In 1930 Charles G. Osgood published translations from the Preface and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Books of Boccaccio’s Genealogia Deorum Gentilium, (Genealogy of the Pagan Gods), along with commentary and an introductory essay. Boccaccio’s work began to circulate in 1371, and these chapters in defense of poetry and ancient myth, albeit strongly derivative, became an influential milestone in the history of humanistic thought. They reveal much about the allegorical mentality of the Middle Ages, as it interpreted works such as Vergil and Ovid. The following discussion of polysemous allegory is from that introduction to Osgood’s Boccaccio on Poetry. It provides a more complex and more accurate view of the subject than the simplistic comments in my review of Tarot Symbolism. A glaring contrast remains between O’Neill’s anything-goes occult fantasy versus the polysemous allegory of Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and their era.
It is easy for modern critical scholarship, from its impregnable if sometimes cheerless heights, to patronize Boccaccio’s way of proceeding; but such complaisance stands in its own light, and estops its perception of his real values. At all events his methods were the methods of his day—or a little better—which is perhaps the most that can be said of any methods. Nor do they want power of edification at any time, even for scholars and professional critics. His interpretations of the myths are essentially allegorical, of course, but even so are instructive, at least in exhibiting all the varieties and resources of mediaeval theory and practice in the use of ancient fable.
The allegorical interpretation of Greek myth is, to be sure, almost as ancient as any record of a given myth itself. Already evident in Homer and Aeschylus, it flourishes in Plato, is a favorite practice of the Stoics and neo-Platonists, and a poetic resource of Vergil, Ovid, and others of highest importance to Boccaccio’s criticism. Such interpretation is prone to extravagance, especially in the later writers whom he employed, both pagan and Christian—Apuleius, Macrobius, Augustine, Lactantius, Martianus, Cassiodorus, and Fulgentius, a writer at times too fanciful, recondite, and unreliable even for Boccaccio.
To Boccaccio every myth is alive, quick to stir anew a poetic imagination as it had often done before. “One must bear in mind,” he says, “that these myths contain more than one single meaning. They may indeed be called ‘polyseme,’ that is, of multifold sense.”
Three traditional systems or schemes of interpretation Boccaccio either describes or at least has in mind. In reality they amount perhaps but to different arrangements of the same ideas; and if Boccaccio, in his artistic freedom, adheres rigorously and consistently to no one of them, his interpretations may all find their places somewhere in these schemes. Furthermore, as they embody the mediaeval conclusions on the subject of classic myths, they will bear rehearsing.
1. He proceeds to set forth the familiar fourfold mediaeval system of interpretation; “The first meaning is superficial, which is called literal. the others are deeper, and are called allegorical. to make the matter easier, I will give an example. According to the poetic fiction, Perseus. son of Jupiter, killed the Gorgon, and flew away victorious into the air. Now this may be understood superficially in its literal or historical sense. In the moral sense it shows a wise man’s triumph over vice and his attainment of virtue. Allegorically it figures the pious man who scorns worldly delight and lifts his mind to heavenly things. It admits also an anagogical sense, since it symbolizes Christ’s victory over the Prince of this World, and his Ascension. But all these secondary meanings, by whatever name, are essentially allegorical. For ‘allegory’ is from allo, Latin alienum, and is so called being alien from the literal or historical sense. But it is not my intention to unfold all these meanings for each myth when I find one quite enough.” In fact he very rarely employs this fourfold system. Such rigor would heavily impede his freedom and pleasure in studying the old poets. His favorite interpretations, therefore, are “moral,” and in the narrower sense “allegorical.”
2. Boccaccio recognizes also a second system, though in effect it agrees with the fourfold method just described. Augustine quotes Varro as distinguishing three aspects of ancient religion or theology—the mythical; the physical; the civil: that is, the mythology of the poets, the mythology of the philosophers, and the mythology of popular worship and superstition. The second, or the mythology of the philosophers, Boccaccio would assign all myths embodying the facts of physical nature or moral truth, whether treated by philosophers or poets, that is all myths or myth-handling at all edifying and worthy of a place in his treatise.
3. A more explicit arrangement, which perhaps amounts to the same thing as Varro’s, but which proves of greatest use in understanding the poet’s use of Greek myth in any age, is described by Augustine in the City of God 18:14. The gods are after all in reality (a) eminent men deified by legend; or (b) they are deified forces of nature and human life, “elements of this world which the true God made;” or (c) they are “creatures who were ordained as principalities and powers according to the will of the Creator,” that is, the angels, both good, and fallen.
Boccaccio’s actual practice derives from these three theories of interpretation. A given legend, then, may be
(a) only the result of history glorified by the poets in honor of a great or ambitious man. Such is its literal or historical sense, Varro’s mythical “theology,” or, more technically, euhemeristic myth. Or
(b) the story in a competent poet’s hands may express allegorically the mysterious forces of nature, or of human life—the moral use, or “allegorical” in the narrower sense, corresponding to the physical theology of Varro. Or
(c) the story may conform to Christian truth, or adumbrate it in anagogical fashion. The gods may really be but the an’gels and emissaries of God imperfectly understood without revelation, and even more some myths gropingly shadow forth the Christian mysteries. Obviously the Platonic tradition lies behind this view.A passage from the first chapter of the Eleventh Book will perhaps furnish the best and briefest exhibition of Boccaccio’s procedure. On the authority of Cicero he has distinguished three Joves, of which Jove III is the great Jove, he of Crete. He then assembles the details of the legend, chiefly on the authority of Lactantius and the authors cited by Lactantius. Vergil, Pliny, Eusebius, Servius, and Petrarch all contribute something. “You see then, O illustrious King, how the man [Jove III] went to work to win long-lived fame, empty glory, and divinity for himself—with what ingenuity and luck, and what help from the wiles of our Old Enemy [Satan].” And erring mortals are prone enough to such perversion; there, for example, are those poor Lystrians in the Bible, who euhemeristically took Barnabas for Jove and Paul for Mercury.
So much for the literal, historical, and euhemeristic import of the legend.
But once they had transformed this superman, Jove III, into Jupiter of Olympus, the poet-theologians confused him with the true God, since Jupiter had long been a name for God, and Olympus a name for Heaven. Hence they naturally alleged that he was father of gods and king of Heaven. Thus the popular conception of God became corrupted with the legends of adulteries, betrayals, and iniquities of historic superman. “But the really enlightened men of that time, as often as they were aware of the true God, instead of this Jove, though they inaccurately use the name Jove, actually mean the natural processes or operation of the forces of nature (naturae naturatae), which is, of course, the work of God.”
The wiser of them did not accept polytheism, but “regarded those divine powers attributed to various gods merely as agencies of the one true God, considering that God, like mortals, acts through agents. All this Apuleius shows very clearly in his book De Dogmate Platonis. But we believe more truly as does the Psalmist who says: ‘God spake and it was done’ (33; Vulg. 32.9). Yet we do not deny that God employs ministers, some of justice, such as demons, some of grace as angels, some of opportunities and vicissitudes, as the celestial bodies.”
This last interpretation, though Boccaccio makes little use of it, may detain us for a moment. It final clause identifies the gods of mythology with planetary influences, and points the alliance between the old paganism and astrology, which, thought repudiated by earlier Christians, was accepted by Dante, Boccaccio, and their times. But the astrological use of this theory mingles with the finer conception that the gods were actually the spiritual ministers of the true God—“some of justice, such as demons, some of grace, as angels”—but imperfectly apprehended by the Ancients as gods, for want of divine revelation. Thus to conceive the old mythology, not as mere maker-believe, but as describing, however dimly, the operations of the Celestial Hierarchy, gives it dignity, reality, and a certain perennial truth. Dante seems naturally to have preferred this finer conception, and it may well account for the lively energy which fills all his use of classic myth in the Divine Comedy.
Then, there is the reverse aspect or corollary—“some of justice, such as demons.” It is usually expounded and elaborated as a distinct theory—that the gods are but the fallen angels in disguise, ranging through the world to the undoing of mankind and the upbuilding of their Lord Lucifer’s infernal kingdom. Especially did they practice deceit through the oracles; and since the oracles have ceased, these fallen angels continue to pervert man through his lusts and passions. The early Christian apologists, in their attack on paganism, swung this interpretation of pagan myth with deadly effect. Though Boccaccio mentions it, he naturally finds it not well suited to his purpose.
These, then, are the various ancient and mediaeval theories concerning mythology, and Boccaccio resorts to them with the purpose of saving this precious lore to posterity; for is it not poetry, and therefore essentially true? Does it not contain historical truth, truth concerning the physical universe, astrological truth, moral truth, nay, religious and theological truth? It is his office, therefore, as poet-scholar-critic, to discern and reveal this truth.
On is tempted in passing to observe a paradoxical contrast between the mediaeval treatment of mythology and that of the Renaissance. The Middle Ages, with what one scholar calls their “encyclopaedic grasp of the Universe,” found a significant place for mythology, as for all else, in their scheme of things. They assume a reality in the old myths, an essential truth variously reflected, but truth and reality nonetheless. The Renaissance, with its advance in classical scholarship, knew more and more about mythology, but took it less seriously. With increase of knowledge the conviction of reality declines, at least in artistic use, and the old myths tend to become mere playthings, material of applied ornament and superficial decoration. Such they are in all but the greatest poetry of the Renaissance, and sometimes even there.
Of the various interpretations which Boccaccio describes, he employs far oftenest the euhemeristic, the naturalistic, and the moral, and of these, perhaps the last two.
Osgood, Charles G., Boccaccio on Poetry: Being the Preface and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Books of Boccaccio’s Genealogia Deorum Gentilium in an English Version with Introductory Essay and Commentary. Pages xvi-xxiii.
Works were interpreted for the moral and spiritual edification of the reader. Euhemerism, taking the gods as deified heroes who serve as moral examples, was a fairly commonplace and usually preliminary step in the allegorization of a given myth. Another preliminary might be the identification of the gods with celestial bodies and their influence, good and bad, or with other forces of nature. With or without such pseudo-literal foundation, moral teachings and parallels with Christian myth were drawn from the Pagan myth. These allegories represented the truth beneath the fiction. Unlike the interpretation of scripture, the literal meaning of ancient myth was not considered true on its face, prior to euhemeristic or naturalistic interpretation. However, neither was it turned on its head, so that the deeper meaning of a symbol would contradict the superficial meaning; for example, as O’Neill insists on making the Pope a symbol of heresy.
The Tarot trumps were apparently never taken seriously prior to the late eighteenth century. Neither occultists nor anyone else bothered themselves to compose a commentary on their design. Because no one considered them significant enough to create an allegorical interpretation, we can not know with certainty what kind of meanings would have been read into it. If we wish, we can easily create allegorical commentaries of our own. If we wish to create such a commentary with any sense of historical plausibility, we first need to understand the literal meaning of the trump cycle, on which such a reading can be based. The literal meaning of the trump cycle is a Triumph of Death design, (see The Riddle of Tarot). One of the most popular and influential works of that era was just such a Triumph of Death, namely Petrarch’s Triumphs. That design was taken very seriously, and from the period of its earliest printed versions it was usually published in conjunction with an extensive commentary. Therefore, we might attempt to adopt some of the allegorical readings from that work to Tarot, at least as a starting point.