The Tabula Generalis of Ramon Llull

Ramon Llull (or Raimundus Lullius/Raymond Lully) was a 13^th-century philosopher who spent his life developing a kind of theological-philosophical system based in the mathematics of combinatorics. This repository contains TikZ code that draws the four explanatory figures of the Ars Brevis, a 1290 work that reduced the elements of his system to only 9. These four figures are accompanied by a table which explains the meanings of the nine symbols (the letters B–K, omitting J). I made these for a translation/edition of Umberto Eco’s La Ricerca della Lingua Perfetta nella Cultura Europea because the graphics in that book are unsatisfying, some parts can barely be read. Only by comparing with other sources was I able to discern the small text. Therefore I created these higher-quality diagrams which can be easily used at large scales, whilst still preserving the text and layout of the versions in the book.

Sources

The Centre de Documentació Ramon Llull has modern versions of these diagrams with text in Llull’s native Catalan, along with many other wonderful resources.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has an extensive article on Llull, featuring photographed diagrams and explanations.

There is a high quality scan of an original manuscript on the Internet Archive, which has helpful color additions, though the writing contains misleading scribal abbreviations.

Ramon Llull’s Ars Magna (Jensen, 2018) also contains some very readable Latin scans, with non-handwritten text.

Technical

The code uses at several points the following construction in order to print a given element of a list of strings within a \foreach:

\pgfmathparse{{"A","B","C","D"}[\x]} % \x is the iterating index variable
\edef\letter{\pgfmathresult} % \letter can now be used within the loop to get the current letter

Furthermore, by scouring the TikZ decorations manual, I landed upon a way to add text that curves, essential for these radial diagrams.

\draw [decoration={
       text along path,
       text={The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.}, % Some formatting breaks when in this text field.
       text align={center} % Aligns the text to the center of the curve
       },
       decorate]
           
      (180:5cm) % Start location of the curve, here defined in polar coordinates to better match up with the arc values below
      
      arc[start angle=180, % Angle of the circle that the arc should begin at
          end angle=0, % Angle of the circle that the arc should end at
          % delta angle can be used in place of end angle to give a change-in value
          radius=5cm]; % Radius of the arc

Building

All documents should typeset correctly with pdflatex, or the diagram environment can be inserted into another document.

for f in ./*.tex; do pdflatex "$f"; done

The first diagram is available as an SVG, and a PDF is included that contains all four.