Book Summary ‘The Game of Saturn: Decoding the Sola-Busca Tarot’ by Peter Mark Adams
I would like to inform you about an exciting new project that I have just completed. Its title is, ‘The Game of Saturn: Decoding the Sola-Busca Tarot’. It is work of non-fiction involving literary and artistic detective work into the labyrinthine imagery of the 15th century Renaissance masterwork known as the Sola-Busca tarocchi. This work is the first full length scholarly study dedicated to it. Created in Ferrara for a Venetian patrician client, its imagery is wholly unique and defies comparison with every other gaming deck before or since. Ranging from the obscure to the grotesque, it’s scenes of homoeroticism, wounding, immolation and decapitation are redolent of hidden meanings, violent transformations and obscure rites. Careful analysis reveals that whoever designed this deck set out, first and foremost, to create a literary artefact that was only later encoded in the format of a Renaissance tarocchi, complete with dead ends and false trails. The deck’s misdirection has allowed its true nature to remain hidden and unrecognized for the last 500 years. The recovery of its heavily
encoded
narratives
therefore
constitutes
a
significant
contribution to Renaissance scholarship, art history, tarot studies and the history of Western esotericism. This masterwork of the card maker’s art was never intended for gaming nor, given its violent and homoerotic imagery, to serve as a sumptuous wedding present or educational aid. It is, rather, a heretical grimoire of the darkest imaginable sorcery. I have been able to conclusively prove
that the presiding deity of this ‘cult object’ is none other than the Gnostic demiurge in its most archaic and violent form, the Afro-Levantine god, Ammon-Saturn, better known from Biblical sources as Moloch. The Sola-Busca tarocchi is one of the few genuinely esoteric Renaissance documents in existence. It constitutes a grimoire replete with dark Gnostic cosmology, theurgy and astral magical rites. Beneath its beautifully decorated surface we encounter a quite different and subversive world, one that mocks conventions and inverts behavioral norms. This ‘looking glass’ world is, quite literally, the dark mirror image of Renaissance light and grace. Careful examination of the historical circumstances attending the deck’s creation and the astrological and artistic sources upon which it draws (the Palazzo Schifanoia fresco cycle and the work of the Ferrarese artist Cosmé Tura) allows us to identify, for the first time, the identity of the polymath who designed it. Based upon this information I am able to account for its complex existence by placing it within its historical context. It was designed and created against a background of political intrigue and espionage directed by Duke Ercole d’Este of Ferrara against the Venetian elite during the drawn out negotiations that succeeded Ferrara’s defeat in the ‘Salt War’ 1482-4. Drawing upon the latest ethnographic research I have situated the cult’s dark esotericism within the larger cross-cultural context of the ‘cosmologies of predation’ that characterize the occult practices of political elites in different societies and ages. This highly illustrated work will add significantly to our understanding of Renaissance art and culture. It opens a window onto certain heterodox and libertine currents within the Ferrarese and Venetian elites at the height of Venice’s empire. A limited English language print run of this book will be published by the UK fine book publisher Scarlet Imprint in the third quarter of 2016.
This heavily illustrated work is around 70,000 words, references some 50 academic works, 70 academic papers and a wide range of original sources from antiquity, late-antiquity and the early Renaissance.
Peter Mark Adams www.petermarkadams.com
[email protected]
Scarlet Imprint http://scarletimprint.com/
