Cerulean
Ah gentle souls...
"The fact that Court de Gebelin's conjectures made sense to him (and to many others) is not due to any historical connection of the cards to Egypt, but to the fact that the universality of the concepts in the cards parallels a large part of Egyptian mythology (which emerged from the same collective source as the cards). ..Among many others, Crowley eagerly embraced this parallelism, knowing full well that it was not a matter of historical origins."
It is gently smiling, when I read how wonderfully stunned Gebelin was when allegorically his mind had a flash of recognition and he thought that he saw "Osirus triumphant" in the Chariot card...and how he felt that associated this Egyptian allegory of what he visually perceived and how a card game he happened upon could hold a long-lost allegorical image that he really saw was an image of wisdom, perhaps a lost truth.
"...It was time to rediscover the allegories which it had been destined to preserve, and to reveal that, among that wisest of peoples, everything, even including games, was based on allegory, and that those sages knew how to change the most useful knowledge into an amusement and make it into more than a game..."
...He (Court de Gebelin) did not pretend to have derived his knowledge from any ancient tradition, orally transmitted. Quite the contrary: according to him, no such tradition existed: for long ages no one had suspected the truth until he himself had with his genius perceived it and uncovered it...
From Dummett & Decker: The Foundation of Tarot Occultism, page 58
A Wicked Pack of Cards
The ability to recognize and use a poetic parallel is a very creative, very human invention. How the first Italian families paraded in triumph in chariots in their marriages and war-worn victorious histories as tribute to their allegorical heritage of "Roman" warriors did--as did Romans did somehow repeat the triumphant ride of chariots as did the Egyptian Pharoahs in their tomb paintings--yes, there was a general truth in being perceive an allegorical parallel, the images that Court de Gebelin recognized and 'rediscovered'.
We might today say that he had a genius moment and a flash of art recognition of a historic allegorical parallel. I'd say his poetic imagination recognition can be loosely generalized as 'genius' and an imaginative triumph.
It was a huge, huge leap that had some half-obscured images of the Egyptian royalty held some resemblence to tarot images--at least in the Chariot, we might see a loose connection.
His overall conclusions were wrong that the trumps were the true wisdom of a golden age that sages and savants hid in plain sight. But they did know that in the Victorian age. Although past associations did also assign their own mythologies to the tarot. For us, we tend to keep assigning psychological perceptions to the parade of images in cards and cartomancy.
It took a few generations and lots of examination of tarot mythology over and over for us twentieth-to-twenti-first century folks to 'rediscover' what tarot writers have written over and over... again and again. Probably our love of psychology and tarot allegories will be seen indulgently by future generations as a kind of folklore of our ages...
You might say one beginning of tarot mythology was an odd circumstance that led a Swiss expatriate pastor with an assumed courtly name to associating these images of a childish, or other folk pastime of human addiction and fate/fortune to be elevated to the realm of a lost wisdom. Isn't that the stuff of myths and romance enough? And it is history...as I now know it right now. Maybe that will change...
And we, who love modern tarot allegories for what they have become through generations of the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth and twenti-first century--we are making the prophesy that we can encode and associate wisdom with old game images and to be true, for some of us. Why not? It's an exercise of creative imagination that is most humanly artful and fun...
This part of the divination and occult history of this 'tarot myth' is true. And we get to be a part of it!
Thanks for the fun questions...what lovely discussion and insights I've read and am checking out.
Cerulean
"The fact that Court de Gebelin's conjectures made sense to him (and to many others) is not due to any historical connection of the cards to Egypt, but to the fact that the universality of the concepts in the cards parallels a large part of Egyptian mythology (which emerged from the same collective source as the cards). ..Among many others, Crowley eagerly embraced this parallelism, knowing full well that it was not a matter of historical origins."
It is gently smiling, when I read how wonderfully stunned Gebelin was when allegorically his mind had a flash of recognition and he thought that he saw "Osirus triumphant" in the Chariot card...and how he felt that associated this Egyptian allegory of what he visually perceived and how a card game he happened upon could hold a long-lost allegorical image that he really saw was an image of wisdom, perhaps a lost truth.
"...It was time to rediscover the allegories which it had been destined to preserve, and to reveal that, among that wisest of peoples, everything, even including games, was based on allegory, and that those sages knew how to change the most useful knowledge into an amusement and make it into more than a game..."
...He (Court de Gebelin) did not pretend to have derived his knowledge from any ancient tradition, orally transmitted. Quite the contrary: according to him, no such tradition existed: for long ages no one had suspected the truth until he himself had with his genius perceived it and uncovered it...
From Dummett & Decker: The Foundation of Tarot Occultism, page 58
A Wicked Pack of Cards
The ability to recognize and use a poetic parallel is a very creative, very human invention. How the first Italian families paraded in triumph in chariots in their marriages and war-worn victorious histories as tribute to their allegorical heritage of "Roman" warriors did--as did Romans did somehow repeat the triumphant ride of chariots as did the Egyptian Pharoahs in their tomb paintings--yes, there was a general truth in being perceive an allegorical parallel, the images that Court de Gebelin recognized and 'rediscovered'.
We might today say that he had a genius moment and a flash of art recognition of a historic allegorical parallel. I'd say his poetic imagination recognition can be loosely generalized as 'genius' and an imaginative triumph.
It was a huge, huge leap that had some half-obscured images of the Egyptian royalty held some resemblence to tarot images--at least in the Chariot, we might see a loose connection.
His overall conclusions were wrong that the trumps were the true wisdom of a golden age that sages and savants hid in plain sight. But they did know that in the Victorian age. Although past associations did also assign their own mythologies to the tarot. For us, we tend to keep assigning psychological perceptions to the parade of images in cards and cartomancy.
It took a few generations and lots of examination of tarot mythology over and over for us twentieth-to-twenti-first century folks to 'rediscover' what tarot writers have written over and over... again and again. Probably our love of psychology and tarot allegories will be seen indulgently by future generations as a kind of folklore of our ages...
You might say one beginning of tarot mythology was an odd circumstance that led a Swiss expatriate pastor with an assumed courtly name to associating these images of a childish, or other folk pastime of human addiction and fate/fortune to be elevated to the realm of a lost wisdom. Isn't that the stuff of myths and romance enough? And it is history...as I now know it right now. Maybe that will change...
And we, who love modern tarot allegories for what they have become through generations of the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth and twenti-first century--we are making the prophesy that we can encode and associate wisdom with old game images and to be true, for some of us. Why not? It's an exercise of creative imagination that is most humanly artful and fun...
This part of the divination and occult history of this 'tarot myth' is true. And we get to be a part of it!
Thanks for the fun questions...what lovely discussion and insights I've read and am checking out.
Cerulean