor him in other ways I would not have gone to Mass, nor would I have said other special prayers of mine.”

Honor the Devil for that which is the Devil’s seems to have been Isabella’s logic.

(notes 30-31, pages 245-246, say “30.(Archivio di Stato of Venice (A.S.V.), Sant’Ufficio,) Busta 63, Isabella Bellocchio, testimony of same, 27 June, 1589, f. 155r. 31. It may be as well that Isabella was also playing on the distinction between honoring and worshipping here. In a society where honor was so important, it was necessary to honor many powers, but that did not imply that one rejected other powers by honoring one particular one. It is possible in Isabella’s case to see how this magic was passed from one courtesan to another. Three years earlier, a servant of the courtesan Emilia Catena had testified that her mistress had been taught this very magic by Isabella Bellocchio. At the same time, she was learning a wide range of other love magic from an old woman noted for her magical medicines and throwing of beans named Anastasia: for this, see ibid., Busta 58, Emilia Catena, testimony of Magdalena, wife of Giovanni. 26 March 1586)

Among other interesting things, note that in Horodowich's account, "bean throwing" (butta fave) was a favored method of divination, just as in the Spanish accounts (this page
http://www.aquelarreweb.net/enlaces/magices/metodos.htm
explains what appears to be the old Spanish witch method of using beans - favomancy - for divination. The cartomancy method also appears to be authentic, although the page is unfortunately illustrated with RWS Tarot Aces).

Also, while Isabella Bellocchio and others "conjured the devil" with tarot cards, in 1741 in Spain, Francisca Romero conjured the spirit of divination with a "tour de carte" - literally a "card trick" - and an invocation of Barabbas, Satan, Maria Padilla "and all her band", and the Diablo Cojuelo ("limping devil", basically Satan's little helper).

http://www.tarotforum.net/showpost.php?p=1799738&postcount=1
(point number 2)

Ross
 

Teheuti

I believe the original research and publication of the material on the witchcraft trials in Venice was done by the late Marisa Milani, professor of the literature of folklore at the University of Padua. She seems to be the first to examine the Venetian Sant-Uffizio archive where she discovered that tarot was used in Venetian “martelli” (love magic): “One such ritual made use of the tarot cards, especially the one that portrayed the devil, which they would place next to a light until a certain time of day when prayers were addressed to it and formulas were recited.” Quoted by Margaret F. Rosenthal in The Honest Courtesan: Veronica Franco, Citizen and Writer in Sixteenth Century Venice (U of Chicago Press, 1992). Marisa Milani, wrote about these practices in Antiche Pratiche di medicina popolare nei processi del S. Uffizio (Venezia, 1527-1591) (Padova, 1986).
 

Ross G Caldwell

Teheuti said:
I believe the original research and publication of the material on the witchcraft trials in Venice was done by the late Marisa Milani, professor of the literature of folklore at the University of Padua. She seems to be the first to examine the Venetian Sant-Uffizio archive where she discovered that tarot was used in Venetian “martelli” (love magic): “One such ritual made use of the tarot cards, especially the one that portrayed the devil, which they would place next to a light until a certain time of day when prayers were addressed to it and formulas were recited.” Quoted by Margaret F. Rosenthal in The Honest Courtesan: Veronica Franco, Citizen and Writer in Sixteenth Century Venice (U of Chicago Press, 1992). Marisa Milani, wrote about these practices in Antiche Pratiche di medicina popolare nei processi del S. Uffizio (Venezia, 1527-1591) (Padova, 1986).

Thanks for the correction Mary. I thought it was Ruth Martin.

I have been coming across Marisa Milani's name a lot (and she is cited by Horodowich of course) but I didn't know she had died. Sorry to hear it.

Ross
 

baba-prague

I don't really have anything to add except to say how interesting I found this. Thanks. As I've mentioned before, some time back I came across a reference to fortune telling by cards being associated with courtesans in the late 18th century and this possibly helps to explain why. I can probably dig it out if anyone is interested.

Incidentally the early 20th century French writer, Colette, also links the use of fortune-tellers and "love magic" with courtesans. It seems like this association persisted a long time.
 

kapoore

Hi Ross,
I think it's interesting that most of the "witches" were courtesans. In the 15th Century the Tarot was played in the wealthy courts of the oligarchs, and of course these courts had courtesans. Then in the 16th Century "witch" trials these courtesans are using Tarot for other than gaming purposes--like seducing a lover back through magic. Is it too daring to jump to the conclusion that the first Tarot divinations were among the courtesans? Some general info http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Courtesan Now I'll have to watch Dangerous Beauty and see if she plays cards.
 

Ross G Caldwell

kapoore said:
Is it too daring to jump to the conclusion that the first Tarot divinations were among the courtesans?

I don't think it's too daring, but it would just be fiction, since there is no evidence, at least in Italy. But if you want to tell a story, make sure it isn't the Celtic Cross or something - it was probably like the "giuoco delle sorte", drawing a single verse at random and having it expounded by a witty poet. That could easily fall into the "divination" category when the issue were sensitive, like whether a certain man likes you or not.

The Venetian Inquistion evidence doesn't mention anything resembling cartomancy (in the sources I know), although the Toledo Inquisition does - and there it wasn't courtesans, but "middle class" women.

There is no evidence I know of fortune-telling with regular cards before the 17th century. Earlier evidence was with specially made cards with verses on them.
 

kapoore

I suppose using cards for magical purposes is not the same as for divination. This is a fine line. If the woman on trial is using the Devil card to draw her lover back to her; might she not also query the cards if she is successful? I find the same fine line in Ramon Llull's art, which clearly was not intended to be "divinatory," but became known as the "divinatory art." How does conjecturing differ from conjuring? All in one's intention? I am a conjecturer (questioner) with the cards, and I guess that would not be divination? I was reading an article on the painting "The Fortune Teller." The name was added later, but there are two other names one being Philip the Good's Fortune read (or something like that). So we have three names all relating to fortune telling but the painting is not about fortune telling?

I'm surprised that it didn't occur to anyone to use cards for divination. Here is a list of divinatory practices from an early 1430s sermon.
"Now the kinds of divination...are multiple: from air, from fire, from water, from earth" Here is the list he gives: geomancy, mirror of Apollo, handle cleaned stones, boy's fingernails, entrails of animals, palm branches, position of the stars at birth, the chatter of birds, sneezing, spontaneous expression (verbal I think), chiromancy, spatulanary (spitting?), dice, molten lead, rotated wheel, trials of hot iron or boiling water.." He also mentions the Pythagorean wheel and calling of angels. I did try divination with the Pythagorean wheel (although did not do it by moonlight invoking my mother's name). I don't recommend it because it's very hard to get a good reading and you will end up depressed.