Two Esoteric Tarots is the record of a fascinating conversation between Peter Mark Adams and Christophe Poncet, convened and with a foreword by César Pedreros. They compare their journeys of discovery into two wildly contrasting tarot decks, the dark ritual landscape of the elite Sola-Busca tarocchi, as revealed in The Game of Saturn, and the luminous and popular Tarot de Marseille, the subject of the forthcoming Tarot of Marsilio.
Scholarly research has firmly maintained that the tarot had no spiritual, esoteric or divinatory dimension before the mid-eighteenth century. However, working independently, Peter Mark Adams and Christophe Poncet have shattered that consensus with their original research, providing abundant evidence that pushes back the date of an esoteric tradition concealed in plain sight by almost three centuries.
Readers of The Game of Saturn will find Peter Mark Adams most recent thinking here, as he decodes the ritual grammar of a performative theurgy which encompasses the grotesque, the abject and the antinomian in service of a draconian deity and Renaissance statecraft.
Parallel to this, Christophe Poncet discovered Platonic philosophy embedded in the imagery and construction of the Tarot de Marseille. A revelation which propelled him into a profound investigation, unearthing connections between the Florentine aristocracy, the Medici family, Marsilio Ficino, Botticelli, and the heretical philosophical underpinnings of the Italian Renaissance.
When brought into dialogue, Adams and Poncets insights converge, to illuminate and fundamentally change our understanding of the tarot, and the submerged currents of the Renaissance, both dark and light, which formed Western esotericism.
A benchmark text for students of the tarot, symbolism, theurgy and performative ritual from two of the leading researchers into the hidden legacy of the tarot.
Foreword
i Two journeys into the tarot
ii Occult, esoteric and performative
iii Decoding the Sola-Busca
iv How the tarot became esoteric
v Of libertine aesthetics: the grotesque and the abject
vi The Hellenistic revolution and the second renaissance
vii Tarot designers
viii The Dummett-Yates controversy
ix Cyphers and time
x The seven planets
xi Orality, writing and the art of memory
xii The esoteric call
Bibliography
Peter Mark Adams is an author, poet, esotericist and professional energy worker specialising in the ethnography and visuality of ritual, sacred landscape, esotericism, consciousness and healing.
Peters esoteric non-fiction is published by Scarlet Imprint; non-fiction concerning energy healing and consciousness by Inner Traditions. Peters literary prose and poetry has appeared in Corbel Stone Press literary journal Reliquiae: Journal of Nature, Landscape & Mythology and the Bosphorus Review of Books. Reviews of esoterically related works have appeared on the dedicated esoteric book review site, Paralibrum.
A range of essays examining other than human encounters have appeared in the peer reviewed journals Paranthropology: Journal of Anthropological Approaches to the Paranormal and The Journal of Exceptional Experiences and Psychology and are available on Peters academia.edu page. With a background in Philosophy from the University of Liverpool, Peter pursues advanced studies on iconology and iconographic; Renaissance art and material culture with the Warburg Institutes School of Advanced Studies in London.
At the crossroads between occult and human sciences, philosophy, iconology and the theurgic art of talismans, Christophe Poncets research on the tarot de Marseilles arcana sets the theatre of an initiatory quest.
It all started as a fantasy tale: on his 19th birthday his girlfriend offered him a wicked pack of cards. A tarot de Marseille deck.
Intrigued by the dynamic density of the symbols sedimented in the images, as an accretion of geological strata, he discovered a strange and foreign language that draws its power from its combinatory plasticity. He then realized that to understand what the cards had to say, one would need to find out from what they were made.
Thus began the allegorical adventure: just like the Fool, the pilgrim who knows not where he is heading to, Poncet gets off the beaten track of the abundant lore on the mythical origins of the tarot and starts afresh from a rigorous analysis of the costumes represented in the cards figures. This leads him to a precise dating and localization of the tarot de Marseilles origins: Florence circa 1470, the cradle of the Italian Renaissance.
In parallel with this iconographical inquiry, as he was reading Platos dialogues, Poncet realized that several arcana stage famous Platonic myths, like the chariot of the soul or the allegory of the cave: the figures he had been studying were suddenly revealing their hidden density.
Beyond art history and its layer of appropriations and influences, came up the inner machinery of a philosophical theatre of memory in which images do not just represent but act as vectors of an occult thought process.
At the intersection between Florence and Platonic mythology, an unexpected protagonist showed up: Marsilio Ficino, philosopher, mage, and astrologist, the first translator of Platos complete works and of the Corpus Hermeticum, and the savant who probably lent his first name to the tarot de Marseille.
Irrigating western thought with the philosophical mysteries of Antiquity, to which his commentaries add a twist of his own, Ficinos works fueled an unprecedented speculative and artistic enthusiasm, which strongly contributed to the transmutation of the scholastic thought of the Middle Ages into a Renaissance of spirit and knowledge.
Just like its subject, Poncets research deploys a multi-layered ars combinatoria: at first, with iconological precision, it investigates the original texts that inspired the artists images; then the philosophical vision, anachronic in the way it reappears and turns back to life in the traditional world of art representations, awakens the iconic and magical dimension of performative images. This dimension, today as in the Renaissance, retains intact the charm of a universal and visionary use of the cards.
Poncets research has led him to produce a documentary film broadcasted internationally, The Mysteries of the Tarot of Marseille, to publish a book on Sandro Botticellis Primavera and the Lovers card of the tarot de Marseille, Le Choix de Laurent, translated into Italian and Japanese, and many articles in academic journals on the tarot, on Botticelli and on Ficino.
