venicebard
Finally, a coherent theory to challenge mine (I am just now learning of Mark Filipas's theory)! This will require more study.kwaw said:Mark Filipas site is now back up:
http://www.spiritone.com/~mfilipas/Masquerade/Essays/allusion.html
Kwaw
My initial reaction is that my respect for the designers of tarot is increased tenfold. For the trumps to embody two alphabetic systems at once is truly amazing . . . as amazing in its way as the preservation of a millenniums-old science of matter in bardic tradition itself (unbeknownst to bards themselves? though they must have had some indication just how important what they preserved was). [Edited to add: actually, this science was divided into two packages so to speak (perhaps simply having survived that way, sans design), bardic and Hebrew traditions, which yield the ancient science only by their conjunction.]
It is extremely helpful to know, for instance, that the stick in LeBateleur's hand is a thin, hollow tube, and to confirm that LaLune represents its conjunction with the sun: but I would go further and confirm that the latter image does indeed (as Mark Filipas suggests) indicate eclipse specifically, because the mere phase of conjunction, 'dark o' the moon' (phase in which I was born), is represented bardically by LeSoleil, this being doubled I or mistletoe/loranthus, standing for both Yule (winter solstice) and dark o' the moon (namely the 'phase' between the end and the beginning, marked by the extra day in the 13-month tree-calendar).
It would of course be helpful to know how many terms in the medieval lexicons were not pictured in the trumps, and how many duplicates of terms there are to make things overly 'flexible', and indeed a few links seem slightly stretched. But overall Mark Filipas's theory seems quite impressive, and I am inclined to give it credence. I do not think it precludes mine, of course, as his is based on Hebrew numbering, whose existence I have never of course denied, and indeed there are intimate relations between the two numbering systems. But again, it forces an upward adjustment in my estimation of the minds who created TdM, and it gives me much to think about.
Much thanx, M. le Kwaw (I return now to Mark's site).