AugursWell, I just happened to be at the library yesterday & wound up checking out Malcolm Godwin's book! I haven't spent any time with it yet though.
My library unfortunately has absolutely nothing on medieval Occitania, so I searched Amazon & came up with two options:
The World of the Troubadours: Medieval Occitan Society, c. 1100-1300 by Linda M. Peterson; &
A Handbook of the Troubadours by F. R. P. Akehurst
The latter was designed by faculty at UCLA, as a socio/historical complement to selections from the literature itself. Obviously, I can't vouch for either book . . . just thought I'd share my current list with you
At the library yesterday, I also picked up a not-quite scholarly but
very interesting book by Graham Phillips (
The Search for the Holy Grail). In it I find reference to two early Welsh stories,
The Spoils of Annwn (c. 900, preserved in the
Book of Taliesin c. 1300) &
Culwch and Olwen (date not mentioned, preserved in
The Red Book of Hergest c. 1400). Both of these tales apparently involve the search for a magic cauldron . . . or Celtic Grail?
I was, however, astonished on first picking up this book to find that it naturally opened to a plate reproduction of 18 trumps from what appears to be a Marseilles-style tarot deck. This Graham Phillips devotes a couple of chapters to tarot, claiming that the trump-cards correspond (sequentially) to characters encountered on the Grail Quest as presented in
La Folie Perceval (c. 1330), itself a prose translation of "the
Peveril sections in
Fulke le Fitz Waryn" (Anglo-Norman French, c. 1260,
Peveril being an earlier Welsh text).
I haven't read the book through yet, but at first glance his conclusions seem a bit extreme. Still, it's certainly something (more) to examine. The reading list is growing long indeed, pretty soon I'm going to have to start combing it with patchouli oil.
originally posted by augursWell
I find it difficult to correlate the year 1181 with the Tarot since, correct me if I'm wrong, there are no surviving decks which go back to that time period.
But isn't it likely that some early decks/images might, like other works of the human pen, not have survived the roughly thousand-year interval between the date of their creation & the present day? Is it really sound to assume that the earliest decks
we have now are the earliest decks that ever existed?
Regarding this Jewish/Christian background of Catharism . . . if you mean to postulate Cathars as potential specialists in Hebrew lexicography, that just doesn't feel right to me at all. As I understand them, the Cathars were . . . well, disinterested? Simple? Elaborate ceremony & symbolism were (in so much as I understand the situation--?) basically antithetical to Cathar practice. And tarot is pretty much
all symbol . . . I have a hard time imagining Cathars behind it!
Admittedly, I did start reading up on Cathars a little while ago as part of a personal quest to understand tarot
(silly me)