Ah, jmd, you're a great guy, a real gentleman, and a true scholar. It's always, as they say in the trades, "a pleasure doing business with you." But I'm afraid I have to part ways with you on this issue.
What was left of ancient Rome certainly was a key component of southern European Renaissance culture, but Renaissance thinkers and artists really had little in common with the rigid formalism of the Romans. Renaissance culture was innovative, boisterous, and full of itself. The comprehensive catalog of Roman ruins engraved by Giambattista Piranesi (17th century) shows that, at least by that time, Roman ways of thinking and being had become vague, indistinct memories to their descendents, who were still awed by the scale and grandeur of what had been left behind. The gap, after all, was over 1000 years.
If Roman culture was an unfocussed memory by 1500, what could be said of the leavings of the autocratic society of ancient Egypt, which was already ancient when Augustan Rome was built? For sure, Renaissance thinkers, including those who played a part in the origins of tarot, were enamored of Plato's philosophy, and probably had more in common with the Greek philosophers of 2000 years before them than with any other ancient people. But that raises another "tarot problem:" neoPlatonism and Kabbalah are philosophically incompatible.
My point is that our "ancestral memories," as Dr. Jung would have it, may be long, but our historical memories are short. I find myself unable to make any spiritual or cultural connection with my Puritan ancestors of 350 years ago, for example. They might as well have been from Mars. For these reasons, I find nothing of value in the work of people like DeGebelin, Levi, and Crowley, but I do find much that has done irreparable harm, as these people used no sources for the histories they made other than their own imaginations and the cryptic pictures on a bunch of old playing cards. In other words, they made stuff up.
Maybe there is wisdom embedded in our genes and subconsciousnesses that can be applied to history in a valid way. Right now I'm reading Robert Graves's "The White Goddess," and it seems to me that Graves tries to have it both ways: he's a real scholar, well-versed in all the archaeological and historical evidence that was available to him, but he also uses what he would call poetic intuition as source material. Can we do that and get away with it? I'll have to think about it some more.
However, for right now, I always assume that what can't be documented in three-dimensional ways doesn't exist except in the overheated imaginations of occultists, and I would reiterate that from 1440-whatever until 1781, nobody having anything to do with the cards ever mentioned (out loud or on paper) anything about Kabbalah, Egypt, or astrology.
I'm always open to changing my mind. A lot of people like Rachel Pollock argue that the founding of occult tarot was the establishment of a sort of second tradition (following the first, which I guess would be Italian/Marseilles cards). But did that founding have a real foundation? If I was to agree that the symbolic vocabulary of modern tarot connects with regions of the mind and soul that can't be accessed by analytical thinking, and that it gives us a pathway to truths that can't be discovered any other way, then I'd be able to get over that hump that I can't get past, which is the anti-historical nature of occultism.