Applying the rules of the ancients to the first phrase of the work, which is read Beresit by the Hebrews and “In the beginning” by us, I wanted to see whether I too could bring to light something worth knowing. Beyond my hope and expectation I found what I myself did not believe as I found it, and what others will not believe easily: the whole plan of the creation of the world and of all things in it disclosed and explained in that one phrase.… Among the Hebrews, this phrase is written thus: בראשיח, berescith. From this, if we join the third letter to the first, comes the word אב, ab. If we add the second to the doubled first, we get בבד, bebar. If we read all except the first, we get ראשית, resith. If we connect the fourth to the first and last, we get שבת, sciabat. If we take the first three in the order in which they come, we get כרא, bara. If, leaving out the first, we take the next three, we get ראש, rosc. If, leaving out the first and second, we take the two following, we get אש, es. If, leaving out the first three, we join the fourth to the last, we get שת, seth. Again, if we join the second to the first, we get רב, rab. If after the third we set the fifth and fourth, we get איש, hisc. If we join the first two to the last two, we get ברית, berith. If we add the last to the first, we get the twelfth and last word, which is תב, thob, the thau being changed into the letter thet, which is very common in Hebrew.
Let us see first what these words mean in Latin, then what mysteries of all nature they reveal to those not ignorant of philosophy. Ab means “the father”; bebar “in the son” and “through the son” (for the prefix beth means both); resit, “the beginning”; sabath, “the rest and end”; bara, “created”; rosc, “head”; es, “fire”; seth, “foundation”; rab, “of the great”; hisc, “of the man”; berit, “with a pact”; thob, “with good.” If we fit the whole passage together following this order, it will read like this: “The father, in the Son and through the Son, the beginning and end or rest, created the head, the fire, and the foundation of the great man with a good pact.” This whole passage results from taking apart and putting together that first word. (Pico della Mirandola 1965: 171–172)
Pico’s ars combinandi has nothing in common with the ars Raymundi. Ramon Llull used his art to demonstrate credible things; Pico uses his to discover things incredible and unheard-of. Nevertheless, the various misapprehensions that will later arise probably derive from the fact that it is precisely Pico’s example that will free Llullism from its original fetters.
It is certainly not a question of seeing in Pico’s uncoupling of the Kabbalistic Ars combinandi from the Ars Raymundi, and in the dizzying permutational exercises that Pico encourages, the detonator that liberated in the coming centuries Llull’s Ars from its early limitations, taking it (as we will see), beyond theology and beyond rhetoric, to nourish the formal speculations of modern logic and the random brainstorming that characterizes so much of contemporary heuristics.
What is certain is that with Pico is affirmed, in harmony with his defense of the dignity and rights of man, the invitation to dare, to invenire or discover, even if it was more in keeping with the tendentious suggestions of Flavius Mithridates than with those of factorial calculus. What was needed at this point was for someone to suggest that, if we are going to continue to talk about being, the being chosen must be a being as yet unmade, rather than a being that already exists. And it was Pico who (perhaps without intending to) steered modern thought in this direction. Which is, when you get down to it, another way of saying that “man, for Pico, is divine insofar as he creates; because he creates himself and his world; not because he is born God, but because he makes himself God. Throughout the entire universe, operatio sequitur esse. … For Pico, in man, and in man alone, esse sequitur operari” (Garin 1937: 95).
This is the sense in which, to use Pico’s own words, the ars combinandi and the ars Raymundi “diverso modo procedunt.” In this sense we may cancel the ambiguous expression forte (“by chance, perhaps, accidentally”), possibly inserted out of prudence, possibly because Pico’s intuition was still in its first vague glimmerings. Once the adverb has been eliminated, in that brief aside, we pass from the idea of man as subject to the laws of the cosmos to that of a man who constructs and reconstructs without fear of the vertigo of the possible, fully accepting its risk.
10.5. Llullism after Pico
With the advent of the Renaissance the unlimited combinatory system will tend to express a content that is equally unlimited, and hence ungraspable and inexpressible.
In the 1598 edition of Llull’s combinatorial writings, a work entitled De auditu kabbalistico appears under his name. Thorndike (1929, V: 325) already pointed out that the De auditu first appeared in Venice in 1518 as a little work by Ramon Llull, “opusculum Raimundicum,” and that it was consequently a work composed in the late fifteenth century. He hypothesized that the work might be attributed to Pietro Mainardi, an attribution later confirmed by Zambelli (1965). It is remarkable, however, that this opuscule of Mainardi’s should be dated “in the last years of the fifteenth century, in other words, immediately following the drafting of Pico’s theses and his Apologia” (Zambelli 1995[1965]: 62–63), and that this minor forgery was produced under his influence, however indirect (see Scholem 1979: 40–41). The brief treatise gives two etymological Arabic roots for the word “Kabbalah”: Abba stands for father while ala means God. It is difficult not to be reminded of similar exercises on Pico’s part.
This confirms that by this time Llull had been officially enrolled among the Kabbalists, as Tommaso Garzoni di Bagnacavallo will confirm in his Piazza universale di tutte le professioni (Venice, Somasco, 1585):
The science of Ramon, known to very few, could also be called, though with an inappropriate word, Kabbala. And from it is derived that common rumor among all the scholars, indeed among all persons, that the Kabbala teaches everything … and to this effect there is in print a little book attributed to him (although this is the way that lies are composed beyond the Alps) entitled De Auditu Cabalistico, which is nothing more when you get down to it than a very brief summary of the Arte magna, which was definitely abbreviated by him in that other work, which he calls Arte breve.17
Among the later examples from “beyond the Alps,” we may cite Pierre Morestel, who published in France in 1621, with the title Artis kabbalisticae, sive sapientiae divinae academia, a modest anthology of the De auditu18 (with an official imprimatur no less, since the author proposed to demonstrate exclusively, as Llull himself did, Christian truths), with nothing Kabbalistic about it, apart from the title, the initial identification of Ars and Kabbalah, and the repetition of the etymology found in the De auditu.
Figure 10.7
An additional stimulus to Neo-Llullism came from ongoing research into coded writings or steganographies. Steganography developed as a ciphering device for political and military purposes, and the greatest steganographer of modern times, Trithemius (1462–1516) uses ciphering wheels that work in a similar way to Llull’s moving concentric circles. To what extent Trithemius was influenced by Llull is unimportant for our purposes, because the influence would in any case have been purely graphic. The wheels are not used by Trithemius to produce arguments, simply to encode and decode. The letters of the alphabet are inscribed on the circles and the rotation of the inner circles decided whether the A of the outer circle was to be encoded as B, C, or Z (the opposite was true for decoding; see Figure 10.7).
But, although Trithemius does not mention Llull, he is mentioned by later steganographers. Vigenère’s Traité des chiffres19 explicitly takes up Llullian ideas at various points and relates them to the factorial calculus of the Sefer Yetzirah.
There is a reason why steganographies act as propagators of a Llullism that goes beyond Llull. The steganographer is not interested in the content (and therefore in the truth) of the combinations he produces. The elementary system requires only that elements of the steganographic expression (combinations of letters or other symbols) may be freely correlated (in ever different ways, so that their encoding is unpredictable) to elements of the expression to be encoded. They are merely symbols that take the place of other symbols. The steganographer, then, is encouraged to attempt more complex combinations, of a purely formal nature, in which all that matters is a syntax of the expression that is ever more vertiginous, and every combination is an unconstrained variable.
Thus, we have Gustavus Selenus,20 in his 1624 Cryptometrices et Cryptographiae, going so far as to construct a wheel of twenty-five concentric circles combining twenty-five series of twenty-four doublets each. And, before you know it, he presents us with a series of tables that record circa 30,000 doublets. The possible combinations become astronomical (see Figure 10.8).
If
