les tailleurs de pierre - stone cutters

[firemaiden]

Hi historians! Some wild, off the cuff speculations here...

I have come accross mention on some french tarot websites of influences on tarot from stone cutter societies, les tailleurs de pierre, those who did the incredible and weird cathedral sculptures. Since we have been discussing how some of the weird figures (monkeys on the wheel of fortune, and different demons) are similar to those carved in stone in the cathedrals, it intrigues me that the appearence of tarot comes along not long after the wave of great cathedral building accross europe. I wondered if there had been any attempt to link tarot to the secret initiation rites of the stone-sculptors companies, - les compagnons des tailleurs de pierre...

For Diana, and others who read french, here is a site about those compagnages: http://perso.wanadoo.fr/jean-michel.mathoniere/ctdp.htm

The interesting thing I learned on this site, is that the french, and german stone cutter societies all insisted that their group's history could be traced back to building the temple of Solomon. This website also says that these claims of origin are only myth, nevertheless, the stone cutters, and the building of cathedrals gained much impetus from the crusades, from contact with the moslem builders.

We have hope to prove, and given up trying to prove, I guess, that the tarot made its way to europe from the crusades, but might it have originated in the imaginations of the medieval stone cutters? -- or even have served as patterns for cathedral stone sculptures?

[firemaiden]

This ancient question never got an answer, but I remember that jmd said one could find all of the images of the major arcana reproduced on the cathedrals of France. Where oh where did he write that?

[jmd]

...or nearly all!

Really, I do not think that many have done much work on this, and most of the material I have seen on the web seems to pop up after I have already posted similar information on Aeclectic.

Most of the threads in the Marseille section contains an image from one of the Cathedral or other 'Gothic' (Lumiere) or Romanesque religious building.

The expection thus far has been the Hanged Man - though I have a number of upside down stone carving images from the period, none with the precision of either Marseille (single foot) or Besançon (both feet tied) type petroglyph.

I was mentioning only a couple of days ago to Le Pendu that, after the Conference, one of my plans is to put together some of the images already posted, and others I have only in my folder, in a more interesting fashion.

These, however, do not in the least indicate that the images were brought over from crusading campaigns, but rather that out of the magnificence that may have been seen in the travels, a local Ile-de-France proto-renaissance arose.

What was drawn from, apart from Hermetic, Neo-platonic, neo-pythagorean and neo-aristotelian thought, was the richness of not only Christian gospels, but the apocrypha, such as the Golden Legends (of Saints, mainly) and the pseudo-infancy gospels.

Of these, visible to the common person whether locally or in travel for pilgrimage (or penance), some - no, many - have made it into Tarot's Atouts' imagery.

[Fulgour]

...in "real" life my last name is antithetical to both
witches and masons. I spell it ending with an -en
but I'll bet more than a few of our members know.

[baba-prague]

Just to add that yes, most of what we think of as the Tarot Trumps images are quite commonly found in older (religious, public and private) sites. I think I've seen at least half a dozen "Strengths" in Prague (actually, make that ten), many "Judgements", a good sprinkling of "Deaths", dozens of "Justices" and quite a few "Suns", "Moons" and yes, "Stars" (well, perhaps only one Star that is identical more or less to the image we are used to). I could go on - really most of the Trumps imagery is quite common and easy to find - and comes in interestingly varied forms.

However, I agree with JMD that the Hanged Man isn't an image that you can find so easily - if at all. Of course, I understand the "Shame" tradition, but as I mentioned on another thread, I suspect that there is also some very old Celtic (or Norse in origin?) tradition of a more spiritual/ritualistic form of hanging upside down that turns up distorted in many old tales and does find its way - in vague forms - into some older imagery. But that really isn't part of the Christian and Classical imagery tradition that we're mostly talking about here. It's something quite other and may have nothing to do with Tarot (intriguing though and I do want to look into it a bit more.)

One more thing to add - it's always interesting to me to see how mixed up the imagery often is in old sites - the idea that Christian imagery was somehow kept very pure and anything 'other' was seen as heretical seems a misunderstanding. Many old cathedrals and churches are a riot of imagery taken from many sources - and as well as the obvious ones of Christian (including of course the apocrypha as JMD says) and Classical, there are images of pagan source, and images that are simply more like "reportage" - pictures of ordinary life - sometimes surprisingly bawdy.

[firemaiden]

Originally Posted by Fulgour

...in "real" life my last name is antithetical to both
witches and masons. I spell it ending with an -en
but I'll bet more than a few of our members know.

Not sure what, if anything, this post has to do with the topic. However, vis a vis the masons - according to compagnonnage expert, Mathonnière - there is no proven link between the early compagnonnages des tailleurs de pierre - (stone-mason societies) and freemasonry, as much as he would like to find one.

[jmd]

The 'links' from compagnonnage to Freemasonry are without doubt there. The problem lies as to how, where and when we search for the link.

What I mean by this is that 'free'-masonry includes those who are not actual masons (masons in the sense of actual workers on building sites)... hence the question becomes as to when lodges allow into their rank non-workers of the field (the first clear record is in the UK).

On the other hand, there are also clear records of masonic lodges in, for example, Strassbourg, with constitution from the 15th and 16th centuries - that J-M Mathonière knows of, as he publishes the same in French at some stage.

So how the compagnonnage of Masonry (which includes stone carvers) becomes much later Freemasonry, and how the weavings of the various strands entwine and impact on one another on French soil is certainly an interesting and worthwhile other area of study and fascination.

[venicebard]

Boy, I sure agree with that last, jmd. I find strong Masonic overtones throughout the Marseilles. It has always seemed most likely to me that Masonry arose from cathedral builders and Templars following suppression of the latter. Am I wrong in presuming Templars linked to cathedral-building? Certainly the blend of Judaic, Christian, and Gnostic elements in Masonry parallels this same mix in the bardo-Qabbalistic flowering of the 12th century whose later manifestation TdM was (according to me).

[firemaiden]

I've just learned that Jean-Michel Mathonière, person to whom, indirectly, I owe my first exposure to tarot, has published a new tarot, with artist Hugues Gartner: Tarot des tailleurs de Pierre "The Stone cutter's tarot"