Pico della Mirandola and the origins of Kabbalistic tarot
/Thesis: the origin of Kabbalistic tarot can be traced to Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (hereafter referred to as Pico) and his studies in Kabbalah.
There are many theories of how tarot and Kabbalah came together. Some are completely fanciful with no documentation or academic rigor to prove their case. Some simply state as obvious that tarot and Kabbalah are connected, without any documentation or for when and why they were brought together.
Since the late 20th century, there have been many serious academic investigations into the origin of tarot as a game and as an esoteric tradition. There have also been some other explanations/investigations. I’ll refer to both approaches below. And at the end of this essay I include bibliographic sources, though I won’t footnote—that will come later, since this my study is still a work in progress. Some of you may recall that I posted an earlier version of my thoughts about Pico. This goes deeper and has more evidence to present.
My ideas have their basis in prior academic investigations, though I admit right up front that my conclusion is based on informed speculation—it is a theory that will require more documentation to prove, but as I present my case, I believe the circumstantial evidence is very strong to support this thesis.
My theory examines the case for Pico bringing tarot and Kabbalah together by asking and proposing answers to the following questions.
Did he have the opportunity?
Did he have a motive and if so, what was it?
What was the method he used?
How did this become established in the Western Occult tradition?
Giovanni Pico della mirandola
Who was Giovanni Pico della Mirandola?
Pico (1463-1494) was a young Italian nobleman and scholar who became a favorite in the court of Lorenzo de Medici in Florence when he met Lorenzo and philosopher Marsilio Ficino in 1484. This put Pico at the very center of Italian Renaissance Humanism. Pico was a member of the group of illustrious artists and intellectuals that Lorenzo gathered around him. Pico may have been a member of a group known as the Academy, in homage to Plato’s Academy, that met regularly at Ficino’s estate—although evidence for the existence of this Academy, and who attended is disputed.
Marsilio ficino
Pico’s best-known work today is his Oration on the Dignity of Man, considered the central document of Renaissance Humanist thought.
Both Ficino and Pico were engaged in scholarly investigation intent on proving their belief in what they called the Prisca Theologica.
What is the Prisca Theologica?
Ficino and Pico believed that all ancient religions had the seed of a single, true theology that had been given to humanity by God in the far distant past. Since they lived in 15th century Italy, they also believed (at least publicly—what they truly believed will always be a mystery) that these ancient religions, when understood correctly, by which they meant how they interpreted them, prefigured the truth of Christian revelation and that theology had reached its apotheosis with Christianity, which embodies the complete truth.
Ficino had devoted himself to translating all of Plato’s works, along with other Hellenistic works including the Corpus Hermeticum, from Greek to Latin. These works were newly available in western Europe after the fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453.
Pico had devoted himself to learning and translating the major works of the traditional Jewish Kabbalah, and his library of Kabbalistic works was considered the greatest among Christian Renaissance scholars.
Of course, the works that Ficino and Pico were translating were considered dangerous and heretical by Christian dogmatists. So they believed that positioning ideas found in these works as divinely inspired and prefiguring Christianity would validate and legitimize their studies. It would remove the threat of being charged as heretics. This was not an idle threat, as tarot historian Christophe Poncet notes in an interview: “in 1416, a theologian named Jerome of Prague is burnt at the stake because he had been professing a theory of universals very close to Plato’s theory of Ideas...and Ficino was aware of it.”
In the case of the Hellenistic works which Ficino worked on, since the civilization that gave rise to these works no longer existed, I would say that bringing this thought into alignment with the thinking of the day was cultural integration.
However, in the case of Jewish Kabbalistic works which Pico worked on, Kabbalah was a living, closed tradition, and using these works to polemically prove the tenets of Christianity to convert the Jews was cultural appropriation. But that’s a side discussion I will come back to later.
Returning to how tarot and Kabbalah came together, let’s look at whether Pico had the opportunity to put them together.
We know that Pico had the greatest collection of Kabbalistic texts among Christian Renaissance scholars. One of those texts, The Great Parchment, was an approximately 6-foot-long diagram of the Tree of Life.
This diagram represented the Sephirot as circles in a specific arrangement. There were more than 100,000 words on this document. And in the circles of the Sephirot, the text that explained the meanings of the Sephirot along with their correspondences to divine names. This text was taken from the 13th century Kabbalistic codex entitled Sha’are Orah, or The Gates of Light. We know that Pico read this document because his library is held today by the Vatican Library, and notes in his handwriting can be read in the margins.
This becomes important because in The Esoteric Tarot: Ancient Sources Rediscovered in Hermeticism and Cabala, author Ronald Decker demonstrates that direct quotes from Gates of Light turn up in the first book of interpretations of the pip card meanings by Etteilla, influencing more than 80 card interpretations (this number, more than the number of cards in a deck, includes both upright and reversed meanings). These interpretations went on to influence Levi and Waite.
So it’s already an established fact that at some point Kabbalah and tarot were joined together. The questions remaining are how and why? My study of Pico and his circle provide a possible answer.
We know that Pico was deep into kabbalistic study, but was he familiar with and did he have access to tarot?
The earliest references to tarot all date to the 1440s and 1450s and fall within the quadrilateral area defined by the northern Italian cities of Venice, Milan, Florence, and Urbino.
In 1440 Giusto Giusti, a notary of the Medici family wrote in his diary: “On Friday 16 September I donated to the magnificent Lord Messer Gismondo a pair of Naibi triumphs, custom designed in Florence with his superb coat of arms.” Further investigation has revealed that there were over 100 purchases of Trionfi tarot decks in Florence between 1449-1460.
So while there is no evidence that Pico ever held a deck of tarot cards, he was an important member of the circle of Lorenzo de Medici, and documents from the period show that both wealthy citizens of Florence and members of the Medici court had tarot decks. To say that Pico knew of tarot and the game of tarocchi is a reasonable supposition.
Certainly Pico’s nephew, Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola was familiar with tarot since he was opposed to their use for divination. He gave us perhaps the first historical mention of the use of cards for fortune telling in his treatise De rerum praenotione (1509), where he wrote: "There are many kinds of lots, as in casting bones, in throwing dice, in the figures depicted in a pack of cards....”
Christophe Poncet believes that Marsilio Ficino is source for the look and esoteric meanings trionfi cards of the tarot of Marseilles, though not the pip cards. I will return to his theory later, since both of Poncet and I situate the birth of esoteric tarot to this time and place, though for Poncet, it is Ficino who was the at the center of the joining of the esoteric to what had been up to that point simply a card game.
Did Pico have a motive for making a connection between tarot and Kabbalah?
In his study of Kabbalah, Pico engaged both rabbis and Jewish converts to Christianity to teach him Hebrew and help translate his vast library of Kabbalistic works. As I mentioned above, the important work in his library germane to this discussion is The Great Parchment, a diagram of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, with text explaining each of the Sephirot using sections from Rabbi Joseph Gikatilla’s classic book, Sha’are Orah, The Gates of Light.
In 1486, at the young age of 23, as part of his work to prove the Prisca Theologica, Pico published the 900 Theses, a list of 900 philosophical statements that included doctrines from Zoroastrianism, Platonism, Hermeticism, but foremost among them were 72 based on his studies in Jewish Kabbalah. The very number of statements he wrote were probably a reference to the Kabbalistic 72 names of G!d.
One of these Kabbalistic theses stated that: “There is no science that more greatly certifies the divinity of Christ than [Jewish] magic and Kabbalah.”
In other words, he weaponized the study of this Jewish tradition against the Jews to promote conversion. This is indeed cultural appropriation. And his work is the origin of both Christian Cabala and Hermetic Qabala, which from my point of view is rooted in antisemitism.
After all, in Renaissance Europe, if you wanted to enjoy the benefits of society, you had to be Christian. Otherwise the doors were closed to you. Or perhaps you simply wanted to avoid being burned at the stake. It was never easy being Jewish in Europe. But this is still a side issue to the main question, so back to what happened to Pico after he published his work.
Pico sent of copy of his 900 Theses to the Pope, and wanted to defend these theses in a public debate in Rome that he believed would lead to the conversion of the Jews. However, despite Pico’s brilliance, he was extraordinarily naïve—his work also undermined the authority of the church. Pope Innocent VIII saw this immediately and declared the book to be heretical—in fact it was the first book to be universally banned by the Catholic Church.
Understanding the danger he was in, Pico retracted the most offending theses publicly, even though privately he still maintained he was right.
Then the Pope charged Pico with heresy. This was a serious charge in medieval and Renaissance Europe—the punishment was burning at the stake. Pico fled to France in fear of his life.
Heretics were sentenced to death by burning at the stake: Here is the Execution of Jan Hus in 1415
There he was arrested and imprisoned at Vincennes, and it was only due to the intercession of Lorenzo de Medici that he was allowed to return to Florence under Lorenzo’s protection. For the next 7 years he lived under papal censure and the threat of the Inquisition.
This provides the motive for Pico bringing tarot and Kabbalah together: If he was to continue his study (and teaching of) Kabbalah, he was going to have to do it secretly.
Ronald Decker in the book where he reveals the connection between tarot card meanings and Gikatilla’s Gates of Light surmised that somewhere, sometime before Etteilla learned the meanings from “a traveling Italian” someone saw a structural connection between the pip cards in their four suits and the structure of the Tree of Life—and that this person decided to use the cards as “flash cards” to learn and teach the meaning of the Sephirot secretly. Of course, I believe this person was Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. He had the opportunity, and he had the motive.
Meanwhile, as part of his struggle to clear himself of the charge of heresy, Pico convinced Lorenzo to invite Savonarola to Florence. Unfortunately Savonarola’s reactionary opposition to Renaissance Humanism deepened the religious, social and political turmoil in Florence, and brought great conflict with the Medici family.
At the death of Pope Innocent VIII, the new pope, Alexander VI cleared Pico of the heresy charges in 1493. But at this point, his protector, Lorenzo de Medici had been dead for a year, and it is believed that Pico was poisoned by Lorenzo’s son Piero in 1494 for the trouble he caused by inviting Savonarola to the city. He was just 31 years old.
A nasty piece of work, savonarola preached against all the values of renaissance humanism and oversaw the burning of great artworks, books, and of course, tarot and playing cards. Eventually he was burned too.
To sum up so far, since I go on lots of tangents that are interesting to me (but perhaps not to you!): Pico had the opportunity because he was in the right place at the right time to have experience with tarot and he had an unrivaled knowledge of Kabbalah, and in particular of the Sephirot, through The Great Parchment, which utilizes the text of Gikatilla’s Gates of Light.
This brings us to the question: what was his method?
Clearly, somewhere, sometime before Etteilla learned the pip card meanings from “a traveling Italian” Decker surmised that someone saw a structural connection between the pip cards in their four suits and the structure of the Tree of Life—and that this person decided to use the cards as “flash cards” to learn and teach the meaning of the Sephirot secretly. Of course, I believe this person was Giovanni Pico della Mirandola.
Of course, playing cards were a relatively new phenomenon—so do we know if anyone was using playing cards or any kind of cards as flash cards for study?
In 1515, just 21 years after Pico’s untimely death, we have the first evidence of scholars using cards for teaching and as an aide-memoire. Franciscan monk Thomas Murner created a deck of cards he used to teach law students to memorize the text of the Institutes of Justinian, a book of Roman law. When you look at his cards you can see that many of them resemble the pip cards in a tarot deck, with objects and suits.
I believe that either independently or in concert with Ficino’s work on the trionfi, Pico used tarot pip cards as a coded aide-memoire (flash cards) to teach the dangerously heretical ideas of Kabbalah.
Poncet posits that Ficino came up with the idea of using cards in this way before Murner and used trionfi cards to teach his ideas about Plato’s philosophy without getting into trouble with the church. He theorizes that this all happened at his Platonic Academy in Florence.
Poncet further believes that Ficino also coordinated with Sandro Botticelli to redesign to trionfi to better illustrate these heretical ideas while keeping them coded so as to not put anyone in danger. Further, he tries to prove that you can see Botticelli’s influence in the Tarot of Marseilles.
Now the very existence of this academy is disputed among academics, since there is no contemporary evidence that a group with that name existed as a formal body—there are no records of meetings and no membership lists. Ficino himself is said to have denied that some of the people who have subsequently be listed as part of this group ever came to his villa to listen to his lectures—among those Ficino denies as having been there is Pico. Nevertheless, another Italian historian places over 100 of Italy’s intellectuals and artists at meetings of this group, and he includes Pico in the list.
Of course, such a group would have been a hotbed of heresy, so I’m not surprised that Ficino denied its existence and that there are no records (at least that have been found yet). In some ways, this seems like a precursor to the secret societies of Europe that were established in following years, the Rosicrucians and the Freemasons. And in fact, it is these secret societies that seem to be where these tarot connections went underground for the next several hundred years, only to be revealed in France in the 18th century by people who were Freemasons—Etteilla, Comte de Mellet and Antoine de Ghebelin. This “underground river” of connection is the next area for investigation.
If it sounds unlikely that these interpretations could be passed down secretly via oral tradition, please consider the case of the Mishnah. If you’re not Jewish you probably don’t know this book—it was the first written compilation of the oral tradition in Judaism, written down by Judah ha-Nasi in the early years of the 3rd century CE, and covers legal arguments and decisions handed down from the period between 516 BCE and 70CE. It covers more than a thousand pages. If you were going to be a rabbi during this period, it was required that you memorize these decisions.
Today, with the use of technology, people who grew up knowing the phone numbers of dozens of people can barely remember their own number. But in ancient times, people had all kinds of strategies to remember vast amounts of information. Buddhist monks chanted the sutras together in groups to learn them by heart for hundreds of years before they were finally written down.
Was Pico part of this “academy” and did he add his Kabbalistic thinking into the mix? Did he come up with this idea of using the cards to teach dangerously heretical ideas separately on his own? These are just some of the questions I don’t have answers for, but you can be sure I’m still looking into anything I’m able to find.
One thing to note. I don’t believe that there is any organic connection between the trionfi and Kabbalah. While the pip cards can be easily fit into the Sephirotic system, the correspondences with the trionfi and Kabbalistic concepts are a bit forced. I still believe that one can learn much about both systems from looking at how they can connect. But I think that the way the later occultists tried to put them together, because those occultists lacked a grounding in traditional Kabbalah, the correspondences don’t work so well. I think Poncet’s ideas about the Platonic ideas encoded in the trionfi make more sense.
It is only when we get to Eliphas Levi and his Doctrine of Transcendental Magic that we find a real connection made between the trionfi and a Zoharic text that makes sense—though later occultists never picked up on this. And it is Levi who was the first, and perhaps the only person so far who recognized the connection between the court cards and the Kabbalistic concept of the Partzufim, which he notes with four obscure sentences that are clear to anyone who is already familiar with the Partzufim.
These connections between the trionfi and the court cards to traditional Kabbalistic concepts is part of my work as both an independent scholar and as a student and teacher of tarot. So there will be writing on these subjects to come. If you’ve gotten this far, I salute you!
Some Side Notes:
About Cultural Appropriation vs. Cultural Integration of Kabbalistic Ideas
Over the last 500 years there have been great thinkers whose contributions to the evolution of Hermetic Qabala have influenced Judaic Kabbalah. And there is much of beauty and value in the Hermetic system. As I often say to my students, both systems are simply maps, and the map is not the territory. The maps will help you get to a certain place in the work, but beyond that place, you’re on your own (or more accurately, working with beings/teachers on other planes).
As a Kabbalistic Tarot reader, most of my work is based in the Jewish tradition. However, the esoteric tarot is a product of the Western Hermetic tradition, so that I find myself working with both systems. As a Queer Kabbalistic Tarot practitioner, I find the depth of the traditional Kabbalistic teachings on gender and sexuality to be mind-blowing and affirming on many levels. These teachings were part of a closed tradition because in Renaissance Europe they would have been seen as dangerously heretical. In many places they would still be considered as such. Today however, Kabbalah is not the closed tradition it once was. Some Jews would disagree, but as I point out when I teach, there is no Pope (or Hierophant) in Judaism, and there hasn’t been a High Priest since the destruction of the Temple (may it never be rebuilt!) Of course it can still feel rather closed to you if you can’t read Hebrew or Aramaic or if you aren’t familiar with the Torah and the Zohar.
I am not claiming a facility with these languages. But I study. Relentlessly. Because my work is to make this information accessible to others. Much as I don’t like Pico’s goals, I don’t deny his relentless scholarship and omnivorous mind. I admire it.
That said, I am offended by those writers today who deny that Christian Cabala and Hermetic Qabbalah have their origin in cultural appropriation. At this point, the horse has been out of the barn for more than 500 years. These branches have become their own traditions. But that doesn’t change their origin or the way they have been used by many people over the centuries as a weapon against Jews.
Trionfi
That’s what the cards we refer to as the Major Arcana were called in Italy. It translates as triumph, from which we get the word that’s also the name of New York crime family, which I never use if at all possible.
Some of my Sources Include:
The Esoteric Tarot: Ancient Sources Rediscovered in Hermeticism and Cabala, by Ronald Decker, Quest Books, 2013.
Secrets of the Marseilles Tarot, a video by Cristophe Poncet found at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nRlQDcyrc4
This video offers deeper information and evidence for Poncet’s theory than the recently published Two Esoteric Tarots: A Conversation Between Peter Mark Adams & Christophe Poncet, Scarlet Imprint 2023.
The Arrival of Florence into Tarot History, a presentation by Ross Caldwell, found at: https://www.academia.edu/101925057/The_Arrival_of_Florence_into_Tarot_History
The Kabbalistic Library of Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola, found at: https://www.pico-kabbalah.eu/first_page.html
The Myth of the Platonic Academy of Florence, by James Hankins, available at: https://www.academia.edu/23681716/The_Myth_of_the_Platonic_Academy_of_Florence
The Card Game of Logic, independently published Adam McClean, who recreated Thomas Murner’s deck teaching the Institutes of Justinian.
Death in Florence: The Medici, Savonorola, and the Battle for the Soul of a Renaissance City, by Paul Strathern.
Spheres, Sefirot, and the Imaginal Astronomical Discourse of Classical Kabbalah, by J.H. Chajes. Available at: https://www.academia.edu/77454843/Spheres_Sefirot_and_the_Imaginal_Astronomical_Discourse_of_Classical_Kabbalah
Dame Fortune’s Wheel Tarot by Paul Huson.
The Renaissance Speaks Hebrew, ed. Giulio Busi and Silvana Greco, 2019.
The Kabbalistic Tree, J.H. Chajes, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022.
A Brief History of Cartomancy, Ross Caldwell, available at: https://www.academia.edu/6477311/Brief_history_of_cartomancy