WU WEI?
There is most definitely a non-woo methodology for collating the empirical ephemera of Tarot history, championed by one of the great analytic philosophers of our time, Michael Dummet. To his great renown, many assumptions concerning their origin were dispelled by the cold hard facts of documented evidence, carefully scrutinized and soberly evaluated. And, when it came to assessing whether there was any discernable rationale behind the design of the earliest known decks…
Michael Dummet said:
I do not even want to take a stand about the theories that have been advanced. The question is whether a theory is needed at all.
I do not mean to deny that some of the subjects, or some of the details of their conventional representation, may have had a symbolic significance obvious to fifteenth-century Italians, or, at least, to educated ones, that escapes us and may be revealed by patient research; that is very likely to be the case. But the question is whether the sequence as a sequence has any special symbolic meaning. I am inclined to think that it did not...
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…It may be that those who first devised the Tarot pack had a special purpose in mind in selecting those particular subjects and in arranging them in the order that they did: perhaps they then spelled out, to those capable of reading them, some satirical or symbolic message. If so, it is apparent that, at least by the sixteenth century, the capacity to read this message had been lost. There are many references to tarocchi in sixteenth-century Italian literature, in which their symbolic potentialities were exploited, but always in an obvious way: no hint survives that any more arcane meaning was associated with them.
That, in essence, characterizes the limit imposed upon the historiography of Tarot by a strictly non-woo approach. Without some ‘smoking gun’ materially demonstrating that their design was purposefully implemented according to an intentionally cryptic plan, the best the evidence yields is that ‘no hint survives’ of any such ‘arcane meaning’. Beyond those bounds of credulity, the origins of the tarrochi, and thus Tarot, are set beyond the reach of logical positivism – at least as applied by M.Dummet, and to such degree that he doubted that their sequence had ever possessed any ‘symbolic meaning’ at all, nor that their source imagery required any special hypotheses to explain their adaptation to these cards other than their ubiquity.
Of the variations between the earliest known tarrochi, he delineated three – two of which fell into obscurity, while the other, consisting of the Milanese Visconti-Sforza decks, served as the basis for the later Marseilles pattern decks. Dummet, while not insisting that any of these sequences had lacked a coherent meaning to their architects, posited that any attempt to reconstruct that meaning at least required access to the original deck – one whose identity, whether or not it may be counted among the oldest surviving decks, remains undetermined. Michael J. Hurst has proposed that, in the absence of such an ‘Ur-Tarot’, we might still outline some of its basic features by examining those early decks for the characteristics they share in common. But, barring the discovery of the actual source material explicitly documenting the intended meaning behind its specific sequence of iconic images, the exercise remains conjecture – albeit far less woo-ish than conjuring tales of mysterious gypsies or bird-headed gods.
Yet, whatever their original form, the consensus among historians adhering to a strictly logical-positivist approach of collating and interpreting relevant material evidence is that these tarrochi were introduced for the practical purpose of amusement – for 15th century Italian nobles to entertain themselves by playing with cards decorated with their own heraldic emblems and extended family. No guile or hidden agenda, just the natural urge to alleviate their boredom with a game. As far as “the occult” is concerned, there exists no explicit connection to Tarot until the 1780’s with the publication of Antoine Court de Gebelin’s encyclopedic Le Monde Primitif – over 300 years after the earliest Tarot decks first appeared among the ruling elites of several North Italian city-states. Though his account of their origin eponymously attributing it to ancient Egyptian priests of Thoth lacked any historical evidence, it nonetheless served as the null hypothesis in Tarot History until Michael Dummet decisively demonstrated that it was pure woo. In turn, his analysis of the material evidence has become the null hypothesis.
At least, that’s my understanding of the current distinction generally made between the empirical study of Tarot history and the woo of fanciful myths surrounding the cards’ mysterious beginnings. Where I take issue with it is not in the historiographer’s method of relying upon tangible evidence provided by surviving documents, as that is a necessary baseline for any historical research. It is rather with a flaw in Dummet’s logic concerning the “occult”, dispensing with it as a possible source of symbolic meaning for the early tarrochi without actually demonstrating a comprehension of what it is he’s rejecting. In particular, with respect to the manipulation of numbered letter-symbols within geometric frameworks, there was no apparent effort put into an analysis of how such systems operate. Dummet rejects a logical option without having studied its logic. Naturally, he had to. If one’s filter for objectivity is material proof, one can hardly go down the rabbit hole of a system that, by definition, prizes “hidden” secrets. Similarly, if one can only accept the obvious as credible, hints of the “arcane” will elude detection.
In a sense, it is that age old tension between the exoteric fundamentalist, dealing primarily in the literal, and the esoteric mystic unveiling allegory & symbolism. Neither is illogical or unreasonable insofar as they describe coherent tautologies, however ad hoc. The former are just less easily persuaded by ‘card tricks’ played by the latter. One sees a Fool, the other a cypher. Both fall under the rubric of exegesis.
But which can really see the Eye of Providence?
Without having recognized what that symbol has in common with the “occult” use of Hebrew letters, numbered 0-21, its bearing upon the geometry of Borromean Rings remains hidden. Thus, the emblem upon the chest of the Visconti-Sforza’s Dragon Emperor would offer no hint of the arcana to a 20th century Roman Catholic analytical philosopher who didn’t look into why someone might have had a rationale for eponymously attributing the TdM pattern deck to the mythic Kemet scribe-deity who invented writing. Whether that rationale is woo or not, one cannot very well exclude its’ “message” if one has no idea what that message is. This is not to suggest that an occult history of Tarot become the null hypothesis, but rather to point out that a strictly materialist logical positivism has its limits when dealing with the possibility of encryption within Tarot.
I would hope that such differences in approach did not alienate one another, but instead opened up a discourse from which all parties could benefit.