Review of The Game of Saturn: Decoding the Sola-Busca Tarrochi, Part Three

Review essay of The Game of Saturn. Decoding the Sola-Busca Tarrochi by Peter Mark Adams

Part 3 (of 3)

By John R. White, Ph.D.

In the previous part of this review essay we saw something of the underlying worldview of the Sola-Busca Tarot, as outlined by Peter Mark Adams in The Game of Saturn. This worldview weaves together strands of Platonism, Mithraism, and Gnosticism, producing a cosmology esoterically useful for the goal of dominating the material world through magical and theurgic practices. We also saw that there was a transformation of the vision of the god Saturn in ancient Roman religion, a transformation which had its impact on the esoteric system embedded in the Sola-Busca deck. In this final part of the essay, I will discuss the person whose thought acted as the major force behind the deck as well as briefly describe a theurgic rite Adams discovers within the deck’s major trumps.

Georgios Gemistus Plethon

One of the many strengths of The Game of Saturn is the careful delineation of the role that the philosopher and esoteric master Georgios Gemistus Plethon (Pletho) played in the development of Renaissance Italian esotericism. Plethon is an interesting figure in more than one way, but he is often thought of as merely a Greek scholar who contributed positively to the Italian Renaissance by his able articulations and defense of Plato and the Platonic philosophy and theology, a fact which is largely beyond dispute. Adams however underlines another and more hidden side of Plethon’s project which is relevant to the Sola-Busca Tarot.

While the Eastern Holy Roman Empire was crumbling, in the early 15^th century, there was a move to reunite the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic branches of Christianity, in part as a way of linking Eastern Mediterranean and Western European cultures together in a common defense against the growing threat of the Ottoman Empire. These religio-cultural movements resulted in the Council of Florence-Ferrara, a church Council dedicated to Catholic-Orthodox reunion. Those attending the Council recognized that one of the theological sticking points endangering reunion was the fact that recent Roman Catholic theology (i.e. over the previous two hundred years) was based on the Western recovery of texts of the philosopher Aristotle, whereas Eastern Orthodox theology was firmly rooted in the philosophy of Aristotle’s teacher, Plato. Though in practice these two philosophers could be rendered substantially and deeply coherent, as various strands of Neoplatonism had shown a thousand years earlier, the vast majority of both the texts of Plato and the texts which demonstrated the potential coherence of Plato and Aristotle were lost to Western Europe and to Roman Catholicism. Thus, the Roman Catholic theology of the time generally knew only of an Aristotle mostly bereft of his Platonic inheritance and, in fact, due to the rise of Ockhamism in Roman Catholic theology from the 14^th century onward, the conception of Aristotle at the time was becoming, if anything, even more bereft of Platonic aspects than it had been in the earlier Middle Ages. In contrast, in the places where Orthodoxy was the dominant form of religion and theology, Plato was still the master philosophical thinker looming powerfully behind the theology.

In order to facilitate mutual understanding between Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism, the Orthodox leaders attending the Council of Florence-Ferrara included Plethon in their entourage. Plethon, an octogenarian at the time he traveled to Italy, was an accomplished scholar of Plato, but also an initiate into an ancient pagan occult order. The Orthodox contingent at the Council brought Plethon so that he would expound the value of Plato to theologians steeped in Aristotle, but Plethon himself used the occasion of the Council for the quite different purpose of resurrecting the pagan esoteric cult of which he was a part, in Italy. Thus, while giving public lectures on the value of Plato for the benefit of those associated with the Council and for the sake of Catholic-Orthodox reunion, Plethon also gave private audiences, above all to elite members of the Italian aristocracy and their educated partisans, in order to persuade them to preserve the pagan and esoteric inheritance of Greece and, by extension, of ancient, pagan Rome. Given the fact that part of the Council was held in Ferrara, there is little doubt that Plethon focused a good deal of his energy on the d’Este family, the ruling family of Ferrara. Plethon’s importance for the Sola-Busca is in part indicated by his picture on the Ten of Discs.

While reconstructing the nature and extent of Plethon’s influence on the deck is difficult because Plethon’s major work, the Laws, is no longer extant, Adams nonetheless makes a cogent and compelling case that Plethon’s cosmology is the central background of the Sola-Busca deck, giving form and coherence to the Platonic, Mithraic, and Gnostic elements implicit in the deck. Adams also proves that Plethon’s influence on Renaissance Italian culture is not as innocuous as that of a fine scholar impacting a philosophically vibrant culture, as many intellectual histories suggest. For Plato, society is best ruled by philosopher-kings, i.e. rulers who seek wisdom, exemplify virtue, and who are particularly conscious of the temptations and dangers of power for both the people and for the soul of the ruler himself. Plethon, in contrast, was either unconcerned about the quality of the Italian aristocracy to whom he entrusted powerful esoteric knowledge or else felt the situation so dire that he had no choice but to impart this knowledge, if he was to preserve the ancient teaching in a time when Greece might be overrun by the Ottoman Empire and Islam. He therefore entrusted these supposedly sacred teachings to Italian aristocrats who, to say the least, in no way exemplified the Platonic philosopher-king, but were largely condottieri – glorified mercenary leaders. To all appearances and in contrast to Plato’s own ideals, Plethon plays off the psychology of power associated with this aristocratic class, considering the continuation of these esoteric traditions more important than the fact that he was communicating those traditions to people clearly unfit for their use – at least from a Platonic point of view.

Thus, thanks to Plethon, a robust and potent esoteric tradition derived from Greece is indeed preserved in Renaissance Italy. However, this teaching is given to persons whose only characteristic in their favor is that they happen to be in positions of power at the moment and are likely to preserve the teaching exclusively for the sake of power, both their own and their dynasties’. (One can feel a little of this aristocratic ethos in the novel The Forbidden Book by Godwin and Sospiro, even though the story is not directly linked to Ferrara or the Sola-Busca deck.) Given this situation, we can see why a cosmology attempting to guarantee reincarnation among elites would be more than merely an attractive proposition. We can also see why Plethon’s strategy more or less guaranteed that his esoteric teaching would be preserved but also that it would need to be encoded, for example in the Sola-Busca deck, because the intense and competitive nature of political and military relationships among Italian city-states of the time would require it being well hidden. It is also clear that this esoteric knowledge would be kept hidden to an unusual degree and only be imparted in small measure to others, and most likely only to political and military allies. Consequently, the deck would not be widely distributed and the cost of production alone would make reproduction largely prohibitive, even if one understood the hidden meanings and the esoteric value of the deck. The precious esoteric knowledge contained within the Sola-Busca Tarot would therefore most likely be hidden to anyone except the few already initiated into its secrets by the d’Este family itself.

Theurgic rite in the Sola-Busca Tarot deck

That dark magic was in use within the ducal lands ruled by the d’Este family is beyond question, due in part to the well-documented case of Don Guglielmo Campana of Modena. Campana, as Adams highlights, is probably a fairly typical case of the clerical underground, members of which practiced the rites of the Church publicly or on demand from the ruling family, but simultaneously worked magic – including dark magic – routinely, for whatever ends the families who employed them dictated. By virtue of being under a family’s protection, clergy could work magic with relative impunity. The specifically magical work was, as a rule, behind the scenes, with the clergy functioning publicly as priests, often priests in good standing. Campana was less hidden about his magical work than perhaps the average member of the clerical underground and thus was brought before the Inquisition at one point for some relatively public activities. Nonetheless, with the help of members of the d’Este’s extended family and some political allies influential on the Church hierarchy, Campana was released and continued in the same work for which he was hired, for many years to come. The example of Campana can give us insight into the usually hidden but esoterically significant role that many clergymen played in the brutal politics of Renaissance Italy. It can also aid us in the realization that religion certainly can be and has been used to keep the masses in order, while cultural and political elites work behind the scenes, buttressing and increasing their own power by using esoteric means not at the public’s disposal. Plethon’s publicly supporting the dominant religion while working behind the scenes with powerful elites to keep pagan esoteric practices alive is another example of the same.

In what from an esoteric point of view may be considered the climax of The Game of Saturn, Adams unfolds a piece of this dark magic, a theurgic rite whose steps appear in some of the major trumps of the Sola-Busca deck. That these cards do comprise a theurgic rite is made clear through Adams’ comparison to extant texts from Plethon, texts which further imply that the latter’s articulated cosmological theory and theurgic practices were the major source for the deck. If Plethon was indeed a part of an esoteric order whose roots extend into ancient history, this ritual may be the only extant theurgic rite deriving from the ancient world.

Adams puts the eight cards he thinks refer to the theurgic rite in order and comments on them step-by-step. The analysis is subtle and detailed and so cannot be imitated here, more than to list the steps in relation to the major trumps representing them and discussing a few general points.

1. X Venturio Opening ritual gesture

2. VIIII Falco Receiving blessings from the gods

3. XVIIII Sabino Pivoting left to invoke chthonic gods

4. III Lenpio Ritual curtsey, incensing, left hand over right eye (invoking chthonic deity)

5. XV Metelo Wielding wand before column holding a Hekate’s top

6. VIII Nerone Ritual frenzy, sacrifice of homunculus

7. XVII Ipeo Possessed by the god, praying before xoanon

8. XII Carbone Using divine powers to materialize, “draw down the moon”

Each of these steps as well as how they hang together is developed in detail throughout this section of the book, with Adams consulting not only the cards themselves but the historical record and relevant ethnographic material. It is clear from a number of the steps that this is a ritual associated with dark magic, beginning with the opening ritual gestures, honoring first the solar gods but then turning directly to the chthonic gods which, in this system, are the Titans, of which Saturn is the king. Adams’ suggestion is that this ritual directly invoked Saturn-Ba’al Hammon, something which is indicated through the invocation of the chthonic gods, Hekate’s top (representing manifestation by means of the dark, chthonic side of the moon), the xoanon (an artifact associated with Saturn), and especially the sacrifice of the homunculus – making direct reference to the child sacrifice demanded by Ba’al Hammon.

Adams includes an interesting and extended discussion of the apparent sacrifice of a child in the ritual. Adams notes that there is no evidence of ritual child sacrifice in the Renaissance and thus he quite correctly excludes that possibility from the outset, looking for other explanations. One explanation might be the use of animals, which are often and in many traditions used as surrogates for humans in magical rites. There is also the possibility of a heightened imaginative state where the subjective and objective modes of reality merge into an experience that might feel like such a sacrifice but not actually be such objectively, something which might be hinted at in the frenzied state Nerone is in in the picture. A still different possibility is that the child is a symbol for sexual fluids being used in the rite, a very plausible assumption, given the erotic imagery throughout the deck. Adams offers a fine discussion of sexual alchemy in this direction.

A further possibility which Adams does not entertain is the sacrifice of an actual homunculus, i.e. a “magical,” quasi-human creature, purportedly created through specific processes using human male semen and earth and, according to the tradition, potentially used precisely for sacrifices of this kind. While scholars like Carl Jung consider homunculi to be pure fantasy, there is some striking recent evidence drawn from the Paracelsus Research Society that a homunculus could perhaps be created. The interested reader can refer, for example, to Joseph Lisiewski’s Israel Regardie and the Philosopher’s Stone for details on this. Why this is an interesting if deeply disturbing thought is that, if such a creature were created for these purposes in the Renaissance, it probably would not have counted as “child sacrifice” in the minds of contemporaries, because such a creature – based on the philosophy of the time – would most likely not have been considered fully human, due to possessing what was considered only an “animal” soul and not a “spiritual” soul. This would be due to the lack of female seed, something which the dominant medieval theory of fertilization, drawn largely from Galen, would have required for a fully human being.

The endpoint of this ritual is clearly theurgic, that is, intended to result in the operator temporarily “becoming the god” and bringing about what magical intentions the operator aims at through the powers of the god instilled into the operator for a time. However, unlike, for example, Iamblicus, for whom theurgy is primarily focused on the hierarchy of spiritual beings in the heavens, the solar gods, this rite aims at theurgic identification with a chthonic god. Rather than “drawing down the life of heaven,” one draws on the power of the underworld, in the form of Saturn-Ba’al Hammon, and attempts to bring about ends and purposes without participation in the higher order of Being implied in traditional theurgy. Whereas a more classical theurgy implies that the operator ritually and temporarily partakes of the spiritual and solar order of Being, fulfilling thereby one of the intentions of the Platonic philosophy, the theurgic act represented in the Sola-Busca deck appears to have no solar intentions: its life is drawn from this material world – more precisely from the underworld – and it has no purposes beyond the material world.

Conclusion

I have attempted throughout this essay not only to underline salient points in The Game of Saturn, but also at times to link Adams’ analysis of the Sola-Busca Tarot to other philosophical, historical, and esoteric points of interest. Nonetheless, my emphasis has continually been to portray Adams’ own work in an abbreviated form, because of its extraordinary value and originality. Naturally, a book of this comprehensiveness is difficult to encompass in a relatively brief review essay, especially due to the multiple and diverse streams of evidence it marshals in order to make its case. For example, in the second to last section of the book, Adams broaches the historical question of who might have overseen the work of developing the Sola-Busca deck and for what purpose, important premises for his argument of how connected the deck is to the power politics associated with the Ferrarese court, at the time of the deck’s inception. While Adams’ analyses make coherent sense theoretically, the final proof of his argument requires the historical hypothesis that someone (or small secretive group) in Ferrara possessed both sufficient technical ability, artistry, literary knowledge, and esoteric background to produce a tarot deck of this caliber and sophistication and further that this person (or persons) was also close enough to the d’Este family to be entrusted with a task of such secrecy, delicacy, and political importance. It further assumes that we can discern a clear purpose for producing such an unusual and expensive deck. Adams offers highly plausible answers to these historical questions, just as he has answered the essential questions relevant for understanding the nature and meaning of the deck itself.

The Game of Saturn is a stunning achievement in many ways. In this work, Adams has largely solved what is arguably one of the great enigmas of the Western esoteric tradition of the last five or six centuries, the Sola-Busca Tarot deck, a deck which has provoked at least as much puzzlement as it has interest over that time period. Adams is careful to insist that his analysis is only partial, because he has by no means decoded all the cards or all the possible connections among them. His point is well-taken and we should certainly not assume that the deck has been wholly decoded in this study. Nonetheless, this point should not be taken as anything like a criticism of the work but simply a statement of fact. If there is anything that The Game of Saturn itself clearly proves it is that, on the one hand, there is a stunning depth of meaning in the Sola-Busca deck, requiring a substantial knowledge of literary, historical, and esoteric traditions even to understand – let alone to decode – the deck and, on the other hand, that the cosmology, esoteric principles, and purposes of the deck cover a vast amount of intellectual and esoteric territory, far vaster than one could expect anyone not an initiate into that tradition to recognize. That Adams is able to decode even this much of the deck is itself an extraordinary achievement and we can be sure that any further decoding of the Sola-Busca deck will be firmly based on what Adams has already achieved in this regard.

Furthermore, Adams’ work demonstrates that the recovery of ancient philosophy and esotericism in the early Renaissance was probably more comprehensive and more successful than we generally realize. The magical system implicit in the Sola-Busca Tarot represents a quite breathtaking synthesis of a number of philosophical, magical, and theurgic systems, welded into a surprisingly coherent picture, and demanding of the practitioner a knowledge and experience of a truly expansive symbol system. Yet far from merely articulating that symbol system in its manifold dimensions, Adams also illuminates the experiences intrinsic to that system, often only implicated in the deck, through his careful research and prudent use of ethnographic, anthropological, and sociological studies. In this respect, Adams links the theoretical aspects of this system with practical and experiential factors in a highly original and informative way, no small achievement given there are no extant records by practitioners of the system.

The Game of Saturn is also important, however, as a potential reflection of our own era – or, indeed, of any era. One thing that emerges quite clearly from this study is that the use of esoteric power by cultural and political elites for worldly aims is not a matter to be dismissed by cries of “conspiracy theory.” This is so not only because Adams gives us a straightforward, concrete case of just such a use of esoteric power, but more importantly because the example he offers elucidates the principle. It is the logic of power itself which demands that one use whatever is at one’s disposal, at least if the goal is to remain in power or increase one’s power no matter what the cost. If esoteric practices are one of the ways to retain or amass power, then the powerful will use it. The background activities of Plethon or the very work of encoding Plethon’s system within the deck are each an illustration of how esoteric power has been used by cultural elites to remain in power, while those same elites use, for example, exoteric religion to distract the masses from the power that is being used over them – or even against them. Just as one would expect from any good case study, The Game of Saturn both gives a rich, diverse, multilayered description of both the nature and the principles of the Sola-Busca deck, but also contains and exemplifies broader principles of esotericism, of social and political history, and of power that continue to be relevant in our own time.

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