A Different Route Considered?

[venicebard]

Somewhere I'm under the impression that the queens were added.. probably because the Mamlûk shows three men in the court.

But did the Tarot introduce the queens? Or were other 52 card packs already showing the queens before the "earliest" Tarot references?

I'm puzzled by what you say here, Robert. Would you not think it more likely that Queens were dropped in deference to Muslim sensibilities in the Mamluk case, just as images are lacking in the three surviving (male) nobles therein? One might (I suppose) also look for some such dropping of a Spanish female page to make the 52, I don't know.

And thank you Ross and JMD for replies #22-24. I would argue as well that the 'noble' spin-off of the printed variety probably did not come up to the latter's standard of subtlety even, if anything resembling the Marseilles's trump XI was 'flattened' into the much shallower symbol of Hercules slaying the poor beast!

Also:

Dummett . . . interprets things a little differently, but it is certain (to me and him) that tarot was not assimilated to esoteric thought until the late 18th century.

I would say reassimilated (and distorted in the process). Do you not hold out some hope that the 'framers' knew what they were doing, that they may have designed the only tarot with widespread consistency-of-order (the Marseilles) with esoteric considerations in mind (by which I do not mean fortune-telling)?

I also don't see how being a game diminishes tarot. It points to a moral and spiritual meaning, and I think most people agree that that is intentional. I believe what the earlier commentators said about it (earlier than the occultists) - it was invented as a way to pass time in an intellectually and spiritually uplifting way. Isn't that we're doing? (Marcello in 1449 said this, and the earliest Bolognese rules said this (1754)).

Amen!

I don't believe, however, that it was designed as a way to determine God's will or the future; it requires *active* engagement.

Absolutely. But perhaps with said 'active engagement' (I couldn't have said it better) something of 'God's' (or the high self's, or 'fate's') presence in the flow might become apparent, n'est ce pas?

. . . but it mentions "fantesca", the female Valet, which dates the document before 1750.

There's another one-uh-them pesky female knaves, Robert, that European piety may have dropped to produce the 52, eh? or am I all wet here? you tell me.

Ultimately, whether 78 preceded 52 or 52 preceded 78, it is apparent to me, anyway, that the 4-suited deck represents the outer shell and the more complete (and precise, meaning traditional) 78-card Marseilles (/Lombardy?) the inner meat, this even though as I see it it is the numbered cards that represent inner reality (Sefirot), the number of them being that of Hebrew mem (40), the closed mouth (M).