2.7.24

More about alchemy in my Inbox . . .

Welcome everyone!

In the last email, I confessed: “Almost immediately after publishing my 1.22.24 post, I realized I had left several stones (couldn’t resist) unturned. I didn’t get to write about it right away—but fortunately I’d made some notes.”

So here we go!

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Synchronicity continues . . .

Recently arrived in my email—from the Beinecke Library’s weekly newsletter:

Yale’s Beinecke Library is home to some of the earliest surviving painted Tarot cards, as well as an array of hermetic texts. Their newsletter rarely focuses on those aspects of the collection, though—so it was a nice surprise when they highlighted a 16th century scroll that combines an English translation of one famous alchemical poem with several of the mysterious images characteristic of alchemical texts.

If you want to know more about the Ripley Scrolls (a colorful story!), there’s lots to learn in Chapter Four of Anke Timmerman’s Verse and Transmutation: A Corpus of Middle English Alchemical Poetry.

Turning a sharp corner: Many commentators made associations between Tarot and alchemy—and though there’s no historical evidence to support a direct link, there are certainly indirect connections worth exploring.

Robert Place has been especially creative in this respect. So . . . I went to his website to get an address, and found that he had posted that very day (!) an account of how Tarot and alchemy came together in his imagination. It’s filled with examples of synchronicity in action, along with explorations of the symbolic and psychological undercurrents that link these two subject areas.

Well worth a read.

Now back to the notes I mentioned, following on from 1.22. I kept thinking about the post, with a sense that it wasn’t finished. And the next morning, I realized I’d been so busy looking at the forest that I’d missed the trees.

Which is to say, I focused on the synchronicity aspect, and neglected to consider the individual instances that had appeared in my Inbox. Beginning with my thoughts about “third places,” and the Starbucks connection. I’d skipped over that because it wasn’t obviously related to alchemy—but why not Google “Starbucks and Tarot,” just for due diligence?

Turns out there’s some fun to be found at Etsy:

And better still, a reminder of Janet Boyer & Co’s delightful Coffee Tarot:

Tour the site for stories about the making of deck, along with insights into the Major Arcana.

Maybe coffee is alchemical in itself, come to think of it. But now to the second tree in the 1.22 forest: an article about asking questions. It uses the word alchemical more or less in passing, so I hadn’t paid much attention to the content. After I thought about it again, though, and remembered how important questions can be in working with Tarot—I went for another look at Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s advice on “How to Ask Good Questions.”

1. Know your purpose. It’s easy to get distracted during a conversation. Try to make sure that every question you ask helps you gather either facts or your interlocutor’s opinion. Genuinely try to know more about them, and frame your questions accordingly.

2. Start by listening. In the classic How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie advised to “be a good listener” and to “ask questions the other person will enjoy answering.” You can’t ask good questions if you don’t listen to what the person has to say.

3. Interrupt wisely. It’s not about never interrupting the person you’re chatting with. It’s about ending fewer sentences with a period, and more with a question mark. Don’t worry about asking the wrong question. Not asking enough is more detrimental to building a relationship than asking one poorly phrased question.

4. Use the right wording. Avoid leading questions and use a neutral tone instead. Refrain hinting at your opinion or the answer you’d like to get. If you want honest opinions or accurate information, don’t prime your interlocutor with loaded questions. Keep them open ended so they have the option of giving you an answer you didn’t expect.

5. Build a hierarchy. Follow general questions with specific ones, focus your questions so they ask one thing at a time, and use something in the answer you got to frame your next question. This will help the conversation flow more naturally.

The more I read those suggestions, the more useful they seemed in a Tarot context.

The next tree was the review of a book that discusses (in really a lot of detail) the history of English alchemical practice from 1300 to 1700. I didn’t look at the book then—but now that I have, I find there’s quite a lot in it about the very same Ripley Scrolls that would make their way into my Inbox a week or so later.

I’m not sure what to do with that connection, if it even is one. But looking over the emblematic images that make the Ripley Scrolls so intriguing, I was reminded of the enduringly mysterious Voynich Manuscript. It too is housed in the Beinecke, and a while back (July, 2021), they presented a webinar exploring some technical studies of the document.

After watching it, I shared some thoughts—and that’s our EP flashback for today. It was a bit long, so I’ll offer the most relevant excerpts . . .

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Tarot Perspectives on the Voynich Manuscript

Just to refresh—the Voynich is famous because it was written in an undecipherable “language,” accompanied by an assortment of drawings that are simultaneously familiar and very strange. The vellum manuscript now contains 240 pages, but there were originally at least 14 more. A few pages fold out to form larger displays.

About a third of the manuscript seems to be sort of an herbal, but the illustrated plants don’t exist (on Earth as we know it, anyway). For example:

The remaining pages fall into various categories, including some that contain only text, and others that contain illustrations which seem vaguely alchemical and/or astrological. For example:

A few pages contain drawings that seem merely fanciful, or decorative.

Once you start down the Voynich rabbit hole, don’t count on coming out anytime soon. But you’ll find an amazing variety of theories, analyses, and commentaries along the way. Predictably, there are many amateur attempts at explanation, and the Voynich has inspired a considerable amount of what we might call “fan fiction.”

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Carbon dating of the Voynich has proved within reason that it was produced in the first half of the fifteenth century, around the same time as the earliest painted Tarot cards. And when you look at the Voynich images closely, some of them (particularly in details) might remind you of the earliest printed Tarots.

Of course a number of people have pointed out such similarities, but since common styles and symbols can be found in most examples of 15th-century art, casual resemblances are not necessarily significant. What separates the Voynich from every other artifact of the period—including Tarots—is its large quantity of unreadable text.

That disconnect brings to mind a different quandary: there are no words associated with the earliest Tarot cards. Nothing written on them, nothing written about them, other than scattered practical references (such as accounting notes) and rules for a game that could be played with them.

But nothing whatsoever regarding the images themselves, their origins, or their meanings. We’ve all gotten used to that fact by now, and since so much has been written about Tarot since the 18th century, there’s no lack of reading material.

The Voynich is essentially a reverse case—plenty of text, just no way to connect the text with the pictures.

And one reason for so much attention to the Voynich “language” is the hope that decipherment of the text will explain the pictures. But as far as I can tell, much less effort has gone toward decoding the pictures themselves. What would we think about the drawings if they stood alone, like the Tarot images?

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At the very least, painstaking study of the Voynich has given us a glimpse of creative imagination at work in 15th-century Europe. And I came away from my brief visit to Voynich-world with this image from Lisa Fagin Davis’s paper, “How Many Glyphs and How Many Scribes? Digital Paleography and the Voynich Manuscript”:

These are examples of the same glyph taken from different places in the manuscript, then grouped by shared paleographic characteristics.

There’s obviously no real connection, but the arrangement looks so much like a Tarot spread that I stopped to think about the enduring appeal of card-like objects—and the ways they can be used to create meaningful groups and structures.

What if the Tarot images had been a mural rather than a set of individual images? They would have been in one order, telling one story. But instead, we have a kit of parts that could potentially tell every story imaginable.

I think we may not appreciate that quite enough.

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As always, thanks for reading! Sunday will be 2.11—obviously a date I won’t be able to resist—so look for something new from EP in your Inbox. C