Major Arcana titles: La Maison-Diev

The title of this card has always intrigued me. Why call it a Maison-Dieu? (God’s House). A Maison-Dieu is the ancestor of our hospitals. Run by the Church and often attached to monasteries, they were used not only to house invalids and ill people, but also to shelter pilgrims and travellers on their journeys.

Today in France, there are still many hospitals called la Maison-Dieu, including one of the biggest hospitals in Paris.

From what I can figure out, they are rather ancient and the first ones were created in about the year 500 AD.

The translation of this word to “Tower” in English is a bit silly (understatement), in my opinion. A Maison-Dieu is not a tower at all. (This card has also historically been called “La Foudre”, i.e. Lightning – again nothing to do with Towers.)

So if the name refers to this ancestor of a hospital, or a hospice rather, then I am most confused as to the two figures falling out of it. (Of course, they could be insane and are jumping out thinking they will fly… - or alternatively, they have been locked up against their will and are escaping.)

Not only confused as to the two figures, but confused as to the significance of this name for this Major Arcanum.

Any help which could help clear up some of my confusion would be appreciated. I find nothing on this subject even in my French literature and Tarot books, nor on the web.

As to the spelling of “Dieu” as “Diev” – I suppose that is another cup of tea entirely.

I wish I had more to add here. I would also very much like to know more. I've read various explanations but not always very convincing.

When we were photographing at some Baroque sites we did notice a link between lightning, the Devil, and the "fall of the titans" - who if you remember, tried to storm heaven (God's house?). It was a theme that came up at Troya Palace in particular. The sculpture I'm thinking of showing two titans that had fallen to the bottom of a pit, lined with devil's heads, snakes and bolts of lightening. It reminded me very much of The Tower at the time. But of course this is centuries after the early cards you are talking about, and I'm not sure if it's a red herring.

I hope far more knowledgeable people will be able to shed some light on this.

I don't profess to be a Biblical scholar, but isn't there a reference in Scripture to lightning destroying a/the temple? Alternatively, could it be a reference to the destruction of the Knights Templar in 1307?

Bob

As I may as well use this accidental posting for something useful, here is the myth of the titans. I obviously managed to garble it a bit - it was Zeus who stormed heaven and threw the titans to the underworld. Zeus used his lightning bolts.
So, there is some connection here, though how much of one is hard to judge (we have used Zeus on The Tower of our new deck in fact, so I have something of a vested interest to declare!)
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from - http://www.mythweb.com/encyc/entries/zeus.html

Zeus was the youngest son of the Titans Cronus and Rhea. When he was born, his father Cronus intended to swallow him as he had all of Zeus's siblings: Poseidon, Hades, Hestia, Demeter and Hera. But Rhea hid the newborn in a cave on Mount Dicte in Crete. (To this day, the guides at the "cave of Zeus" use their flashlights to cast shadow puppets in the cave, creating images of baby Zeus from the myth.)

When he had grown up, Zeus caused Cronus to vomit up his sisters and brothers, and these gods joined him in fighting to wrest control of the universe from the Titans and Cronus, their king. Having vanquished his father and the other Titans, Zeus imprisoned most of them in the underworld of Tartarus.

Then he and his brothers Poseidon and Hades divided up creation. Poseidon received the sea as his domain, Hades got the Underworld and Zeus took the sky. Zeus also was accorded supreme authority on earth and on Mount Olympus.

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Alternatively, if you want to go off to "titans tower" you can find the whole thing done in comic-book style ;-)
http://www.titanstower.com/source/whoswho/dtroytitans.html

Le_Corsair said:

Alternatively, could it be a reference to the destruction of the Knights Templar in 1307?
Bob

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Ah! You said what I didn't dare say, Bob! A man after my own heart.....

A bit of brainstorming........

All of the images that I can recall depict people either being ejected or fleeing from La Maison Dieu. Wouldn’t the medieval and earlier-Christian mind have regarded this name positively..... a suggestion of a place of sanctuary. And I thought the deal was that you couldn’t get kicked out of sanctuary? Hmmm...

But this building looks decidedly secular to me. I’m much taken with the political connotations suggested in Robert O’Neil’s interpretation at http://www.tarot.com - which incidentally pose [the most, for me] plausible explanation for the absence of this card in decks commissioned by the aristocracy.

The notion of the tower as a metaphor for man and his attempt to ascend to the home of the gods. The phallic shape...... the destruction of the head, the seat of the intellect and ego..... pride cometh before the fall....... the fall from grace..... the meek shall inherit the earth. The dangerous consequences of intellectual arrogance combined with corporeal over-confidence.

The tower as a place of confinement, imprisonment...... the damsel confined to the tower.

The notion of mental illness as the result of being touched by the gods.... the lightening bolt of transformation and enlightenment. Were such people regarded with fear or respect by the populous? Might they have been confined or given sanctuary by religious orders?

Didn’t the Knights Templar provide safe passage for pilgrims? Weren’t they later to be driven from their own place of sanctuary and the place set on fire?

Sorry Diana....... please forgive my ramblings.

Aoife said:

Didn’t the Knights Templar provide safe passage for pilgrims? Weren’t they later to be driven from their own place of sanctuary and the place set on fire?

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That's the only plausible reason I can find for this card to have been named (or re-named) the Maison-Dieu (Diev).

And of course, some of the Templars managed to escape. Lucky guys. (I keep on coming back to the Templars in my search. I'm not saying they invented Tarot - but I do believe that the cards we know so well were used by them to tell their story.)

I tend to priviledge the idea that La Maison Dieu refers to the Tower of Babel. The tower of Babel was a Ziggurat, which means "House of God"

Quoting from this fascinating site about the Ziggurat

Theory One - the ziggurat was probably not the place of public worship or ceremonies, but rather the house of God. Through the ziggurat, the gods could be close to mankind. The cults performed in the ziggurats were limited to the priests, and their assignments were to provide for all the needs of the gods. There are several ideas about the symbolic meaning behind the ziggurats. One is that they were reconstructions of the mountain temples that the new inhabitants to Mesopotamia used to erect while they lived in either the Taurus (now Turkey) or the Zagros Mountains (now Iran).

Theory Two - the ziggurat was a reconstruction of the cosmic mountain from the creation myths.

Theory Three - the ziggurat was built as a bridge between heaven and earth. The Sumerian temple was a cosmic axis, a vertical bond between heaven and Earth and the Earth and the underworld and a horizontal bond between the lands. It is built on seven levels, it represents seven heavens and planes of existence, the seven planets and the seven metals that are associated with them along with the corresponding colors - as if energy centers or Chakras.

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See also: Is there archaeological evidence for the Tower of Babel?

I've always been intrigued by the notion that we don't exactly know quite who's house it was... God's or the Devil's? Irony seemed not unknown to the medieval mind - especially in matters concerning organised religion!

The Minchiate e.g. has that rather well known image of (usually) a woman fleeing from a street-level door of a tower, pursued (rather too!) closely by... a Daemon(?) - More than a hint about... some kind of Hell-mouth?

In his Minchaite Book, Brian Williamas mentions the archetypal image (Giotto c1290) of St. Francis of Assisi "supporting the church (tower)" (sic!) In a sort of Medieval Superman role...

Macavity (Introducing even more variables)

Among church reformists during the renaissance Babylon and the tower of Babel were associated with Rome and the corruption of the Catholic Church. Within a reformist context therefore the lightening struck tower could envisage G-d's destruction of a corrupt church.

Kwaw