A look at Tarot as very Ancient, and subject to concerted mis-representation

[pan]

thats not a proof of anything other than playing
cards being a watered down version of tarot.

nice try tho


I like the 52 card deck for a couple of reasons.

1. theres 10 numeric cards just like the standard
tarot.
2. Theres persona cards in the "gay" arrangement
3. The major arcana are the only thing conspicuously missing, and thats easy to understand...the major arcana are too charged with
pagan meaning.
4. The 52 card deck uses the four quarters suits.

[pan]

mamluk cards...boy was i having a hard time
remembering that word.
Somebody earlier tried to tell me that egypt
was improbable as an origin point.

nice map on that site.
guess what region is highlighted as the origin point of mamluk cards?


again, i think you have done a great job of showing that different theories abound.
trionfli decks and marseilles decks and it goes on and on...

but, wether or not tarot existed as a precursur isn't really what you are proving here.

You are talking about the evolution of playing cards.

and playing cards were derivative of tarot...
as far as i am concerned.

nice site.
thanks

[Cerulean]

There is one writer that I'm beginning to appreciate who seems to really track beautifully with many bits and pieces that I've seen and heard in discussion of history, Renaissance thought and associations with pagan divinities, even the 50 card 'tarocchi of Mantegna,' which had some clerical support--and this close-to-tarot game is the view as if the heavens were alive with the muses, graces, Olympians and music of the spheres.

Joscelyn Godwin has written many books on music, pagan literature and history, but the thread that I pull from him is he is writing not as an observer, but as someone who can see universal concepts and also feel the context of the time.

Anyway, the title that is most related to tarocchi interests is his "Pagan Dream of the Renaisance and Chapter 3 covers very heightened examples of the revival of antiquity, retranslated in the prosperous golden ages of Italian nobility.

He mentions Francesco Colonna's Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, Tempio Malatestiano, Tarocchi of Mantegna, the Florentine Picture Chronicle of the 1460s and the Schifanoia Frescos in Ferarra in 1450-1471 under Duke Borso

There were some pagan influenced excesses such as the Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini, where one enters in the north through the watery sign of cancer to bodily exististance to the southern area of the temple that is ruled by Capricorn to transcendence and immortality. This was under Sigismundo Malatesta. Godwin's book also cites one of the various Tarocchi of Mantegnas. He chooses to discuss the one which might have been conceived in the 1460s by Pope Pius II, Nicholas of Cusa and Greek colleague cardinal Bessarion in Mantua from June 1459 to July 1460. (There are dates from 1465 (online?) to a Lo Scarabeo's Silver Mantegna reissue of the 1470 and the Il Menghello version of the cards)

I'm still reading about with the Hyperotomachia Poliphi or the Florentine Picture Chronicle...but from what I know about the imagined world of the Schifanoia Frescos and 1465/1470 Mantegna cards, at least from Ferrara, one could see the imagined and painted dream of immortals, divinities and muses who accompanied and watched over the world of man.

Some may point you to Dante Algheri as a great example of both an endpoint and beginning of medieval and Renaissance cosmology where someone who tried to write it all in a cosmic framework. Yes, the pagan world of divinities were very important.

One could even read of them as allegories or personalities in bits and pieces of written poems and Italian history, as in pagents and triumphs during marriages and ducal crownings that echoed the Roman triumph.

There is a historical theory that the uneasy and delicate balance of seeking classical wisdom from Athens and Rome balanced with the heritage of beliefs from Jeresulem is supposedly an ongoing theme, not only in the development of humanities and Renaissance histories, but from the beginning of Western civilization.

Here's a hopeful thread note that might assist with that concept:
http://www.tarotforum.net/showthread...n+civilization

I don't know if I'm wandering too far: but perhaps a little of this background is helpful? At least the author cited above?
Best wishes

[pan]

and what are you going to call "wands" in a watered down deck anyways?
lol

[firemaiden]

I don't know what you mean by a watered down deck. But wands are of course - batons, and come from polo sticks. Have you read jmd's thread on Mamluk cards and polo sticks?

The Chinese Connection and the Polo Stick

[firemaiden]

Your ideas are interesting, and perhaps we shall be able to prove some of them, by continuing to search, and yes, even to argue. I don't think, however, that arguments such as "you can't prove there are no ____ (fill in the blank)" will ever gain respect.

There must be a different approach.
To begin with I have a most important question for you. What do you mean, when you say "Tarot"? I am beginning to wonder, if you mean, "the Spirit of Tarot" - or "the Art of Divination". Or do you mean "pictographs", "hieroglyphics" or "pictures carrying meaning", or do you mean "the symbolic language of pictures"?

It could be that all of this time, we are at loggerheads over semantics.

What is it exactly, that goes back so far into time?

[jmd]

pan asks a very difficult question in one of his or her posts, as to what motivates us in our particular views on Tarot's origins. I suppose that for me, part of the answer is in my post on page four - but it is a difficult answer to articulate clearly.

I remain open to numerous possibilities, and my personal 'pet' view is that the Tarot, as a deck of 78 cards, arises out of the Languedoc region in late 12th century. This totally flies in the face of evidence, and, like pan, motivates me to keep stepping on toes who may wish to reach conclusions in stronger terms than current historical evidence suggests.

I wonder what motivates pan to want to affirm a far anterior existence for Tarot. Certainly aspects of many things posted contain some truth. An example which seems odd, however, is that book burnings of the sort described did not occur in the same fashion in, for example, India. Yet no Tarot remains - to my knowledge.

Likewise, the cards which do remain in Mamluk lands, by looking into them carefully, suggest more that they are anteriorly related to Tarot minor Arcana, rather than the maybe preferable, but requiring a jump beyond what is warranted by my faith, view that they are a corrupted part of the 78 cards.

[Eberhard]

I wonder why everybody seems so fixated on the questionable behaviour of the Roman Church during the medieval ages. Just speculating, it could as well be that the Tarot indeed came from Egypt, in form of the Mameluk cards, but that the trumps were hidden due to the Islamic prohibition of images. The Sufi brotherhoods had their own secrets, too.

As one could observe with the publication of the Enneagram over the last decade, the Catholic Church also tends to "embrace and enhance".

Eberhard

[jmd]

Quite so, Eberhard. Not only is the Enneagramme such an example, but even the Tarot itself.

Many absolutely superb Tarot books have emerged from those who were or indeed are within the folds of the Catholic Church. Even in mediaeval times, much of the syncretism useful to our purposes arose within the context of the Roman Catholic Church, and numerous monks (such as Trithemus, to name one important German figure) worked quite within due bounds of his Church.

The other aspect to all this, of course, are the atrocities which, also, had an impact. Having focussed in this thread on this latter, without really looking at contributions which temper these views, certainly give a one-sided view.

[baba-prague]

I'm quite sure that this is a bit of a tangent, and maybe my motivation for posting is simply to give support to a basic belief that evidence is essential when we are talking about history, but my current interest is Russian magic. I've been working my way through a published PHd thesis on the subject - very dense but immaculately well researched. It is generally accepted as the best modern work in English on the subject ("The Bathhouse at Midnight" by W. F. Ryan)

What is striking is the range of things mentioned as being used - broadly - for divination (and all of them backed up by written evidence). To give you some idea:
animal behaviour
overheard words
the way smoke blows
part of the body itching
an animal or person crossing the path
bird cries
events linked to certain calendar times
celestial phenomena
ringing in the ears
the way grass rustles
a guest arriving
sparks from the fire
a candle burning down or going out

it goes on and on (the above is a small fraction).

In these extensive lists what is noticeable is that cards don't get a mention as Russian divinatory tools until the 18th century (1765). It's particularly interesting as Russian magic and belief was arguably stuck in the medieval period for longer than much of the rest of Europe so might well turn up early evidence if there was any.
(yes, that's a generalisation, but in many ways true). Surely - if almost every other thing that you could possibly think of was mentioned as being used for divination it can only imply that either cards were NOT used in this way, or that cards themselves were not widespread (which I'm trying to find out more about, the book I've reading says they were in Russia from late 16th century, but it is not a book about playing cards as such so only treats the subject in passing). The question becomes not "were cards used for divination" but rather "why weren't they used"? Which is in itself an interesting one.

By the way, the sources used are from all levels of society - i.e. the absence of any mention of the use of cards for divination can't be put down to the fact that this is only a history of peasant divination techniques - it includes the "upper classes" too.

This is a very short post, and there is a lot more to say about this strand of evidence, but it IS valid evidence.
Remember that the Roma are more widespread in Eastern Europe than elsewhere - and yet NO mention of the early use of divinatory cards occurs in some of the very places where the Rom were.

So I would tend, until I find other evidence, to believe that tarot as we know it (more or less), originated in Western Europe sometime in the medieval period - I don't suppose we will ever know exactly - and was initiallly used for a game. Whatever more romantic version I would LIKE to believe.
Honestly, being a romantic at heart I do in some ways hate to follow the more mundane theory, but my rationale leaves me no choice.

Call me brainwashed :-)