View Full Version : Marseilles Courts - General comments
In the earlier thread on 'Names on French playing cards (http://www.tarotforum.net/showthread.php?s=&threadid=7294)', and with regards to the Courts, ihcoyc mentions that there is a tradition which assigns names to each of the court cards - names which, for the most part, have been lost (to most of us at any case).
Compare this to what we would understand by the qualities exemplified by these 'kings': Churchill, Hitler, Mao Tse Tung, Gorbachov; or these Queens: Mother Theresa, Kennedy-Onnasis, Blavatski; or these 'knights': Steiner, Einstein, Jung; or these 'princesses': Princess Di, Marilyn Monroe - I have only written some who come to mind, without implying much.
It is not, after all, the individuals we are here considering, but their iconic caricatures (Jungians may have written 'archetypes'). If in addition to having an indeterminate representation of a king, its title was 'Churchill', then, to be sure, the qualities apprehended through this appellation would be - though no less broad - far clearer for many. I am not, it may be useful to add, suggesting that we name the cards thus, only that the tradition of naming the courts, such as those mentioned in the earlier thread, makes both pedagogical and mnemonic sense.
Yet, it also constrains, and it would be better to suggest, for example, that the King of Cups has the ability to move a nation, as Churchill or JF Kennedy were able to - and as was Hitler! Here, names may be useful in assisting to determine characterological traits of the cards as variously exemplified in those individuals.
For myself, I suppose I also do something similar with regards to the MBTI (Cf the much earlier thread in Using Tarot Cards: Choosing a Significator (http://www.tarotforum.net/showthread.php?s=&threadid=1516)). Elemental, physiological or astrological correlations also likewise prompt for insight into the cards. Each of these methods, however, remain, as do the naming, mnemonic aides. In my opinion, we should remain mindful of this lest the cards' indeterminate icons become fixated with a peculiar hue imposed by the particular 'system' at hand (to give yet another example: earth of earth, &c.).
So what of the Courts - is there rhyme or reason for their number and suit division?
One of the most likely provenance of the Courts is their relationship to a fourfold chess-like game - yet, another possibility presents itself.
If we assume - with fair reason, that each of the suits represents a station, 'caste' or 'class' in life, then for each of these there is a metaphorical King, Queen, Knight and Page aspect. The King of Fools, or the Knight of Savages, or the Queen of Merchants, or the Page of Milkmaids, would all be appellations which, though not literally true, would be so symbolically or metaphorically - and easily so understood today as well as in times gone by.
But enough for this long post - and to yet another thread to begin the Courts!
My understanding is that originally, there were three court cards, and they were all military figures: the King, the Knight, and the Page/Jack/Knave. These are the court cards of the Spanish non-Tarot decks with Latin pips.
The name of the lowest court card is itself interesting, and seems to vary from one language to another. The Italian name, fante, preserves some of the original military significance, meaning "footsoldier." To make him a valet seems to alter the meaning somewhat, as does "knave." Originally, then, we had three branches of military service represented in the courts: the officer corps, the cavalry, and the infantry. They do resemble the chess pieces, which were themselves modeled after an army, of course. [My understanding is that the Vizier became the Bishop, though, and that the Knights were separate. At least, this is my recollection of the rules for Arab-rules chess.]
The Queen is the interloper, the later addition. Her addition changed the dynamic of the courts from a military hierarchy to a household. The king and queen were the couple; the knight, their eldest son and heir, and the valet their servant.
I tend myself to identify the courts with celebrities and historical figures who call to mind some of their characteristics. The Queen of Swords is Greta Garbo, for me; the King of Clubs is Harry Truman.
Do you think the 'kabal' behind the tarot was thinking about the fourfold fomula of YHVH when creating the four court cards?
...and Karnak :-)
I did not think when I used the word 'kabal', but the synchronicities are either just that 'synchronicity', or else there was an intentional allignment with the Qabalah. [22, 4, 10]. One thing I have learnt about the qabalah,( & magick) is that synchronicity is a definate player.
I only have one very old deck, it's called 'Ancient Italian', is this a Marseilles style deck?
This site (http://jducoeur.org/game-hist/seaan-cardhist.html) on the history of card games backs me up for the claim that Queens were added to the deck, which originally contained Kings, Knights, and Knaves. A bibliography is provided there. The International Playing Card Society (http://www.pagat.com/ipcs/history.html)'s history site also mentions the descent of the earliest European cards from Arab cards, which had Kings, Knights, and Knaves, but lacked the Queen.
I suspect the Knight was dropped by the French card makers because he was much harder to draw in the picture frame provided than the King, Queen, and Knave. The French cards became the international standard because they were cheap and easy to make; the cards could be produced from stencils, and individual woodcuts were no longer needed for pip cards.
Originally posted by AmounrA
I only have one very old deck, it's called 'Ancient Italian', is this a Marseilles style deck? The Ancient Italian Tarot from Lo Scarabeo is not really a Tarot de Marseilles --- the court cards are different, and for example the Fante di Denari will not have an extra coin at his feet, and is captioned like the rest. It is, however, thoroughly founded on Marseilles symbolism in the Majors. It is one of my favourite traditional decks of all time. (I love the facial expression on the Strength card.)
catboxer
14-11-2002, 13:11
Interesting topic.
As Ihcoyc has pointed out, the earliest 52-card decks in Europe were clones of their Islamic ancestors, and the all-male trio of courts seems to reflect the uncompromising male dominance of those societies. In addition, the Arabic courts were abstract patterns, not representations, because of the Islamic prohibition of representation of the the human form (considered idolatrous).
It's not surprising that the Italian originators of tarot wanted to add a little sex appeal and romance to their decks, and so introduced a female element. Renaissance thinkers may have been members of a paternalistic Roman Catholic society, but they were also newly-minted humanists.
Lots of people, including Dummett and Kaplan, believe that the Cary-Yale Deck was a sort of very early tarot prototype -- one of those Italian variations that was similar to, but not exactly like the true tarots that followed it. That pack solved the gender imbalance problem by adding not just queens, but female knights and female pages, so each suit had six courts, 16 cards altogether. There are some decks, too, in which the knights are males and the pages females, which is another way of achieving gender balance.
Personally, I've never liked the idea of 14 cards in a suit, even though it's the standard and time-honored tarot configuration. Thirteen is the magic number nonpareil -- the ancient prime number that designates a complete life cycle, as it is also the number of lunar months in the year. In addition, the King-Queen-Jack configuration suggests the eternal trio of mother-father-child.
And ignoring for a moment all the talk about neoPlatonism and Kabbalah, I've often wondered whether the popularity of the Arthurian legends throughout Europe, with their romantic influence, didn't have something to do with the advent of females in card decks. In any case, what good are card decks, or what good is life for that matter, without women. I know there are differences between men and women, and I say vive la difference.
aah - such wonderful reflections. Again, historical investigations add to our store of knowledge. Yet the interpretations of the evidence needs to be carefully looked at. We are, after all, looking at Tarot, and not other, though possibly connected, cards or games.
As with the Major Arcana, in which there were other picture cards in use which were not Tarot, it is also clear that there were other courtcards used in certain games (naipes, for example) which were not Tarot. Is it the case that a Queen was added?
Another way to look at this is that the early Tarot, incorporating depictions of the nobility, would have of necessity needed to include a Queen - especially if early Tarot had southern French, Troubadour, Bogomil or Cathar influence, influence which, it should be remembered, pervaded society from which Tarot emerged.
Contra ihcoyc, then, I would venture that the Queen, though undoubdtedly not found in the military and early saracene influenced decks, is intrinsic to the Tarot: the Queen is included from the earliest Tarot decks.
With regards to the four elements, I agree with Diana that, as these were well known and especially accepted amongst both Mediaeval and proto-renaissance French intelligentsia, the suits may very well have been so perceived at the time. I should also take the opportunity on briefly adding a comment with regards to the four classes: it is the military which is linked to the nobility, not the merchants (except, maybe, in Switzerland ;)).
With regards as to whether there should be thirteen or fourteen cards per suit - and I won't here repeat earlier posted comments regarding the number of lunar months in a year - fourteen does give a sense for the lunar cycle which thirteen doesn't, for it is the number of days in either its waxing or waning aspect.
To my mind, that there are four suits adds to the sense that there ought also be four courts per suit. As to the gender of the Page, it remains, to a very large extant, indeterminate out of a particulaar context.
I would agree that the presence of the Queen is the less conspicuous addition that distinguishes the Tarot from the earlier non-Tarot decks of playing cards. Moreover, the presence of the Queens in the non-Tarot French/international decks, and the fact that the Queen is outranked only by the King in those decks, shows that ordinary playing cards themselves were derived from, or at least influenced by, the Tarot.
The sex of the lowest court card probably ought to be indeterminate, if the Tarot courts represent a household rather than an army. The valets seem to have been reinterpreted, away from being footsoldiers, to represent the servant classes universally present in the households of the nobility. As such the people they represent could be either sex. My understanding is that it was the lowest court card in the Portuguese Latin-suited decks of playing cards that became female, rather than the Queen.
Were the Court cards designed to depict actual historical figures? I mean, do they resemble any royalty, or important people of the time? Does anyone know?
I strongly suspect that any depiction of actual historical figures is a later depiction which may have occured for specific hand-painted decks - if at all (though I'm sure that this did occur).
Later still, with non-Marseilles type depictions (such as the Tarot which emerged following, and depicting, the revolution, or the hunting Tarot of Germany) may very well have incorporated individuals.
Earlier - and later, for that matter - decks, however, I am quite sure, depicted more the station and the suit - irrespective of who may have been similarly thought of.
ihcoyc referenced a site with information about the queen's absence from the deck, from a history of playing cards. I must warn all that playing card and tarot card aficianados are as different as clowns are to mimes. I hear they frequently battle on another in public parks!
Or maybe a better analogy would be downhill and cross country skiing. Of course, the Tarotists would be parallel with the more aesthetic cross country skiiers.
catboxer
31-12-2002, 11:05
Believe it or not, people who study the history of playing cards are not a separate species from tarot afficionados. In fact, students of playing cards and tarot wonks are frequently the same people. The reason for that is because exactly 52/78ths of a tarot deck is also a complete playing card deck.
Tarot did not begin as a single idea, despite the persistence of some in believing that it represents a conceptually hermetic and seamless body of thought. This is because the earliest packs had two purposes; they were:
*A philosophic statement, and
*A game.
Or to put it another way, they were a philosophic statement that was used as a game. I suppose an imperfect analog would be a modern playing card pack that consists of pictures of important people in American history; its only use would be as a game, but it would also convey a philosophical statement of sorts.
The sources of the philosophic statement expressed by the sequence of trump images, and consideration of what that statement might be, have been gone into at length on this board. One of the more interesting sidelights of that discussion focusses on the so-called Tarot of Mantegna, so-called because it's not a tarot deck, or even a card deck (it was printed on paper sheets), and was not drawn by Andrea Mantegna. It is, however, likely intended to represent a sort of blueprint of the universe. It consists of 50 images divided into five groups of 10 pictures each, and each group is arranged in a strict hierarchy, starting with the lowest (group one starts with "Il Misero" the beggar, a close relative of Il Matto the Fool) and ending with the highest (the final image is "First Cause," a universe consisting of 15 circles with the earth in the middle). It may have predated the Visconti-Sforza tarot (see Kaplan I: pages 35-47), and some of its images are very similar to trump images in the tarot decks that were contemporaneous with it (see, for example, the Mantegna's "Mars" and the Chariot in various tarot decks). It seems reasonable to conclude that the tarot trumps articulate some sort of philosophic statement, similar to the esoteric architecture represented in the Mantegna.
But, as others have pointed out, at most, the trumps are imbued with a symbolic meaning. The suited cards, excepting the queens, existed before the tarot deck, and were incorporated into it in order to facilitate its use (gaming), but not its philosophy.
We know that the early decks were used for a game. We assume they also had a philosophic statement.
In a 52-card deck, there are 13 tricks in a normal trick taking game (Bridge, Spades, Hearts).
Add a court card and we have 14 tricks.
Add 21 Trumps, and we now have 77 cards total, which equals 19.25 tricks.
Add Le Mat, a Non-Trump Trump (it frees you from the obligation of having to play a trump or follow suit – but cannot win any tricks) and you now have 19.5 tricks per hand.
I have a feeling we are missing something here, and should look towards the game, to determine why the card count came to 56+77+1.
Alternatively, did the game evolve around the philosophical ‘archetypes’?
Which came first?
Because if the Archetypes indeed came first, we have to chuck the whole shebang, and go back to “What did Le Fou mean in 1350”, and NOT what did “Le Fou” mean in 1760 or 1910.
There was a difference in “just coming out of the dark ages” and “the age of reason” that has never been adequately rectified. There was a profound difference in how the archetypes were perceived at either side of the 400-year span.
Jung was filled with his own ideas and knew little on pre-Christian Europe. His entire upbringing was colored by the church (being a pastor’s son).
Or perhaps I am rambling…
Originally posted by Umbrae
In a 52-card deck, there are 13 tricks in a normal trick taking game (Bridge, Spades, Hearts).
Add a court card and we have 14 tricks.
Add 21 Trumps, and we now have 77 cards total, which equals 19.25 tricks.
Add Le Mat, a Non-Trump Trump (it frees you from the obligation of having to play a trump or follow suit – but cannot win any tricks) and you now have 19.5 tricks per hand.
I have a feeling we are missing something here, and should look towards the game, to determine why the card count came to 56+77+1.
You're assuming that tarot was a four-player game, but most of the tarocchi games I know are designed for either three or six players. If we assume the original game of tarot was a six-player game, the number of cards makes perfect sense: 13 x 4 = 52, and 13 x 6 = 78.
Just a thought.
-Baneemy
Some of this discussion of course assumes that the early Tarot was mainly used for a card game - it certainly was following its unification of minor and major arcanas, but I am yet to be persuaded that the major arcana were designed with that intent.
Still, the point made by Baneemy is worthy of consideration, especially given that there are a number of period card-tables with three sides.
The game of Tarot, as commonly played, in France, still has a minimum of three players, with the preferred number being either this basic three, or, failing this, five. It seems to me that the rules for 4, 5, & 6 players are modifications of the basic ones for 3-players.
Two consideration we haven't really discussed are, on the one hand, why or when the courts standardised to four per suit (as opposed to either three or six), and, on the other, how came it that cards depicting, in images, the courts were used by, presumably, Muslim Moors (who abhor such depictions)?
Though these are important for our sense of history, they are still considerations of the proto-Tarot - for the Tarot itself has four courts per suit, in a deck of a full seventy-eight cards.