Fool

The Alchemical Fool: bringing down the spiritual fruit.


I will start with the Fool card of the Noblet, c. 1650. An animal is grabbing at the Fool's genitals. It is a strange creature, halfway between a dog and a cat. And in the Noblet, it even has webbed feet. As Debra pointed out recently on the Tarot History Forum, Flornoy identifies the animal as a civet, a species that is halfway between dog and cat; it was imported from India to France in order to kill rats. It is now banned, as it killed every small animal, even useful ones. But even this creature does not have webbed feet. (1)

I am struck by the similarity of the animal's position to that of a strange creature in 17th century alchemical illustrations, depicted as lunging at another figure, in this case female. In the explanations for this figure that the alchemists provided, it is identified with "the fixed" as opposed to the maiden, which is "the volatile." The lunge is the fixed's attempt to assimilate the volatile. The process is "the fixation of the volatile." There is also  "the volatilization of the fixed." Here is another example, with another doglike animal, except that this time it is the fixation of the volatile.

In some cases, the animal representing the "fixed" even has webbed feet. It is referred to then as a toad, notably in a celebrated text and illumination called the Ripley's Vision, written in the 15th century but not known outside of England until the late 16th. Ripley relates:

A Toade full rudde I saw, did drink the juice of Grapes so fast,
Till over charged with the broth, his Bowels all to brast...

Then it suffers mightily, dies, and turns various colors, before its body safely combines the volatile with its own lowly nature. When it does, it proves to contain the essence of the elixir, the universal medicine.

 It strikes me that volatility is part of the Fool's nature. He roams from place to place, never settled.  He's afraid of everyone.  In Italian the card's title is "Matto," meaning Madman. It comes from the same root as the English "mad." It means "cut down, crippled, mentally deficient," according to my 1967 Webster's New World Dictionary. He's a maniac.But the animal is after something he has.

An alchemical illustration of such a toad, representing our earthly nature, is below, from a 15th century alchemical manuscript now in the British Library (2):

In another poem, the "Ripley Scrowle," the toad appears again, with webbed feet. It is being eaten by a dragon, symbolizing uncontrolled volatility. The writing below the image says that "I"--meaning the dragon:

...That sometyme was both wood and wild,
And now I am both meeke and mild;...

Destructive madness lifts as a result of eating the toad.

Above this image are Adam and Eve next to something resembling the Tree of Knowledge, from which grapes grow.

I think we now know what the Grapes symbolize in the first poem. They are the fruit of the tree of knowledge. To eat them brings one much suffering and certain death, as it did for Adam and Eve. But the eventual result is a return to paradise, and perhaps a higher state of being than if one never ate at all, since one now has both immortality and knowledge.

Let me compare this with another image, the 2 of Batons of a deck done in early 16th century Italy. Alongside it I put two other images, one a Roman mosaic from Norbonne France, of a goat eating grapes, and the other of a young goat climibng up the god Dionysus's robe, Roman from Sicily. The one of the goat illustrates a poem by Virgil. 

 It seems to me that the situation is much the same as  the fox and the grapes, an image from the Song of Songs. The goat is the fixed, the grapes are  is the volatile. Too much wine leads to volatile anger and other forms of destructive madness. The right amount brings good cheer. But this toad is a small animal, no dragon. Eating of the forbidden fruit, it eats too much. It is then the animal who is the Madman, Le Mat. As for the Fool above him, as we shall see, he is none other than God himself, in a state of unknowing.

For that exposition I will turn to another way of representing the Fool, in a way similar to that in which the Greco-Roman god Saturn was depicted. Several early Fool cards are very reminiscent of a typical image of Saturn, which I show here in the "Mantegna" series of around 1465, at Right. To its left are the d'Este and Charles VI card Fool card. These are similar mainly in the figure's giant size with much smaller figures gathered around it.

Saturn castrated his father Uranus, and was castrated in turn by his son Jupiter. The children below the Fool are like the children of Saturn, waiting to be eaten. One c. 1420 drawing in a book about the Greco-Roman gods shows Jupiter, who was hidden by his mother until he could grow up, ending the cycle by castrating his father.

Saturn in the myth is a crazy madman, devouring his children out of jealousy, unwilling to let the succession of generations take place. Another aspect of the scene is that Saturn here would have signified the god of the Old Testament, as Saturn was in medieval and even ancient times identified with the Jewish God (as SteveM points out in a link I have footnoted). So Jupiter's castration of Saturn would represent the overthrow of Judaism by Christ, and liberation from the iron law of Jehovah into the rule of the god of love. However Christianity adds a new wrinkle. Since God and Jesus are two aspects of the same god, it is God himself who by undergoing suffering and death redeems his curse upon humanity and ends his own madness. (2)

This Christianization of the myth of Saturn has its alchemical equivalent. Saturn, for whom the corresponding metal is lead, is the stage known as the blackening, the nigredo, a stage which the toad in Ripley's Vision reaches in death. Lead was known to be poisonous, and madness preceded death. In the tarot, that is how the sequence starts: a madness that proceeds toward deth.

Here is another version of the myth, from Natale Conti's Mythologies, 1551. Speaking of the alchemists, he says:

They claim the ancients say Jupiter castrated Saturn with a sharp sickle, threw his testicles into the sea, with Venus then arising from them and the sea-spume, because Saturn is a certain salt and is the father of Jove, as it were, because of a salt-preparation deriving from metallic salt. But because this "Jove" or salt-derivative exists in a glass vessel, and is released into a very subtle and delicate water through the action of fire, which is also understood as Jove himself, and, also, because this "Jove" carries off with himself the "virile parts," that is, cuts off and separates the sulphur hidden within the salt, the residue being received into a vessel placed for the reception of it, he is said to have cut off the potency of Saturn. And since salt sinks down in water, "in the sea," Venus is said to be born from this compound of salt and sulphur.(3)

The alchemists have conflated two myths, one about Jupiter's castration of Saturn, and the other about Venus's creation from the testicles of Uranus. I will talk about Venus later, with reference to the Love card; for now I will focus on the castration of Saturn. Castration is the extraction of the sulphur, the "potency of Saturn" from which the elixir is obtained. That is what the animal on the Fool card wants. However in its accessible solid form, the sulphur is in combination with other things that are harmful (Saturn in a primitive state). To be useful for humanity, the sulphur must be separated off from the harmful things, so that it can later be recombined with things in a way that will be beneficial. So in a new form, a new salt, it becomes the chemical equivalent of Venus, spiritually the "celestial Venus" of divine love. But that will take the entire alchemical sequence to achieve.

I think that same account of separation is illustrated in the following c. 1420 illumination (even though it is in a book describing the gods, I think the artist has drawn on alchemical imagery). Here, while King Saturn and Queen Rhea look on above, a prince, i.e. Jupiter, gives male genitalia to children, who then put it in the mud. Children are associated alchemically with the stage of multiplicatio, because it is the reproduction of the elixir. Merely touching it to other properly purified substances will produce more of it. It is the substance of magical transformation. (4)

The genitalia on the Noblet Fool are what links him to the myth of Saturn. The animal reaching up links him to the divine; it is on the one hand a deliverance from madness, and on the other hand the death and redemption of those creatures of earth who eat of the divine substance.

In France of c. 1660, there was published a deck that seems to split into two cards what was in the f Noblet put into one. This is the Minchiate Francesi, which is dated to c.1660, according to "Huck" on THF (http://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=782). Huck observes that the dating comes from a publication in which the noted French card historian Thiery Depaulis participated (http://www.millon-associes.com/doc/CP-Carte-a-jouer-051111.pdf).

"Chaos," I think, would be the upper Folly, the god, and "Momus" the lower Folly, the human, in the world of original sin.. These two names come from Hesiod's genealogy of the gods, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyx_(mythology)), in which Chaos is first and Momus his grandson, a god who mocks the others, In the illustration, however, Momus appears as a court jester, who typically mocks the people around him. This reduction in status may be due to a satire written by Alberti in the 1450s, in which the gods throw Momus out of heaven because of the chaos he causes there. He is then on earth, where he fathers the goddess Rumor. Between his mocking and the activity of Rumor, the earth turns to chaos as well. The successful mocking of authority and the spreading of false rumors results in anarchy.

Etteilla in the late 18th century may have used these cards for what, in this light, would also be two versions of Folly. Below I present a black and white copy of the card as it appears in the original, from the book Wicked Pack of Cards, and in the revised version of c. 1840.

 The title "Chaos" is not in the original. But it does appear in Eteilla's discussion of the card. In the 2nd Cahier he says:

 The first sheet, listed no. 1, represented...a light surrounded by a thick cloud, or the chaos which was turned back in order to give place to the Truth, at the moment when the Creator manifested his glory and his sovereign bounty to the Creatures of the whole Universe, who slept and will sleep again in his intelligence.

It is God's own chaos when he created heaven and earth: "...and the earth was void and without form. And God said 'Let there be light."

Etteilla's version of the card he labeled "Folly", number 78 out of 78 cards,  is on the left; I have used a later colored version, but in this case, unlike the later card 1, and except possibly for the coloring, it is exactly the same as the original.. Etteilla made him a beggar. But perhaps, looking back at the earlier image, he means the folly of the world around this beggar rather than of himself..

In the revised version, someone added "The alchemist." This must have been, I think, a distancing from physical alchemy at a time when science was reigning supreme. In the 2nd Cahier, Etteilla himself praised alchemy, to the extent that it was a road of healing, especially of the spirit, rather than of turning base metals into gold. The beginning of the journey was card 78, which in his writing he placed between cards 21 and 22, and the end was card 1.

To sum up so far: the Fool, or Madman, is at the beginning of the work. He can be envisioned as either total volitality, as in Chaos or the prima materia in either gasious or liquid state. Alternatively, the Fool, the prima materia, can be seen the result of burning, a black substance akin to Saturn, which eats its children--everything that comes of it--yet contains the precious ingrediants later to become the elixir.

References: the Fool and Alchemy. 1. civet: see Debra's post at http://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=383&start=70#p9672. For more on the lunging animal, see my post at: http://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=383&start=70#p9669. The image of the Noblet Fool is from Flornoy's site at tarot-history.com. The first alchemical image is from Mylius's 1622 Philosophia Reformata; I have taken itfrom http://www.hermetik.ch/eidolon/bilder/d ... /index.htm. The commentary I get from Stanislas de Rola, The Golden Game, p. 180 ff. The second image is from Michael Maier’s Symbola Aureae mensae, 1617. I take image and commentary from de Rola. The Ripley Vision is at http://www.levity.com/alchemy/rpvision.html. The Ripley Scrowle image is at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File: ... Scroll.JPG. The accompanying poem is at http://www.levity.com/alchemy/ripscrol.html. For more discussion of the toad see http://www.levity.com/alchemy/toad.html.
2. Image of toad: Laurinda Dixon, Bosch, p. 223,  folio 68, from MS Harley 2407.. 
3. Saturn: for more discussion see http://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=383&start=80#p9705. SteveM on the Jewish god, two posts further down. My continuation: http://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=383&start=80#p9757. The drawing is from the De deorum imaginabilus libellus, in Vatican Library Reginensis 1290, a manuscript that Seznec (Survival of the Pagan Gods, p. 177) dates to 1420. I get my image from Hans Liebeschütz, Fulgentius Metaforalis: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Antiken Mythologie im Mittelalter, Leipzig 1926.
3. Conti quote: Anthony diMatteo, ed. and trans., Natale Conti's Mythologies, a Select translation, p. 67.
4. The illumination is from Vatican Apostolica Cod. Pal. lat. 1066, of which this is page 226. I get it from de Rola's Alchemy the Secret Art.