
Peter Mark Adams | Game of Saturn: The Sola-Busca Tarot, Bloodlines, & The Demiurge Deal
The 15th-century Sola Busca Tarot has emerged from centuries of aristocratic secrecy to reveal a disturbing blueprint for elite ritual magic. Esoteric scholar Peter Mark Adams joins the program to analyze this artifact, which he identifies as a sophisticated grimoire of draconian sorcery used by the House of Este and other Renaissance dynasties. Unlike traditional decks, this relic lacks Christian imagery and instead encodes a dark cosmology of predation designed to secure worldly power across multiple lifetimes. Adams details how the Italian aristocracy protected clerical sorcerers who practiced maleficium and astral magic involving the fixed star Caput Algol. The deck reflects a Gnostic worldview where the elite sought to bypass spiritual liberation, opting instead to make a deal with the demiurge, or Saturn, to control their own reincarnation into specific bloodlines. These practices, rooted in the Orphic traditions of the Byzantine civil service and the Mithraic cult revivals of Michael Psellos, suggest a continuity of occult governance that eventually linked the Italian nobility to the Hanoverian monarchs of England. Beyond the historical analysis, the conversation explores the intersection of high art and high sorcery, noting how Pamela Colman Smith later integrated Sola Busca imagery into the modern Rider-Waite-Smith deck. Peter Mark Adams describes the intense energetic experiences required to decode these symbols, while the host reflects on the chilling implications of a self-perpetuating management class. The episode concludes with a look at the Italian Ministry of Culture’s recent acquisition of the deck and the scholarly reproduction efforts by Scarlet Imprint.



















