foolish said:
Let's go back to one of the main points in this argument: I am not saying (and I don't believe anyone else is) that there is ablsolute proof of Cathar involvement in the creation of the tarot. But I believe that there is enough circumstantial "evidence" out there to consider it as an interesting possibility. And I think there are many more people than just myself who are willing to discuss this as a possibility.
Many people like to discuss
The Da Vinci Code as a real possibility too. Or Von Däniken, as you noted. Or whether or not Barack Obama was born in the USA. The popularity of a subject has nothing to do with its truth, nor whether it is worthy of discussion.
There is not only no "absolute proof of Cathar involvement in the creation of the tarot" - there is not the slightest shred of a hint of a suggestion that there is any reason to even think they did. As you admitted:
However, I must stress again that the "symbology" of the Cathars would have been indistinct from that of the orthodox church, since they didn't claim to follow any relgious order other than that of Christianity.
If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and everybody says it's a duck - it must NOT be a duck! That seems to be your argument.
Mary has gone blue in the face trying to emphasize that this "Cathar hypothesis" is not history - it is mythology. Mythologizing is a form of moralizing; it is a homily or imaginative preaching on the subjects found in texts, games, performances, etc. The concerns of the community or person making the myth, or moralizing on the game, are clearly shown in the content. Mary pointed this out a few posts back. They usually have little to do with history, since the concerns of the moralizer are not historical, but polemical. In the case of Tarot-as-Cathar, it is part of a wider myth, the "Evil Catholic Church" narrative.
In this narrative/myth/morality, the interpreter performs an eisegesis ("reading-into") of the Tarot based on the following sort of syllogism -
I'm only interested in heresy (because it is anti-church)
I'm interested in the Tarot
Therefore the Tarot is heretical.
The eisegete then sets out to prove the thesis that Tarot is heretical.
Historical method works differently. It doesn't set out to prove anything about Tarot (for example); it studies the known facts, and tries to
figure out what it is. It draws conclusions, it doesn't impose conditions. In this sense history is like a science, archeology or forensics (as Huck pointed out, it is like a detective trying to figure out whodunnit). Work outward from the facts, not inward from a bias (bias will form as the facts become clearer).
In the case of Tarot, some indisputable facts are -
It is a deck of cards.
It is a game.
It has an extra bunch of cards that distinguish it from the regular decks of cards, and this bunch of cards has a standard set of subjects.
All extant 15th century Italian Tarots are incomplete (Sola Busca is not standard).
The earliest cards and documentary evidence are all in Italy, for over 60 years (1442-1505).
The earliest documentary and physical evidence comes from Ferrara (1442 on), Milan (mid-1440s on), Florence (1450 on) and Bologna (1459 on).
We can draw some conclusions - Tarot was a card game with a standard set of trumps invented in Italy, before 1442. When charted, the evidence shows a pattern of diffusion from one of these centers. The game became popular quickly and was played openly.
We can draw another conclusion - Tarot was invented in an urban environment, one of the ones listed.
Michael Dummett did all of this reasoning, and much more, by 1980.
The content of the trumps - literary references and artistic conventions - suggests it was invented in an educated milieu. Some, like
Time, suggest it was invented very close to 1442 (because the earliest iconography for this figure was invented around 1440). The pattern of the evidence suggests it was only within about 5 years of 1442.
And so on...
This is detective work, not story-telling. The only thing mythology and (modern) history have in common, is that they are both presented, at last, in narrative form. In every other way they have different methods and different aims, and just because historians, like moralists, have to use narrative to describe historical processes, does not mean that history is mythology.