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Or, at least, that it was seen so by people in Tuscany well before the occult revival.catboxer said:I should have remembered that a comprehensive representation of the entire system of astrology is a part of the Florentine Minchiate. That certainly could be seen as possible evidence that the regular tarot is, at least partly, an astrological vehicle.
I think we're winning the battle against spurious history, as much as it could be won. Most more recent books on Tarot seem quite happy to concede that the cards appeared around the turn of the fifteenth century in northern Italy. Fewer and fewer people put much stock in the old tales about gypsies and ancient Egyptians. This is about all we can do.I also liked what you had to say about the evolution of folk traditions. But is inventing a spurious history out of whole cloth, as the French occultists did, the same thing as evolution and transformation of a folk tradition?
"Inventing a spurious history out of whole cloth" is in fact a stratagem that looms large in these sorts of folkloric and historical traditions. The brothers Grimm made themselves a body of "German" folklore out of mostly French sources. They turned old cautionary tales about the danger the nobleman at the top of the hill posed to your daughter into stories about dark deeds in the woods. On the whole, they improved on their originals, even as they served one aspect of the agenda of Romanticism. And eighty years later, their accounts were taken as essential to the German national spirit, and investigated for clues as to pagan survival.
Sir James Frazer invented a new mythology for the ancient and primitive world from whole cloth. The trick was to ignore anything inconvenient actual sources told you about the meaning of their customs. Any annual custom could be pressed into the system, especially if it involved fire, or vegetation. All it took was a magisterial will to substitute a "true" meaning for whatever it was your sources told you. His invented mythology got into D. H. Lawrence and T. S. Eliot and spawned great literature. It got into pop science fiction and spawned uncountable potboilers. It got into Robert Graves and spawned several new religions.
I'm ranting now, and I didn't mean to start. But this sort of thing is, in a sense, of the essence of human mental life. We aren't going to stop it. We'd do better by adapting to the sort of needs these tales feed, and working authentic material to feed those needs.
Frankly, the time and place of the Tarot's actual creation was a true time of wonder, full of beauty, romance, and intrigue, full of interesting characters and people with vivid lives and real wisdom to share. Much better than those boring toga-clad sots, the Ascended Masters or the Great White Brotherhood. I'd rather spend eternity chatting with Caterina Sforza and Alessandro Borgia than Koot Hoomi and St. Germain. If contemporary people can relate to The Sopranos and The Godfather, they can relate to the Sforzas and the Medici. It's up to us to make reality more interesting than bogus legends.