A look at Tarot as very Ancient, and subject to concerted mis-representation

Hmmmm, Diana, by definition an "oral form", without cards, is not "tarot as we know it in its present form."

I love the idea of course, that an oral history could have been the source for the 22 trumps, - a teaching board for an underground heresy. Very, very cool idea. I would very much like to try to reconstruct how that story went, which was my purpose for starting the mother of this thread.

The Lehmann Foundation article that Macavity linked us to raises a lot of very complex and perplexing questions about the history of the period we're dealing with here. Concepts like "heresy" can turn out to be very difficult to deal with, because the definition of what's heretical changes over time. Yesterday's heresy might become today's high fashion.

I wonder, and I'm asking (because I don't know), did it take courage for Pico de Mirandola to publish his book of Hebrew esoterica for a gentile, Catholic readership in 1486? He was only able to do so because a Jewish apostate, Raymondo Moncada, translated parts of the Sephir Yetzirah and other works for him. He certainly would not have been able to do so 100 or 150 years earlier.

The Catholic Church of the late empire, the dark ages, and the middle ages proscribed Judaism and all forms of paganism. That's common knowledge. The Church fathers did everything they could to convince pagans not just that their gods were false gods, but that they were worshiping devils and demons. This uncompromising attitude toward anything that was not Christianity lasted a thousand years.

The Renaissance changed all that. When Renaissance historians discovered the glories of classical antiquity, there was no way they could avoid re-discovering and appreciating the religion and mythology embedded in classical thought and literature. So what had formerly been heresy gradually came into vogue, but in what manner? Were there Renaissance thinkers who actually worshiped the old gods?

In any case, no educated Renaissance Italian was immune to the trend. Even princes of the Church engaged in appreciation of classical literature, and the culture embedded in it, in ways that would have been considered heretical by their spiritual ancestors.

I don't think there's much doubt that, by this conduit, a lot of paganism, classical astrology, and perhaps even a whiff of Jewish mysticism became incorporated in the symbolism of the tarot trump images. Was this stuff still considred by some authorities as heretical at the time? I tend to think not, but I really don't know.

i thought a lot about the core points of my arguement and am happy to return refreshed.

the first and foremost in my mind is very
simple.

okay fine, so there is no direct scholarly evidence that tarot existed prior to 1400s.

Niether does the scholarly evidence prove
that there were not cards prior to the 1400s.

So people ask me to prove myself. I can't in
a sense do that at the level they are asking.

Yet, at the same time, neither can they prove
the reverse, and again, for exactly the same
reasons.

So people may choose to believe that tarot started
in the 1400s, because thats where the scholarly
trail leaves off. But that is in fact just as much
a leap of faith as the reverse.

The question then becomes what the attachment is
to the idea and why it is held so vociferously.
I am a PHd equivalent student of psychology and
one thing I am always interested in is motivations.What motivates an epistomology? An ideology? Or even a scholarly analysis and interpretation of facts?

The hardest thing about motivations is oftimes
they can only be guessed at. Most people are not
even consciously aware of their own motivations,
let alone capable of discerning and processing
other peoples.

What it all comes down to is this;
did the motivation exist to erase tarot?
the answer is undeniably yes.

In fact, the cards were considered heretical and
even outlawed at certain times in history. Tarot
decks are known to be amongst the documents burned in book burnings.

So the result is that my speculation that tarot is
in fact far older than the 1400s is not nutty,
improbable, fruitcakey, or anything like that.
It is in fact very possible and very plausable.
My specualtion is every bit as plausable as the
speculation that tarot started in the 1400s.

The difference between these viewpoints is what
motivates them. My viewpoint is motivated by becoming very close to tarot and very close to paganism and very close to christian, gnostic,
essene, and judaic history, and trying to make sense of the clues that i have.

In my mind, the symbols used in tarot, while
certainly available to the culture of the time and
to some extent made popular by the heretical movments of literature etc, these symbols are simply not only too pagan, but too lucidly pagan.

Tarot to me does not present itself as something
that was helter skelter sewn together out of
mere accident and pop culture rebellion. It sings
and balances as a cohesive matrix; which would be
conspicuously out of balance if even a single element were missing.
And in fact, i have in another thread begun to describe that matrix as i see it.

To be clear, the route that i think the tarot followed is an origin at least as old as language
itself, because in my mind tarot represents a
very specific stage of lingual development; preverbal prephonetic symbolic communication;
hieroglyphs.

It is my belief that tarot in various forms evolved in different cultures, and that this explains a variety of different tarotesque cards,
including muslim variations.

It is my belief also that the primary avenue through which tarot as we now think of it starts
after some prehistory in Egypt, continues out of egypt with the escaped jews, who then break into
two main groups, becoming the jews we now think of as such, and the forerunners of the gypsies, (a word by the way which still carries the "gyp" phoneme, which is linguistically rare and as a side note may point itself to a very direct connection.) It is further my belief that Qaballah
was the judaic exploration of the tarot, and that
finally, tarot comes to its darkest days as assorted groups occupy Israel and have invariably
bad effects upon judaic culture. The Gnostics and
the Essenes are in my mind the hold outs against
the Roman Catholic invasion, trying to retain and
rediscover their heritage the same way a native American might now. And failing, to some extent, just as a native American might now, because to some extent, some of the culture was frankly destroyed.

It is lastly my belief that the Gnostics retained
the last viable copies of the old tarot, and that
these ended up in Roman Catholic vaults, to be discovered by monks centuries later.

The Gnostic tarots were accompanied by verbal
descriptions which gave judeo-christian meanings
to the tarot (focusing upon the aspect of the symbolic wheel which the romans could identify with.) This, as well as the link to qaballah, saved the tarot from complete destruction, but still, the printed tarot decks that we now have
as demonstrable histories were "leaked" peices of
information which were also very changed from their predecessors. Omissions and reorganizations and renaming of the cards created a great deal of
disbalance of the deck, which was instinctually
compensated for very quickly.
(the omissions left obvious holes which were then filled. Sometimes not very well.)

pan said:

..Neither does the scholarly evidence prove that there were not cards prior to the 1400s. "

Click to expand...

The burden of proof is on the existence, not the non-existence. Think about it. Are scientists required to prove the non-existence of magenta flying hippopotmi?
No.
Why not?

Pan, I think we would all be thrilled to find a much more ancient origin to tarot than the fourteenth century. We do not "choose" to believe in a fourteenth century origin. We accept that based on the available factual evidence, an earlier origin cannot be supported. That does not mean that historians will stop looking for earlier evidence.

Bye the way: it is now well known that the people called "gypsies" actually came from India. Linguistically the term gypsies reflects an earlier, now disproven idea that they were somehow egyptian.

india seems to be a primary link.
Chess comes from india, gypsies come from india,
its beginning to look fairly suspicious that way.

the burden of proof is fair in this case to impose
versus the other side, considering the actual situation.

I am not proposing something which is innately
outlandish; flying hipos.

I am propsing something which is innately probable; the existence of Tarot prior to
the 1400s.

Considering that books were burned,
genocides carried out,
and information destroyed
considering other proofs of intentional misinformation for any of a thousand subjects
(oh, hear the one about the aids virus that
can break through condoms..."some holes in condoms wide enough for as many as 10 viruses to pass through"...ooops, that was a religion inspired
bunch of total bs. And it happened only a few weeks ago. It got national airing in assorted magazines. And it was total and absolute bunk.
There are misinformation factories out there operating according to them in the name of "god".)

Considering all of that, i think its very reasonable to blow the burden of proof the other direction.

So, by all means, proove that tarot doesn't
have ancient origins. You can't. So there we are in the middle.

In the meantime, the internal architecture of the
cards, and their pagan meanings and complimentary
blances and polarities within the wheel are themselves more than enough to prove to me and i think anybody that sees the pattern.

The "proof" you are asking for has been right in front of you the whole time. The problem is, you don't really understand this thing that you are looking at as a cohesive dynamic whole.

Is that equal to a scholastic proof on the order
you are asking for? Nope. But its good enough for
me, and good enough for other people as well.

Until you have the proof to support the opposite
point of view, i'd expect the only logical thing to do would be to drop the argument and choose to
believe that i am full of hot air.

The more honorable thing to do would be to approach it from the devils advocate perspective
and start making my argument to yourself and see
if you can make it stick.

By the way, i can do this fairly well for your argument.

here goes;

Tarot started in the 1400s.
The proof of this is the decks we have record of.
Not only do we know that tarot started in the 1400s,
but we can look at the evolution of tarot from
assorted decks and watch as it evolves from simpler forms into the ones we have now.

The evolutionary process that we can track with
assorted early decks shows that tarot was more or
less invented as art, commissioned by various
renn artists to bring back some old mythologies;
greek and roman prechristian mythical systems,
and so forth.

So Pan, your argument simply doesn't hold water.



see?
try it, its not as hard as you think.

ps

what if the gypsies stopped in india the same way the jews stopped in israel.
"come from" may have some very different implications depending on how far back in time
you are prepared to reason.

My favorite such argument is the chess
india vs China.
origin question.

pan said:

what if the gypsies stopped in india the same way the jews stopped in israel. "come from" may have some very different implications depending on how far back in time you are prepared to reason.

Click to expand...

I’m going to jump here and suggest reading “The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey” by Spencer Wells. It will make your discussions of the migrations of mankind make more sense.

When you get off the topic of Tarot, into something specialized, say - human migratory patterns – it behooves one to make sure their footing is well grounded.

Substantial errors can cause other positions to become open to question, especially when stating opinion as fact.

I'm glad you mentioned about the Journey of Man, they had something close to it on PBS 3 months ago, which I think did verify genetically that the Romney population originated in India/Pakistan. I'd forgotten about that link, just remembered that there was a strong tie to the country. The weird thing about the show was that they were looking at the Y chromosone thingie, not the X. I'd taped the special for a pen pal in Montreal and sent it out to her before watching it a second time.

Thanks Umbrae.

Oops, oops! Guess the gypsy/Romney connection is a bust! Take a look at this:

http://www.themysticeye.biz/cms/html/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1

Hmm, Statement--incorrect assumption--fact. Covers a lot of what's been talked about in this thread.

The challenge is to prove that tarot originated in Italy in the fifteenth century. Here's the proof:

1. There are two major components to a tarot deck: trumps and suited cards.

2. The suited cards are a modified playing card deck.

3. The original playing cards in Europe were of Muslim provenance (see Andy's Playing Cards site -- http://www.geocities.com/Paris/Musee/7685/cards.htm), and the relationship between these and the suited portion of the tarot pack is established because the suit signs are identical (except for the polo sticks, as we have previously discussed here).

4. Playing cards entered Europe no earlier than 1375, although whether they entered via Muslim Spain or one of the Italian port cities can't be firmly determined.

In short, before there were tarot cards, there were playing cards. The creation of the tarot deck was accomplished by adding to the pre-existing 52-card playing card deck, as is proved by the correlation of suit signs between the two, for purposes of playing a new game.

Once more, amusement trumps metaphysics.