15th Century Italy: How confident are you?

Ross G Caldwell

Hi John!

John Meador said:
I concur with your observation re:"deck of cards as a historical object".
I am very interested in the possibility of you addressing "a philosophy rather than a deck of cards" aspect and possibly clarifying just what that might constitute.

I think much of the trouble some have with me and a few other historians comes from failing to accept this distinction. That is, the distinction between the historical research of evidence, and the interpretation of a system of thought *in itself*.

I think everyone agrees that the standard tarot trumps are based on an idea, they form a whole. It really is true, that I think no-one today would argue that the series is a set of random images. So the idea behind the order can be construed as a "philosophy", and finding it is what I would call the "Philosophy of the Tarot".

Since most of the tarot trumps embody ancient ideas, iconography, allegories etc., and since the order reflects a medieval view of the cosmos, both spatially and temporally, it is clear that the archaeology of the tarot "idea" can include all of the philosophy behind it - Ptolemaic cosmology, Apocalyptic eschatology, Platonic-Aristotelian morality, neo-Platonic spirituality, morality plays, mystery plays, feudalism, etc.: all of these things made up the medieval mind, and the tarot reflects the medieval mind. How can it not?

But whereas many people would rather talk about all of this philosophy rather than the cards that came to reflect a trace of this or that idea, I want to be a detective of the traces of the card deck, which is called tarot.

For me, tarot is a deck of cards, or a family of decks. Neo-platonism is not tarot, and ancient calendrical systems are also not tarot. Tarot is a pack of cards in which some of these ideas may be found - or maybe not. But I think it does violence to the term, and certainly makes it hard to do history, when tarot is considered to be a primordial philosophy that only incidentally became a pack of cards.

Rather, the cards, their number, order and design, are integral to any philosophy which is present in them. I learn from the cards, in the context in which I find them ("in situ"). I don't impose a philosophy on them - I am drawing it out of them, as they speak to me from their setting in history.

A sort of Rupert Sheldrake-ian morphic resonance applied to a trans-temporal tarot, perhaps? :)

-John

;-) I think I understand what you mean (I only have a vague understanding of Sheldrake)... but I don't agree, I guess. I think the tarot could only happen when certain conditions were met in history. Calling other systems "tarot" is, for me, an extremely unhelpful thing.

Ross
 

Ross G Caldwell

I realize I have to add to my previous post.

The fact that tarot is a game is *integral* to any interpretation of its philosophy. Games have their own logic, and card games have their twist on it.

I'm glad it's a game, and not a philosophical tract. Philosophies and teachings can be shown to be wrong, they come and go, but games are self-contained and last forever.

Games are a universal and profound aspect of human behavior. Their design - the philosophy behind each one - can be studied to discover what sort of mindset their creators have, what they value most. They often tell an immense amount about the society that produces them and uses them.

For me, the Trumps, added to the regular pack, tell me a lot about European society, particularly northern Italian society, 600 years ago. Later packs tell me about the times and places that made them, just as the latest tarots tell us a lot about our contemporaries who make them.

My belief is that the original trump series was a moralization about Fortune - itself a statement about games and chance. The lesson is that all of life is a game of chance, for the great and the small, that there are forces beyond our control that will ultimately defeat us, but that God triumphs over all.
 

Ross G Caldwell

kilts_knave said:
Wow! Thank you for this link. Now I have something to show my dad.

K:spade:K

I'm happy it's there. Does your dad read this language?
 

firecatpickles

No we don't read German, unfortunately. I may have it translated professionally, though.

KK
 

Ross G Caldwell

kilts_knave said:
No we don't read German, unfortunately. I may have it translated professionally, though.

KK

There are some good German-speakers on this list (Catlin?), but the text is long and not exactly German (they say it's the Alsatian dialect, and it's archaic spelling). But it would really be worth it - as well as going through the rest of the text to see what other things he says about other games, maybe mentioning cards in passing.

(although I can read modern German tolerably, my dictionaries fail me with this one, and I can't guess what words the orthography is trying to get at sometimes...)
 

firecatpickles

Translated or not it is a fascinating piece of our family's history!

K:spade:K
 

Ross G Caldwell

kilts_knave said:
Translated or not it is a fascinating piece of our family's history!

K:spade:K

oh yeah! I forgot, you're related to this monk somehow!

Is it too long to say how?
 

Fulcanelli

Hermetic Deception?

baba-prague said:
Frances Yates:

"The works which [were] believed to be of profound antiquity, were really written in the 2nd to 3rd centuries AD."

In other words they have been definitively - as far as I know - identified as much later works pretending to be ancient Egyptian. Yates goes into some detail about how this dating was arrived at. Not that I feel that devalues them, but it definitely casts a different light on any approach from a historical perspective.

Perhaps If they were written as late as Yates suggests, there was no intention of deception, as your comment seems to imply.

Just a thought.