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Perseus, the Persian Death. Spoliumquae sibi pestemque videnti“A triumph to him [who holds it];[but] Death to the beholder. Manilius,Astronomicon I. 358-360 PerseusImage-formation and texts. The passage from Manilius shows how an image can instantly evoke recall of a known text and impel recollection of additional relevant matter.‘La Mort’ is not the name of the constellation. ‘Death’ was the character long-established for Perseus, whose name in the original Greek means ‘The Destroyer’. But the evocative tag ‘La Mort’ first served as a cue to memory, then soon became the title for any figure placed in the same position in the pack. When the original reference of the Atout figures was lost – if ever known to the majority - the imagery put on the 13th Atout was nothing more than an illustration of that title. To imagine Perseus as a rearing animal, or as a mounted figure, was not the Greco- Roman habit, their Perseus being provided with nearby Pegasus as its steed. But Perseus itself as a horse, or horse-born warrior, was the older figure, the usual image in Mesopotamia, Syria and Arabia. It is a natural idea, given Perseus’ appearance at the time of its highest ascent. Fig. PerseusThis card in the Charles VI set was created to the same formula as the ‘Fool’ discussed in another paper. Its outline is made to approximate the constellation’s as far as possible. Dress and posture then express the traditional character of that constalltion, according to eastern and western popular lore, while linking the figure to specific passages of standard texts. A number of visual ‘cues’ in the smaller details then direct the viewer to a broader matter, this set of cards including the Arabs’ star-names and stellar lore. (By lore we mean unwritten learning, transmitted orally for the most part - not magical ideas) As we have said, this set of cards was evidently first designed to aid teaching as well as recollection. (Readers interested in the nature of such medieval rebuses, their use in education and memory, will find much has been written on this subject in recent decades).[1] A person was expected to memorise every book read, image and text being considered alternative and equally valid ways to engrave the original, spoken, word in memory. The rebus differed from our illustrations in representing literally the words of a text. By definition, a rebus was meant to be “read”. In the Charles VI cards the readable elements of the more accomplished cards are effectively multi-lingual, equally intelligible in terms of Christian, Muslim, Latin, Hebrew, Greek or Syriac culture and language. We concentrate on points relevant to Latin-speaking Christians of late medieval Europe, referring to the Muslim and Arabic aspects only to clarify certain points or explain the relevance of devices in terms of western adoption of the ‘Arab’ star-names.Astronomical Nomenclature.Western astronomers began using ‘Arab’ star-names in preference to the classical Latin about the 12th century, this practice increasing with wider access to works and instruments from Islam. By the end of the 15th century, the process of change was all but complete, and those ‘Arabic’ names remained the formal, scientific nomenclature for over half millennium – that is, until the closing years of the nineteenth century. In 1880 an astronomical conference ratified a new system, naming individual stars by a Greek letter and/or a number attached to the constellation’s Latin name. A ‘constellation’ was now defined as an area of sky, every star in that area, whether or not part of the main figure, being named for the area. It was in that way the Pleiades came to be considered part of Taurus, and the star in Perseus which older Romans had called caput medusa (Medusa’s head), and for which the ‘Arab’ name was Algol, came to be called beta Persei ( β Persei). Modern astronomy uses an exclusively alpha-numeric notation of no relevance to our study, but each of the other three styles will be used as convenient. Not all the star-names known to Europe as ‘Saracen’ words were actually Arabic. The rise of Islam saw Muslim Arabs adopting many classical terms in preference to those used by their star-worshipping ancestors. Other terms had already been taken into Arabic from elsewhere. The Arabs’ word for the Pleiades, Thurayya, is one example. It comes from India’s Dravidian (pre-Hindu) peoples[2] and means ‘victory’ not only in Arabic, but victory or ‘kingship’ still in Tamil. Other terms again came from Syriac, formerly the language of the Chaldeans, later the lingua franca of Rome’s eastern empire, and finally the language of liturgy, scholarship and culture among some eastern Christian communities even after the Muslim conquest.[3] One ‘Arab’ word used to name Orion, for example, is ‘Gabbar’. The word comes from the Syriac, in which it means ‘giant’ or ‘strong man’ and is probably related to the idea of the mummified “iron man” – an Egyptian theme rendered into Latin as gabbaras. One sometimes finds Gabbar Arabised - becoming al-Gabbar.Manilus’s Astronomicon was written long before the advent of Islam. It is a long astronomical poem in five sections or ‘books’, the first of which describes the celestial globe of stars, providing their forms and names according to the Graeco-Roman custom. However, Manilius himself claimed his book would also describe the Egyptian heavens, and we find hints of this knowledge in his poetic descriptions of several constellations.[4] The section in which, as Manilius promised, the Egyptian decanal stars would be described is not extant.The Astronomicon is mentioned again in the tenth century by Gebert d’Aurillac as a manuscript found in the library of the monastery at Bobbio, along with a copy of Boethius’ mathematics, but then Manilius’ book seems to fall from view until it becomes a subject of renewed study and eventual publication in the late fifteenth century. The form of our cards suggests that some other people, at least, had access to it in the meantime. In the twelfth century, a Dominican named Peter of Abano - an Arabist, physician and scholar of Hebrew – was informing people in western Europe about the nature of the eastern stellar lore and science. He may have known the complete version of the Astronomicon, for the imagery of decanal stars adorning the Schiffanoia in Ferrara is said to have been influenced by Abano’s instruction and writings in the subject. A British cleric named Michel Scot, working in Sicily but contemporary with Peter of Abano set marginal figures akin to our Atouts throughout his two-volume text on astronomy. [5] Scot certainly had direct access to the older popular star-lore, as well as being well-trained in the clerical art of rebus construction. But while it is the fusion of these two skills – rebus construction and knowledge of the Arab star-names - which define the forms of the early Atouts, we have no reason to suppose that either of these men invented the Charles VI style of figures.We begin by taking a quick glance at the most remote antecedents of our pack’s four kings and their governing stars, before comparing the Charles VI card ‘La Mort’ with the representation of Perseus on a cylinder-seal of Chaldean or Assyrian workmanship,[6] made some 1800 years later than the first, that is in the 8th century b.c. [Fig.2] From that time onwards, the style and character for Perseus remain constant.Fig. 2 is dated to the third millennium b.c. and comes from the Indus valley. The figure to the left here is Orion, recognisable by its universally known idiosyncracies (i) the East-marking star: indicated here by the ‘east/dawn’ emblem of a cock, (ii) its curiously reversed stance and (iii) its proximity to the monster here envisaged here, as in a fourteenth century French manuscript, in our Taurus. [Fig. 3: Frontice to Moralia in Job. See flikr website for daanamindon]. Beside Orion to each side (in Fig. 2 above) are the northern and southern masters, both adorned with that knotted and tangled hair which, as we will soon see, came to be identified with ultimate triumph. But of particular interest for our discussion is the representation here of one wild creature with an emphatically sickle-shaped horn. The reader is asked to note it particularly, for will be discussed again. [Fig.4 Cylinder seal. late 8th C bc]In Fig. 4 the creature with the sickle-shaped horn is here again, and here we have Perseus in its more usual form, as a mounted horseman in full military costume. We can identify the constellation by its proximity to the Pleiades, which represented twice: literally in the seven-dot figure at the upper right-hand corner and figuratively as the knotted tassel suspended from the rider’s bridle. A consideration of the constellation itself shows why both depictions were accepted. For reasons further explained below, as the rider’s bridle ornament it should be envisaged as made of knotted and twisted hair just as (in general) the Pleiades continued to be described down to the fifteenth century ad. The knotted hair-cord served as one constant poetic metaphor among several others for the Pleiades, those others including the westering ‘cup’ form which would symbolise the concealed triumph of the Muslim Arabs.The rider is shown on the seal in military dress, as Perseus usually is, an idea so well entrenched over the centuries that it survived even the Greeks’ later mythologising. Homer (who was not a Greek but an Ionian or Dorian extraction) wrote his Illiad at about the same time the Chaldean seal was made. He wrote it in the genre of the star-saga, Perseus appearing under the name/epithet Diomedes.[de/io-Medes: god of the Medes]. Homer equips him correctly with a form of ‘skull’-cap[7] and somewhat later Herodotus, in speaking directly of the Medes, reports the name Dio-kes, suggesting a common element in Medean names. We find the same cap depicted in a medieval European image of Death with its sickle. [Fig.]One might be tempted, then, to think that the Medes invented this constellation of Perseus as a celestial rider, the Persians’ ancestral ‘god-king.’ But other elements included in this seal show a direct connection not only to the older Dravidians of the Indus valley, but also to the Egyptians, long before we hear of the Medes.It will be easiest to explain how the various regions’ imagery connects by considering the other constellations shown on the seal, and since most are also represented among the Charles VI cards, it is hoped this digression will not prove too tiresome. The guardian ‘jauza’As Hr-Re-On (Surmounter of the sun on his mound), an Egyptian king was immortalised when acting in the role of Defender of his realm. That name/epithet[8] was heard by the early Greeks as W/Hr-re-on, later Or-ri-on,/Orion - which form of the word the Romans and later west adopted. Orion is an appropriate figure to serve as model “defender of boundaries”, since it stands with upraised arm, endlessly patrolling the world’s southern boundary while remaining firmly opposed to the sun. The same vision led to an idea that the stars of Orion’s belt were knots of a surveyor’s ‘horizon’ cord or measuring cord, as we have discussed in an earlier paper.[9] Orion’s appearance as a giant tree, an animal, or a human figure, who stands alone of all the constellations to confront the rising sun, reinforced these ideas of defence. One word used to describe Orion among the later Arabs was jauza’, commonly taken to mean ‘the central one’ but which Burton identifies as properly referring to the now-extinct Antelope bubalis, with its distinctive, sickle-shaped horn. That creature was noted for two other characteristics: its naturally ‘kohl-rimmed’ eye, and its fierce and endlessly faithful duty of boundary defence. The earliest Egyptians envisaged such ‘wild cattle’ (as they were termed), circling about the boundaries of the king’s immortal realm, too. His other ‘horizon’, his territory after death, was originally envisaged as lying in the north of the sky. (The Egyptian term translated ‘horizon’ meant any area enclosed). In the circumpolar region, the ‘island’ or city of stars wheeling forever about the pole of the sky were described in many ways: as imperishable metal, as souls, as gods and as wild cattle.It is that boundary - the fiercely defended enclosure in the north of the sky - which the Chaldean-Assyrian seal shows Perseus in the act of surmounting. It depicts the triumph of Perseus, already (as the Greeks later knew) the emblem of the Persian-speaking peoples. It is at once a marker of place, and of time in the annual cycle of the year.We ourselves recognise three constellations in that northern circle. One is a serpentine figure we call Draco, the other two (separated by its body) we call the ‘Bears.’ Since one of these bears is larger than the other, we distinguish them as Ursa major and Ursa minor. Each of the three, in turn, has occupied the point of celestial north in historical times, and all three became the subject of many stories, variant imagery and much religious moralia. (The shift of apparent north from one constellation to the next is very slow and due mainly to precession which causes us to see an apparent movement of the heaven’s north-point around a ‘clock’ whose full compass takes roughly 27,000 years.)In the days of earliest Egypt, and for the older writers of the Biblical text, Draco occupied the Pole. For the Romans, Ursa Major marked that point and the reliance of western Europe on Roman texts until our period of study meant it was commonly still treated as such when card-sets were made. However, even in the Roman period, the Phoenicians (that people without a nation-star) recognised our Polaris of Ursa minor as marking celestial north, an understanding which was gaining ground among astronomers of late medieval Europe.[10] The Charles VI cards include a card for both, and one – the Chariot – originally referred to all the circumpolar stars together by reference to the text of the Astronomicon. But this issue is dealt with in the relevant essay.All the stars placed in the northern circumpolar ‘horizon’ were regarded by the older Egyptians as immune from that decay reasonably associated with waters – celestial or terrestrial. Sometimes the whole heaven of stars was seen that way, and described as made of bronze or other ‘imperishable’ metal. For a short time each year, however, Perseus seems to surmount the circumpolar stars, observation of its brief, and transitory, triumph playing a vital role in development of its popular verbal and pictorial imagery. Perseus has always been identified with death, or the death-dealer. For the Persians themselves, its rise to stand above the northern stars suggested not only their own triumph but also suggested, perhaps, that one day even those older celestial northern ‘gods’ would die. For those opposed to the Persians, the same celestial moment could be interpreted differently; to suggest death’s triumph as one more apparent than real, since the central stars inevitably rise over Perseus again. The first conception is reflected in the Christian Apocalypse, which says in one place that the stars will fall from heaven and the heavens be rolled up like a scroll at the end of days. But the opposite thought - seen already in early Egypt - would come to infuse Christian doctrine, placing the heaven-haven of an after-world always to the north, imagining there a city of elect souls, and taking as doctrine the belief in eventual resurrection. The same annual phenomenon in the heavens underpins a reference in the Qur’an to a Sassanian Persian victory over the ‘Greeks’ (as Christians were called) - as but a temporary triumph. It is worth noting here that the rider on the Charles VI card wears Sassanian costume, and that reference to the scroll of heaven was often merely a literary device.[11]Memory of the northern stars as ‘kine’ also survived the millennia, entering the astronomical thesaurus, east and west. It gives us the ‘leapers’ found in both Latin proverb and Arab science in reference to stars in Ursa minor. It explains the Latins’ ludentes ‘leapers’ and Circatores ‘circlers’ which then become ‘dancers’. The Charles VI card shows this character for the Ursa Minor stars. In addition, two stars in Ursa minor are called by the Arabs the Farquadan or calves, and in Latin the Guardians or Wardens of the Pole. In every case, it is their faithfulness to duty and their close proximity to the point of both physical and spiritual north which is their principal virtue. This character again is seen in the relevant card of the Charles VI set. The card’s lower part shows the constellation’s character as “dancers, circlers and leapers” while the upper depicts those two stars of the constellation called the guards, or wardens of the Pole, the proverbially steadfast farquadan. Other card-sets focus solely on that enduring and steadfast character, leading to a common representation of lovers joining in the steadfast of marriage.[12]It will be seen on the Chaldean seal that Perseus is most immediately opposed by an antelope with that distinctive, sickle-shaped horn of the bubalis, the Arabs’ jauza. The same creature was termed in Biblical Hebrew yahmur - Yama being the Persian (and the older Dravidian) word for death. This linguistic connection may indicate an even more ancient identification for the death-dealing ‘Defender’ but if so it is one of which only such fragmentary hints remain. By contrast we have numerous examples in ancient seals and military monuments to show how it was that the jauza could be associated with Orion – defender of the lower horizon – and also with stars of the north. [13]At the very dawn of Egypt’s formal history its first king, Narmer, chose to adopt the stance of Orion on his monument to his repelling of easterners, that habit remaining conventional until Alexander’s arrival signalled the end of Egypt’s independence. Narmer indicates the parallel action of his celestial double, and his own divinely ordained role, by having those jauza’ of the north depicted on his upraised ‘lotus-bud’ sceptre. [Fig. ] We call it a ‘mace’ but the Egyptians saw it differently, speaking of this as the sceptre over the living and of a ‘pole’[14] over the star-souls above.[15] Fig. 4. Narmer’s paletteLeft: Narmer as Orion; Right: Narmer’s maceheadThe Arab tribes apparently inherited knowledge of the Egyptians’ two horizons and their guardians as ‘wild cattle’, to some extent retaining that knowledge even when the meaning of their own term jauza, was largely forgotten. In later Islamic works the word is not rarely taken mean ‘the central one’ which translation (while not accurate) is nonetheless appropriate. Orion has constantly occupied the mid-point of the celestial sphere since time immemorial, the lower equivalent to that other centre offered by the northern celestial mound.We find a certain confusion among Arabic sources in the later period over whether the word jauza refers to Orion or to that great “house” behind him – the constellation we call Gemini. The same uncertainty is most likely the reason for an interpolated ‘Tower’ card within the Charles VI set. That ‘Tower’ card (Maison de Dieu) does not appear in most of our extant early Atout-series, and interrupts the pattern presented by the other stars of the Charles VI set. But in ancient Egypt, the word Pharaoh meant literally “great house” and ancient Egyptians had described as an ‘horizon’ any area within a boundary. Popular recognition of the jauza as the star of the Pharaoh’s ‘horizon’ is probably responsible for a shift in identity of the second, from the upper celestial circuit down to that of the ecliptic, giving us a dual allusion to Orion and Gemini as the ‘great house’ of the defender. The Northern stars.Our earliest known written references to the celestial mound occur in Egypt’s Pyramid text utterances, dating from the 5th and 6th dynasties.[16] Faulkiner believes the star-religion alluded to here represents the oldest strand of religious belief in Egypt, and readers who care to read them will doubtless recognise in the Utterances many allusions to ideas still vital four and a half thousand years later. Their survival is due not least to their infusing Biblical imagery and thus affecting Christian thought and doctrine from its earliest years. In the following utterance, the tamed cows of the lower world are being imagined circling and mourning the king’s departure, their movement envisaged in parallel with, or as mirror image to, circling kin in the north:The sky thunders, the earth quakes, because of dread of you [O king]… when you ascend. O you milking cows who are in this [horizon below], you nursing cows who are here, go round about him, beweep him, lament him, mourn him when he ascends and goes to the sky among his brethren the gods.[17]Sympathy between the lower (earthly) and higher (celestial) lands is an important theme in Egyptian belief,[18] maintained in this case by the Arabs’ conception of Ursa Major as a wheeled funeral bier, of the type called a throne (sarir), which is imagined led by a number of stars from the constellation, as mourning daughters. Carolingian Europe saw the northern kine as domesticated cows herded around their tight circuit by rustic or ‘pagan’ Bootes. [Fig. ]Later we hear of Ursa major as a rustic wagon, ‘Carol’s wain’. But the image presently on the Charles VI card to represent Ursa Major re-works the form of the Arabs’ ‘bier-throne’ so as to make of it (as best the painter could) a ‘chariot-throne.’ The result is very plainly, and spectacularly, unroadworthy. Even in the twentieth century, however, and in North Africa we have a description of a procession in which these ‘throne-biers’ are actually the vehicles in an annual procession whose antecedents are unmistakeably Carthaginian-Egyptian. We believe that the pattern of the card-pack, and its use for educational exercise-games came to Europe from Sicily, or by way of Sicilian-Norman influence from North Africa.Our constellation of the northern serpent Draco was known to the Egyptians, and also to the early people of Israel. Formed in bronze, winding about the pole, it is mentioned as a healing figure in the days of Moses. Its name was ‘nhshtn’ “the bronze one” and the effigy remained for hundreds of years in the temple of Jerusalem. But as Draco fell slowly from the point of north, and Ursa Major took its place, so the terms were sometimes adapted, perhaps the reason why we have the Arabs’ choice of na’ash (bier) as the term to describe their north-marking constellation, the adjacent Ursa Major. As late as the tenth century ad the Persian al Biruni refers casually to the fact that ‘the Arabs' still consider Ursa major to mark the point of north, even while a proverbial saying of the Bedu shows that they, at least, kept a clear memory of the serpent’s fall and Polaris’ counter-movement to the true north.None of these alternate metaphors found in other regions conflict with ideas found so much earlier in Pharaonic Egypt. Later folk-legends and poetic motifs of the near east appear rather to elaborate upon the primordial Egyptian vision, using first one and then another – as if the whole body of Egyptian thought provided a litany of alternative poetic metaphors for the heavens.In another passage from the Pyramid texts, the king seems to identify himself with that star which, thousands of years later, the Chaldean-Assyrian cylinder seal shows marking the brow of the rearing antelope defending the north of the sky.Other passages explain how the king reaches his northern horizon by climbing or by means of a reed float. In one passage we seem to find a reference to the Pleiades in its form as knotted hair, appearing to rise up to the north:“travel to your (celestial) fields, you shall cross the interior of your woods, your nose will snuff the sweet scent.. you shall raise up the king’s (celestial double) for him at his side, even as this [knotted hair] of yours rose up to you.”[19]That conception of the Pleiades as knotted hair or hair-cord, (whether or not associated with Perseus) also survived essentially unchanged from early in the third millennium bc until the fifteenth Christian century. It appears on a map made for Charles V of France in about 1375, here made the Rider’s whip of knotted-hair cord - upheld in the Arabs’ preferred ‘cup’ shape.[20]And in case readers may think this too fanciful a reading of the later figure, we may refer to the work of an Arab mariner, writing in the fifteenth century of our era, and describing the relationship between Perseus and the Pleiades. His poems and explanatory comments will be quoted below.One should not attribute the endurance of such ideas over five thousand years as proof for any continuing religion or cult, hidden or otherwise, but rather as evidence of how knowledge of the heavens was bound closely to popular culture and to the exercise of practical skills. The stars were used for time-keeping, navigation, surveying, to provide names for the months and days of the agricultural calendars, and to provide character ‘types’ in popular narrative, poetry and moralia. By reference to those uses the star-lore passed from each generation to the next, neither the stars nor the practices themselves having any reason greatly to alter over time.In the east, one finds the composition of star-based poetry, story and moralia is accomplished somewhat as music is composed. While the basic scale and notes – in other words the star-characters - are fixed, a new sequence or emphasis creates an entirely original piece while leaving each separate element recognisable. Such a custom was not native to the west, nor widely known there except to the clerical class - to whom it came in waves through contact with eastern Christianity. The nearest equivalent in western culture is probably the representation of the Vices and Virtues, or Christ and his saints, in medieval religious plays. The Greeks’ PerseusThe Greeks of Europe came relatively late, emerging from obscurity about two centuries after the Chaldean seal was made. They sometimes mocked, and sometimes merely misunderstood what they learned, as Philo of Byblos later complains. The romantic legend of their Perseus, for example, makes him a pedestrian hero and a Greek, but does reflect the pattern of the constellations and recognise Perseus as the Persians’ nation-star. The Greeks even provided their Perseus with a trophy whose hair is notably tangled, though they imagined it in the blazing β Persei, not in the Pleiades The Romans of course had followed the Greeks – and thus was the “sphaera graecia” formed. Their error in identifying the trophy star by Perseus becomes a little easier to understand if one supposes horsemen of the north- east, in earlier times, bore an enemy’s head dangling from the horse’s tack. We know that the Thracians, Sythians and Celts – related tribes – had a somewhat similar practice and the first two certainly influenced Persia’s history.Influence from India and pre-Islamic SyriaThe Rohan Book of Hours was painted early in the 15th century in France. That is, it dates to about forty years into the period when card-use became more common in western Christendom, and to within a couple of decades of the time when the Charles VI cards are said to have gained in their present form.One page of it shows a cadaver below an image of the northern circumpolar heaven. Transgressing heaven’s limit we have a now plainly-devilish Perseus, with Cepheus shown as an armed angel in the act of preventing his incursion. Perseus has snatched and is attempting to hide beneath its animalian body, a soul which properly belongs to Cepheus (here a representative of the sword-wielding God of the North). In general, a sword-bearing constellation by the Northern circle will be Cepheu, who becomes the Emperor of the tarot. Keeper of the northern kine/kin, Bootes was not represented on the Chaldean seal, for it lies across and not within the northern line and has never occupied the point of visible north. But its position makes it appear as a block to entry, and thus made it a metaphor for the herd-keeper and door-keeper of heaven in some forms of the celestial imagery. In Christian works, Bootes is most commonly depicted as the pope, holding the keys to the kingdom of heaven, as is done in the Charles VI set. (In that set the Pope depicted is St. Sylvester). An alternative image of Ursa major as the northern celestial ship only confirmed that habit, since Peter [Lat: Petrus, the rock] was a fisherman, and his successors were described as navigators of the ship of souls. In the Rohan Book of Hours, Perseus the transgressor of the northern boundary-circle is immediately recognisable - even as a devil, but it does come as something of a shock to see the vulnerable soul, half hidden beneath it, here represents the same figure as the ‘bishop’ on the Charles VI card and – astonishingly – the vulnerable young calf on the Chaldean seal.Perseus must have had a long history of taking the first-born, or most precious.Detail: Rohan Book of Hours. Early 15thC.The same picture offers a hint about where medieval France gained access to this body of older stellar lore, for the figures wheeling about the God of the North are here depicted neither as cattle nor as the archetypically-faithful pair, but as a wheel of armed ‘lovers’ who at first convey something of the quality of the women of Ajanta and Ellora. They are coloured lapis lazuli, or wine-dark purple, as ancient Egyptians did to symbolise immortality and as Hindus colour the face of Krsna.[21] The immediate source of the image is India, and we may suggest more exactly the most ancient Christian community in the world, the Tamil community of St. Thomas in southern India, founded during Christ’s lifetime by his brother. But the tamils were originally mariners, too, and there is nothing to prevent these from being representations of those....The Indian community originally owed allegiance to the Persian-Nestorian patriarch and then to the patriach of Egypt. They would finally accept the authority of the Roman pope in the sixteenth century, being then accorded the honourable term ‘Chaldean’ by the Roman church. [See appendix 1] The ‘houris’ are meant to be understood as ‘hours’ – an apparent error from Greek usage of which this is not the only instance known, and which again may reflect older Egyptian notions. The ‘God of the Hours’ here is thus the God of the North, master of the faithful and master of time itself. The same epithets: Lord of the Hours, Old Man, and God of the North are recorded of the Egyptian community in Syrian Harran, in accounts by the Muslim Arabs of the time of conquest. The Harrans were at that time obliged - like every other older community -to prove themselves adherents of a religion acknowledged by the Prophet of Islam, and to produce books of holy writ. It was then, we are told, that the Harranians called themselves – very wittily – ‘Sabeans’ (which in Syriac means not ‘people of Saba’ but devotees of the ‘old man’]. For their holy writ they produced the great works of Greek astronomical literature, the Illiad and the Phainomena among them. As their ‘gods’ they named the legendary masters of technical skills concerned with navigation, surveying and land-measure: Pythagoras as master of measures; Homer as master of the star-saga and its characters, and the ‘agatha daimon’ or loving spirit as the practical god who keeps the world turning.The Harranians’ influence on eastern Christianity, including that of the Edessan Christians later termed Nestorians, as well as on the astronomical culture of medieval Islam is a matter of historical record. They, like the ‘Nestorians’ were employed in early Baghdad, to translate and convey the corpus of more ancient learning to their new masters. It is from Baghdad, probably by way of Norman Sicily, that we are most likely to owe revived knowledge of the eastern world’s moralised heavens in medieval Europe, but this line of transmission appears to be only one of several strands by which the ancient characters and morals of the sphaera barbara reached the west from the seventh century onwards.The Harranians.Like the Chaldeans, the Harranians are an historically-attested community, remembered in popular lore of the near east and recorded in works of their time. We find in the fifth century that Christian Edessa is criticised for ‘worshipping’ the same stars and gods as their neighbour (and traditional enemy), pagan Harran. A bishop of Tella is accused of having used a calculation-table as a ‘table of devils’ – probably a form of algorismic board calculating times and seasons. But a curious custom in western academic scholarship sees an acceptance of the Edessans while the Harranians, like the Chaldeans – and almost any people said to have reverenced the stars – are consigned to an intellectual equivalent of the medieval abyss. This peculiar habit would appear due partly to the poverty of western star-lore itself, and partly to an inability to appreciate that the star-characters infused areas of culture other than formal religion or astrology. One finds them, in fact, most frequently used to illuminate eastern poetry, proverbs, narrative and teaching, and our fullest record now of the ancient heavens comes, in fact, from the writings of a fifteenth-century navigator, an Arab-speaker named Ibn Majid.Western scholarship commonly forgets, too, that even in western Christendom the stars were still believed living (and often angelic) beings as late as the thirteenth century. The great sources for western Christian scholarship, including the works of Aristotle and Plato, take for granted that the stars live. In fact, many Christian writers preferred the eastern attitude because it provided moralia along with clinical observation of the heavens, where mathematical astronomy is a-theistic by nature and regularly applies calculation skills to the heavens, in a way which some considered contrary to the Biblical statement that the stars were (and thus should remain) “numberless.” It is far from impossible, then, that beliefs of the Harranians immediately before the rise of Islam, like the Chaldeans before the rise of the Greeks, could have directly influenced the formation of our star-cards - just as easily as such influence could have come from the Christians of Edessa, the Copts of Egypt, the Byzantines, or the Greeks. Protestant Europe’s ignorance, before the twentieth century, of ancient Egyptian thought does not justify the assumption that no other race or time on earth could know more. Earlier monastic Europe was transplanted directly from Egypt and something of the Egyptians’ knowledge of the heavens came with it, having deeply influenced Coptic Christian thought.The Pleiades’ image as knotted cord-work, or Perseus as death certainly did survive the centuries, to appear in medieval Europe perfectly intact, and many fine details and with all its ancient connotations precisely, if quietly, retained. On a world map made in Majorca for Charles V of France about 1375, the figure of Perseus-and-Pleiades is shown, as we have seen, though it is called an Arab camel-rider and its knotted-hair cord shown as a whip. Nonetheless the figure still indicates ‘west’ by reference to the Pleiades and carries the same ambivalent quality, a sense of initial but temporary menace, and yet of ultimate victory.[22] And at just the same time, the Pleiades’ alternate image - as a cup - is used to indicate the western quarter of the tarot’s schematic world.Ancient Star-lore in the fifteenth century.All these metaphors for Perseus and the Pleiades were known to Ibn Majid. Much of what he knew was jealously-guarded information, it is true, because it was the key to navigating the lucrative trade-routes of India and the far east. But Majid had also studied classical works on astronomy and star-lore, and makes reference to one Egyptian work – apparently well known in his time - which appears now to be lost. A manuscript copy of Majid’s work is retained by the same library as that containing the Charles VI cards. But before citing Majid’s comment on Perseus-and-the-Pleiades, we should describe further its appearance in the sky.Persia’s ‘horse’ stands against the pale glow of the galaxy. In the west, the flowing tide was imagined a ‘milky way’ but elsewhere as a road of burning cinders, a salt road, or an outflowing of water or of blood. That influenced the way the figure was described, whether as a ‘pale horse’ or as one called kumait, a word describing the colour of dried blood, or wine, and which we call ‘bay’. The horse on the Charles VI card is meant to be a bay. Near Perseus, the ornament of the Pleiades, as we have seen, could be imagined as hanging from the bridle, or as the stop to Perseus’ advance, or imagined as a cup. In each case, it was the ‘container’ of the larger figure. In Persian, the word for a cup is that for the Pleiades: jam, while the Persian word for death is Jama. Homophony means that the ‘cup of death’ is naturally identical to the ‘cup of victory’ - an association of ideas attested very early in both verbal and visual imagery. Imagery Intermediate between ancient Egyptian and medieval Christian periods.The military monument raised by the Assyrian king Essarhaddon, to celebrate his victory over the Egyptians, plays upon these ideas, using the heavenly superiority of the Victory cup over the Egyptians’ “lotus bud” of Orion to add insult to injury – in the usual way of such monuments.Now that he has attained his victory, Essarhaddon stands rather than rides, and his ‘trophy’ of the Pleiades is right way up, the cup from which he enjoys the sweet taste of victory as wine or as blood. Fig. Essarhaddon over Egypt: the sweet taste of a triumph.(While the cup suit of the tarot is the cup of the Pleiades, it is there meant only as a formal astronomical emblem, to indicate terrestrial ‘west’) Thus Majid:This [asterism, the Pleiades], Thurayya, is called Victory because its setting at dawn [westering] is a sign of increase to the Arabs. It is also called al-Najm [The star or The triumph]. A star is called najm [ a triumph] because it rises for a period of time; in the speech of the Arabs[23] injam means rising; they say to someone who is victorious Thou art najum i.e. rising over your enemy, gaining mastery over him etc.[24]It is from this usage, we believe, that the star-figures included in the tarot came to be known as ‘triumphs’- probably by Dante’s time.But Majid knows of another version:I watch for Thurayya, waiting for her dawnThe night allures her that she should drink of blood.[25]It is a nicely ambivalent image, echoing the idea of horrid Medusa as caput Algol in Perseus, yet recalling the custom of the early Arabs, whereby to taste another’s blood was to enter into close kinship with them.Fusing these ideas and various images for the Pleiades meant that the latter could be seen as the rider’s bridle ornament, which acted as a leading rein, and as the cup which halted its flowing advance. A mere metaphor for the later Muslim Arabs, in earlier times the theme of blood as victory might have been taken more literally and less kindly. A priest of the Persian-Sassanian period, some centuries before the rise of Islam, wrote in response to a petition explaining King Ardashir’s constant orders for bloodshed as if it were an item of royal or Mazdean religious doctrine: ‘Bloodshed among people of this kind, even if it is of a prodigality that seems to have no bound, is recognised by us as life and health, like the rain which quickens the earth.”[26] “Water in the ground” is the Arabs’ popular etymology of the word Thurayya and the star is later represented by reference to that folk-etymology on some printed Atouts. These show a soul kneeling under a great seven-pointed star, pouring water ‘into the ground.’ Whatever its origins, the image was rapidly and badly misunderstood in the west, being then and later commonly confused with Aquarius, the bearer of the water-jug.The Pleiades is not represented at all in the Charles VI set, its presence merely implied by the card for Perseus.But Majid can say, after noting that Perseus indicates Persia’s location in the world, and its nature, that the horse of Perseus is a literary symbol for all unbridled passion. He offers the verse: Let us ride the roads of pleasure with wineI will loosen, my friends, the reins of al kumait and the bridle [al-lijam].[27]And then explains:Kumait can be taken to mean wine, and then Thurayya [Pers: jam] means the cup [which holds it] but if you take Al-Kumait to mean the bay Horse and al-lijam (Arab: with two ls) to mean the bridle of the horse, [which also ‘holds’ it], it increases the wit of the poem.[28]Perseus in the Charles VI card seems to be enjoying an unbridled rampage, but for Christians as for Muslims, “seems” is here the operative word.Christ had said, “Those who keep my word shall never see death” and in a literal sense the viewer of this card is not supposed to “see” Death either, but instead to see the figures shown below, and contemplate by reference to the permanent northern stars the ultimate victory over death promised by their religion after death, and again at the end of time.The Christian’s proper attitude to death had been formulated by Paul in the first Christian century, in a letter to the Corinthians of Greece, and another to the Romans. Paul was a Jewish scholar who lived in a world where the language of international intercourse was Greek. He lived only two centuries after Manetho, but lived at a time when when his homeland was occupied by a Latin power. His writings show his knowledge of Hebrew, Latin and Greek among others, and consciously employ ideas from all three – even playing on correspondences between them. So while passages from his writings about death were endlessly repeated in western Christendom, their wit and deliberate subversion of the older stellar lore was – and remains - rarely recognised. Among such passages is even that which the designer of the Vizconti-Sforza card used to inform his Atout-figure: Death is swallowed up in Victory O Death where is thy Victory O Death where is thy sting?The word Paul uses for this sting does not describe an arrow head, nor even the rain of arrows earlier associated with Perseus by reference to its period of meteor-showers. Instead, he uses kentron, which means a caltrop, an object formed by welding a number of arrow points together. [Fig.] It was not hurled by the rider, but by the defender, into the path of the oncoming horseman to stop the advance. Its Hebrew equivalent was parash, related to the horseman (and Persia) but actually describing the sort of slashing strike which brought immediate death. In biblical literature, it describes (for example) the slashing strike of the adder in contrast to the serpent’s “bite”.Manilius uses an exactly equivalent term to describe the sort of death brought by sight of Perseus’ grisly trophy. He uses the Latin peste (pestemque). It means the sort of death which stops one in one’s tracks, a slashing strike. Precisely the same Latin word was often used in medieval Europe to refer to the plague, whose source was understood to be the north-east, the region named for Persia. Sometimes the swift-striking Rider’s bow is replaced by the Persian pilum, or throwing spear. One sees that weapon depicted in a number of later medieval works from Europe too, the Charles VI card having originally shown Perseus in this way – as a spear-thrower or arrow-hurler. A subsequent addition of a scythe-like blade to the haft would have the advantage of permitting reference to the Latin term curvus Saturnus for the curve of stars, z,x ,e ,n Persei, since in classical astronomy the stars were described as the Roman death-god’s characteristic sickle, as well as a form of ordinary pruning-blade which remained in daily use from classical times to the Renaissance. One sees it represented in the west as early as Charlemagne’s time, and its general recognition explains why a later Atout can show grim Death/Perseus as a placid gardener. [Fig.] Perseus is associated with these emblems, and with the character of plague and death even in earlier Christian literature, as we see from the description of the ‘four horsemen’ of the Apocalypse. The four are visions of Perseus held by the four major nations of the ancient world. The passage runs:“A rider on a white horse, and its rider had a bow … he went out conquering, and to conquer”“ A rider on a bright-red (blood-red) horse… its rider was permitted to take peace from the earth .. and he was given a great sword”“ A rider on a black horse .. with a balance in his hand”“ A pale horse, and its name was Death, and Hades followed close behind”Medieval imagery of the eleventh to fourteenth centuries shows this ‘hades’ as a monster, whose huge maw suggests the whale. It represents the constellation we call Cephus, the sea monster commonly envisaged as hell’s maw. The idea of the ‘balance’ can be seen by looking at the constellation. It is an alternative representation of the ‘head stars’ for the rider.Manilius’ term peste applies not only to Perseus’ swift decapitation of the creature Medusa, but to what occurred if any glimpsed her snake-wreathed head. The striking or slashing death of Perseus is probably an original characteristic, long predating the Greeks’ romantic tale. That reputation passed into western astrology only in relation to the star imagined to mark Medusa’s head (Algol), which remains “the most bloody and violent star of the heavens” according to the astrological literature.The maker of the Charles VI card understood the eastern traditions and imagery far better than most. His horse rears as Perseus’ does, Death’s costume is very accurately shown to be Persian – and more exactly Sassanid Persian - while the horse is made a dark-bay and no longer the “pale horse” of earlier figures. The key to the Sassanian costume, by the way, are the scarves worn at brow and waist,[29] very likely adopted to represent wisps of the Milky Way flowing out from their nation-star. Another helpful ‘star-figure’ from the earlier period is Assurbanipal’s. An Assyrian king, he lived two centuries before the Greek Herodotus. On Assurbanipal’s monument we are given a clear idea of the relationship between the chariot of Ursa major and Perseus, as well as a fine demonstration of how physical reality affected conceptions of the heavenly forms. The monument at once records an historical hunt, and is meant to serve as a permanent reminder of the king’s power over heaven and earth. Much of the seemingly realistic imagery of the Pyramids is meant to address both heaven and earth in the same way.We see here that the ‘Charioteer’ represents royalty, while the single mounted archer is now merely an assistant to the nation’s “god.” The Assyrians had conquered the Chaldeans, and it was they who envisaged their god in a northern chariot. Curiously enough, however, they appear to have co-opted the term for Perseus, making the Pleiades the ‘tuft’ of their more northerly horse’s tail. We read on a Babylonian inscription, then, that an eclipse occurs in “Perseus-with-Pleiades”, but the major figure is termed a charioteer, and the Pleiades the ‘tuft of the tail’.This may explain why, when the Sassanian-Persian Ardashir, centuries later, wished to express his contempt for the captured Roman emperor Valerian, he placed the Roman imperial crown over his own headscarf, moving the one at his waist - marking the usual line of Perseus’ ascent – down to the ‘tuft’ of his horse’s tail,[30]implying an absolute pre-eminence.It is Perseus’ veiled or translucent appearance which gives Death its ‘hollow’ character, symbolic not only of an insatiable hunger for blood, but in later times of ideas about death itself as a “hollow triumph”. Perseus’ character as an archer or spearman records the impact and frequency of the Persid meteors, whose showers are seen, now, from mid-July to mid-August during the early part of the night. At their peak, they appear to shoot from the figure at the rate of roughly one a minute.Perseus may then be depicted, alternatively if less accurately, as an archer such in the PMVS[31] set. Still shown with its head-scarf and clutching an enormous serpentine bow, it plainly relies most on classical and Christian traditions and imagery, its maker less aware of the distinction between the Saracen and the Persian,[32] and of course ignorant of the fact that St. Paul’s “kentron” was not an arrow.The Pleiades was further imagined as a rosette ornament, as we see on the bridle of Ardashir’s horse or on the Cretan Phaistos disk made half a millennium prior to the advent of the Sassanians. In this way it figured in Etruscan funerary imagery in connection with their Angel of Death, and the same emblem is to be found – usually as a rosette of seven dots – made the throne[33] or background for many early cards. They are Pleiades’ or “triumph” star- cards.Such emblems as that shown on Ardashir’s horse and in the earlier examples we have given were actually used in the near east as part of the horse’s tack, whether as the leading-rein tassel or as the horse-brass. They served to identify the rider, so that possession by any but God or a trusted groom implied the rider’s ignominious defeat. It meant, in a sense, his scalp. It was literally and figuratively one’s battle standard, to be protected with one’s life. And for that reason, near eastern peoples saw the Pleiades’ tangled stars, and not the star Algol, as significant of ultimate victory, and of victory over death.Such is precisely the theme of the Charles VI card. It shows those figures under Perseus as lying calmly in repose, waiting for the time of their ultimate arising in victory.Altogether, our fifteenth-century card shows the Sassanian/Persian destroyer at the time of its temporary Victory. Whether interpreted according to Muslim or Christian ideas, it represents a hollow, transient and temporary triumph, which will be one day succeeded by the true victory promised by God – but whose time is presently concealed from us. It is not clear if Thurayya was ever correctly identified by western users in this context. Its hidden character is maintained in the Charles VI card, the relevant asterism [the Pleiades] not being depicted but simply implied. . [1] To date the two papers have been published discussing Atouts from the Charles VI set as rebus-figures: ‘Michael Scot’s figure of “Juppiter” as type for the tarot’s Magus’ and ‘The Place of the Fool.’ The major scholarly work on use of mnemonic ‘figura’ in medieval Europe remains that of Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory. [2] Thurayya ( = ‘Victory’) is a Tamil word which became the Arabs’ term for the Pleiades. [3] A term found on Islamicate instruments as the name of Orion (for example) comes from the Syriac. Gabbar, ‘the giant’ is sometimes Arabised to become al-gabbar. [4] Which classical Rome mockingly termed the ‘sphaera barbarica’, later authors taking the epithet literally. The barbara are a people of whom remnants remain about Africa’s east coast. A number of old maritime songs and poems allude to them as masters of the sea and stars. The Christian legend of ‘St Barbara’ speaks metaphorically of the non-classical heavens - as at least one cleric of the medieval period understood. Seeing Michelangelo’s image of the ‘Judgement’ – based almost entirely on that non-classical astronomy – he said it was better suited to a bath-house than a cathedral, and “ordered three windows made in that wall”. For the point of this punishment, see the legend of St. Barbara. For a poetic prayer to the ‘barbara’ as masters wind and waves, see Hourani, Arab navigation before the coming of the Portuguese. If, as I suspect, the Greeks’ barbaroi were these peoples of the sea, there was truth in the suggestion that their speech was incomprehensible. Remnants remain to us of litanies praising a single deity in alternate lines from many different languages. They are not the ‘magical’ incantations supposed, but a kind of religious thesaurus very useful for the long-distance trader. [5] See present author’s essay: ‘Michael Scot’s figure of “Juppiter” as prototype for the tarot’s Magus.’ [6] although the former seems more likely. [7] Homer later speaks of the Medes directly and reports the name Deiokes. Muslim authors instead speaks of the Medes as Jibal. In regard to Homer’s writings as star-sagas, and while we do not agree in every instance with the identifications given by Wood, the reader is recommended Wood, Florence and Kenneth, Homer’s Secret Iliad: the epic of the night skies decoded, London: John Murray, 1999. Diomedes as Perseus, op.cit. pp.143-7. It is much to be regretted that the publisher chose such a fulsome title. For Diomedes’ skull-cap op.cit. p. 146. cf. monument of [8] The Egyptians’ attitude to naming has caused a great deal of confusion in western scholarship. It will clarify the Egyptians’ custom of linking gods’ names if one treats those names rather as qualitative descriptions and not finite categories. The system is rather like that we use to describe colour. Thus if ‘mut’ meant both mother and death (as it did) but one wished to emphasise the former quality, it was possible to speak of the goddess as ‘mother-fertility’ or ‘cow-mother’ Hathor-Mut. While the two names referred to distinct characters, just as ‘Red’ ‘blue’ and ‘yellow’ are quite distinct colours, nonetheless they could be combined to refine an intended meaning: as we might speak of ‘a bluish-red’, or a ‘reddish-yellow’ – without a confusion between the two, nor any intention to conflate them into a ‘purple’ or ‘orange’. [9] See ‘The Place of the Fool’ in this series of essays. [10] Herodotus records the tale of the foundation of Carthage. The sky between the stars was commonly termed ‘purple’, although the Egyptian texts and later Persian poets tend to speak of it as green. Homer’s “wine-dark” sea suggests a Phoenician influence. [11] Manuscripts from the time of the crusades correctly distinguish the Persian from both the ‘Saracen’ and the Arab. A ‘Saracen’ is shown with a headcover knotted to one side, while the unmounted Arabs are depicted (equally accurately) with just a narrow fillet bound about the forehead. See e.g. illustrations throughout Hallan, E., Chronicles of the Crusades. (The scarf worn by Mithra is usually equally long and flowing, but is shown about his neck). The model of the Persian Sassanian with his billowing scarves was different; it signified particularly the Persian Death and its sudden pestilence. [12] The visual pun offers an intriguing suggestion of influence from early medieval England, where some of the stock star-characters were known from at least the ninth century, and are found in monastic illuminations. An Antiochian, or Nestorian, bishop had been appointed over the English church in the eighth century. Since the language of the Church was Latin, this posed no substantial problem and from that time we find an informed use of the moralized heavens in a number of western Christian texts. [13] The so-called palette has the form of a type of fire-shield still in use by tribes of the upper Nile in the mid-twentieth century. The carbon dust which it accumulated was mixed with minerals and spittle to form the black kohl which the Pharaoh wore in war. The image of the bubalis from Pinney, Roy, The Animals of the Bible, New York: Chilton Books, 1964 Pl.12. Pinney says the creature was made extinct in about 1924. It occurs in Biblical literature as the yahmur. It is perhaps relevant here that the Persians’ word for death was Yama. [14] The pole is depicted and spoken of as a walking-staff. [15] The allusions are to numerous to mention but see e.g. Pyramid Text Utterance 225. [16] UTT 273-4 seem to reflect an identification of the king with Perseus. [17] UTT 337. [18] Paralleled again in the uniting of Egypt’s own northern (lower) and southern (upper) territories. The Egyptians were very keen on the idea of doubles, and mirroring. In fact they saw the bowl of the sky as reflecting a reverse image to the land, but for simplicity’s sake we omit mention of the north-south “reversal” here. [19] From UTT 301 § 456-7. Faulkiner has noted the tentative nature of his translation thus: ‘wig (?)’. It is knotted hair, but that of the Pleiades-trophy, symbol of the west and of ultimate triumph. Hence the habit, in Egypt, of calling ‘westerners’ those who live immortal and triumphant after death. The whole complex of poetic ideas and imagery would survive to appear in various forms in medieval western Christendom. [20] This point is clarified in the essay ‘Emblems and structures of the tarot.’ [21] The image is found in the Rohan Book of Hours, painted in the first quarter of the fifteenth century. It is reproduced in Evans, The Flowering of the Middle Ages, London: Phaidon p.169. God, here, is not Perseus. His blade is that identified with the shape of the Ursae (again) since the days of Egypt. Perseus is here the semi-quadruped and winged demon with the small body beneath him, being repelled, with Cepheus the armed angel who stands as a block across the circle’s entry. It is a figure’s relative celestial position, perceived mythic function, and traditional moral character which identifies figures in the older stellar lore, not any fixed image of their appearance as in the Greek habit. [22] The maker of the Atlas renders the figure benign by labeling it an Arab trader. [23] Majid was a Moor. [24] Tibbets. [25] Tibbetts op.cit. [26] Quoted in Boyce, M., Zoroastrians: their religious belief and practices. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1979 p.102-3 [27] Hence: ‘unbridled’ pleasure. ‘Al Kumait’ became synonymous for any behaviour, or any thing, that was unrestrained. See also Burton’s remarks, in his Terminal Essay: in Alf Layla, Vol.X. [28] Tibbetts, p . [29] That costume was certainly known to some in late medieval Europe. Sassanian metalwork and fabric adorned with the Persian rider came to Europe no later than the days of Charlemagne, and manuscripts of the crusading period rightly distinguish the Persian from the ‘Saracen’ and Arab. A ‘Saracen’ is shown with a headcover knotted to one side, while the unmounted Arabs or bedu are depicted (equally accurately) with just a narrow fillet bound about the forehead. See e.g. illustrations throughout Hallan, E., Chronicles of the Crusades. (The scarf worn by Mithra is usually equally long and flowing, but is shown about his neck). The model of the Persian Sassanian with his billowing scarves was more significant; it signified the poisonous Persian Death and its sudden pestilence. [30] George Contnau, Everyday Life in Babylonia and Assyria, London: Edward Arnold 1959 PlXIII,XIV,V.7. It is a subversion intended to insult. Rather than permitting the emperor an honourable death, Ardashir kept him and 70,000 of his legionaries slaves for life. [31] Pierpont-Morgan-Bergamo-Visconti-Sforza. [32] Illustrated in Kaplan, Encyclopaedia of Tarot, Vol.1 p.71. “Death” should, perhaps, be without his ‘sting’ the arrow, but a different interpretation is given at times – as for instance the very interesting depiction of Death as an arrow-hurler in the fifteenth-century manuscript illustration which appears without attribution in Fifteenth Century Attitudes. [33] The picture’s background as throne: see