Review essay of The Game of Saturn. Decoding the Sola-Busca Tarrochi by Peter Mark Adams
Part 2 (of 3)
By John R. White, Ph.D.
In Part 1 of this review essay, we looked at some of the details of the mysterious Sola-Busca Tarot as well as some of the salient features of Peter Mark Adams’ ethnographic approach to this deck in Game of Saturn. Of particular importance was Adams’ recognition that the major trumps in the Sola-Busca deck seem to have two different layers of meaning: a surface meaning, referring to the figure on the card and its literary references, and a hidden, latent meaning, for which the manifest meaning is both a blind and an indicator. We saw, for example, how, in the case of XIII Catone, a story from the youth of Cato the Elder both hid and indicated the deeper meaning of the card, which referred not to Cato but to esoteric practices of drawing down the energy of the dark star, Algol.
Mithraism
Adams continues his search for the meaning of the deck throughout Game of Saturn, supplementing the symbols and representations on the cards with research into the literary and historical materials that must have gone into those symbols and representations. Using this same method, he penetrates not only to the deeper meanings of specific cards but, more importantly, to the overall contextual worldview implicit in the deck’s imagery. By way of example, Adams notices two complementary major trumps, II Postumio and XI Tulio. The garb each is wearing complements the other in color scheme, as well as in details of design, such as each wearing a Phrygian cap and the complementary manner in which they are holding their torches. This suggests some connection between them, in which they are paired off. Adams makes the cogent case, based on the symbolism in each of the cards, that these figures are not actually representing Romans, as their Italianized Latin names suggest, but rather the mythological figures Cautes and Cautopates, the paired torchbearers who are part of the Mithraic mystery cult. Cautes and Cautopates also symbolically refer to the solstices, a point to which we will return in a moment.
The significance of the presence of Mithraic symbolism in the deck should not be lost on us. In the later Roman Empire, there were two dominant religions vying with each other for dominance, Christianity and Mithraism. Though at a public level, Christianity appears to have won that battle, it is often the case that major religious movements do not so much disappear when another tradition dominates the public mind as recede into the background, often continuing among well-protected elites. A number of indications in the Sola-Busca deck suggest a metaphysical background of ancient Mithraism, a background considered heretical in Renaissance Catholic Italy. For example, another major trump, VII Deo Tauro, contains what appears to be a deliberate misspelling. On the surface, the card appears to refer to a Celtic king of Anatolia, Deiotarus. Yet, the misspelling results in the Latin words “god bull,” suggesting the central act of the Mithraic rites, the tauroctony (Mithras slaying the bull), and also referring to the constellation Taurus, the Bull. The constellation “Perseus,” mentioned in Part 1 of this review essay, occurs right above Taurus in the sky, sword in hand, thereby symbolizing the sacrifice of the bull central to the Mithraic mysteries.
Worldview of the Renaissance Elite
We have already seen that the Sola-Busca Tarot was to all appearances a deck distributed very sparsely and only among aristocratic families in the Renaissance. The fact that this deck was shared among the aristocracy also suggests that at least some members of those families were quite aware of this spiritual and cultural background and were in some way practitioners of that religious view, no matter what public dedication they may or may not have had to the dominant exoteric religion, Roman Catholicism. Recognizing the Mithraic background also brings the spiritual and symbolic universe implicit in the Sola-Busca Tarot more into focus.
Previously in VoxHermes (https://voxhermes.wordpress.com/2018/10/23/the-magic-of-philosophy-part-one/, https://voxhermes.wordpress.com/2018/12/20/the-magic-of-philosophy-part-two/), I have highlighted that the ancient esoteric communities were typically also communities of philosophers. The philosophical traditions which dominated in many of the ancient Western mystery traditions were those associated with two initiates, Plato and Pythagoras. This was no accident of history. Both Platonic and Pythagorean traditions aimed at an experience of an eternal, timeless reality, something which transcended the historical and contingent character of material reality. Indeed, we might say that the basic intellectual impulse of Platonism is toward an order of Being rather than an order of mere Becoming. To the ancients, “becoming” or historical contingency is a mark of imperfection, since it implies that something is dependent on the limits of time and space. In contrast, the order of Being (Ideas, archetypes, the gods, etc.) are understood to be trans-historical, i.e. beyond space and time and the limits the latter impose on reality. Human beings, though of the order of becoming due to being embodied, can cultivate higher spiritual powers, so the Platonists and Pythagoreans thought, and thereby partake of the order of Being, which, among other things, linked the human soul in its highest dimension to immortality.
Typical, then, to the Western mystery traditions of the late Roman Empire, Mithraism also had a decisively Platonic or, more precisely, Neoplatonic component. Among the elements of its Platonism is the idea that the souls of human beings descend from the heavens and ascend to them again at death. In those processes of descent and ascent, the soul is colored by the various spheres which characterize the lower heavens, associated with the planetary traits and energies. There is also, parallel to the Neoplatonic dimension, a gnostic element in Mithraism. Adams offers an important distinction between two kinds of ancient Gnosticism, liberation Gnosticism versus fateful Gnosticism (pp. 50-1, and expanded on later on in the text). Whereas the former seeks liberation from the limits of contingency in a way closely parallel to Platonism, i.e. through development of an inner spiritual principle, fateful Gnosticism also seeks to activate the spiritual principle or divine spark within, but not for the sake of liberation from the contingent world. Rather, the latter seeks to remain within the confines of a material world, while also having some of the benefits to the soul that accrue due to the activation of the divine spark. While both can be understood as types of Gnosticism because of what they share – seeking the activation of the inner spiritual principle – they are in certain respects opposites. Liberation Gnosticism seeks relative freedom from the limits of the world of Becoming by rising to the order of Being, while fateful Gnosticism seeks no such liberation but rather to dominate the world of Becoming. While liberation Gnosticism thus seeks transcendence from space, time, and fate, fateful Gnosticism, seeks higher Being only in order, and to the extent, that doing so leads to a fuller domination of space, time, and fate.
It is this latter form of Gnosticism which appears in the Sola-Busca deck. In other words, the initiate of this Renaissance Mithraic cult does not rail against the necessity or fate characteristic of the material world but attempts to use fate to its worldly advantage. Among other ways, the elite families of the Renaissance aimed to control not only their current fate but the fate of future lives by guaranteeing that they would return, through transmigration of souls (reincarnation), to elite positions in the material world, over the course of multiple lives. Hence the saying on XIII Catone: “I am ruled by fate.” Whatever theoretical problems might be associated with liberation Gnosticism – and there are many – it at least sought higher spiritual realization as an end in itself. In contrast, fateful Gnosticism had no otherworldly goals, but sought exclusively to dominate the material world over the span of many lives, including seeking to guarantee for its practitioners consistent rebirth among the reigning power elite, and thus sought the realization of higher spiritual realities only in order to rule in the material world, governed by fate. This in fact brings us back to Cautes and Cautopates. The torchbearers of ancient Mithraism symbolized, among other things, the specific places where human souls descended into incarnation and ascended again after death, places which dominated the sky at the time of the solstices. Controlling this sphere of cosmic action, was intended not only to impact one’s current life but potentially one’s lives to come.
Saturn and Ba’al Hammon
The d’Este family, who financed the Sola-Busca deck, were well known in their time not only for their arrogance and ruthlessness, but also for their superstition. They were firmly of the belief that astral necessity was the primary controlling power over all events, including political and military events. This being the case, just what we would expect in the Sola-Busca deck are references to darker, astral magic as a way of controlling the potentially negative effects of fate while using the principles of fate to worldly advantage. Adams’ work unfolds a surprisingly comprehensive story comprising (1) the surface meanings of many of the cards including their dominant themes, (2) the underlying meanings in many of the cards, indicating among other things a specific cult to Saturn, and (3) some of the practices and rites the cards suggest, including attack sorcery, sexual alchemy, and theurgy.
Among the many strengths of Game of Saturn is Adams’ ability to interweave insights based on the cards themselves with ethnographic information and an ongoing narrative of how these various pieces of knowledge work together to explain the purpose of this enigmatic deck. Though an outstanding piece of esoteric scholarship in its own right, the book retains a sense of the drama of discovery, by drawing the reader into the processes whereby Adams draws his conclusions. Furthermore, Adams’ exhaustive ethnographic work elucidates aspects of the deck that could not be understood otherwise, thereby giving a sense of the vast achievements of scholarship in the Renaissance, as well as of the less than ideal ends to which such knowledge could be used.
I began Part 1 of this essay mentioning different approaches to Saturn in recent and recently translated works, among other things to highlight opposing views between, say, God of the Black Cube, where Moros frequently describes Saturn as “evil,” and the views of the UR Group articulated in the essay on the “Western Tradition,” where “Golden Saturn” initiates the original Golden Age of the Roman tradition, and is therefore perhaps the furthest thing from anything one might call “evil.” Adams’ research into the cosmological background of this deck helps us to understand these inconsistent and in some ways contradictory conceptions of Saturn.
It is well documented in both ancient texts and in contemporary scholarship that a decisive change occurred in the ancient Romans’ conception of the god Saturn, specifically at the time of the Second Punic War. This change was a consequence of the interesting and perhaps unusual way in which religion and war were intertwined in ancient Rome. It was part and parcel of Roman civic piety that the Roman priesthood would seek to persuade the gods of the people Rome sought to conquer to join the Roman pantheon, prior to the Roman army’s attack. The working assumption here was that if the local gods agreed to join the Roman pantheon, the Roman victory would be assured because it would already be achieved at the higher spiritual level, before the army attacked at the material level. Macrobius, in fact, gives examples of the actual formulae that the generals were to use in such situations to draw the god over to the Roman side, before they were to attack.
In order to overcome Carthage, the Roman priesthood sought to convince the chief god of Carthage, Ba’al Hammon, to come over to the Roman pantheon, with the understanding that Rome would then celebrate this god from that point onward. The transition of Ba’al Hammon into the Roman religion, however, had specific consequences for the Roman understanding of Saturn, because for all practical purposes, Ba’al Hammon was treated as an aspect or as a manifestation of Saturn. Consequently, Saturn takes on some of the characteristics and emphases within the Roman religion that Ba’al Hammon had within Carthaginian religion. Assimilating a foreign god is not a one-way street: by Romanizing a Carthaginian god one simultaneously alters the Roman god in the direction of its Carthaginian counterpart.
Why the identification of Ba’al Hammon and Saturn in the first place? On the surface, there are a number of parallels, among them that Ba’al Hammon was a god of the underworld and that Carthaginian worship of Ba’al Hammon included the sacrifice of children. Though Saturn was not strictly speaking a god of the underworld – he was a god of the earth and of the soil, more properly a telluric god of the underground than a god of the underworld – he was also referred to as Dis Pater (Father of the Underworld) at times. In any case, the parallel was close enough to permit an identification for the purposes of piety. Regarding the sacrifice of children, there is some controversy concerning whether the Romans literally sacrificed their own children – even after Ba’al Hammon was subsumed into Saturn in Roman practice – but as we know the myth of Kronos-Saturn includes the idea that the latter ate his children, something which in turn provoked the war in heaven which resulted in the Age of Zeus-Jupiter.
Of further importance is the connection of Saturn to time. Even among the Greeks, there was some identification of Kronos (Saturn) and Khronos (god of Time, from which words like “chronology” come), in part because of their similar pronunciation, something which continued into the Roman worship of the same gods, as well in the key symbols of Saturn, such as the scythe: the scythe represented Saturn’s connection to agriculture, to be sure, but also specifically to the harvest, with its implications of death (end of a growth cycle) and therefore also to time. It doesn’t take much by way of associative thinking, if one considers Saturn a god of time, a god of agriculture (and thus of the cyclical seasons), and a god associated with what is of the earth and under the earth, also to see him as a god of necessity, fate, and the underworld.
According to Roman tradition, with the victory of Jupiter over the Titans, Saturn was banished from Olympus but, according to one tradition, Saturn was then sent to the Italy, where he was welcomed by the Italic king, Janus, and initiated the Golden Age. The earlier Roman worship of Saturn was a worship based on the gifts of the Golden Age, such as the arts of agriculture, the craft of building, and the art of sea navigation. With the subsumption of Ba’al Hammon into the Roman pantheon, however, a darker cast came upon Saturn. Now he was a god of necessity and fate, as well as a god of the underworld, demanding the sacrifice of living children. Similarly, though once he had been “Golden Saturn,” referring to his relationship to the golden harvest, later on in the Empire he was only “golden” insofar as the Roman treasury was housed at the Temple of Saturn – a crass literalization of the Golden Age to mere monetary gold – and Saturn is then seen as a dark god, seeking living sacrifice, and a god ruling time with the iron chain of necessity.
This is indeed a transformation and one which helps explain the differences between the above views of Saturn. Moros’ view, for example, appears to express the later view of Saturn, drawn from the later practices of the Roman Empire. In contract, Evola and UR Group highlight the earlier conception of Saturn, just as one would expect from authors dedicated to the primordial Tradition. Though he does not mention the above historical factors, Evola seems at least to intuit this historical shift regarding the conception of Saturn when he mentions in a footnote,
The Saturnalia, by evoking the Golden Age in which Saturn reigned, celebrated the promiscuity and universal brotherhood that were believed to characterize this age. In reality, this belief represents a deviation from traditional truth, and the Saturn who was evoked was not the king of the Golden Age, but rather a chthonic demon; this can be established by the fact that he was represented in the company of Ops, a form of the earth goddess (p. 216, Revolt against the Modern World).
The specifics of Evola’s Traditionalism aside in this quotation, it is clear that he at least sees this change in the vision of Saturn and considers the latter not Golden Saturn but a perverse degradation of the god to a demonic entity.
It was evidently this latter picture of Saturn, this “chthonic demon” as Evola says, that is the power worshiped by the by the d’Este family and the Renaissance aristocratic elite, a “Saturn” who has become quite different from Golden Saturn and has all the brutalizing characteristics of Ba’al Hammon. Indeed, as we shall see in final next installment, Adams not only proves this point through his painstaking analysis of the cards, but he also unearths perhaps the only extant theurgic rite from the ancient world, hidden in the major trumps of the Sola-Busca Tarot, a rite which indicates an explicit invocation of this “demonic” Saturn.
To be continued.
John R. White, Ph.D. (Pittsburgh PA) is a Jungian psychoanalyst and mental health counselor. He was a philosophy professor for twenty years, prior to becoming a psychoanalyst, and his current research interests concern the various links among psychology, parapsychology, philosophy and esotericism. He is a student of several esoteric traditions.
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