Noblet trees
In this post I will look at the trees on the Noblet Star card in terms of Greek mythology. First, here is the relevant detail of the Cary Sheet (c. 1500, probably Milan):
Here is the Noblet (c. 1650 Paris) as it exists in the Bibliotheque Nationale, somewhat faded over time:
One difference between the Cary Sheet and the Noblet that I have not discussed is that there are clearly two trees on either side of the main figure, instead of generic plants on a low hill and a high one. What trees in Greek mythology could correspond to the two, consistent with the meaning of the lady with the two jars (discussed in my previous posts)?
For the fat tree, I see two reasonable candidates: the pomegranate (above) and the fig (photos of trees below, left). The pomegranate was sacred to Persephone. Her eating from Hades’ pomegranate grove (with his encouragement) is what condemned her never to leave for long from the Underworld. So when Persephone comes to live with her mother Demeter, the plants and trees come alive; when she must return to Hades, everything wilts. On the card, the cycle of nature is reflected in a deciduous tree, now symbolizing death and reincarnation endlessly repeated, the cycle involving the water of Lethe.
Fig trees are related to Dionysus. The juice was used in wine-making, to remove toxins (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dionysian_Mysteries). In appearance the fruit was held to resemble the female genitalia (Simoons,
Plants of Life, Plants of Death, p. 285, at Google Books). It was thus appropriate to the orgiastic dances of Dionysus’s satyrs and nymphs, as well as to the water of Lethe, drunk before emerging from a woman’s body in a new incarnation.
The branch of the fig tree, suitably carved, is of a phallic nature. It relates to Dionysus’s own return from the underworld, as told—for the purpose of revealing the mysteries--by the Christian theologian Clement of Alexandria. A man showed Dionysus an entrance to Hades, and Dionysus agreed in exchange to let the man have sex with him upon his return. But the man died before Dionysus could grant his request. Then, as Clement of Alexandria tells it, “Cutting off a branch from a fig-tree which was at hand, he shaped it into the likeness of a phallus, and then made a show of fulfilling his promise to the dead man” (
Exhortation to the Greeks 2.30, at
http://www.theoi.com/Olympios/DionysosMyths2.html#Underworld)
This last detail is illustrated on a Roman-era sarcophagus (above), although in this case the figure holding the fig branch is a satyr reenacting the event. My copy of the image is from
http://www.bacchos.org/tarothtm/15d...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leuce_(mythology). This myth is described in Virgil's Eclogues and in Servius's commentary on them, sources mentioned often by the 16th century mythologist Cartari. It is also the only reference I have found to Mnemosyne as a body of water as opposed to a goddess.
But the tree on the card seems more likely to be a cypress, because of the density of its branches (photos of trees above, right). Cypresses were sacred to Apollo, Hades, and Artemis
(
http://www.theoi.com/Flora1.html;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypress).
Since Artemis was the goddess of childbirth and Hades the god of death, that tree suggests birth and death, or death and rebirth. Apollo's associations are similar: he was born in a cypress grove; also, a young man who died of love for Apollo was changed into a cypress. The cypress was well-known for its resistance to decay and thereby found frequent use in coffins.
If the tree is an evergreen, moreover, then the trees offer a symbolic reinforcement of the two streams. The water of Lethe offers forgetting and a new incarnation, just as the deciduous tree dies in winter and revives in spring. The water of Mnemosyne offers an escape from death and rebirth; similarly evergreens retain their greenery throughout the year. It is also a kind of Greek equivalent to the tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life: the fruit-bearing deciduous tree is a tree of death, while the evergreen offers eternal life.
A cypress is mentioned in the “gold tablets” that were put in some ancient Greek and Italian graves, found in the late 18th century and after. Some writers have related them to the Star card, even though the discovery was too late. It is possible that some tablets had been found earlier and not made public for fear of accusations of grave-robbing. The inscriptions on the tablets, as we shall see, offer striking resemblances to the Romano fresco, and also to Dante’s account of the two streams in the
Purgatorio (both discussed in a previous post).
Several of the tablets talk about two springs and one or two trees. An example of the “long type,” from 4th-3rd century b.c.e. Petelia, in Calabria (opposite Sicily on the Italian mainland) is the following:
You will find a spring on the left of the halls of Hades,
and beside it a white cypress growing.
Do not even go near this spring.
And you will find another, from the Lake of Memory,
flowing forth with cold water. In front of it are guards.
You must say, 'I am the child of Ge and starry Ouranos;
this you yourselves also know.
I am dry with thirst and am perishing.
Come, give me at once cold water
flowing forth from the Lake of Memory.'
And they themselves will give you to drink from the divine spring,
and then thereafter you will reign with the other heroes.
http://www.csun.edu/~hcfll004/lamella.htm)
The specification of a “cypress” is the first of five coincidences between the gold tablets and tarot-related imagery of the 16th-17th century.
Ge is the earth-goddess; Ouranos is the god of heaven. "I am the child of Ge and starry Ouranos" is a password to be used by the soul after death. Another translation is "I am the child of Earth and Starry Heaven." This phrase also appears in Paul Christian’s mid-19th century occultist interpretation of the cards, supposedly based on a secret tradition but appearing shortly after the texts of the first tablets were published. The phrase also appears in Hesiod's Theogeny, 6th century b.c.e., which has been known as long as any literature from that time (
http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/hesiod/theogony.htm). There it applies to the gods. The Orphics held that humanity is descended from the dust left when Zeus burned up the offending Titans in a blast of lightning, hence a mixture of matter and divine spirit. By saying the password, the guardians know that soul is worthy of the immortals. (
http://www.bartleby.com/65/or/OrphicMy.html).
Here Memory is not only water, it is a lake. The other spring must just gush out of the ground and become the source for the River Lethe. In both the Giulio Romano fresco (detail below) and the tarot card, one spring runs onto the ground, the other into a lake or other large body of water.
Another gold tablet, from 2nd century Crete, is of the “short type”, a brief dialogue:
A: I am dry with thirst and am perishing.
B: Come, drink please, from the ever-flowing spring on the right, where the cypress is. Who are you, and where do you come from?
A: I am the son of Earth (Ge) and Starry Heaven (Uranos).
(
http://www.csun.edu/~hcfll004/lamella.htm)
On this tablet, one is supposed to drink at the cypress; on the other, that was where one was not supposed to drink. Other tablets say that the first spring, to be avoided, is by the cypress, and that it is on the right. The problem with secret oral traditions, in a culture that is used to writing things down, is that details get confused as they get passed down from one person and place to another. You will notice that the card-makers, Noblet, Dodal, Chosson, and those after, were not unanimous about the placement of the trees either.
A variation on the theme is one described by John Ops on his “Pythagorean Tarot” website (
http://www.cs.utk.edu/~mclennan/BA/PT/M16.html), that some tablets say that the two trees are dark and white cypresses. I have not myself found any reference in the literature on the tablets to this distinction between dark and white cypresses. Ops’s own citations say nothing about them either. And again there is the problem of which goes with which spring. But I do not discount Ops completely. Curiously, in the Romano fresco, there is what appears to be a dead tree behind the main one--or merely shedding its needles, as some evergreens do in the winter. Perhaps it is the fresco’s equivalent of one of Ops’s trees.
What is common to all the gold tablets that mention a second spring, is that the spring to be drunk from is the one further away (Radcliffe G. Edmonds III,
Myths of the Underworld Journey: Plato, Aristophanes, and the 'Orphic' Gold Tablets, p. 50f, in Google Books). This principle also works for the Romano fresco, if we exclude the other trees in the scene as being too far from the spring to count. On the Noblet, however, it is not clear which is closer and which is further away.
The presence of two springs, or at least two sources of flowing water with guardians, is another coincidence between the gold tablets and both the Romano fresco and the tarot card. This feature is also present in the widely read accounts of Dante and Pausanias. But the tree, or perhaps two trees, is not in these sources.
I have mentioned two trees in the Romano fresco, an apparently dead one in back and a central one next to the old man, an evergreen with broad branches. This tree has broad limbs more characteristic of a cedar than of a cypress. In particular, it could be a Cedar of Lebanon. There is a picture of one on the Lebanese flag. Since ancient times it has been associated with immortality due, like the cypress, to its resistance to rot (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebanon_Cedar;
http://www.keyway.ca/htm2002/cedars.htm).
Lebanon is also the home of the 4th century St. Maron, who introduced the three-barred cross later adopted by the Papacy. The Maronite Church identifies this cross with the Cedar of Lebanon, saying it looks like one (
http://www.itmonline.org/bodytheology/stmaron.htm). This is the cross that de Gebelin thought derived from the Djed pillar—Osiris’s backbone, symbolic of the stability of Egypt, not a tree. But there is not much resemblance.
We also see a reclining figure reminiscent of a famous statue by the classical Greek sculptor Phidias, in the Athenian Acropolis (below). Some say it is Theseus, but the reclining position, as though holding a cup or some grapes at a banquet, suggests Dionysus, to scholars now as it would have to the humanists of Romano's time (
http://www.ecfs.org/projects/fieldston272/SlideIndexes/greek4.html. See also Wikipedia Commons entry for Dionysus British Museum.)
The presence of Dionysus in the fresco is another possible connection to the gold tablets. These tablets were probably a product of Orphism, a Greco-Roman cult that saw Dionysus as a savior god. In the 1980’s some scholars hypothesized that the tablets were Pythagorean; but then new tablets were found explicitly mentioning Bacchus, i.e. Dionysus, and most scholars went back to Harrison’s earlier hypothesis.
Now let us look at one more gold leaf, much of it illegible:
But so soon as the Spirit hath left the light of the sun,
To the right-----------------------of Ennoia.
Thou must man--------------------being right wary of all things.
Hail thou who has suffered the suffering.
This thou never suffered before.
A kid thou art fallen into milk.
Hail, hail to the journeying on the right.
----Holy meadows and groves of Persephoneia.
(Harrison,
Prolegomena to Greek Religion, p. 584, in Google Books)
The first three lines have to do with what the soul is to do after death. That the soul is to choose what is on the right is clear from the last line "Hail, hail to the journeying on the right." At the earlier appearance of "right," in the second line, is a word that never appears otherwise, Ennoia. My guess is that it is where one goes if one drinks of the spring of Memory.
Harrison (p. 588) points out that "Ennoia" is similar to "Eunoe," which Dante used for the stream of Memory at the end of the
Purgatorio. The main difference is in the beginning, "Eu" versus "En". "Eu" means "good." The root for the other half, nous, is the same. "Eu" is a very frequent beginning to many words used in Orphic contexts: eunoias, "good thoughts," for example, also occurs on Orphic tombs, in the phrase "good thoughts and remembrances." Another gold tablet refers to Dionysus as Euklaes, Glorious One, and Euboulos, He of Good Counsel.
”Ennoia” is probably one spelling of the Greek word meaning “Thought.” What Harrison perhaps did not know is that another similar word, "Ennoea," was common in Gnostic writings of the same time period as the tablets. It was Greek, but appeared in Latin characters in the Latin translation of the heresiologist Irenaeus, starting in his account of Valentinus, the leading Gnostic teacher of his day, and continuing in his discussion of the first Gnostic heretic, Simon Magus. To Simon, as Irenaeus presents him, "Ennoea" is the name of the feminine aspect of the highest god, his thought actualized. Ennoea puts his thought into action in the lower world, where she finds herself in exile from the divine realm. She appears again with this name in numerous Gnostic teachers (see Irenaeus,
Refutation of all Heresies, I.1.1, I.12,1, 1.12.3, I.23.2, I.23.5, I.29.1, I.29.2, I.30.1. at
http://www.gnosis.org/library/advh1.htm). Often she is the one responsible for the creation of the archetypal world. She is the one whom the Gnostics also called Sophia, Wisdom, similar to Hochmah in the Hebrew Bible, the bride of God. In Christianity she corresponds to the Virgin Mary, who Dante saw as Queen of Heaven in the highest circle of Paradise On the tablet, what the line probably means is that in choosing the spring on the right the deceased will enter the realm of Ennoea, Thought or Intellect. .
So why didn’t Dante say “Ennoea”? Irenaeus's work, in its ancient Latin translation, was a basic reference throughout the heresy-hunting Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and beyond. In Dante's time, the Inquisition was at its peak, having eradicated all but the mildest of heresies throughout France, Italy, the Low Countries, Spain, and Germany by a process of systematic terror against whole populaces. (On the Inquisition up to the 1230's, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Inquisition. For Dante's time, early 1300’s, see:
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/inquisition1.html).
Using the term "Ennoea" or "Ennoia" as a stream that introduced one to Paradise would have endangered not only Dante but anyone who possessed or copied his works. Moreover, it did not quite fit his context, one of goodness rather than thought. So perhaps he changed one or two letters, affecting only the diphthongs.
So we have four coincidences between the gold tablets, supposedly unknown before the late 18th century, and European works of art from the 14th to 17th century: (1) two guarded streams (Dante, Romano, Noblet); (2) one or two trees near the streams (Romano, Noblet); (3) specific indication of a cypress as one of the trees (Noblet); (4) indication of Dionysus, among other gods or heroes (Romano, Noblet); (5) word similarity, Eunoe and Ennoia (Dante). For 1 and 4, the coincidence can be explained by reference to Pausanias. The others cannot.
But another explanation would simply be the naturalness of the objects chosen. "Eunoe" is a natural word for Dante to choose. In pictorial art, trees are natural symbolic landmarks, and the cypress a natural choice to symbolize death followed by immortality, just as a pomegranate or fig tree is a natural choice to symbolize death followed by a new incarnation.
All the same, associating the card with the the gold tablets adds an unearthly, mystical resonance to an already unearthly and mysterious card.