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Old 23-01-2021, 12:57 AM
Scholarly Tarot Scholarly Tarot is offline
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The Astonishing Era of the Zohar and Tarot Cards, King Arthur and Robin Hood

Three succinct words can be used to describe and summarize the long forgotten century 1300-1400 A. D. “Pain and misery.” The entire world was unhinged in Medieval Europe in this century with fundamentally everything imaginable going wrong, with more dire death, political intrigue and struggle, poignant pain, spiritual hate, gross, horrendous war, savage, merciless plague, and manifold misery than in any century before nor, possibly, since. But what possibly would I want to look here for concerning the spiritualistic Kabbalistic text the Zohar and the spiritualistic mystical Tarot Cards? Allow me to unfold a mysteriously interesting story with intriguing connections.

This remarkable century of the 1300’s is directly sandwiched by two of the most remarkable Medieval writings of all history dealing with one of the most stunning, and amazing legends: Geoffrey of Monmouth’s The History of the Kings of Britain, (1136A.D.) and Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur, (1469-1470 A.D.) expounded, propounding, and elucidating the legend of King Arthur and the Round Table, involving the Search for the Holy Grail.

One of our great Medieval scholars, Norman F. Cantor, presented some intriguing connections he makes of this era in history. The Catholic “New Piety” was one the popular teachings to reach right down to the ground instead of remaining with the high and far off mighty ecclesiastical authorities. The knights, peasants, artisans and miserlies all were taught this new piety which consisted of little more than giving the Jews - the “Other,” the terrible, the ugly, the evil, the damnable - a choice, convert to Christianity or die. This led to popular Jewish assaults for the next three centuries. A particular thought which had chilling murderous effect was the blood libel.

“The blood libel was the claim that at Passover the Jews engaged in the ritual murder of Christian children, whose blood allegedly became the ingredients in Passover matzos. In the disordered and violent society of Europe, children, not greatly prized and watched in an era of a runaway population boom, easily fell prey to death by misadventure or disappearance. The Jews were blamed for these misfortunes.”[1]

This blood libel, interestingly enough, as Cantor shows, spread eastward erupting in the city of Lincoln in the 1150’s on into Troyes in northern France (The famous Jewish medieval scholar Rashi’s town) and on into the German Rhineland shortly after 1200 following the same trajectory of the Arthurian literature in France and Germany, the conclusion of which Cantor ruefully notes “that the Jew-hating blood libel was centrally integrated in the most creative side of medieval literary culture, the first wave of romanticism in Western civilization.”[2]

The Albigensian Crusade (1209-1244) marred and decimated the 1200’s demonstrating the medieval Catholicism was as gruesome and terrible against whoever they styled as heretics as they were to the Jews or anyone who didn’t think, act, and live like them.[3] Directly by Popes from Lucius III to Gregory IX and Innocent III, many indiscriminate massacres were led by Simon of Montfort, the massacre of Montsegur ending the horror of decades.[4] Wars of Constantinople (1203-4), Bouvines (1214), Leignitz (1241), Peipus (1242), and Malta (1283), ended the restless, bloodied, slaughtering, sick, weary 1200’s leading to the century of the reigning Edwards throughout the 1300’s.[5]

Edward I was the outstanding king of England in the Middle Ages.[6] Named after Edward the Confessor, knighted by King Alfonsi X of Castile, he was the King who captured and took back the Stone of Scone from Scotland, on which Scottish Kings were crowned. This stone, according to the legends was the same stone Jacob laid his head on when he wrestled with angels at Bethel. Edward dedicated the stone to Edward the Confessor.[7]

Once he got peace restored in 1270, he went on a Crusade but didn’t have much success or luck. The irony for him was “Exactly one hundred years after Richard the Lion Heart broke the walls of Acre two hundred thousand Mamlukes marched against the Crusaders last city. In 1291 Acre fell: the same year that Edward expelled the Jews from England the last Christians were driven from Palestine.”[8] “England was the first nation in medieval Christendom to rid itself by law of its entire Jewish population.”[9]

Edward II was a weak willed king, and thus, in 1314 taking up arms to fight since his Father’s Scottish battles were incomplete, suffered an “ignominious defeat at Bannockburn at the hands of Robert the Bruce, who secured Scottish independence.”[10] Badly outnumbered, 18,000 to 9500, the Scots fought the English just outside in the field ahead of Stirling castle, but the ground was marshy and the Scots chose their battle ground wisely which the English did not know, and the terrain helped the Scots defeat the English badly.[11]

Edward III’s main theme was to assume the claim to the throne of France, which caused the Hundred Years War. Many battles followed, the naval battle of Sluys (1340), Crecy (1346), Poitiers (1356), Calais (1347) and in the years 1348-1350 the Black Death, the Plague hit which cut the population of England in half. There were wars after (La Rochelle, 1372). His son Richard (Richard II, of Shakespeare fame), was valiant and personally rode out (a 14 year old King!) to subdue without force the famous Peasant’s Revolt of 1381 led by Tyler Wat. They had been conscripted to laboring from 5 a.m. until 7-8 p.m. everyday in the summer, 7 days a week, and during the full hours of daylight in the winter, for 3 pence a day/15 hour work days/ 7 days a week. A century later it was raised to a paltry 5 pence.[12]

In Byzantium in the east, meantime, thousands of miles across the European empire from England, in the 1290’s, the various Greek states collapsed and Byzantium took advantage of the weaknesses and chaos, which also meant the Balkans remained weak to Byzantium. There was an ebb and flow of power, as usual.[13] By 1300 there was an apocalyptic fervor with both Jews and Christians in all of Europe because of the international political situation being queasy.[14] It was in this time, the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries which also saw the great development of scholastic nuances and philosophizing in the church with both the split arms of the church, the Dominicans and Franciscans working together to bring about a reasonable interpretation of the Eucharist.[15]

The Albigensian Crusade had occurred earlier with the Cathars being slaughtered because they had differed from the church in many ways, but especially the sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist. Jesus was regarded not as the Son of God, but as an Angel.[16] The church was attempting to work things out intellectually, (they had Thomas Aquinas after all, and Anselm too, not to mention that Scottish Franciscan philosopher John Duns Supreme Court, Bonaventure, William of Occam, and Roger Bacon was in the intellectual scientific background all through this) even though the Popes like John XXIII the Papacy in Avignon condemned the Spirituals as heretics, while Pope Leo X recognized the Observants, heirs of the Spirituals, in an attempt to keep things calm. The Spirituals after the death of St. Francis Assisi in 1226 were drawn to the apocalyptic prophecies of the Italian abbot Joachim of Fiore.[17]

In the East, in Byzantium, the church was gaining strength as well, under the reign of the Orthodox Emperor Andronicus II, in fact, being said to “reach a climax.”[18] In the West the English literature had produced over 16 Middle English Arthurian romances in rimed or alliterative verse, including Chaucer’s tale of the Wife of Bath, and Gawain and the Green Knight.[19] In the East, Constantinople wasn’t to fall to the Turks for another 197 years yet.

“Islam, Judaism, and Christianity were all theistic and providential religions. Because of their common nature, the challenge that Aristotelian doctrine offered to one was bound to be repeated with respect to the others.”[20] And what was that challenge? “Medieval society inherited a social tradition as well as a political system from the ancient Mediterranean civilization.”[21] And Platonism was the most influential philosophical system adapted into not only the Christians but Jewish faith heading into the Middle Ages. But Aristotle’s doctrines were strong in medieval Christianity, and it gained hold after the 1100’s. His view was to gather data, look at all of it, classify, organize, hypothesize about the meaning, and come to a conclusion. In other words, his was the scientific thinking that grabbed onto the church.[22] The debate was Augustine vs. Aristotle, church/state vs. individual.

And this leads us to the beginning of the Zohar. “The writer of the Zohar was writing at a time when Palestine, after the vicissitudes of the Crusades, was again in the hands of the Arabs.” The moral atmosphere as well as various and many polemical references to Christianity and Islam demonstrate he was living in the era of around 1280. Several apocalyptic calculations for the end of time ended up being at 1300, so he was living in the time of darkness before the dawn of the Messiah. The author, according to Jewish Kabbalistic scholar Gerschom Scholem was Moses de Leon “who lived until 1290 in the little town of Guadalajara in the heart of Castile.”[23] There is a particular blend of Maimonides, the Jewish scholar, and the Neoplatonists with a spiritually subversive view of their philosophies into a spiritual realm rather than a material, logical, rational one..[24]

This was what was being grappled with in both East in Byzantium and the West at this peculiar time. It is fascinating how, in the meantime, with the apocalypse imagined right around the corner, Pope Boniface VIII began humbling everyone around him from the powerful Colonna family (the two brothers were Cardinals), declaring a Crusade against them when they posted information publicly about his haughtiness of declaring he had power over eternal as well as temporal property matters and all were to obey his decisions. They repented and he confiscated their estates and gave the property to his own family. Albrecht the German Emperor was brought to abject submission as well. Boniface further tried to intimidate and remove Edward’s I of England Scottish crown, Edward simply ignored him, further straining relations of the church with the empire! Perhaps the Pope was angered Edward stole the Stone of Scone of the Scottish Kings and glorified himself with it instead of handing it over to the property authority, the Pope himself?

The Pope actually did something for the first time in the church that made him a boatload, a genuine mountain of money. He held the first Jubilee Year ever in 1300. The Bull appointing the Jubilee promising full absolution of all sins, total remission if it was attended by all peoples from the world, and the folk remained for a month enjoying the festivities at St. Peters in Rome. The handkerchief of Veronica which had an imprint of the Savior’s face was on full display for the strengthening of the faith as well.

The populace tramped all over themselves in St. Peters during the entire month. A contemporary source said over 200,000 pilgrims from all over the empire attended, with 30,000 coming and going daily! “The offerings were so copious that two clerics stood day and night at the altar of St, Peter’s gathering up the coins with rakes.” Boniface used the money to prosecute his wars against Sicily and the Colonna family and to enrich his relatives. Succeeding Popes after him reduced the time in-between Jubilees due to the outlandish success, from 33 years, then down to every 25 year intervals.[25] It was this crass materialism and lust for worldly wealth and power which the Zohar was also against, not to mention Luther’s posting of his 95 theses in later times.

Now the fascinating thing is Scholem’s description of why Moses de Leon wrote the Zohar. At this time, there was a rise of the rationalistic mood, and it was that rationalism the Zohar is attacking! He brooded over Maimonides in his youth, and when rationalism in his adult life began taking sway over the Jews (and the Christians as evidenced in the renewing of discussions on the sacraments, Jubilees, etc.!) “in opposition to them he strives to maintain the undefiled Judaism of the Torah, as he interpreted it in his mystical way.”[26]

In conjunction with the Zohar coming out right before the end of the world in 1300, combined with the apocalyptic frenzy and fear of the populace, with the amazing and disturbing increase in violence with everyone[27], we find the development and deployment of the Tarot cards, along with the wiley hero/bandit Robin Hood, demonstrating the line between the good and bad, law and lawlessness was blurred terribly. Was robbery thievery, or was it charity?[28] Remarkably during the era 1275-1325 was a renewed determination of the people to remind the King and his aristocratic minions of the serious importance (and consequences for not doing so!) of reading out loud twice a year the renewal of the Magna Carta and laws of truth to prevent any old Emperor or King from simply rewriting the laws in their favor or minimize the novelty of their own legislation without controls in place, such as the control of the Magna Carta, as so many Popes and church ecclesiastical offices were attempting to do, not to mention the Emperors and their vast bureaucracy.[29]

Boniface’s Bull The Unam Sanctam issued against Philip the Fair of France on Nov. 18, 1302 was a flat out declaration that in all matters on earth, whether material, spiritual, property, person’s rights, interpretation of the laws, “the most notorious deliverance of the popes,” presenting the “theory of the supremacy of the spiritual power over the temporal, the authority of the papacy over princes,” was nothing if not baldly, arrogantly, weeningly audacious! All peoples of all nations of the world submit to me, period. Thus declared Boniface. Since Christ had failed to show up, Boniface would take his place on earth as Cosmocrator.[30]

From the Jewish side, we have the Zohar with its doctrines of marriage of Adam Kadmon (the combined 10 sephiroth) in heaven with his Shekhinah when men and women married on earth, uniting the heavens and the earth, a rejection of the Alfonsine King. Alfonso, being the Troubadour that he was, sang of love and attachment to the Virgin, in true Christian fashion of the day, while the Zoharic Jewish stance was one of the Shekihinah, the regal motherly guardian of Israel. “The Zohar highlighted its radical critique of Alfonso’s royal Troubadour ideology.” It simply rejected it all together.[31]

On the Christian side of things, we have the enigmatic Tarot cards. These cards drawn by artist Jacquemin Gringonneur for Charles VI of France, appeared for the first time in 1392, some of which exist to this day.[32] And right here, we are in the literal thick of things in Medieval Europe of which most of us as school boys and girls learned about, all except the Tarot cards that is. This was the age of great spiritual women, Catherine of Sienna (1347-1380) who influenced Pope Gregory XI to hasten the end of the Papacy’s “Babylonian captivity” in Avignon. The rise of Pope Urban VI gave rise to the “Great Schism” of Catholicism (Both the Pope in the West, and the Pope in the East excommunicated each other at the same time!). Here we see the battles between England and France where the mad king Charles VI was incapacitated, but his children influencing the French (through marriages and murderous intrigues) at Orleans where we then hear of Joan of Arc (1412-1431) inspired by visions to lead the French to victory at Orleans.[33]

But above all, this was the era of Dante. Campbell explains that on his examining the Marseilles deck of Tarot, he saw the four different suits, which fit perfectly into the four classes of the Medieval social order of Europe. “The swords signify the nobility; the cups suggesting the chalice of the Catholic Mass, are for the clergy, the townsmen, the burghers; while the Staves, Clubs, or Batons, stand for the ‘churls,’ the peasantry and servants. Each suit consists of ten numbered cards, followed by four face cards; first the Knave, then the Knight, on whom the Nave would attend, next the Queen, and finally the King. And what each of these sequences would have represented in a medieval context would have been a scale of mounting spiritual, as well as social, power.”[34] It was from the beginning of 1330 that we begin to hear of the clergy complaining about members of their flock playing with playing cards.[35]

Up to this time in the entire previous century in Castile (where the Zohar came from) there was an ambitious and dedicated school of Spanish translators of Toledo under the King Alfonso the Wise of Leon (1252-1284) rendering out of Arabic into Latin fundamental Moslem and ancient Classic thinkers such as Aristotle and Ibnu’l-Arabi as well as one of Dante’s honored masters, Brunetto Latini (1210-1294) visited Toledo shortly before his death. And the masters of philosophy of both Muslim and Christian schools, teaching alchemy and astrology were in the court of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II (1220-1250).[36]

What Campbell had noticed on his examining the Tarot with all this in mind was “a tradition expounded by Dante in his Convito. To make a long story short as we now have seen the historic era of the rise of the Zohar and Tarot, as it were, almost together from the two main religious groups in medieval Europe, the Jewish and the Christian, the Tarot Cards are of a revelation “of a grandiose poetic vision of Universal Man.[37] This was the beginning in medieval group think which had forcibly been thrust onto humanity, of the individual with his own rights, powers, visions, and spirituality without the say-so of the church, to become unified with God.

In the philosophy, without elaborating on the magnificent connections of religious symbolism, since this is already long enough, the cards lead the soul upwards into God where one is liberated from the mouth of death. One does not need to be a member of an organization, or belong to any group, work within its own set parameters of ritual, in order to be spiritual, to be fulfilled, and elevated to God. In the Arthurian legend of the search for the Holy Grail, in the courtly and poetic circles “the ideal of individual experience [for the Troubadours this was individual love for each other, not arranged marriages by the state for tax purposes] prevailed over that of the infallible authority of men whose character was supposed to be disregarded. And in the church as well, the principle of such infallibility was called into doubt, questioned and rejected by John Wycliffe (died 1384).”[38]

This is the thrust of the Jewish Zohar, and the “pagan” (Christian?) Tarot, both representing each religious arm in medieval Europe, each grappling with the abuses, overweening arrogance, and miasmic sickness unto death of the lust for power and filthy riches, to be abused on all levels. One, the Zohar, in written form, describing the symbolisms of which individuals can incorporate into one’s own spiritual practice. The other, the Tarot, in artistic, pictorial symbolic form, without written instruction, in order to facilitate personal meditations, leading to spiritual connections within each person’s breast of spiritual effusion of light, love, warmth, goodness, beauty, and truth. Both mediums took away the power of the abusers held for previous centuries upon centuries and began a new era of light for individuals, and continue to do so today.
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Old 23-01-2021, 01:01 AM
Scholarly Tarot Scholarly Tarot is offline
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Footnotes

1. Norman F. Cantor, “The Sacred Chain: A History of the Jews,” HarperCollins, 1995: 172.
2. Cantor, “Ibid.” p. 175.
3. Mark Gregory Pegg, “A Most Holy War: The Albigensian Crusade and the Battle for Christendom,” Oxford University Press, 2008.
4. Norman F. Cantor, editor, “The Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages,” Viking Press, 1999: 22-23.
5. Kelly Devries, Martin Dougherty, Ian ****ie, Phyllis G. Jestice, Christer Jorgensen, “Battles of the Medieval World 1000 - 1500,” Amber Books, 2006: 70-115.
6. David Williamson, “Kings & Queens of Britain,” Dorset Press, 1992: 72.
7. Williamson, “Ibid.,” p. 72-73.
8. Barbara Tuchman, “Bible and Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour,” Ballantine Books, reprint, 1984: 79.
9. Stephen Greenblatt, “Will in the World, How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare,” W. W. Norton, 2004: 258.
10. Williamson, “Ibid.,” p. 76.
11. Devries, “Ibid.,” pp. 116-125.
12. Williamson, “Ibid.,” p. 82. For pay and daily work hours, Philip Schaff, “History of the Christian Church,” Vol. 6, p. 779.
13. George Ostrogorsky, “History of the Byzantine State,” Rutgers University, Revised and Enlarged, 1969: 488-489.
14. James Carroll, “Constantine’s Sword, The Church and the Jews,” Houghton Mifflin, 2001: 331.
15. Darwell Stone, “A History of the Doctrine of the Holy Eucharist,” Vol.1, Wipf & Stock, 2006: 395.
16. Norman Cantor, “Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages,” HarperCollins, Revised and Enlarged, 1993: p. 104.
17. Cantor, “Ibid.,” p. 174. See Joseph Dahmus, “A History of the Middle Ages,” Barnes & Noble, 1995: 331-339. Also “Heavenly Powers, Unraveling the Secret History of the Kabbalah,” Castle Books, 2000:99.
18. George Ostrogorsky, “History of Byzantine State,” p. 486. “This was the golden age of Byzantine monasticism, especially the venerable monasteries of Mount Athos, exercising a growing authority and influence over the entire spiritual life of the empire.” p. 487.
19. Roger Sherman Loomis, “The Development of Arthurian Romance,” Harper Torchbooks, 1964, 133.
20. Norman F. Cantor, “The Civilization of the Middle Ages,” p. 360.
21. Cantor, “Civilization of the Middle Ages,” p. 7.
22. Cantor, “Ibid.,” p. 19.
23. Gerschom Scholem, “Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism,” Schocken Books, reprint, 1974: 186. See also his “Kabbalah,” Meridian Books, 1974, p. 57.
24. Scholem, “Ibid.,” p. 184.
25. Philip Schaff, “History of the Christian Church, Vol. 6, The Middle Ages, from 1294-1517,” Wm. B. Eerdman’s, reprint, 1967, p. 12-14.
26. Scholem, “Ibid.,” p. 203. “He came from the world of philosophical enlightenment against which he subsequently conducted so unremittingly a fight.” (p. 203).
27. Albrecht Classen, “Violence in Medieval Courtly Literature, A Casebook,” Routledge, 2004.
28. J. C. Holt, “Robin Hood,” Thames & Hudson, Revised and Enlarged, reprint, 1996. A stunning piece of detective work considering the ramifications of what was right and wrong, and who was breaking the law and who wasn’t! The dividing line between who the bad guys and good guys were was blurred tremendously in the Middle Ages, the exact situation Robin Hood was trying to open them up to grasping through his robbery/charity.
29. Richard Firth Green, “A Crisis of Truth, Literature and Law in Ricardian England,” University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999: Chapter 6 especially.
30. Philip Schaff, “History of the Christian Church,” Vol. 6, pp. 25-29.
31. Neil Asher Silberman, “Heavenly Powers, Unraveling the Secret History of the Kabbalah,”Castle Books, 2000: 91. This was a rejection of the idea of the Monarchy, p. 96.
32. Joseph Campbell, “Foreward,” in Richard Roberts, “Tarot Revelations,” Vernal Equinox Press, 3rd edition, 1987: 5.
33. Norman F. Cantor, “Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages,” pp. 106, 263. See also Joseph Dahmus, “A History of the Middle Ages,” pp. 351-352. Also WIlliamson, “Kings & Queens of Britain,” p. 90.
34. Campbell, “Symbolism of the Marseilles Deck,” in Roberts, “Tarot Revelations,” p. 9-10.
35. Campbell, “Ibid.,” p. 9.
36. Campbell, “Ibid.,” p. 6.
37. Campbell, “Ibid.,” p. 7.
38. Joseph Campbell, “Occidental Mythology,” Penguin Books, reprint, 1976: 509-510.
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