Gog & Magog and beyond...
kwaw said:
The two demi-goblins with the devil at the beginning of the third septenary ...
But as an essentially Chistian salvation cycle it makes sense too that they may represent Judaism and Islam as the two 'enemies' of Christianity.
In the TdM version of the trump cycle, we see three cards with such subordinate figures. The Pope and the Devil are strikingly parallel in their composition. But first we need to back up a bit.
The Emperor and Pope, along with lesser figures, are portrayed together in many works of didactic art, most often in Triumph of Death works (like the famous examples from Bologna, Palermo, Pisa, and Clusone) and Dance of Death works. In such works they convey the idea that all stations of mankind, i.e., Everyman, is subject to Death. Thus, the lowest trumps need to be interpreted as being such a ranks of man. The middle trumps contain some of the most common allegorical subjects in art and literature of the period, including Love, Time, Fortune, Death, and the three Moral Virtues. Beginning with the Devil, however, we move from representatives of Mankind and allegorical circumstances of life to the realm of eschatology. In that section we see the triumph over the Devil via fire from heaven (in the Tower) and the ultimate triumph over Death via the Angel of Resurrection.
The highest section of the Tarot sequence begins with the Devil. This takes us into a third realm of existence, a third type of subject matter, eschatological. The best proof text comes, not surprisingly, from Revelation. “When the thousand years are over, Satan will be released from his prison and go out to deceive the nations, Gog and Magog... But fire came down from heaven and devoured them. And the devil, who deceived them, was thrown into the lake of burning sulfur....” (Rev 20:7-10.) This description of the Devil and Lightning/Fire cards is fairly direct, and signals the beginning of the End Times, immediately after the Millennium. “The first angel sounded the trumpet, and there came hail and fire mixed with blood, and it was hurled down upon the earth.” (Rev 8:7.) This victory was made possible by Christ, whose self-proclaimed title as author of Revelation was “the bright Morning Star”. (Rev 22:16; cf. Rev 2:26-28.) This triptych, Devil, Lightning, Star, shows Christ’s triumph over Satan, one of his two eschatological adversaries.
The other great opponent is Death. “Since the children have flesh and blood, [Christ] too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil...” (Heb 2:14.) “For [Christ] must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death.” (1 Co 15:25-26.) After the Devil is vanquished in Revelation 20:9, the dead arise, “and death and Hades give up the dead that were in them, and each person was judged according to what he had done. Then death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire.” (Rev 20:14.) In Tarot, the triumph over death is shown via resurrection. Typologically the resurrected faithful are the New Jerusalem. This explains the sequence of Moon, Sun, and either the Angel (of resurrection) or World (showing New Jerusalem), in terms of Revelation 21:23. New Jerusalem “does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp.” “The seventh angel sounded his trumpet, and there were loud voices in heaven, which said: The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he will reign for ever and ever.” (Rev 11:15.)
From the first trumpet to the last, the triumph over Christ’s two eschatological adversaries is the required conclusion to the "economy of salvation", the narrative thread that runs from Genesis through the Gospels and finds its resolution in Revelation. The defeat of the Devil and triumph over Death from chapter 20 of Revelation are linked to Adam’s sin and punishment, as well as Jesus’ death and resurrection, and thus conclude Christian history. Because of the deeply interrelated typology created by the Church over the centuries, such a simple design can effectively epitomize, or at least call to mind, the entire Christian mythos of man and God, beginning with Adam’s Fall from grace, through Christ’s death and resurrection, to the Apocalyptic denouement of the Last Judgment and the new world to come, the “world without end.”
ASSUMING some such design, at least in TdM, we can get back to the Pope and Devil. In the lowest section of the trumps the highest figure is the Pope, while the Devil is the lowest figure in the highest section. Their composition in TdM is strikingly parallel: They both have a large central figure, crowned, making a “blessing” gesture with the right hand and holding a “scepter” in the left. (No such pairing occurs in any other deck.) Each central figure has two subordinate figures in the foreground, and there are also two figures falling from the Tower. (The two subordinates are unusual on other Pope or Tower cards, they appear on no other Devil cards.) This composition, a dominant central figure with two subordinates, appears on no other cards in the TdM trumps. Such an iconographic pairing of Pope with Devil would be obviously meaningful given the beliefs of the time. For several centuries the populace had been awaiting the End Times, and legend held that the Antichrist would be Pope.
Martin Luther was not (as is often supposed) the first to hit upon the idea that the Antichrist who sets up his throne in the Temple can be no other than the Pope at Rome and that the Church of Roms is therefore the Church of Satan. Amongst the eschatologically minded in the later Middle Ages the idea was already a commonplace. Even such a champion of the Church as St. Bernard could come to believe, in his tense expectatio of the final drama, that many of the clergy belonged to the hosts of Antichrist. And in the pronouncements of the propheta who was burnt as a heretic at Paris in 1209 similar ideas appear as an integral part of a doctrine which clearly drew heavily upon the Johannine and Sibylline traditions, Thios man, a cleric turned goldsmith, foretold that within five years the people would be consumed by famine, the kings would slay one another with the sword, the earth would open and swallow up the twon-dwellers and finally fire would fall upon those members of Antichrist, the prelates of the Church. For, he insisted, the Pope was Antiochrist, on account of the power he held; and the Babylon of the Apocalypse was really Rome.... Any Millenarian movement was in fact almost compelled by the situation in which it found itself to see the clergy as a demonic fraternity.
Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium.
The Devil is thus shown as a perverted version of the Pope, and the small figures, tonsured clergy in the Pope card, become corrupt demons in the Devil card. This identification of the Pope and Antichrist was current for centuries before Tarot was invented, and remained a mainstream Christian legend for centuries after. Protestant propagandists made a great deal out of that legend, and it is, in fact, still prevalent today. The point here, however, is that by revising the iconography of both Pope and Devil cards to make them cognate compositions, a secondary tale could be told about the cleansing of the corrupt Church at the End Times. This happens in the Tower.
The TdM Tower card, and no other, is called la Maison Dieu, the House of God. Many interpretations have been offered for this, most of them explaining it away rather than explaining it. The name has been widely considered to be uninformative or even misleading, perhaps a mistake of translation from Casa del Diav[olo]. The apparent problem is, why would fire from heaven be striking the House of God? In the Millennialist context discussed above, the destruction of the House of God, i.e., the Church, coming as it does after the rise the Antichrist to the papacy as shown in the Devil card, makes complete and perfect sense. The ascension of the Antichrist to the head of the Church would mark its ultimate corruption, at which point the Millennialist mythology said it would be destroyed. Returning to the interpretation from Revelation 20, immediately after the passage about Satan’s post-millennial release and his subsequent deception of the nations, “fire came down from heaven and destroyed them”. Various other explanations for the use of a tower can be offered in other decks, but the pairing of Pope and Devil, combined with the name House of God, provides another, specific to TdM: Turris Ecclesia, the Tower of the Church.
The TdM Tower appears to represent the Turris Ecclesia of St. Hildegard of Bingen. Both “Tower” and “House of God” are perfectly correct names—it is both a tower and the House of God, i.e., the Church. Significant elements of Hildegard’s description also fit the TdM image: The Turris Ecclesia is a round tower, white, with three windows. Although the stenciled colors vary from one TdM deck to another, these elements fit the TdM card rather well. Then there are the details of what is happening in the TdM image. The tower itself stands intact, while the “crown” is blown off, and two figures are thrown down. The white tower itself represents the true Church, made up of the faithful. (Cf. II Co 3:9-17.) The crown represents the head of the Church, i.e., the Antichrist who has become pope. Architecturally, the crenelated top of a tower is called the crown, for obvious reasons. Via metonymy, the crown represents the head of the Church, i.e., the pope. The falling figures represent the corrupt clergy, who are shown on the previous card (and on the Pope card). The corrupt Church is destroyed, while the cleansed Church of the faithful, the tower itself, remains unscathed. This is yet another difference between the TdM Tower and other Tarot Tower cards in which the tower itself is broken.
There is a fundamental distinction between the Church as the corporation of the faithful, the Bride of Christ, Heavenly Jerusalem, etc., and the worldly Church, which is the corporation of the corrupt, and which is to be destroyed. This distinction is made clear in the card, when understood via Hildegard’s vision. Hildegard writes:
Now the reason why you see a huge round tower entirely built of white stone is because the sweetness of the Holy Spirit is immense and comprehensively includes all creatures in its grace, so that no corruption in the integrity of the fullness of justice destroys it; since glowing, it points the way and sends forth all rivers of sanctity in the clarity of its strength, in which there is found no spot of any foulness. Wherefore the Holy Spirit is ablaze, and its burning serenity which strongly kindles the fiery virtues will never be destroyed; so all darkness is put to flight by it.
In other words, the Church is cleansed by the Holy Spirit and still stands intact—as in the Tarot image. St. Paul says that the Antichrist “sets himself up in God’s temple, proclaiming himself to be God.” (II Th 2:4.) While the popes didn’t claim to be God, they did claim to be the only route to God, and the Church was the only means of salvation. “And then the lawless one [Antichrist] will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will overthrow with the breath of his mouth and destroy by the splendor of his coming.” (II Th 2:8.) Another of the iconographic oddities of TdM is that the Tower is struck by something looking like half fire, half wind (breath). So... one layer of meaning of the Tower card in the context of the Pope and Devil/Antichrist cards, with their pairs of minions, is the cleansing of the House of God.
