origins of terms "major arcana" & "minor arcana"

[Mabuse]

I was going over some websites on the early French occultists, searching for the precise origins of the terms "Major Arcana" and "Minor Arcana" I've discovered quite a number of their writings on the website of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. It appears that Levi's writings are the earliest ones to speak of Greater Mysteries or Arcana, if I recall correctly. Am I correct in assuming that Levi originated these terms, or did they originate earlier?

 

[DianeOD]

Arcana

In the fourteenth century, the term 'arcana' tended to mean things held in the heart (as memory and intelligence).

It related to the idea of the arca noe - in which all the world had been held in microcosm.

An important teacher and proponent of a memory-system which - to put it generally - was based on a conceptual model of the arca noe was Hugh of St. Victor, and his theory seems to have been very influential.

However, in the twelfth century, Michael Scot (in whose manuscripts are marginal illustrations apparently related to the form of some images in the tarot's arcana major) is recorded as saying "the more one considers the arcana of God, and the arcana of the human heart, the more mysterious they seem."

I would not like to use this as proof that forms of card-pack were called by these terms in 12thC Sicily, but it is not impossible. (Rosanne has referred to Sicily's cards in another thread, if you'd like to search).

Many other works of the same period use the terms 'major' and 'minor' to describe the easier, and harder levels of a study. An important mathematical work, for example, will speak of the 'arte minor' an 'arte major' as the easier arithmetic of the calculator, and the harder applications of maths - to astronomy and the calendar and so forth.

However, while there is nothing anachronistic about the idea these terms 'arcana major' and 'arcana minor' might have been used in late medieval Europe, we have no documented use of their being applied to the tarot pack, at least as far as I know to date.

 

[Scion]

I may be wrong on this, but I'm almost positive the first printed reference to Major and Minor Arcana with regard to the Tarot starts with Paul Christian (aka Jean-Baptiste Pitois) in his book Histoire de la magie, du monde surnaturel et de la fatalité à travers les temps et les peuples later published in English as The History and Practice of Magic... In the 1820s, Pitois worked at the Arsenal, one of Levi's early sources of esoteric material and one of the roots of the French occult revival.

 

[DianeOD]

First printed ref

I believe that is the first printed occurrence of the terms' application to the pack so far known.

Question is, whether it was a term invented, or applied, or even re-applied.
The people concerned had to do some research into their topic - so was it a term they found in another source, or made up for themselves? I'd be inclined to think the latter, if for no other reason that the order of the Latin words is not given in the right order i.e. should be arcana major (or majoris), not major arcana.

On the other hand, a poem called de Vetula contains the following:

Mundi partes, celestis scilicet illa, hec elementaris, mundo servire minori/non dedignantur. Mundus minor est homo, cuius e celo vita est; et victus as hiis elementis sic dictus, quia sit mundi majioris ad instar factus.

Now this happens to accord very well with the pack's 'architecture' and three levels, which as I believe are designed to provide a generic model of the mundus according to the sort of "total structure, in parts and parts-of-parts" which defined the medieval Scholastic approach to explanation of all things.

Sorry - translation of the Latin:

The divisions of the universe [mundi partes], namely that celestial [part] and this of the [4] elements, do not disdain to serve the lower world. That lower [mundus minor] is man, whose life derives from the heavens; and being sustained/upheld by these elements it was thus said it/he was made in the likeness of the greater [mundus major].

I won't try to discuss the poem's provenance, dating or what was then (1300-1500) believed in that regard.