„Anagramy” Marii Kazimiery Sobieskiej
The “Anagrams” of Marie Casimire Sobieski

Summary/Abstract: This article concerns the residence in Rome from 1699 to 1714 of Marie Casimire Sobieski, widow of King John III. She belonged to the Accademia dell’Arcadia with occult tradition, and collected cabbalistic manuscripts which today are held in the Jagiellonian Library (Ms 2284). They include numerology predictions (fols. 160r–162v, 194r) described by the queen as “anagrams”. The deciphering of these predictions by replacing the numbers with the corresponding letters of the Latin alphabet enabled the determination of the names and titles of twenty-one persons. The veracity of the deciphering is confirmed by the first two letters of the name which are placed above each numerological representation and by the year of birth of a given person. In addition to Marie Casimire’s son Jakub Ludwik, these are the relatives of the Sobieski family and people related to it by marriage as well as figures of importance to the political life of the end of the 17th and the beginning of the 18th century. It was the abbot Pompeo Scarlatti, the ambassador of Maximilian Emmanuel, Elector of Bavaria, in Warsaw, who made the queen interested in numerology; he accompanied her on her journey to Italy and remained at her court in Rome. Marie Casimire took an interest in numerology predictions after a tragedy in 1704, when her sons Jakub Ludwik and Konstanty were kidnapped and imprisoned by Augustus II, to be released only two years later. However, the majority of these predictions date from the years 1711–1713. Contrary to the tradition of maintaining secrecy, binding at Italian academies, the queen disclosed some of the methods of numerology prophesying; however, except for one case, she did not reveal the content of the prophecies hidden behind the obtained numbers.

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