catboxer
Nothing but a Game/Starvation Blues
If one were to seriously maintain that tarot was, from its earliest days, "nothing but a game," I would challenge the words, "nothing but," for all the reasons jmd enumerated in his last post. It requires nothing more than the internal evidence in the cards themselves -- the obvious fact that the trumps are symbolic pictures, intended to convey some sort of meaning extraneous to the requirements of gaming -- to show that tarot is not "just" a game. However, in determining the actual purposes to which the cards were put, anyone attempting to prove that they had any other function than game playing is going to suffer the starvation blues while searching for documentation to prove his case. I know of no documents or records that antedate the 18th century that refer to any other purpose for tarot (triumphe, tarocchi) except gaming. I'm including tarocchi appropriati in that category, as it was a sort of parlor game, played with the images of the cards rather than the cards themselves.
What I'm saying is that we need to draw a distinction between the purposes, or uses of the cards, and their pictorial content, which may have had no other purpose than itself. That is to say, the designer(s) of these allegorical pictures may have made them the way they did simply for the joy of doing so. If the content of the cards was used for anything during the first 300 years the deck existed, there is no record of it.
To be sure, it was what Tom T. Little calls a "smart game." He informs us, in his article on Marziano da Tortona's "Birds and Gods" card game (a tarot ancestor) that Tortona wrote a book, which exists even today, housed in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, and explains the metaphorical and allegorical meanings of his cards (which unfortunately are lost), rather than setting forth the rules of play for the game for which they were undoubtedly designed. No such book for the tarot trumps has ever been found; I've always seen our function here in this forum as a kind of attempt to reconstruct it. It would only be in the reconstruction of the intentions of the originators that the real meanings of the cards and the deck as a whole could finally be seen.
The earliest trace of actual cartomancy is from Bologna, in the form of a sheet of divinatory meanings for 35 seemingly haphazardly chosen cards (out of the 62-card Bolognese deck). The names of the cards that appear there make the sheet datable to sometime before 1750. This was followed by Casanova's reference to a reading performed by his little girlfriend, in Russia, in 1765. She used a 25-card square, so she must have been using either a tarot deck of some kind or a regular playing card pack. Then a few years later come de Gebelin, Etteilla, and all the rest.
Typical of the earliest documents is Francesco Sforza's request to his treasurer (in 1450) to immediately purchase two superfine triumphe decks, or, in the event that such cards were not available, two high quality decks of regular playing cards. Had the tarot cards been meant for any other purpose than play, regular 52-card playing decks would hardly have been a viable substitute. (A photograph of the letter appears in Kaplan:II:5.)
If one were to seriously maintain that tarot was, from its earliest days, "nothing but a game," I would challenge the words, "nothing but," for all the reasons jmd enumerated in his last post. It requires nothing more than the internal evidence in the cards themselves -- the obvious fact that the trumps are symbolic pictures, intended to convey some sort of meaning extraneous to the requirements of gaming -- to show that tarot is not "just" a game. However, in determining the actual purposes to which the cards were put, anyone attempting to prove that they had any other function than game playing is going to suffer the starvation blues while searching for documentation to prove his case. I know of no documents or records that antedate the 18th century that refer to any other purpose for tarot (triumphe, tarocchi) except gaming. I'm including tarocchi appropriati in that category, as it was a sort of parlor game, played with the images of the cards rather than the cards themselves.
What I'm saying is that we need to draw a distinction between the purposes, or uses of the cards, and their pictorial content, which may have had no other purpose than itself. That is to say, the designer(s) of these allegorical pictures may have made them the way they did simply for the joy of doing so. If the content of the cards was used for anything during the first 300 years the deck existed, there is no record of it.
To be sure, it was what Tom T. Little calls a "smart game." He informs us, in his article on Marziano da Tortona's "Birds and Gods" card game (a tarot ancestor) that Tortona wrote a book, which exists even today, housed in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, and explains the metaphorical and allegorical meanings of his cards (which unfortunately are lost), rather than setting forth the rules of play for the game for which they were undoubtedly designed. No such book for the tarot trumps has ever been found; I've always seen our function here in this forum as a kind of attempt to reconstruct it. It would only be in the reconstruction of the intentions of the originators that the real meanings of the cards and the deck as a whole could finally be seen.
The earliest trace of actual cartomancy is from Bologna, in the form of a sheet of divinatory meanings for 35 seemingly haphazardly chosen cards (out of the 62-card Bolognese deck). The names of the cards that appear there make the sheet datable to sometime before 1750. This was followed by Casanova's reference to a reading performed by his little girlfriend, in Russia, in 1765. She used a 25-card square, so she must have been using either a tarot deck of some kind or a regular playing card pack. Then a few years later come de Gebelin, Etteilla, and all the rest.
Typical of the earliest documents is Francesco Sforza's request to his treasurer (in 1450) to immediately purchase two superfine triumphe decks, or, in the event that such cards were not available, two high quality decks of regular playing cards. Had the tarot cards been meant for any other purpose than play, regular 52-card playing decks would hardly have been a viable substitute. (A photograph of the letter appears in Kaplan:II:5.)