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.)