The Game of Saturn: Decoding the Sola-Busca Tarocchi – Peter Mark Adams (Scarlet Imprint)

Description

A new edition of the first full-length scholarly study of the enigmatic Renaissance masterwork known as the Sola-Busca tarot, revealing a pagan liturgical and ritual tradition active among members of the Renaissance elite, encoded within the deck. Beneath the cards’ ornate surface, the imagery ranges from the obscure to the grotesque — scenes of homoeroticism, wounding, immolation, and decapitation pointing to violent transformations and hidden rites.

For the first time in over five hundred years, careful analysis of the deck’s embedded clues reveals a dark gnostic grimoire replete with pagan theurgical and astral magical rites, presided over — the author argues — not by any conventional deity but by the Gnostic demiurge in its most archaic and violent form: the Afro-Levantine serpent-dragon Ba’al Hammon, known also as Kronos and Saturn, and more notoriously as the biblical Moloch, devourer of children.

The book traces the transmission of this current from Constantinople to Renaissance Italy via the Byzantine Platonist George Gemistos Plethon, whose vision of a theurgically enlightened elite is argued to have mutated, within the violent and sorcerous milieu of the Italian courts, into its dark shadow: a Saturnian brotherhood operating within a cosmology of predation, seeking to channel the draconian current to preserve elite wealth, power, and control — the book frames this as marking the birth of an “illumined elite” over three centuries before Adam Weishaupt’s Illuminati. Set against the tense diplomatic intrigue and espionage of Ferrarese-Venetian relations, this is a significant contribution to Renaissance scholarship, art history, tarot studies, and the history of Western esotericism.