Le Mat

catboxer

Nothing but a Game/Starvation Blues

If one were to seriously maintain that tarot was, from its earliest days, "nothing but a game," I would challenge the words, "nothing but," for all the reasons jmd enumerated in his last post. It requires nothing more than the internal evidence in the cards themselves -- the obvious fact that the trumps are symbolic pictures, intended to convey some sort of meaning extraneous to the requirements of gaming -- to show that tarot is not "just" a game. However, in determining the actual purposes to which the cards were put, anyone attempting to prove that they had any other function than game playing is going to suffer the starvation blues while searching for documentation to prove his case. I know of no documents or records that antedate the 18th century that refer to any other purpose for tarot (triumphe, tarocchi) except gaming. I'm including tarocchi appropriati in that category, as it was a sort of parlor game, played with the images of the cards rather than the cards themselves.

What I'm saying is that we need to draw a distinction between the purposes, or uses of the cards, and their pictorial content, which may have had no other purpose than itself. That is to say, the designer(s) of these allegorical pictures may have made them the way they did simply for the joy of doing so. If the content of the cards was used for anything during the first 300 years the deck existed, there is no record of it.

To be sure, it was what Tom T. Little calls a "smart game." He informs us, in his article on Marziano da Tortona's "Birds and Gods" card game (a tarot ancestor) that Tortona wrote a book, which exists even today, housed in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, and explains the metaphorical and allegorical meanings of his cards (which unfortunately are lost), rather than setting forth the rules of play for the game for which they were undoubtedly designed. No such book for the tarot trumps has ever been found; I've always seen our function here in this forum as a kind of attempt to reconstruct it. It would only be in the reconstruction of the intentions of the originators that the real meanings of the cards and the deck as a whole could finally be seen.

The earliest trace of actual cartomancy is from Bologna, in the form of a sheet of divinatory meanings for 35 seemingly haphazardly chosen cards (out of the 62-card Bolognese deck). The names of the cards that appear there make the sheet datable to sometime before 1750. This was followed by Casanova's reference to a reading performed by his little girlfriend, in Russia, in 1765. She used a 25-card square, so she must have been using either a tarot deck of some kind or a regular playing card pack. Then a few years later come de Gebelin, Etteilla, and all the rest.

Typical of the earliest documents is Francesco Sforza's request to his treasurer (in 1450) to immediately purchase two superfine triumphe decks, or, in the event that such cards were not available, two high quality decks of regular playing cards. Had the tarot cards been meant for any other purpose than play, regular 52-card playing decks would hardly have been a viable substitute. (A photograph of the letter appears in Kaplan:II:5.)
 

Kaz

i like your way of looking at the fool as a buddha :)
yes.......

kaz
 

catboxer

I can live with the Fou being placeless. In fact, I'm more comfortable thinking of him that way. A homeless beggar is without a home. Sometimes you can find him in the doorway of the old abandoned Woolworth store, and sometimes he sleeps in the vacant lot across the street from the Comfort Inn, and he panhandles every day down on Market Street.

You can find him because he's always somewhere (everybody has to be somewhere), but he has no place to call his own. So it is with Il Matto, who has no place in the deck and no place in society. He's always moving, like airborne dust.
 

Cerulean

Catboxer's post and the Nobelet card are great discoveries for me this week...a coworker said as she encountered a black and white cat who walked just outside a peaceful retreat site (where some local sisters live---we have a Catholic mission within walking distance of Santa Clara). The cat followed her and talked until she did the "nice cat, yes, I'm glad to scratch your, er...wherever you want me too..." The cat was wonderful, until she did a foolish thing. She told the cat, "I'm really a dog person, so I'm going to stop now..." And the cat leaped up on its hind legs, unsheathed it's front claws and did a 'Ohhh-no, you aren't leaving' hook on her jeans. The cat got an extra few minutes of attention and the woman said that she was certain some of the nuns on the second story saw her and was saying to themselves, "Oh that cat just got another one!"
Whoever did this wonderful card knew cats. And might not the Foolish One have done something so silly?
 

ihcoyc

Re: Re: Le Mat

Diana said:
Why was he placed there, between XX and XXI? And why and when was he moved?
My understanding is that it was Eliphas Lévi who chose to place the Fool between Judgment and the World. He did so because in his qabalistic correspondence between the tarot and the Hebrew alphabet, he figured that the Fool belonged to Shin, the next last letter of the Hebrew alphabet. So also do more recent writers who follow the French esoteric traditions, like Valentin Tomberg.

The Golden Dawn, Paul Foster Case, and people following them assigned Aleph to the fool, with a corresponding reassignment of the rest of the trumps from II to XX. Since they already had a card that was at I, they necessarily had to assign the Fool a 0 to make it precede I. Of course, there's no 0 in Roman numerals in any case, so it would have been better to follow the tradition and leave it off the card.

Pleasantly inconsequential debates like this help underline that any attempts to force tarot to fit the frameworks of qabalah, astrology, or numerology are only partial and imperfect fits. The Fool, of course, needs no number. The Fool is neither a suit card, nor a trump. In a sense, he stands outside of both sequences, and is above either of them.
 

Cerulean

A teacher of a mask-making class, who also teaches historical theatre arts, gave us a lecture that showed us early Harlequin, Jester, Motley Fool characters. Patterned garments or rags showing patches were common. It seemed over time every Commedia D'Arte character had a male/female counterpart---she traced some of them to stereotypical characters from different areas of Italy. At least for costuming references or contribution to the historical Fool/Jester character of popular tales, perhaps it might help pinpoint some tarot fools if you are researching.
Her first recorded reference of a traveling theatre troop originated in Italy in about 1480. Prior to that, for about 200 or 300 years, I believe, public playacting was either outlawed or controlled stringently in a very Biblical presentation.
Could the use of the court jester in costume (Alas, poor Yorick?) either to begin a play or end of it have something to do with the different regions placing a jester/fool at the beginning or end of a triumph deck?
Just a few thoughts.
Mari H.

P.S. Please forgive the cat post if it was too frivolous.
 

Umbrae

Diana said:
The word Mat could come from the Arabic meaning "Death". As many tarologues put in relation the Bateleur, The Arcane Sans Nom (XIII) and the Mat, this could be a pointer to that. Those who believe in the Saracen origin of Tarot, seem to believe in this theory.

You know, the letter U became a V in the majors – it’s difficult to carve a U in a woodcut block.

Perhaps the A was easier than an O…?