Umbrae said:
Great stuff.
The world of Tarot is filled with Sloppy Scholars - has been since "It came from Egypt" by A. Court de Géblin...all the way to today. We take our modern premise, and work backwards to 'prove' it.
Any other field of study would laugh tarot historians out of the hall.
All of them…
Thank you DianeOD, because I understand what you’re attempting to say.
I heard "sloppy scholars" .... likely following this from Diane:
The point is that the 'history of tarot' has hardly ever been investigated.
What has been investigated is the history of modern card-games, and the genealogy of modern/current tarot packs, and so forth.
When you compare the methods being used, they fly in the face of the most basic technical rules for investigating an historical artefact.
But people who are interested in card-games, or attached to a particular notion that packs have always related to their own favourite interest - such as alchemy or magic or whatever - really don't want to do historical research per se. What they want is to prove that their own preference is the right, true and original way to use cards. May be it is; maybe not. That's what historical research is supposed to be about.
If what we were researching was, say, a particular design of embroidery on a medieval gown (i.e. images on cloth, rather than on card), we'd ... I say we because by training I am an archaeologist of technologies, with specialist training in near eastern languages, religion, art and artefacts... and with emphasis on the connection between east and west...
Anyway: what we would do first, is analyse the material. If it turns out to be silk, inwoven with gold thread, then we count the number of threads per inch.
OK - suppose the fabric shows that the material was made in China, or in Syria, or in Byzantium, or by the Syrian weavers that Charlemagne imported into France...
Then we look at the colours used... where did *they* come from. If local, then the material was probably brought back without embroidery, and dyed locally. So the embroidery is probably local.
Then you look at the cut of the thing... and then the imagery stitched onto it.
If the figure embroidered on it is plainly similar to ones from Syria, or Byzantium or Egypt (and one routinely looks around the whole range of possible sources for imagery, because people have always liked getting 'foreign' imagery on things; it shows they are avant-garde, or rich, I suppose).
So then you find that the closest type of this imagery comes, in fact, from India. Really interesting.
written in a post of Diane 17.10.07, which sounds, that "true scholars should follow a neutral way, not blended and preoccupied by ideas, which they had already had before they enter ... which was followed by this statement, 4 hours later, also 17.10.07, also Diane, but another thread
Since I knew from the beginning that the figures were based in astronomy, and with reference to the "new" scientific Arabic names as well as older classical ones, I was able to consult those, too.
... which - just my impression - tells somehow, that she had once actually the position, that she had attacked 4 hours ago.
I've just to repeat Umbrae's words
Any other field of study would laugh tarot historians out of the hall.
All of them…
He precisely says "all of them" and that's a sort of global attack, one should be careful about.
Well, Tarot History is ... beside few exceptions ... not paid history. Here and there are some persons, which possibly get some money for the theme as a promotional work, getting a degree finally for it. Others come from the field of art history. Some matters are arranged by Museums for playing cards, perhaps.
A lot of people just work by their own engagement, just cause they once found a personal reason to follow the theme, which mostly means, that they didn't follow Diane's earlier suggestion, to enter the field of research "without private engagement". How could they ... the field of human past is gigantical, there are so many topics, which might be followed, anybody needs to reduce the ocean to the small pool, where he can walk around and have a look and describe the details, that he/she can observe. And, during this reducement, anybody follows his/her own favour, otherwise he/she would do nothing, because then there would be the feature of missing motivation.
Well, Umbrae, we, self-declared historians in a free chosen topic with the certain desire to develop a sort of self-defined quality, don't like as other humans, when dogs piss at our trousers, when they've no other place, where they could spend their water.
If you've specific points to address in specific matters, where you think, that an argument is wrong or an opinion accusable, please do, but global attacks as the given statement, just means, "anyway, I hadn't really anything to say, just wanted to have a look, if the water still is cooking at 100 degree Celsius."
... really funny, Umbrae ... as you predicted in wise fashion we'll laugh till you're outside the mentioned hall
Back to the topic. Diane in the starting article of the thread asked me to
contribute with something, that I wote in another thread:
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I assume, you speak of the Atout as the "Atout of Tarot" and you think of them as the 22 special cards or of a variation of the special cards like for instance the 17 figures, that you see as a complete Tarot-theme.
For these we've the condition, that we've some hundred real Tarot playing cards in Italy for 15th century and from nowhere else (if we leave Guildhall and Goldschmidt fragments out), also we've about 50 accompanying documents, from which nearly all are refering to Italian conditions and only 2-3 involve French contexts.
From the documents we've the condition, that they to a high degree involve high nobility in Italy, very seldom the ordinairy public
From all this the conclusion is near, that Tarot or this way to create special cards with the function of trumping beside the standard Matrix decks was born in Italy by high nobility. This is normal conclusion, that "a tree comes from the forest" is the usual rule and that "a forest comes from one tree" is a rare case.
A "rare case" would demand generally really good arguments to become the true story.
If you speak of "Atout" as the trumping rule inside card games, so already Dummett has the opinion, that trumping existed with the invention of playing cards in Europe, though he's missing final evidence in the way "that one cannot be sure about it."
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... if you wish to read it in context, see the Bohemian thread 1340 ...
http://tarotforum.net/showthread.php?t=86010&page=1&pp=10
It's somehow fundamental, that any history researcher makes his choice for his theme and defines his topic, as it makes sense to him and to his project. Now the project in our case is given and it's titled "Tarot", or better, as we're interested to keep the topic reduced a little bit, "History and Origin of Tarot".
Well, in our (Trionfi.com's) case it's more less defined as "History and Origin of Tarot in 14th and 15th century", just as we think, that this field is already big enough. And already this looks occasionally as "too much".
Dummett/Decker/Depaulis defined their research field different, and focussed much more on later times, and if 15th century, and then they concentrated on objects, from which it was more or less clear, that it was a playing card topic. So "their" 15th century studies stay relative small.
Kaplan made a rather good contribution by developing some biographical dimension for the connected people in 15th century.
Bob O'Neill used his energy for routes deep back in history, neoplatonism, Kabbalism, Gnosticism etc.
Diane has a favour for the Arabian connection to European playing cards ...
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Anybody defines his choice and topic him/herself. That's fine. If everybody would write with the same approach, the theme would naturally become boring.
Some trouble is created by the use of the word "Tarot" .... everybody turns the word into something, which fits with his/her own approach and "chosen theme". According to Dummett it's the expressing for specific playing cards. Others see forms of Tarot even in the alphabet. Mostly nobody cares to define his use of the word against the use of the word by others.
Trionfi.com has defined its object "Tarot in 14th/15th century". Now ... the word Tarot likely wasn't known in 14th/15th century, actually our object are socalled Trionfi cards. But ... we would be stupid, when we didn't use the word "Tarot". There's the public, and when 95% of the language users at least once have heard of the existence of the word Tarot and only less than 1% of the word "Trionfi", it's natural, that an author relates himself to the stronger word in 20th/21st century, although Tarot in 14th/15th century had a language-user worth of probably 0%.
So the problem with the word Tarot comes from the "audience", from the "public opinion and knowledge". Part of this "public opinion of knowledge" are the search engines. When we wouldn't use Tarot as a keyword, the search engines wouldn't take us in the right category and Tarot interested people wouldn't find us.
So we use the word, cause we're not stupid. We wish, that our texts are read, we're authors. And Diane's problem is even harder, as her topic from "public understanding" is even in more distance than our topic Trionfi. So she also uses the word Tarot.