jmd said:
Perhaps Mac22's question is also more akin to 'how many legs does an animal have?' Even if we do not consider insects, arachnides and crustaceans 'animals', I would imagine that at the very least whales, penguins, vultures, gorillas and horses would be. So 'how many legs?'
LOL - I didn't take his question as quite so problematic. I thought it was just about the Cary Yale.
I guess your point is that answering the question about how many trumps it had does get into problems of definition, as well as scenarios of tarot's development.
How many trumps did early tarot have, or how many trumps did early card decks have?
A set of permanent trumps is what distinguishes tarot from other types of cards. Assigning trump power to one of the regular suits, or part of it (like Karnöffel), is different. The latter does seem to come before the invention of tarot, and might have influenced it (I think so anyway).
It seems to me that this might be why the game of cards was called "naibi" instead of "kanjifa" when it came to Europe (remember the "ai" is not a diphthong, that is the pronunciation is "na-(H)EE-bee", not "naybee" - thus (and also because it is a different spelling in Arabic) there is no relation to the word "nabi", meaning Prophet.). The "Na'ib" is equivalent to the Knight and Jack in our decks, so maybe the game that first came to Europe was called "Na'ib" because he had a special role, perhaps as the highest card in a temporary trumping game.
In any case, I am convinced that trumping games pre-existed the invention of permanent trumps (I think most people are). But - this is an important point - a set of permanent trumps, distinguished from the suited cards in the deck, is a rare phenomenon. It seems that it was only invented twice, and in the same place roughly - northern Italy, first half of the 1400s. There is a good possiblility that the two forms of the permanent-trump deck were invented in the same place - Milan - so it is tempting to reduce to idea to once only.
The form of the two decks - the Marziano/Filippo one, and the Tarot, is obviously different, but the idea is the same. It seems that the Marziano/Filippo one came first, so if this was the invention of the idea of a set of permanent trumps, then whoever invented the tarot was probably inspired by the earlier deck.
The number of cards might or might not have been a consideration. For Marziano it was - he designed a deck on a "fourfold" pattern; there were four suits, and 4x4=16 "trumps". This is explicit. The number itself and its symbolic significance may not have entered his mind, but the fact of its fourfoldness did.
So, maybe the number of trumps in the later tarot deck was taken in the same way. Speculating, there are six court cards and four suits, so maybe the Cary Yale trumps were 6x4=24. That's not Dummett's reasoning, but it is his result (including Fool as outside the series, that's 25 "trumps"). On the other hand, Huck's reasoning from the "fourfold" argument is that it could just as well have been 16. But, since all known complete tarot decks have more trumps in the series than suited cards, and since there are obviously lost cards in the Cary Yale as well as an isolated Cardinal Virtue, it seems wiser to believe that the Cary Yale had more than 16 trumps.
Dummett added one other consideration to his speculations, that the ratio of trumps to suited cards is 3:2 in standard tarots (21 trumps, 14 cards per suit = 3:2); for him it was noteworthy that in the Cary Yale, with its six court cards, if the number of trumps were 24 (plus Fool), the ratio 3:2 is maintained - 24 trumps, 16 cards per suit = 3:2.
Not sure if I'm persuaded by that, but it is a comparison, like so many other things, to keep in mind.
This aspect of the stabilising of trumps to 22 is something that I do think needs to be accounted for, and something that may have been diminished from a Minchiate-type deck, or increased from an early proto-tarot such as a 16-trump Visconti.
Absolutely. The problem for interpreters is the lack of evidence. We can only rely on logic, spinning more or less plausible scenarios.
The solid facts of the chronology appear to be:
The existence of trumping games (with colourful names for the trumps);
The existence of a permanent trumping game (Marziano);
The earliest extant tarot trumps have the Theological Virtues among them.
Thus, when the 21 (plus Fool) number came to be "stabilised", the simplest solution is that suggested by Dummett - the three Theological Virtues were removed, along with the extra court cards. This resulted in a game played in princely circles in northern Italy, and finally in a popular version.
The problem may not be that simple, and there is no way to judge this scenario historically.
So, one of the unstated questions is with regards not so much to images and card games of the time, but also what is to be regarded, specifically, as tarot... and also what are some of the likely influences that caused specifically 22 to be trumps.
I have my theories, but I don't think there is a consensus beyond "it was invented in a princely court." Maybe not even that.
The number 21 is indeed in a 3:2 ratio with the suits, but that seems insufficiently explanatory. The best comparison was noted by Moakley, from a suggestion by Kendall, that 21 is the number of possible throws with 2 dice. She didn't go further than to merely mention this idea, but it might be very important. For instance, Decembrio, Filippo Maria Visconti's biographer, notes that he liked to play Astragales, which are a form of dice. We can presume the term included the cubical dice as well as the knucklebones type. What is important is that the throws of astragales and dice had names, and these are in classical sources Visconti might have known. He certainly had an interest in classical history, and games.
There is also the theme of "Fortuna" in the trumps, and dice and their 21 throws are a symbol of Fortune (and as Moakley noted, the throws of 3 dice are 56). So with all the mathematical, mechanical, ludic, and classical interests of Filippo, it makes him a good candidate to invent the tarot, just as he did the Gods and Heroes deck.
The 'obviously' missing virtues are also important considerations.
I think so too.
Ross
