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