catboxer
I've been reading an obscure work which has been somewhat discussed here, "The Hieroglyphics of Horapollo." I especially enjoyed Ross G. Caldwell's perceptive comments about this book on the "Plato" thread.
The work itself is an unsorted bundle of loose ends in which the author (or authors) engages in an apparently random association of concepts with images. It's kind of like playing a word association game. For example:
"11. WHAT THEY MEAN BY A VULTURE
When they mean a mother, or sight, or boundaries, or foreknowledge, or the year, or the heavens, or pity, or Athene, or Hera, or two drachmas, they draw a vulture. A mother, since there is no male in this species of animal. And they are born in this way:" (Here follows a fanciful description of the supposed manner in which vultures conceive and deliver eggs.)
I would not have made any sense of these strange interpretations at all if it weren't for the introduction by the translator, George Boas, and, especially, a short but very tightly written foreward by Anthony T. Grafton. Apparently, when this work was written, in the fifth century CE, the hieroglyphic script it purports to explain had been nearly totally forgotten. The author, a Hellenized Egyptian, assumed that every glyph was a symbol, whereas we now know most of them to be simple phonemes.
Egyptian culture had long fascinated western Europeans, from the time of the Roman Empire onward, partly because Egypt was so old. Its monuments were already ancient by the time the Colosseum was built. As Grafton explains it, "the powers of traditional Egyptian culture fascinated Western historians, philosophers, and scientists, who admired what they saw as the millenial continuity of Egyptian life. In particular, Egyptian philosophy seemed to them older and deeper than their own" (p. xi).
And no wonder. Ancient writing which can't be deciphered is automatically mysterious, and the mystery is deepened by the impenetrability of the beautiful symbols of the hieroglyphic script.
This was not the only work that mixed genuine Egyptology with imagined doctrines of the past. There were also the works supposedly authored by a certain Hermes Trismegistus which, in Grafton's words, "mixed real Egyptian traditions and unfounded Greek prejudices into one heady textual cocktail."
I have no way to judge whether the "Hieroglyphics" contributed to the birth of tarot. I simply don't know enough. Grafton assures us that "the 'Hieroglyphica' itself did more than any other single text to shape the Renaissance's view of Egyptian symbols" (p. xvi). But I don't see any overt Egyptian or pseudo-Egyptian symbolism in any of the early tarots, rather what's there is mostly Christian or Hellenistic Pagan symbolism.
One thing is certain, however. This book, or the ideas contained in it, persisted through the centuries, all the way down through the Enlightenment, and resulted in the late 18th century in the now notorious assertion by Court de Gebelin that the tarot trumps were a set of degraded Egyptian hieroglyphs. The idea persisted, resulting in Levi's contention that every trump was simultaneously a symbol, a concept, a letter, a number, and an astrological attribution.
These misconceptions should not have lasted past 1822, when the Rosetta Stone was decoded and the hieroglyphic language was at last revealed for what it really is. Thus, by the early years of the twentieth century, AE Waite wrote a snarling and curmudgeonly condemnation of occult Egyptology as it had been applied to the tarot.
But the myth of Egypt and it's magical hieroglyphs, which if studied methodically will unlock the secrets of the universe, persists right down to the present day. New "Egyptian" decks are still being drawn and commercially produced in the twenty-first century.
Thanks to Horapollo, it looks like we're stuck with those doggone Egyptians.
The work itself is an unsorted bundle of loose ends in which the author (or authors) engages in an apparently random association of concepts with images. It's kind of like playing a word association game. For example:
"11. WHAT THEY MEAN BY A VULTURE
When they mean a mother, or sight, or boundaries, or foreknowledge, or the year, or the heavens, or pity, or Athene, or Hera, or two drachmas, they draw a vulture. A mother, since there is no male in this species of animal. And they are born in this way:" (Here follows a fanciful description of the supposed manner in which vultures conceive and deliver eggs.)
I would not have made any sense of these strange interpretations at all if it weren't for the introduction by the translator, George Boas, and, especially, a short but very tightly written foreward by Anthony T. Grafton. Apparently, when this work was written, in the fifth century CE, the hieroglyphic script it purports to explain had been nearly totally forgotten. The author, a Hellenized Egyptian, assumed that every glyph was a symbol, whereas we now know most of them to be simple phonemes.
Egyptian culture had long fascinated western Europeans, from the time of the Roman Empire onward, partly because Egypt was so old. Its monuments were already ancient by the time the Colosseum was built. As Grafton explains it, "the powers of traditional Egyptian culture fascinated Western historians, philosophers, and scientists, who admired what they saw as the millenial continuity of Egyptian life. In particular, Egyptian philosophy seemed to them older and deeper than their own" (p. xi).
And no wonder. Ancient writing which can't be deciphered is automatically mysterious, and the mystery is deepened by the impenetrability of the beautiful symbols of the hieroglyphic script.
This was not the only work that mixed genuine Egyptology with imagined doctrines of the past. There were also the works supposedly authored by a certain Hermes Trismegistus which, in Grafton's words, "mixed real Egyptian traditions and unfounded Greek prejudices into one heady textual cocktail."
I have no way to judge whether the "Hieroglyphics" contributed to the birth of tarot. I simply don't know enough. Grafton assures us that "the 'Hieroglyphica' itself did more than any other single text to shape the Renaissance's view of Egyptian symbols" (p. xvi). But I don't see any overt Egyptian or pseudo-Egyptian symbolism in any of the early tarots, rather what's there is mostly Christian or Hellenistic Pagan symbolism.
One thing is certain, however. This book, or the ideas contained in it, persisted through the centuries, all the way down through the Enlightenment, and resulted in the late 18th century in the now notorious assertion by Court de Gebelin that the tarot trumps were a set of degraded Egyptian hieroglyphs. The idea persisted, resulting in Levi's contention that every trump was simultaneously a symbol, a concept, a letter, a number, and an astrological attribution.
These misconceptions should not have lasted past 1822, when the Rosetta Stone was decoded and the hieroglyphic language was at last revealed for what it really is. Thus, by the early years of the twentieth century, AE Waite wrote a snarling and curmudgeonly condemnation of occult Egyptology as it had been applied to the tarot.
But the myth of Egypt and it's magical hieroglyphs, which if studied methodically will unlock the secrets of the universe, persists right down to the present day. New "Egyptian" decks are still being drawn and commercially produced in the twenty-first century.
Thanks to Horapollo, it looks like we're stuck with those doggone Egyptians.
