This chapter in process of revision April 2017. I have not yet revised the footnotes.
250 YEARS OF HISTORY: THE TAROT TRUMPS AS A RENAISSANCE RE-IMAGINING OF AN ANCIENT UNIVERSAL PHILOSOPHY
In this preliminary chapter, I will first give a summary of the history of tarot cards over the period that I am considering. Then I will go over some of the esoteric currents that co-existed with the tarot in the same times and places.
1. History I: from Asia to Africa to Europe:
In the chapters on specific tarot cards, I will be comparing tarot images of 1440-1761 with one another and with images from classical mythology as then understood and portrayed. This introductory chapter will provide background material. Much of what I have to say has been said before. However I am also adding relatively new material from tarot forums on the Internet.
This section will cover playing cards before tarot, and then the specific decks I will be looking at, from Milan, Ferrara, Florence, and Bologna to Lyon, Paris, and Marseille. And I will limit myself to what has been documented, the probable rather than the possible, and history rather than legend.
The story starts not in ancient Egypt or even Rome, but in northern China. The invention of rag-based paper made it possible to make stiff, durable cards, and card games were used by the 900's. There were three and four-suit decks, numbered 1 through 9, with pictures of coins, strings of coins (resembling sticks), myriads of strings, tens of myriads, and extra cards with people on them. The particular type of game that tarot became associated with, trick-taking, was in place by the 1100's, using cards based on dominoes in two suits. (1)
Playing cards worked their way west, following the trade routes, and developing along the way. By not later than 1300, they had reached the Muslim lands of the eastern Mediterranean, then ruled by the Mamluks of Egypt. The cards now had four suits, with 10 numbered cards plus a king, a minister, and an assistant minister. A deck with 47 out of 56 cards is preserved in the Topkapi Museum in Istanbul. The suits are coins (like its Chinese forebear), curved swords (i.e. scimitars), cups, and polo sticks. Polo was popular in Muslim lands but had long died out in Europe. The designs, from the 1400's, are strikingly like those of the Italian proto-tarot of the same time-period. The cards for ministers were abstract designs, although other surviving Muslim cards do show seated and riding persons. (2)
In Europe, there are records that might refer to playing cards early in the 1300's, in Marseille and Barcelona. Decks clearly reached many places in Europe by around 1377, in substantially the Mamluk form. A record in Viterbo has them brought by "Saracens." There and in Catalonia the term for the game is "naibs," presumably after the Arabic word for "deputy." Church records of that time show numerous condemnations of playing cards, after centuries of condemning many things, but never cards. (3).
In fact, the records are so silent, or so clearly changed after the fact when there does seem to be an earlier reference, that it has become a dogma of tarot history that that playing cards did not exist in Europe before the 14th century. But there is a remark by tarot historian Andy Pollett that sets me wondering. Pollett cites a 1227 travel account--of uncertain accuracy, to be sure, but not discredited-- about the children of Italian nobles playing with illustrations on "carticellas," a name suggesting small pictures made of paper or pasteboard. (4)
It seems to me that the Church would not have condemned children's use of cards in games with instructional purposes. Even the mid-1400’s “triumph” decks may have been made primarily for children’s use, probably with instruction in mind. If the record is silent about cards before the 14th century, that may be because children's games weren't considered worth mentioning. I conclude that we don’t know when, once stiff paper was manufactured in Europe, playing cards were first used. All we know is that playing cards with numbers and courts weren't used by adults before the 1300's. (5)
After 1377, it is certain, cards quickly became a popular form of adult entertainment. In Northern Europe, the Muslim symbols were changed to a variety of themes—hunting animals is one example; another is the German system of acorns, oak leaves, and hearts. The games were primarily trick-taking ones. The player with the highest card in the suit led won the trick, and then led the next one. Beyond that, complexities varied from game to game. (6)
References, from Asia to Europe.
1 Michael Dummett, The Game of Tarot 1980, pp 34ff. Trick-taking is p. 63.
2. Malmuk cards: http://it.geocities.com/a_pollett/cards64.htm. Brella-Brambilla cards: http://it.geocities.com/a_pollett/cards34.htm.
3. Dummett, pp. 10ff., 43ff.
4. 1227: http://l-pollett.tripod.com/cards3.htm.
5. children: http://trionfi.com/0/f/05/.
6. different decks: http://l-pollett.tripod.com/cards3.htm. Trick-taking: Dummett, Game of Tarot p. 53. Some early decks are at http://www.poker168.com/bwg/bwg_pk1.htm.
2. History II: Karnoffel, Emperors, and the Triumphs of Milan. In German-speaking lands, the 1420’s saw an important innovation, the game “Karnoffel.” For the suit of whatever the first upturned card was, some of its cards had special powers. The deuce could take any trick, for example. Instead of having their usual prosaic numbers, they were called “The Devil,” “The Emperor,” the Over-taker, the Under-taker, etc. It was Carnival time (probably the origin of "Karnoffel," everything topsy-turvy). In Italy there was a game called "VIII Imperatori,“ i.e. "Eight Emperors”, perhaps similar to Karnoffel and perhaps not. It may have simply added an Emperor and an Empress to each of the four suits; they may or may not have formed a hierarchy of their own. It is here where the decidedly European idea of the "trump suit" is in process of being born, although at first not with a special set of cards distinctly a fifth suit. (1)
The 1420's saw another important innovation, in Milan. Duke Filippo Maria Visconti's secretary, Martiano da Tortona, proposed a pack with suits illustrated by four different types of birds. There were also four sets of four gods and demi-gods, ruled over by a chief god. Probably the only court cards were the kings. The rules specified by Martiano specified that all the orders of gods took precedence over all the suit cards and kings. In other words, they act like what in modern card games would be called trumps. (2)
Also in the 1420s, there was other activity that might have been associated with the new game. In Milan, there was at least one "triumph" procession of floats, the themes modeled on Petrarch's poem "Il Trionfi," in which Chastity triumphed over Love, Death over Chastity, Fame over Death, and Eternity over Fame. Love and Death are clearly themes of the tarot, and probably the others are as well, although not so-named. In Bologna, the humanist Leon Alberti wrote a play based on 20 triumphs. In Ferrara of 1422, there was a purchase order for 13 cards--but whether for 13 special cards, or 13 replacement cards to an existing deck, is unknown. In any case, the idea of a sequence of special cards, each triumphing over, or trumping, as we would say now, the ones before, was in the air. (3)
Through the use of such references, people who knew them would have an advantage when playing the game. Although the precise rules at the beginning aren't known, it was clearly a trick-taking game where an important part of being able to win was being able to remember what important cards (mainly, the trumps and kings) had already been played. Classical references would have enabled players to construct narratives as they went along. To remember which cards had been played, all that players had to do was repeat to themselves the story they had constructed up to that point. The more references, the easier it would be to construct such narratives. A similar procedure enabled orators and actors remember long speeches. (8)
In the 17th and 18th century "secret societies" developed which may have imparted some of the less accessible information to its members. To the extent that this information, taken literally, went against Christian doctrine, there would have been reason, in these heresy-hunting times, to keep it secret. However I want to stress that it is not the information itself that would have been secret, as anyone with a knowledge of Greek and access to a good library would be able to get it; it is the endorsement of such data, as important in the business of self-realization, that would have been kept from those in the business of persecuting heterodox ideas.
Cultural Context III: Egyptian and Greek "Mysteries." In 1958, Edgar Wind's Pagan Mysteries of the Renaissance provided a framework for understanding some Renaissance art as an attempt, drawing on classical texts and images, to metaphorically recover ancient mysteries of Greece and Rome. Wind gave vivid examples, primarily in visual art, but also in poetry and drama. Art historians ever since have been following Wind's lead. I am going to apply the same approach to tarot cards.
Exactly when the Orphics began is unclear. Probably it was sometime in the 5th century b.c. in the Greek colonies of southern Italy. They may have been an offshoot of the Pythagoreans. Late in the Roman Empire (4th century c.e. according to Harrison in Prolegomena to Greek Religion, p. 624, in Google Books) they are characterized by an allegiance to a set of poems called "Orphic hymns," mythically attributed to a man named Orpheus. These hymns reworked the old myths, especially the myths about Dionysus, into a new framework and cult. Eventually it became so close in practice to early Christianity that Christians charged that it had been invented by the Devil as a clever trap! Plato and the his followers show considerable Orphic influence. (1)
For Roman-era writers about mythology, Dionysus and Osiris, despite being gods of different countries, Egypt and Greece, were treated interchangeably (Wind, p. 174, cites Herodotus II, 48; Plutarch Isis and Osiris 28; Servius, In Georgica I.166). Their cults were separate but interconnected. The differences did not bother the Roman-era writers.
In mid-15th century Italy, Bessarion and, for the time he was in Italy, his teacher Plethon, were earlier Greek mystery-loving Christians. Bessarion's home in Rome functioned as a kind of unofficial academy of learning. A letter he wrote to the sons of his deceased teacher Plethon gives the tone:
For Bessarion and, most likely, the humanists of the Roman Academy, the myths of the Greco-Roman world were not to be taken literally, but metaphorically, as Plato treated them in his works. to represent in sensory terms the inexpressible experience of the divine, as well as for their moral lessons. That is how the Grail stories were taken, and why Dante put pagan mythological figures in his Divine Comedy. Some went further, into Kabbala as well. For Pico della Mirandola, as Wind summarizes him (p. 21), "Cabbalistic thought and pagan imagery might...become new handmaidens of Christian theology."
Pico talks about the Greek mysteries as something to be attained anew. In his Oration he proclaims:
I propose that students of Greek and Latin combed the classics for references to Dionysian "mysteries" and that some of the results are suggested in the Marseille-style tarot. I am developing here a theory about the Marseille tarot that has been presented in French on the Web by "Daimonax" (http://www.bacchos.org/tarothtm/index.html). But his theory of how Dionysian mysteries got into the tarot, that they were preserved in the initiation rituals of acting companies, is hard to believe; the classics alone can account for what he finds.
Another source for "mysteries" starting in the 15th century was the so-called "Chaldean Oracles," a group of sayings probably from 2nd century Hellenized Syria, known through quotations by the so-called Neoplatonists of the 4th and 5th centuries. They seem to be a fusion of Middle Platonist philosophy with Babylonian religious rituals, probably Zoroastrian in origin. Italian humanists became aware of them as a distinct group through an edition and commentary by Gemistos Plethon, a Greek who visited Forence in 1439-1440 and lectured there during a conclave that sought to unify the Greek and Latin churches. This edition and commentary someohow came to Ficino in the 1460s, and perhaps to others as well, the most likely being Filelfo in Milan. Plethon's edition was based on an earlier one by Michael Psellos, and it, too was translated by Ficino. Other sayings besides the ones Plethon included were also known, even in the 1460s by Filelfo, and an expanded collection of "Oracles" was published in 1597. I will endeavor to show similarities between the tarot and these sayings.
Cultural Context IV: Neopythagoreanism. Fragments of Pythagorean philosophy found in Aristotle and other ancient writers had exerted an influence on Christian writers since Clement of Alexandria, particularly in the School of Chartres of the 13th century.
There were two sorts of ancient Pythagoreans. First, those referred to by Plato and Aristotle, of the 6th century, followers of Pythagoras, who according to legend founded a school in Italy in the 6th century. Then there was a revival of Pythagoreanism called Neopythagoreanism, starting in the first century b.c. and continuing through the Neoplatonists Macrobius, Porphyry, and Iamblicus.
Neopythagorean number theory focused on the numbers one through ten. Several ancient texts were available during the early years of the tarot, in both Latin and Greek. The most extensive, and the one I find applies most readily to the tarot, is the Theologumena Arithmeticae, or "Theology of Arithmetic," a text that was initially part of the collection of Bessarion, the Greek prelate turned Roman Catholic Cardinal. After Bessarion's 1469 death, his collection became the nucleus of the Biblioteca Marciana of the Republic of Venice, available for borrowing by qualified citizens. There were copies of Bessarion's manuscript in Florence and Naples. The copy in Florence reportedly contains marginal notations in the handwriting of the Florentine scholar Poliziano. He may have been the one who introduced Neopythagoreanism into the tarot, perhaps with with his friend Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. Poliziano and Pico traveled together to the various libraries of Italy in the late 1480s. They both had homoerotic leanings--a tendency quite noticable in the Sola-Busca deck--and were killed together in Florence in 1494, by arsenic poisoning; whether it was intentional or through using it as a medicine is not known, but they died shortly after a banquet that both attended.
A copy of the Theologumena Arithmeticae arrived in Paris eventually, and in 1547 the Greek text was printed in Paris. The next translation had to wait until 1988, with Robin Waterfield's translation into English.
There were also writings in Latin that presented Neopythagorean number theory, notably Macrobius's Commentary on the Dream of Scipio and Martinus Capella's Marriage between Mercury and Philology, continuously available in manuscript and in print starting in the late 15th century. In the 16th century there was a section on the first ten number of Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy, 1533. In addition, various Church Fathers, notably Origen and Augustine but also to some degree Irenaeus, had written on the first ten numbers, adapting Neopythagoreanism to Christian purposes. In the Middle Ages these writings had their own exponents writing in the same spirit.
In the 16th and 17th century there were writers who explicitly applied Pythagorean theory to playing cards. In 1584 Piedmont there was Guillaume D'Ocieux's so-called "tarotica" passage, in which the tarot featured as one of a long series of instances where the number four is prominent, part of a longer work going through examples for each of the first ten numbers. This text was discovered by Andrea Vitali and described, with tentative translations, at http://www.letarot.it/page.aspx?id=293 (to get to an English translation, click on the British flag at the top right of the page). In 1582 another author writing in French, Jean Gosselin in 1582, wrote La signification de l 'ancien jeu des chartes pythagoriques, in which he applied Pythagoreanism to the 32 card deck, of 4 suits each with 8 cards, as used to play the game of Trente e Un. See my account at http://www.letarot.it/page.aspx?id=608.
Cultural context V: Kabbalah. Another current of thought which could be brought to bear on the tarot early on is Kabbalah, as it was accessed during the period 1450-1650. It seems to me that the main texts that would have played a role are those that were available in Latin during that period. That leaves out the Zohar and the writings of the 16th century Kabbalists in the Eastern Mediterranean such as Cordovera and the followers of Luria. One of Cordovera's books was published in 1597 Venice, in Hebrew, with no translation into any language until the late 20th century (into English). It is true that there was a translation of the Zohar done in the 16th century, by Postel, but it was never published ("the Postel translation was never printed to this day": Joseph Dan, "Christian Kabbalah: From Mysticism to Esotericism," in Western Esotericism and the Science of Religion, p. 123).
What was available was mainly the following: first, the Kabbalistic Theses in Pico della Mirandola's 1486 900 Theses; secondly Reuchlin's 1517 book Art of the Kabbalah; third, Paul Ricci's 1515 abridged Latin translation of Gikkatilla's c. 1300 Gates of Light, which dated from about 1300; and fourth, Agrippa's 1533 Three Books of Occult Philosophy. Of these, the first three are by and large consistent with one another; Agrippa seems to have had additional sources. (It is true that Agrippa wrote a version of his Three Books in 1510. But that version contained no Kabbalah, according to Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl in Saturn and Melancholy. "The cabbalsitic element was entirely lacking," they declare (p. 352), based on a detailed examination of the manuscript.)
All of these works discuss the ten sefiroth, some more and some less. It seems to me most natural that Christian esotericists of the time. if they applied Kabbalah to the tarot at all, would have applied the doctrine of the sefiroth. There were 11 entities, if one included the En Sof as well as the 10 sefiroth. Gikatilla even used another concept, "Da'at," but it mostly meant the middle line rather than an independent entity of its own. Being based on 10, they are a natural complement to Neopythagorean number theory.
At the same time, none of these works discuss "paths" between sefiroth, except in terms of the flow of energy down the tree. (For example, for Gikattilla, Tifereth got energy from both sides, and so did all the sefiroth below them.) These did not become important in Kabbalah until Cordovera assigned one to each of the 22 Hebrew letters in 16th century Palestine. The early pictures of the Tree of Life show fewer than 22. I count 15 on the Tree shown on the frontispiece of the Portae Lucis.
I also will not be using the Sefer Yetsirah, or Book of Formation, another work of Jewish mysticism that may even predate Kabbalah. It correlates the planets, signs of the zodiac, and three of the four elements with the 22 Hebew letters. It is possible that letters correlated with cards, but the assignments to planets do not correlate with what I see in Pico. And Agrippa has something else entirely. I do not see what these correlations add to what is already a rich association to Greco-Roman imagery; at best they suggest a dogmatic narrowing of possibilities. I would rather focus on gods and myths than planets and zodiac signs.
One early parallel to tarot has to do with a poem that Mateo Boairdo wrote having a stanza for each of 78 cards of an imagined card game, 22 trumps and four suits. Two of the suits represent vices and two represent virtues. In the poem, each vice has a corresponding virtues, so that a particular virtue opposes and "drives out" the corresponding vice. The same structure can be found in the account of virtues and vices in the Corpus Hermeticum Tractate 13, where 12 vices "retreat before" 10 virtues. Pico calls attention to this passage in the part of the 900 Theses on "Mercury the Egyptian"; he says that the vices there correspond to the Kellipoi, or evil powers, in Kabbalah; but he cannot say more because it is secret. Pico's work was published Dec. 1, 1486. The date that Trionfi.com suspects for the appearance of the poem (at a d'Este wedding in Ferrara) is Jan. 1487. Boiardo was Pico's older cousin.
Cultural Context VI. Alchemy. The 14th and 15th centuries were a major period of popularity for alchemy, which continued into the 16th and 17th centuries. Alchemical works used a combination of text and pictures. It presented its material in discreet stages, many with accompanying illustrations, with both a spiritual and a material goal. The stages usually involved symbolic death, transformation, and spiritual rebirth. Like the tarot, the alchemists used Greco-Roman myth as well as Christian imagery. Their numerous arrays in the form of trees, with circles placed on them designating planets or alchemical stages, also suggest the Kabbalists' Tree of Life. Robert O'Neil (Tarot Symbolism pp. 264-291) found points of contact between alchemy and tarot in every one of the trumps. I will be following in his footsteps.
Some surviving alchemical texts antedated or were contemporaneous with the first tarot. The Turbo Philosophorum, an anthology of Arabic sources, was part of the Visconti Library in Milan.
A so-called "Arnaldian" work (from Arnald of Villanova) called the Rosarium Philosophorum existed in manuscript by the end of the 14th century. Urszula Sculakowska, in The Alchemy of Light (2000), says that illustrated versions circulated by 1400, called “Rosarium cum figuris” (p. 25, at http://books.google.com/books?id=ZJox8E ... um&f=false).
Before that, Chaucer spoke of it, and in anthropomorphic terms, in his “Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale” (late 14th century). In the “Rosarie” of “Arnold,” the Yeoman tells us, Sol and Luna are said to be the father and mother of the dragon Mercury and his brother "brimstoon"(lines 1418-1447, at (http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl- ... an-can.htm). This is not the plot of the Rosarium, but of some other Arnaldian work; but the passage shows how early and widespread the Rosarium and other Arnaldian works were known, and the metaphors they used.
A German work called the Heilege Dreifaltigkeit (Holy Trinity) existed by 1408 and survives in several early 15th century manuscripts. A copy was owned by the father of the Duchess of Mantua, Barbara of Brandenburg; she in turn was a close friend of Bianca Maria Sforza, who is intimately connected with the early Milanese tarot.
Another set of alchemical illustrations occurs in a book that doesn't even discuss alchemy, a commentary on the early Christian writer Fulgentius. It is nominally about the Greco-Roman gods; but the illustrations are unmistakably alchemical in character, as Stanislaus de Rola analyzed them in his 1973 Alchemy: the Secret Art.
We will have occasion to visit all these texts and illustrations many times, for their parallels in the imagery of the early tarot.
Cultural Context VII: Fortune telling. Finally, there is the popular tradition of fortune telling. Although the deck was primarily used in a trick-taking game, it is possible tht the cards were also used for divination, as there are 21 number-combinations of two dice, for which there were divination manuals. There were also "lot books" of 20, 22, or some other number of verses with advice or predictons; a German one exists that dates to 1450, and surely they existed before that. These lot books have some affinity with tarot, especially the Florentine version with more trumps known as Minchiate. Ross Caldwell discovered a mention of sortilege with tarot in the writings of Pico's nephew. Ordinary playing cards were also used in sortilege, probably more so than tarot. (11)
One device for divination was "Pythagoras' Wheel": one asked a question and the fortune-teller did a number-letter correlation for one's name or birthplace, added the numbers, and looked for it in the center of the card. If the number was on the top half of the card, the answer was yes; if not, no (Heninger, Touches of Sweet Harmony: Pythagorean Cosmology and Renaissance Poetics, p. 238; the image was originally in Christophe de Cattan, The Geomancie, trans. Francis Sparry, London 1591, but according to Heninger the "wheel" is from Venice a century earlier.)
An early example using cards with numbers attached is described in Cartwright, Isabella d'Este, marchioness of Mantua, 1474-1539; a study of the renaissance : she reads the "mystic numbers" in a game called "lotto." Cartwright speaks of "the Lotto cards with the mystic number XXVII, vinti sette, signifying that she had vanquished all her foes." "Lotto" is Italian for "lot" or "fate." Although here the year is c. 1523, these cards with "mystic numbers" are first referred to in the account of her life in c. 1490, the beginning of her years in Mantua. (12)
An example explicitly from tarot is in the 1527 epic poem "The Chaos of Triperuno," by the Italian poet Teofilo Folengo. In one section of the poem, Folengo has one of his characters, named Limerno, recite five sonnets that he composed relating to the tarocchi. Limerno says that four people, two men and two women, drew five trumps each and constructed their "destinies" based on it. They asked the character to compose sonnets incorporating the five cards. The sonnets are not exactly "destinies" but rather moral advice in a narrative using the five titles of the cards. (13)
That, too, counts as divination, it seems to me. When astrologers cast horoscopes to determine favorable days for their patrons to wage war, they, too, were giving advice based on what the "stars" said. Divination was not a matter of predicting an inexorable future or "fate.
I have no idea when divination assumed the importance it suddenly had in the late 18th century for Etteilla and his school. His first book, c. 1771, had to do with a Piquet deck, that is, ordinary cards with the 2-5's omitted. The only sign before that is in mid 18th century Bologna (http://www.tarotpedia.com/wiki/Bolognese_Tarot_Divination). Decker et al in A Wicked Pack of Cards suggest, based on the evidence of Etteilla, that there was a tradition of French cartomancy about which we know nothing:
Anothing thing that is clear from Etteilla is that whatever stream fed his brand of cartomancy, it did not include astrology. The subject is not mentioned in his first book of 1773, and it only appears in the fourth Cahier as a kind of afterthought. Using the correspondences that he assignes between the 12 signs of the zodiac and the first 12 trumps, and those between the 10 number cards of Coins and the planets plus 3 other planet-like attributes of horoscopes, one may do a card-reading based on a the astrological configuration present at a person's birth. But that is astrology's only role in Etteilla's system. It plays no role in the reading once the cards are chosen. It is probably for that reason that the divination manuals of the Etteilla School make no mention of astrology whatsoever.
References, Cultural Context:
1. In J. Karlin, trans. and ed. Rhapsodies of the Bizarre. Another good translation is at http://www.tarotpedia.com/wiki/Du_Jeu_Des_Tarots.
2. Hidden stream: Christine Payne-Towler, The Underground Stream. An unfavorable review at http://www.aeclectic.net/tarot/books/underground-stream/. A summary by her is at: http://tarot.com/about-tarot/library/essays/history.
3. Petrarch: Gertrude Moakley, The Tarot cards painted by Beonifacio Bembo for the Visconti-Sforza family, 1966. A translation and analysis of Petrarch's poem is at http://infomotions.com/etexts/gutenberg/dirs/1/7/6/5/17650/17650.htm.
4. Handbooks: The best is Vincente Cartari, Imagines Deorum, Qui Ab Antiquis Colebrant, 1551, at http://www.uni-mannheim.de/mateo/camenaref/cartari.html. Italian edition,
Imagini delli Dei de gl'Antiche, 1647, reprinted 1963. Digitalized, Italian text only, at http://www.bibliotecaitaliana.it/xtf/view?docId=bibit000718/bibit000718.xml. Seznec: Jean Seznec, Survival of the Pagan Gods. Much of this book is on-line at http://books.google.com/books?id=YOISgWIQE7AC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Seznec+Survival+of+the+Pagan+Gods&source=bl&ots=UtV_j-iMxo&sig=0LHy9CxXqq0CEVvHw9eEp8LEPEI&hl=en&ei=RfqxTcTfIomusAOQqpn-Cw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CCoQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q&f=false.
7. On tarot as hieroglyphs, for full documentation see my posts on Aeclectic Tarot Forum on the thread http://www.tarotforum.net/showthread.php?t=94755, starting on p. 5 at post 43. Another presentation, with some discussion, is at http://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=603.
8. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_of_memory. The classic account is Frances Yates, The Art of Memory.
9. Jane Ellen Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion - Google Books Result Also numerous other studies, cited as we go.
10. "Daimonax," at http://bacchos.org/. Greco-Egyptian: Mary Greer, http://marygreer.wordpress.com/events/. On a possible Greco-Egyptian connection, Michael Poe, http://www.denelder.com/tarot/tarot034.html, is not credible as he presents it, and has not been verified by others (see http://www.luxlapis.co.za/at/serapis_02.htm). However his proposed images do correspond to those of the Egyptian-style cults of the Roman Empire.
10a. For documentation on the Chaldean Oracles, see my posts at http://www.tarotforum.net/showthread.php?t=160976&page=3 and following, starting bottom of this page 3 and going on for many pages.
11. Divination: Place, Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination, pp. 118 ff. Also http://geocities.com/cartedatrionfi/Fragments/1480-1539.html, scroll to "Lot Books I."'
12. Quoted by Huck at http://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=432.
13. Kaplan, Enclyopedia of Tarot Vol. II, pp. 8-9. See also the thread on Tarot History Forum starting at http://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=759.
22 Invocations of Dionysus. To summarize the cards and the myths as an initiatory sequence relating to the cult of Dionysus, based on documented mythic imagery in ancient works of art or literature, I have written a set of one-line Invocations. Each one addresses the god with a different one of his numerous Greek epithets, each starting with a different letter, following the order of the Greek alphabet. Although the Greek alphabet has 24 letters, I could find no epithets for Dionysus starting with the letters Rho (R) or Upsilon (Y). Along with the 22 Invocations, I have put explanations for each. (1)
My idea for these invocations was stimulated by a set of ancient epithets of various pagan gods that was attached to the cards in 1936 by a Swedish scholar named Sigurd Agrell. People after him, of course, have suggested that this system was in use during the Roman Empire and then became the basis for the tarot. Each Latin epithet begins with a different letter of the Latin alphabet, which then corresponds, in order, for 22 of its 23 letters (Yes, there are now 26, but "w" was added in the Middle Ages, and "u" and "j" in the 18th century; "y" was never used to start a word, and then only for Greek words imported into Latin). Since the list is one that easily could have been made up in the 20th century, I decided to try doing the same with just the epithets for Dionysus. I wish to emphasize that I claim no ancient origin for these invocations, just for the epithets themselves. (3)
The cards they are meant to correspond to are the trumps of the Marseille pattern, the one which began in the Cary Sheet, has its first full expression in Noblet, 1650, and its most popular version in Conver 1760 and 1761.
Unfortunately most of these historical decks are not for sale in the United States. But much of it is reproduced, in variable quality, on the Web. Among the historical "Marseille" style decks, Jean-Claude Flornoy has published a deck restoring the original colors for the Noblet; the trumps are available for viewing on his website along with the originals, and the same for the Dodal which came a little later. The 1761 Conver has been "restored" by Camoin and Jodorowsky, viewable on their website; however they have added details and distributed colors on some of the cards differently from the originals; for that reason if I use their version of a card, which is often quite stunning, if it departs from the original, I will say what they have added. More often I use the Heron's reproductions of the 1761 Conver original, and sometimes the 1760 version by the same publisher (which has a less effective choice of colors), and sometimes the "Chosson" of 1672. (4)
Plan of this Study. To look at how the tarot was understood in its first known 230 years, I will first examine its Christian associations, for the tarot was of necessity a game that wanted, and on the whole got, acceptance by the Church. Then there are Egyptian associations, mostly from Greek sources, for those who wanted the cards to reflect the mystery tradition of Isis and Osiris. Third are the Dionysian and other Greco-Roman associations, as reflecting what the Renaissance would have imagined for Greek and Roma cults grounded in Greco-Roman myth. In one case, the Pope card, I have also found Mithraic imagery. Then I will discuss Pythagorean, Kabbalist, and alchemical associations, connecting the imagery of the cards with writings accessible in the period.
The Pythagorean associations for the cards have mostly to do with the numbers that are on the cards in the Marseille-style sequence. The Neopythagorean account of the number has many points of contact with what is on the card and what the other cultural associations bring out. At the same time, the Pythagorean account seems to relate to the corresponding suit cards as well. Here the imagery on the Marseille-style cards, except for the Aces, is rather meager. So I rely on two other sources: first, the word-lists that were published by the Etteilla School in around 1791. These probably draw from an earlier cartomantic tradition. And second, the Sola-Busca suit cards of 1491. These are the only complete deck before the Waite-Smith of 1910 to have specific scenes drawn on the number cards, similar in style to those on the trumps. I see an uncanny correlation between the cards and the Etteilla School lists, which also correlate with the Neopythagorean accounts of the different numbers in the Theologumena Arithmeticae.
References, Invocations and Plan of Study:
1. Epithets: several lists on-line: e.g. (a) http://www.theoi.com/Cult/DionysosTitles.html. (b) http://www.wildivine.org/dionysos_epithets.htm. Search "epithets Dionysus." I also include an amalgamation of all the epithets I could find as an Appendix. Greek alphabet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_alphabet.
2. 12 step programs: e.g. at http://www.12step.org/.
3. Sigurd Agrell: see p. 122ff of Hermetic Magic: The Postmodern Magical Papyrus of Abaris - Google Books Result. An extended application to tarot is at: http://www.latintarotkey.com/. It claims to be a Mithraic analysis but is in fact pagan eclectic.
4. Flornoy is at http://www.tarot-history.com/. For Camoin-Jodorowsky, see http://en.camoin.com/tarot/-Home-en-.html. Various decks are as follows:
"Anonymous Parisian": http://www.poker168.com/bwg/bwg_tl7.htm
Brera-Brambilla (2 triumphs): http://www.storiadimilano.it/Arte/carte_gioco.htm. Scroll down.
Cary-Visconti (Cary-Yale): http://www.tarot.org.il/Cary%20Yale/. or, for suit cards, too:
http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/dl_crosscollex/. Search "Cary Visconti."
Cary Sheet: http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/dl_crosscollex/. Search "Cary Sheet 3s".
Castello Ursino (3 out of 4): http://trionfi.com/0/j/d/charlesvi/.
Catelin Geoffrey: http://www.poker168.com/bwg/bwg_tl6.htm
Chosson 1672 (search "Chosson"): http://tarotchoco.quebecblogue.com/tdm-edition-de-francois-chosson-photoshoped-arcanes-majeurs/
Conver 1760 original: http://en.camoin.com/tarot/Tarot-Marseilles-Nicolas-Conver-1760.html
Conver 1760 recreated by Camoin 1960:
http://tarotchoco.quebecblogue.com/tdm-de-nicolas-conver-edition-du-bicentenaire-camoin-arcanes-majeurs/
Conver 1761 original
http://www.interhobby.net/tarot/viCard.php3?Code=545÷ID=AM.
Conver 1761, Camoin-Jodorowsky 1999 "recreation":
http://en.camoin.com/tarot/Tarot-cards-Slide-show.html
d’Este: http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/dl_crosscollex/. Search "d'este."
Dodal originals and recreation: http://www.tarot-history.com/Jean-Dodal/index.html
Gringonneur (Charles VI): all 16 triumphs at http://www.poker168.com/bwg/bwg_tl4.htm. Better quality of 12 of them, plus the 1 suit card, at http://expositions.bnf.fr/renais/arret/3/index.htm
Minchiate: http://www.unics.uni-hannover.de/rrzn/endebrock/coll/pages/i31.html
Noblet originals and re-creation: http://www.tarot-history.com/Jean-Noblet/index.html
Rosenwald Sheet: http://trionfi.com/0/j/d/rosenwald/.
Rothschild sheets (2 of them, here called "Bolognese tarocchi"): http://trionfi.com/0/j/d/bologna/.
Rothschild card (which I do not use; Emperor is only triumph): http://trionfi.com/0/c/40/.
Sola-Busca: http://www.tarotpedia.com/wiki/Sola-Busca_gallery.
Tarot of Mantegna: http://trionfi.com/0/j/d/Mantegna/.
Visconti-Sforza (PMB): http://www.tarot.com/tarot/decks/index.php?deckID=35. Among the trumps on this site, the Devil and Tower cards are modern additions; the card names are modern, too.
1. History I: from Asia to Africa to Europe:
In the chapters on specific tarot cards, I will be comparing tarot images of 1440-1761 with one another and with images from classical mythology as then understood and portrayed. This introductory chapter will provide background material. Much of what I have to say has been said before. However I am also adding relatively new material from tarot forums on the Internet.
This section will cover playing cards before tarot, and then the specific decks I will be looking at, from Milan, Ferrara, Florence, and Bologna to Lyon, Paris, and Marseille. And I will limit myself to what has been documented, the probable rather than the possible, and history rather than legend.
The story starts not in ancient Egypt or even Rome, but in northern China. The invention of rag-based paper made it possible to make stiff, durable cards, and card games were used by the 900's. There were three and four-suit decks, numbered 1 through 9, with pictures of coins, strings of coins (resembling sticks), myriads of strings, tens of myriads, and extra cards with people on them. The particular type of game that tarot became associated with, trick-taking, was in place by the 1100's, using cards based on dominoes in two suits. (1)
Playing cards worked their way west, following the trade routes, and developing along the way. By not later than 1300, they had reached the Muslim lands of the eastern Mediterranean, then ruled by the Mamluks of Egypt. The cards now had four suits, with 10 numbered cards plus a king, a minister, and an assistant minister. A deck with 47 out of 56 cards is preserved in the Topkapi Museum in Istanbul. The suits are coins (like its Chinese forebear), curved swords (i.e. scimitars), cups, and polo sticks. Polo was popular in Muslim lands but had long died out in Europe. The designs, from the 1400's, are strikingly like those of the Italian proto-tarot of the same time-period. The cards for ministers were abstract designs, although other surviving Muslim cards do show seated and riding persons. (2)
In Europe, there are records that might refer to playing cards early in the 1300's, in Marseille and Barcelona. Decks clearly reached many places in Europe by around 1377, in substantially the Mamluk form. A record in Viterbo has them brought by "Saracens." There and in Catalonia the term for the game is "naibs," presumably after the Arabic word for "deputy." Church records of that time show numerous condemnations of playing cards, after centuries of condemning many things, but never cards. (3).
In fact, the records are so silent, or so clearly changed after the fact when there does seem to be an earlier reference, that it has become a dogma of tarot history that that playing cards did not exist in Europe before the 14th century. But there is a remark by tarot historian Andy Pollett that sets me wondering. Pollett cites a 1227 travel account--of uncertain accuracy, to be sure, but not discredited-- about the children of Italian nobles playing with illustrations on "carticellas," a name suggesting small pictures made of paper or pasteboard. (4)
It seems to me that the Church would not have condemned children's use of cards in games with instructional purposes. Even the mid-1400’s “triumph” decks may have been made primarily for children’s use, probably with instruction in mind. If the record is silent about cards before the 14th century, that may be because children's games weren't considered worth mentioning. I conclude that we don’t know when, once stiff paper was manufactured in Europe, playing cards were first used. All we know is that playing cards with numbers and courts weren't used by adults before the 1300's. (5)
After 1377, it is certain, cards quickly became a popular form of adult entertainment. In Northern Europe, the Muslim symbols were changed to a variety of themes—hunting animals is one example; another is the German system of acorns, oak leaves, and hearts. The games were primarily trick-taking ones. The player with the highest card in the suit led won the trick, and then led the next one. Beyond that, complexities varied from game to game. (6)
References, from Asia to Europe.
1 Michael Dummett, The Game of Tarot 1980, pp 34ff. Trick-taking is p. 63.
2. Malmuk cards: http://it.geocities.com/a_pollett/cards64.htm. Brella-Brambilla cards: http://it.geocities.com/a_pollett/cards34.htm.
3. Dummett, pp. 10ff., 43ff.
4. 1227: http://l-pollett.tripod.com/cards3.htm.
5. children: http://trionfi.com/0/f/05/.
6. different decks: http://l-pollett.tripod.com/cards3.htm. Trick-taking: Dummett, Game of Tarot p. 53. Some early decks are at http://www.poker168.com/bwg/bwg_pk1.htm.
2. History II: Karnoffel, Emperors, and the Triumphs of Milan. In German-speaking lands, the 1420’s saw an important innovation, the game “Karnoffel.” For the suit of whatever the first upturned card was, some of its cards had special powers. The deuce could take any trick, for example. Instead of having their usual prosaic numbers, they were called “The Devil,” “The Emperor,” the Over-taker, the Under-taker, etc. It was Carnival time (probably the origin of "Karnoffel," everything topsy-turvy). In Italy there was a game called "VIII Imperatori,“ i.e. "Eight Emperors”, perhaps similar to Karnoffel and perhaps not. It may have simply added an Emperor and an Empress to each of the four suits; they may or may not have formed a hierarchy of their own. It is here where the decidedly European idea of the "trump suit" is in process of being born, although at first not with a special set of cards distinctly a fifth suit. (1)
The 1420's saw another important innovation, in Milan. Duke Filippo Maria Visconti's secretary, Martiano da Tortona, proposed a pack with suits illustrated by four different types of birds. There were also four sets of four gods and demi-gods, ruled over by a chief god. Probably the only court cards were the kings. The rules specified by Martiano specified that all the orders of gods took precedence over all the suit cards and kings. In other words, they act like what in modern card games would be called trumps. (2)
Also in the 1420s, there was other activity that might have been associated with the new game. In Milan, there was at least one "triumph" procession of floats, the themes modeled on Petrarch's poem "Il Trionfi," in which Chastity triumphed over Love, Death over Chastity, Fame over Death, and Eternity over Fame. Love and Death are clearly themes of the tarot, and probably the others are as well, although not so-named. In Bologna, the humanist Leon Alberti wrote a play based on 20 triumphs. In Ferrara of 1422, there was a purchase order for 13 cards--but whether for 13 special cards, or 13 replacement cards to an existing deck, is unknown. In any case, the idea of a sequence of special cards, each triumphing over, or trumping, as we would say now, the ones before, was in the air. (3)
At some point the word "triumphs" came to be used for this new kind of deck and its special cards The first record of the word describing a pack of cards is in 1440 Florence, in a diary entry by a notary who sent a deck by that name to Sigismundo Malatesta, lord of Rimini but also a military commander hired by the city of Florence.. However a letter from 1449 used the same word to describe the deck with gods and birds introduced 25 or more years earlier in Milan. The deck appears to have been designed by one Martiano da Tortona, who died in 1425. (4)
The earliest surviving deck of triumphs whose cards can be clearly identified with the traditional tarot imagery is one made in Milan either for the Visconti ruling family or the Sforza who succeeded them. It is sometimes called the Visconti-Sforza deck, but more usually the Cary-Yale, for the name of the last private owner and the current owner, Yale University. (Here I use both terms: in my original draft, I used the term "Visconti-Sforza"; later I changed to the more usual "Cary-Yale.")
Dummett thinks that it is "certain" that it was made for Duke Philippo Visconti before his 1447 death, with 1445 as his best guess. However his main argument, that the suit of Coins contains imprints of actual coins made during the Visconti reign, is inconclusive. The cards could have been made any time after such coins were introduced. And in any case, close inspection shows that the coins on the cards are not identical to any known Visconti coins. They are also not exactly like the coins issued by the Sforza regime that followed. (5)
Dummett thinks that it is "certain" that it was made for Duke Philippo Visconti before his 1447 death, with 1445 as his best guess. However his main argument, that the suit of Coins contains imprints of actual coins made during the Visconti reign, is inconclusive. The cards could have been made any time after such coins were introduced. And in any case, close inspection shows that the coins on the cards are not identical to any known Visconti coins. They are also not exactly like the coins issued by the Sforza regime that followed. (5)
There may be a connection between the earlier Marziano deck, with its Greco-Roman gods, and this first extant deck, of which 11 triumphs survive. The Beinecke Library of Yale University, which currently holds the cards, on its web pages with their pictures, assigns them each to a particular suit, going in order from Swords to Batons to Cups to Coins, with 2 or 3 cards per suit. The curator for the cards states, in emails to me, that the cards came to Yale with these assignments. It seems likely that they go back to the earliest days, since no deck other than the Marziano makes such whole assignments. Assuming that 5 triumphs are missing, that amounts 1 card missing per suit, except for the last one in which 2 are missing. Since only 1 of the 4 cardinal virtues is present in the extant cards, although all 3 of the theological virtues (Faith, Hope, Charity) it is reasonable to assume that 3 of the remaining cards are virtue cards, each assigned to a different suit in accorrdance with a correlation first recorded in the 16th century: Justice to Swords, Temperance to Cups, and Prudence to Coins. Fortitude is the extant virtue card, already assigned in the Beinecke's web-page and catalog, to Batons. Then besides these 7 virtue cards there would be the 6 triumphs of Petrarch's famous poem "Il Trionfi"--all of which have reasonable equivalents in the surviving cards except Time--plus three more cards. Of these the Emperor and the Empress exist among the surviving cards, perhaps taken from the game of "VIII Emperors". The one remaining card is perhaps the Triumph of Fortune, a triumph featured in a poem by Boccaccio that probably inspired Petrarch, the "Amorosa Visione". So in all there are 16 triumphal cards, considering the virtues as triumphal, as they traditionally were shown in overcoming corresponding vices.
Exactly when this change from a Greco-Roman theme to the more Christian one of Petrarch and the triumph of the seven virtues, would have occurred, or where, is unclear. The simplest hypothesis would be Milan in the years immediately after Marziano's death. In the earliest extant deck, that at Yale, the suits of Coins and Cups feataure Visconti heraldics. The suits of Swords and Batons, however, have Sforza heraldics. This suggests the marriage of Francesco Sforza and Bianca Maria Visconti, an event that occurred in October of 1441. Moreover, the style of execution is very much like that of the proposed artist of the cards, Bonifacio Bembo, at that time. Since he was then in his early 20s, he would not have been entrusted with such a commission much earlier. If done then, it would most likely not have been the earliest deck of its type, if that type is merely an adaptation of the Marziano pattern, because it is 16 years after Marziano's death.
There are also alternating heraldic devices on the Love card. These have been thought by many to commemorate the 1428 marriage of Filippo with Maria of Savoy, the Visconti viper alternating with the white cross on red background of Savoy. Moreover, the clothing style in the deck as a whole reflects that period, c. 1430. However that heraldic was also that of the city of Pavia, the second city of the Visconti court. Moreover, the man on the card has a fountain device on his chest, just as it appears in the court cards of Staves. The fountain was a Sforza device. Thus it may be that both alternating heraldics on the banners are Visconti, while Sforza is represented on the man's ches. In this spirit Kaplan said it was "quite possibly" a deck made for the marriage of Bianca Maria Visconti and Francesco Sforza in 1441. Dummett suggests c. 1445. Others, notably Andy Pollett, say that it was most likely done by the Sforzas in 1450 or so, when the white cross had become a Sforza device in virtue of his conquest of the city of Pavia, whose insignia it was. (7)
It seems to me (as it has to many others) that the alternating heraldic banners look very much like banners identifying families. In that case, unless the deck was done after Sforza's capture of Pavia in 1449, the banners on the card would refer either to the 1428 Savoy-Visconti marriage or an earlier one between Bianca of Savoy and Giangaleazzo Visconti. Assuming that the Yale deck is not the first of this type, it would have been a standard feature of that type, a deck not intended for the common citizen but rather the Visconti family for its own use; there would not have been many, because no trace has survived to point to this earlier period, other than these alternating banners..
It seems to me (as it has to many others) that the alternating heraldic banners look very much like banners identifying families. In that case, unless the deck was done after Sforza's capture of Pavia in 1449, the banners on the card would refer either to the 1428 Savoy-Visconti marriage or an earlier one between Bianca of Savoy and Giangaleazzo Visconti. Assuming that the Yale deck is not the first of this type, it would have been a standard feature of that type, a deck not intended for the common citizen but rather the Visconti family for its own use; there would not have been many, because no trace has survived to point to this earlier period, other than these alternating banners..
The deck that survived may be one made for Bianca Maria Visconti around the time of her marriage of 1441 or thereafter, commissioned either by her father (before 1445, when Sforza started working for Venice) or her stepmother (before 1447, when the Ambrosian Republic was declared in Milan), oe around 1450, copying an earlier one as part of a Sforza propaganda campaign to show the continuity of the new regime in Milan with that of the old. In that case, the white cross on red background would have a double meaning, not only as a Savoy device, but also of Francesco Sforza, in virtue of his conquest of the city of Pavia, which used that device. (8)
That the Yale deck was not the first of its type is suggested also by the identity of its artist, Bonifacio Bembo. He was only in his early 20s in 1441, too young for such a commission. But the Bembo were a workshop started by Bonifacio's father in which there were several sons. If they had made previous decks, the assignment would have simply been to the workshop, which then assigned the work as it saw fit, and so to the sons under the supervision of the father; there also would have been drawings of old decks to use as a basis for new ones. (9)
From this deck, as I have said, there survive 11 triumphs and assorted of suit cards. Some suits have male and female pages and male and female knights, for a total of 16 cards per suit. This is another reason for thinking that the number of triumphs was 16, on the principle of there being the same number of cards in the new suit as in the old ones. But Dummett maintained (at least before 2004) that there were likely more, as many as 24 (adding the theological virtues to the standard 21, plus the Fool), supporting the principle that the ratio of trump cards to suit cards would have been 3:2. (10)
Along with the “Cary-Visconti,” or "Cary-Yale," there is one other deck in a similar style, today called the "Brera Brambilla." Only two trump cards survive from that deck, the Emperor and the Wheel of Fortune. That the latter was present is an argument that it was present also in the near-contemporaneous Yale deck. In this deck, enough suit cards are present to be able to say fairly definitely that there were only the standard 14 court cards present, omitting the female Knights and Pages. If so there might have been 14 trumps as well. In Ferrara of New Year's Day 1441, which is before the Sforza-Visconti wedding, there is a record of "14 figures" given to Bianca Maria Sforza then. The Brera-Brambilla could have fit that pattern, whatever it was.
That the Yale deck was not the first of its type is suggested also by the identity of its artist, Bonifacio Bembo. He was only in his early 20s in 1441, too young for such a commission. But the Bembo were a workshop started by Bonifacio's father in which there were several sons. If they had made previous decks, the assignment would have simply been to the workshop, which then assigned the work as it saw fit, and so to the sons under the supervision of the father; there also would have been drawings of old decks to use as a basis for new ones. (9)
From this deck, as I have said, there survive 11 triumphs and assorted of suit cards. Some suits have male and female pages and male and female knights, for a total of 16 cards per suit. This is another reason for thinking that the number of triumphs was 16, on the principle of there being the same number of cards in the new suit as in the old ones. But Dummett maintained (at least before 2004) that there were likely more, as many as 24 (adding the theological virtues to the standard 21, plus the Fool), supporting the principle that the ratio of trump cards to suit cards would have been 3:2. (10)
Along with the “Cary-Visconti,” or "Cary-Yale," there is one other deck in a similar style, today called the "Brera Brambilla." Only two trump cards survive from that deck, the Emperor and the Wheel of Fortune. That the latter was present is an argument that it was present also in the near-contemporaneous Yale deck. In this deck, enough suit cards are present to be able to say fairly definitely that there were only the standard 14 court cards present, omitting the female Knights and Pages. If so there might have been 14 trumps as well. In Ferrara of New Year's Day 1441, which is before the Sforza-Visconti wedding, there is a record of "14 figures" given to Bianca Maria Sforza then. The Brera-Brambilla could have fit that pattern, whatever it was.
And just before that time, there is the record of the deck made in Florence for Sigismund Malatesta.It is hard to say how many triumphs that deck may have included. From Florence the earliest deck that is anywhere near complete is the so-called "Charles VI" (erroneously first thought to have been French from the time of that king), with 16 surviving triumphs, from no earlier than the 1460s. In that deck three tarot subjects appeared that are not among those supposed in the Yale deck (the Moon, the Sun, and the Fool), while none of the three theological virtues are present. On the other hand, a type of tarot native to Florence that is recorded by name in 1466, called minchiate, did have all seven virtues, just as hypothesized for the Cary-Yale, although in a quite different order from that presented at Yale. That may well have characterized the early tarot in Florence as well (a suggestion developed by Franco Pratesi). In any case, by the 1440s in Florence Triumphs seems to have been played by many, albeit illegally (two were fined in 1443) until 1450, when the statutes explicitly allowed triumphs for the first time.
.
After 1450 comes another extant hand-painted deck of Milan, from the same workshop as the two previous decks. This is the one that Dummett called the “Visconti-Sforza"; it is also called the “Carrara,” but more usually the "Pierpont-Morgan-Bergamo" (PMB). (I will sometimes call it the "Visconti-Sforza, and sometimes the PMB.) Various dates have been suggested for the earliest cards of this deck, from 1450 to the early 1460s. As with the Brera-Brambilla, no female pages or knights are included; there are 14 cards per suit. The style is similar to that of the Cary-Yale although with less ornate gold gilding.
Of the cards painted originally for this deck, there survive 14 triumphs, all by one artist, probably Bonifacio Bembo. Then at some point in the century, (Dummett suggested at the same time, although this seems unlikely because the earlier cards are much thicker than the later), 6 more triumphs were painted by another artist. How many of them, if any, replaced cards previously in the deck is unknown. It is also unknown whether there were 2 more besides the 20 total. What counts against this idea is that there are 15 other partial decks that seem to be 15th century copies, more or less, of this one deck of 20, 11 with more than 1 card, and in none of them is there a Devil and Tower card. But the sample is too meager to exclude that they are simply missing. Also, it could be that those two cards were removed by someone who found them too "devilish" for a Christian household, perhaps before the other decks were made.
After 1450 comes another extant hand-painted deck of Milan, from the same workshop as the two previous decks. This is the one that Dummett called the “Visconti-Sforza"; it is also called the “Carrara,” but more usually the "Pierpont-Morgan-Bergamo" (PMB). (I will sometimes call it the "Visconti-Sforza, and sometimes the PMB.) Various dates have been suggested for the earliest cards of this deck, from 1450 to the early 1460s. As with the Brera-Brambilla, no female pages or knights are included; there are 14 cards per suit. The style is similar to that of the Cary-Yale although with less ornate gold gilding.
Of the cards painted originally for this deck, there survive 14 triumphs, all by one artist, probably Bonifacio Bembo. Then at some point in the century, (Dummett suggested at the same time, although this seems unlikely because the earlier cards are much thicker than the later), 6 more triumphs were painted by another artist. How many of them, if any, replaced cards previously in the deck is unknown. It is also unknown whether there were 2 more besides the 20 total. What counts against this idea is that there are 15 other partial decks that seem to be 15th century copies, more or less, of this one deck of 20, 11 with more than 1 card, and in none of them is there a Devil and Tower card. But the sample is too meager to exclude that they are simply missing. Also, it could be that those two cards were removed by someone who found them too "devilish" for a Christian household, perhaps before the other decks were made.
Below are three examples of cards characteristic of the three circumstances in which cards from the three main early Milan decks were painted. (11)
In the left-hand card, the crosses and serpents on the card suggests a wedding, planned or about to take place. However the serpent heraldic was taken over by the Sforzas after Francesco married Bianca Visconti and conquered Milan. The center one has lost a lot of its gold. The scene there could be a purposeful reference to the previous one, but without the heraldic devices. Both couples are strikingly like a couple in two frescoes allegedly by the painter Bonifacio Bembo; at least one of these is considered to be Francesco Sforza and Bianca Visconti. They are also quite like drawings done for an Arthurian romance book done in the 1440s. The third card above is an example by the later artist. (12)
One might think that the 6 additions to the Visconti-Sforza (PMB) were simply replacements for cards damaged or lost. But this is not certain. Account books in Ferrara during the relevant years show payment for (a) a set of “14 figures” for Bianca Maria Visconti on cotton paper in 1441, and (b) decks of “70 cards” (5x14?) in 1457, done in magnificent gold These were times particularly appropriate for them to be gifts to Visconti and Sforza: in Jan. 1441, Bianca Maria Visconti was in Ferrara being courted by Leonello d'Este; then in 1457 her 13 year old son Galeazzo Maria Sforza was visiting Ferrara. The decks in question could have been versions of the Visconti (Cary-Yale) or Visconti-Sforza (PMB) decks themselves. This "5x14" theory for one or more of the Milan decks remains neither accepted nor rejected in current tarot history writing. But such 14 trumps could also have been Ferrara decks, proto-tarot or otherwise. My own response to the theory may be found in a separate blog. (13)
In my view it seems likely the Visconti-Sforza/PMB deck reflects the particularities of the Sforza family. The couple on the Love card is meant to suggest Francesco Sforza and Bianca Visconti. Similar likenesses appear on other cards as well. The person most often represented, chiefly in the court cards, resembles their eldest son Galeazzo. The person on the cards is a boy of about age 11. He looks most clearly his age on the Page cards, the Knight of Staves, and the Justice card (where he is the knight in the background); but on the King and some of the Knight cards, he is simply the same 11 year old, given a fuller face. Since Galeazzo was born in 1444, that would date the deck to about 1455. A similar deating has been advocated on stylistic grounds by Bandera and Tanzi in a catalog for an exhibition including some of the cards in 2013. On the other hand, a letter from Sigismundo Malatesta to Bianca Maria Sforza requesting a deck "with the ducal insignia" in 1451 or 1452 suggests that it or something like it already existed then.) I will discuss these points in more detail, as well as other cards' relationship to other members of the family, when we get to the relevant cards.
References: Karnoffel, Emperors, and the Triumphs of Milan:
1. Karnoffel and Emperors: http://www.geocities.com/cartedatrionfi/Fragments/Karnoffel.htm. See also http://trionfi.com/0/c/l.
2. Names: http://trionfi.com/0/b/09/index.php.
3. Table: http://trionfi.com/0/b/07/index.php. 1440: http://trionfi.com/etx-giusto-giusti.
4. 1449 letter and painter: http://trionfi.com/0/b/. Many "triumphs": http://www.geocities.com/cartedatrionfi/Fragments/1440-1479.html#1441.
5. Cary-Visconti: http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/dl_crosscollex/. Search "Visconti." Dummett's theory based on the coins is in The Visconti-Sforza Tarot Cards. 1445: in Game of Tarot, excerpted at http://trionfi.com/0/c/34/index.php.
6. Savoy: reported in Dummett, The Visconti-Sforza Tarot Cards, p. 13f, Kaplan, Encyclopedia of Tarot, vol. 2. pp 51, 80, 83. Clothing style: if you look at the clothing in the deck, it is similar to that in sketches by the painter Pisanello in the 1420s and to the earliest frescoes in the cathedral at Monza, done at that time. See my post at http://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=365&start=270#p7136.
7. Fountains: Kaplan, vol. 1, p. 62; vol. 2, p. 49. Marriage: Kaplan vol. 2 p. 93. Pollett: http://l-pollett.tripod.com/cards31.htm Pavia: Kaplan Vol. 1, p. 106.
8. Other copies: One could have been made for Philippo's mistress, who would have passed it on to her daughter Bianca Maria, Filippo's illegitimate daughter who later married Francesco Sforza. Consistent with this scenario, the "World" card in the deck (which might have been called something different then) might even be of Filippo being rowed across a river to visit his lover in the castle he gave her. This interpretation of the World card is advanced by mmfilesi at http://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=365&p=6796. Autorbis, a principal trionfi.com researcher, does not choose between 1428 and 1441: see http://trionfi.com/0/c/34/index.php. Propaganda campaign for legitimacy: Gary Ianziti, Humanistic Historiography Under the Sforzas: Politics and Propaganda in Fifteenth-Century Milan. 1445, 1447: Kaplan vol. 2 p. 149.
9. Bembo: E. Samuels Welch, entry for "Bonifacio Bembo" in Dictionary of Art, Vol. 3 p. 696: "The artist was probably popular with the Sforzas for his ability to imitate and repaint earlier works commissioned by the Visconti." But Welch advances the theory that a different brother was responsible for many of the works attributed to Bonifacio, including the cards.
10. That there were 64 total suit cards is endorsed by Dummett, Game of Tarot, p. 77. 22 as earliest: http://www.geocities.com/cartedatrionfi/Fragments/1440-1479.html#1441. Look under "archetypal tarot." For 5x16, see: http://trionfi.com/0/c/2209/, also http://www.tarotforum.net/showthread.php?t=98232&page=1 (by Huck Meyer). For 24 trumps, see Dummett entry at http://trionfi.com/0/c/34/index.php, search "twenty-four".
11. Dummett, The Visconti-Sforza tarot cards, among many other sources. The data on the 15 decks is from Kaplan, Encyclopedia of Tarot, Vol. 2. Dummett recently: Artibus et Historia 56 (2007), pp. 15-26.
12. Insignia and weddings: http://it.geocities.com/a_pollett/cards31.htm.
13. "5x14 theory": http://trionfi.com/0/f/. For an opposing view, http://www.geocities.com/cartedatrionfi/Fragments/1440-1479.html#1441. Look under "5x14 theory."
In the left-hand card, the crosses and serpents on the card suggests a wedding, planned or about to take place. However the serpent heraldic was taken over by the Sforzas after Francesco married Bianca Visconti and conquered Milan. The center one has lost a lot of its gold. The scene there could be a purposeful reference to the previous one, but without the heraldic devices. Both couples are strikingly like a couple in two frescoes allegedly by the painter Bonifacio Bembo; at least one of these is considered to be Francesco Sforza and Bianca Visconti. They are also quite like drawings done for an Arthurian romance book done in the 1440s. The third card above is an example by the later artist. (12)
One might think that the 6 additions to the Visconti-Sforza (PMB) were simply replacements for cards damaged or lost. But this is not certain. Account books in Ferrara during the relevant years show payment for (a) a set of “14 figures” for Bianca Maria Visconti on cotton paper in 1441, and (b) decks of “70 cards” (5x14?) in 1457, done in magnificent gold These were times particularly appropriate for them to be gifts to Visconti and Sforza: in Jan. 1441, Bianca Maria Visconti was in Ferrara being courted by Leonello d'Este; then in 1457 her 13 year old son Galeazzo Maria Sforza was visiting Ferrara. The decks in question could have been versions of the Visconti (Cary-Yale) or Visconti-Sforza (PMB) decks themselves. This "5x14" theory for one or more of the Milan decks remains neither accepted nor rejected in current tarot history writing. But such 14 trumps could also have been Ferrara decks, proto-tarot or otherwise. My own response to the theory may be found in a separate blog. (13)
In my view it seems likely the Visconti-Sforza/PMB deck reflects the particularities of the Sforza family. The couple on the Love card is meant to suggest Francesco Sforza and Bianca Visconti. Similar likenesses appear on other cards as well. The person most often represented, chiefly in the court cards, resembles their eldest son Galeazzo. The person on the cards is a boy of about age 11. He looks most clearly his age on the Page cards, the Knight of Staves, and the Justice card (where he is the knight in the background); but on the King and some of the Knight cards, he is simply the same 11 year old, given a fuller face. Since Galeazzo was born in 1444, that would date the deck to about 1455. A similar deating has been advocated on stylistic grounds by Bandera and Tanzi in a catalog for an exhibition including some of the cards in 2013. On the other hand, a letter from Sigismundo Malatesta to Bianca Maria Sforza requesting a deck "with the ducal insignia" in 1451 or 1452 suggests that it or something like it already existed then.) I will discuss these points in more detail, as well as other cards' relationship to other members of the family, when we get to the relevant cards.
References: Karnoffel, Emperors, and the Triumphs of Milan:
1. Karnoffel and Emperors: http://www.geocities.com/cartedatrionfi/Fragments/Karnoffel.htm. See also http://trionfi.com/0/c/l.
2. Names: http://trionfi.com/0/b/09/index.php.
3. Table: http://trionfi.com/0/b/07/index.php. 1440: http://trionfi.com/etx-giusto-giusti.
4. 1449 letter and painter: http://trionfi.com/0/b/. Many "triumphs": http://www.geocities.com/cartedatrionfi/Fragments/1440-1479.html#1441.
5. Cary-Visconti: http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/dl_crosscollex/. Search "Visconti." Dummett's theory based on the coins is in The Visconti-Sforza Tarot Cards. 1445: in Game of Tarot, excerpted at http://trionfi.com/0/c/34/index.php.
6. Savoy: reported in Dummett, The Visconti-Sforza Tarot Cards, p. 13f, Kaplan, Encyclopedia of Tarot, vol. 2. pp 51, 80, 83. Clothing style: if you look at the clothing in the deck, it is similar to that in sketches by the painter Pisanello in the 1420s and to the earliest frescoes in the cathedral at Monza, done at that time. See my post at http://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=365&start=270#p7136.
7. Fountains: Kaplan, vol. 1, p. 62; vol. 2, p. 49. Marriage: Kaplan vol. 2 p. 93. Pollett: http://l-pollett.tripod.com/cards31.htm Pavia: Kaplan Vol. 1, p. 106.
8. Other copies: One could have been made for Philippo's mistress, who would have passed it on to her daughter Bianca Maria, Filippo's illegitimate daughter who later married Francesco Sforza. Consistent with this scenario, the "World" card in the deck (which might have been called something different then) might even be of Filippo being rowed across a river to visit his lover in the castle he gave her. This interpretation of the World card is advanced by mmfilesi at http://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=365&p=6796. Autorbis, a principal trionfi.com researcher, does not choose between 1428 and 1441: see http://trionfi.com/0/c/34/index.php. Propaganda campaign for legitimacy: Gary Ianziti, Humanistic Historiography Under the Sforzas: Politics and Propaganda in Fifteenth-Century Milan. 1445, 1447: Kaplan vol. 2 p. 149.
9. Bembo: E. Samuels Welch, entry for "Bonifacio Bembo" in Dictionary of Art, Vol. 3 p. 696: "The artist was probably popular with the Sforzas for his ability to imitate and repaint earlier works commissioned by the Visconti." But Welch advances the theory that a different brother was responsible for many of the works attributed to Bonifacio, including the cards.
10. That there were 64 total suit cards is endorsed by Dummett, Game of Tarot, p. 77. 22 as earliest: http://www.geocities.com/cartedatrionfi/Fragments/1440-1479.html#1441. Look under "archetypal tarot." For 5x16, see: http://trionfi.com/0/c/2209/, also http://www.tarotforum.net/showthread.php?t=98232&page=1 (by Huck Meyer). For 24 trumps, see Dummett entry at http://trionfi.com/0/c/34/index.php, search "twenty-four".
11. Dummett, The Visconti-Sforza tarot cards, among many other sources. The data on the 15 decks is from Kaplan, Encyclopedia of Tarot, Vol. 2. Dummett recently: Artibus et Historia 56 (2007), pp. 15-26.
12. Insignia and weddings: http://it.geocities.com/a_pollett/cards31.htm.
13. "5x14 theory": http://trionfi.com/0/f/. For an opposing view, http://www.geocities.com/cartedatrionfi/Fragments/1440-1479.html#1441. Look under "5x14 theory."
14. Malatesta letter:
History III. The Triumphs of Ferrara and Florence. Now let me turn to the group of surviving triumph decks used in the Ferrara area, and also the deck from Florence.
History III. The Triumphs of Ferrara and Florence. Now let me turn to the group of surviving triumph decks used in the Ferrara area, and also the deck from Florence.
As in the case of Milan, it is possible that Ferrara had tarot-like decks in the early 1420s, as there is a record of 13 cards made in 1422, and also of a "VIII Emperatori" deck (ordered from Florence) in 1423; but no cards have survived. The next record is 1442, using of the word "trionfi." Then in 1457 we hear of 70 card trionfi decks. One early deck, c. 1440-1470, is probably the so-called “Catania,” also called the “Ursino.” 4 triumph cards survive there, including a very curious one of a lady on a stag, which Ronald Decker identified as Temperance. (One more was discovered more recently, an Empress. Both the Temperanc and the Empress used recycled paper in the middle on which the dates of 1427 and 1428 can be read, implying that they were done after those dates.) There are no female knights or pages. Another deck, c. 1450-1455, has two triumphs now in Warsaw and another in France; a Queen of Coins in the same style appeared on Christie's Auction House's site in 2005. (1)
There is also one identified as having been made for the d’Este ruling family of Ferrara. There are 8 triumphs and assorted suit cards remaining. Of these 12 triumphs, only 1, the World card, overlaps with the first Milan deck. It overlaps considerably with the Visconti-Sforza (PMB). This one has the arms of Aragon and the Estense, so probably for a d'Este-Aragon wedding. There was one such in 1445 and another in 1473. From 1473 there is independently an account that a certain artist made triumph cards for that wedding. (2)
Another similar deck that is the so-called "Gringonneur," also called "Charles VI." It turned up a couple of centuries after it was made in the inventory of the kings of France and was erroneously attributed to a man named Gringonneur recorded as making some cards. It has designs similar to those done for the Estensi, but on its Chariot card there are featured the seven "palle" (balls) that were the Medici device, but without the fleuer-de-lys awarded the Medici by the French king in 1465 . This deck has 16 surviving triumph cards, all on subjects identifiable as tarot. It is the first surviving deck to have what today we call the "Tower" card. (3)
There is also one identified as having been made for the d’Este ruling family of Ferrara. There are 8 triumphs and assorted suit cards remaining. Of these 12 triumphs, only 1, the World card, overlaps with the first Milan deck. It overlaps considerably with the Visconti-Sforza (PMB). This one has the arms of Aragon and the Estense, so probably for a d'Este-Aragon wedding. There was one such in 1445 and another in 1473. From 1473 there is independently an account that a certain artist made triumph cards for that wedding. (2)
Another similar deck that is the so-called "Gringonneur," also called "Charles VI." It turned up a couple of centuries after it was made in the inventory of the kings of France and was erroneously attributed to a man named Gringonneur recorded as making some cards. It has designs similar to those done for the Estensi, but on its Chariot card there are featured the seven "palle" (balls) that were the Medici device, but without the fleuer-de-lys awarded the Medici by the French king in 1465 . This deck has 16 surviving triumph cards, all on subjects identifiable as tarot. It is the first surviving deck to have what today we call the "Tower" card. (3)
At some point, but within 50 years or so, someone wrote numbers on some of the cards in the "Charles VI." What seems clear is that the numbers stop at 20. The Fool would probably have been unnumbered, making 21 in all. The card that appears to be left out, based on these numbers, is either the Popess or the Empress. If so, the removal may have been at the time the numbers were added, as they conform to the list in a poem written around 1500, leaving out the Popess. Or perhaps the two had the same number, and tricks taken by one, when both were played, depended on the order in which they had been played. (4)
Between 1460 and 1500, probably from the Ferrara region, comes the first known description of the cards, in the course of denouncing them, the so-called “Steele Sermon.” It lists by name the 21 numbered cards plus the unnumbered Fool. The names correspond closely to their names today; only the order of the sequence is different, as it is in other numbered sequences in later times. It follows what Dummett called the "B order", that of Ferrara and Venice (5)
Within this same time frame, there is also a poem by Matteo Maria Boiardo, older cousin of the more famous Pico della Mirandola, which seems to describe a pack with four allegorical suits and 22 additional cards. Since the descriptions do not correspond to any conventional decks of the time, it was probably then just a proposal (although examples of actual cards fitting his descriptions do survive, as well as an account from around 1500 that seems to assume their existence). Yet the number 22 seems to be significant, at least as far as suggesting that there were 22 trumps by then.
Some people have found in the cards described by Boiardo correspondences to Kabbalah, specifically to the 10 sefiroth plus the unnumbered En Sof beyond them, as a course traversed twice. This association is not unthinkable, as under d’Este rule, Ferrara and the surrounding area was particularly welcoming to Jews, at a time when Jews were much less welcome elsewhere; moreover, this area was home to Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, who publicized the Kabbalah in the 900 Theses of 1486. The association to Boiardo's decks seem to me rather arbitrary; I will consider correlations between the standard triumphs and the 15th-16th century Christian Kabbalah's sefiroth in this blog; (6)
What I think is true relative to Boiardo is that the specific 22 "virtues and vices" of his poem are explained by reference to Tractate XIII of the Corpus Hermeticum, published in 1471. Pico drew specific attention to it in his 900 Theses of 1486, making a connection to the "punishers" of Kabbalah. In this way the door would have been opened to later practitioners of the tarot to develop their own Kabbalistic associations to the tarot if they chose. (7)
Except when someone penciled in numbers afterwards, there were no numbers on the early hand painted decks. So a person had to memorize the order to play the game, one in which points accrued by the taking of tricks, as in modern-day Bridge. The cards and their order, most of them, seem to have had an instructional purpose.
From among the various decks, a pattern seems to emerge. But what it is, is subject to dispute. For some, what we see first are the lowest members of society, the Fool and the Magician, who is really a common street performer of tricks, followed by the highest members, the Emperor, the Pope, and their consorts. Here the presence of the Popess presents a problem, since there is no such person. It is perhaps a joke. But there are other possibilities. It may be that the Fool was never part of the hierarchy at all, since it has no number, but was always a wild card. In that case the Magician, which always appears first, may simply stand on his own as the first card, after which come the Emperor and the Pope as the secular and spiritual heads in society, and their consorts. Then come cards for various "conditions of life"—love, victories of one sort of another, old age, death—and the moral virtues, temperance, courage, and justice. On the other side of the Death card are cards denoting things not subject to death: the Devil, Fire from the heavens (as it was called early on), and the Star, Moon, and Sun, the “three luminaries," each brighter than the one before. Oddly, however, Temperance, which would seem to be a "condition of life", is put above Death in the 16th century lists from Milan and France, . At the end are the Last Judgment and the so-called "World," sometimes with one at the end and sometimes the other; and sometimes Justice is there, too, as God's justice at the end of the world Although some individual cards are unclear, overall it is an education in Christian values and salvation. (8)
Besides the hand-painted decks that we know of, there were surely others now lost. There were also decks other than the hand-painted ones, for use by the people. The sentencing in Florence of 1441 of two individuals playing near the prison suggests such decks, as well as, slightly later, the records of merchants showing a variety of prices, from relatively inexpensive on up. There are no surviving examples definitely from the 15th century. I will address the issue of mass-produced decks in the next section. (9)
Two other decks deserve mention. One is the hand-painted Sola-Busca of probably 1491. It has 22 trumps and 4 suits of 14 cards each. The trumps mostly correspond to Roman heroes mentioned in ancient sources; to that extent it is not a prototype of the designs usually associated with tarot, Another peculiarity is that the number card illustrations are not simply arrays of swords, sticks of some kind, coins, and cups, but rather depictions of people or cherubs in various situations. These unique illustrations were not repeated, as far as is known, until in 1910 many of them were reworked as number cards in the famous Waite-Smith deck. It seems to me possible that the Sola-Busca could have been part of a fortune-telling tradition later popularized by the Etteilla school. I will discuss that hypothesis more fully in connection with the number cards. The Sola-Busca was not completely unique. The so-called "Leber" cards, and a few others that may or may not be part of that deck, known through copies published by Cigognara, are other examples. (10)
Between 1460 and 1500, probably from the Ferrara region, comes the first known description of the cards, in the course of denouncing them, the so-called “Steele Sermon.” It lists by name the 21 numbered cards plus the unnumbered Fool. The names correspond closely to their names today; only the order of the sequence is different, as it is in other numbered sequences in later times. It follows what Dummett called the "B order", that of Ferrara and Venice (5)
Within this same time frame, there is also a poem by Matteo Maria Boiardo, older cousin of the more famous Pico della Mirandola, which seems to describe a pack with four allegorical suits and 22 additional cards. Since the descriptions do not correspond to any conventional decks of the time, it was probably then just a proposal (although examples of actual cards fitting his descriptions do survive, as well as an account from around 1500 that seems to assume their existence). Yet the number 22 seems to be significant, at least as far as suggesting that there were 22 trumps by then.
Some people have found in the cards described by Boiardo correspondences to Kabbalah, specifically to the 10 sefiroth plus the unnumbered En Sof beyond them, as a course traversed twice. This association is not unthinkable, as under d’Este rule, Ferrara and the surrounding area was particularly welcoming to Jews, at a time when Jews were much less welcome elsewhere; moreover, this area was home to Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, who publicized the Kabbalah in the 900 Theses of 1486. The association to Boiardo's decks seem to me rather arbitrary; I will consider correlations between the standard triumphs and the 15th-16th century Christian Kabbalah's sefiroth in this blog; (6)
What I think is true relative to Boiardo is that the specific 22 "virtues and vices" of his poem are explained by reference to Tractate XIII of the Corpus Hermeticum, published in 1471. Pico drew specific attention to it in his 900 Theses of 1486, making a connection to the "punishers" of Kabbalah. In this way the door would have been opened to later practitioners of the tarot to develop their own Kabbalistic associations to the tarot if they chose. (7)
Except when someone penciled in numbers afterwards, there were no numbers on the early hand painted decks. So a person had to memorize the order to play the game, one in which points accrued by the taking of tricks, as in modern-day Bridge. The cards and their order, most of them, seem to have had an instructional purpose.
From among the various decks, a pattern seems to emerge. But what it is, is subject to dispute. For some, what we see first are the lowest members of society, the Fool and the Magician, who is really a common street performer of tricks, followed by the highest members, the Emperor, the Pope, and their consorts. Here the presence of the Popess presents a problem, since there is no such person. It is perhaps a joke. But there are other possibilities. It may be that the Fool was never part of the hierarchy at all, since it has no number, but was always a wild card. In that case the Magician, which always appears first, may simply stand on his own as the first card, after which come the Emperor and the Pope as the secular and spiritual heads in society, and their consorts. Then come cards for various "conditions of life"—love, victories of one sort of another, old age, death—and the moral virtues, temperance, courage, and justice. On the other side of the Death card are cards denoting things not subject to death: the Devil, Fire from the heavens (as it was called early on), and the Star, Moon, and Sun, the “three luminaries," each brighter than the one before. Oddly, however, Temperance, which would seem to be a "condition of life", is put above Death in the 16th century lists from Milan and France, . At the end are the Last Judgment and the so-called "World," sometimes with one at the end and sometimes the other; and sometimes Justice is there, too, as God's justice at the end of the world Although some individual cards are unclear, overall it is an education in Christian values and salvation. (8)
Besides the hand-painted decks that we know of, there were surely others now lost. There were also decks other than the hand-painted ones, for use by the people. The sentencing in Florence of 1441 of two individuals playing near the prison suggests such decks, as well as, slightly later, the records of merchants showing a variety of prices, from relatively inexpensive on up. There are no surviving examples definitely from the 15th century. I will address the issue of mass-produced decks in the next section. (9)
Two other decks deserve mention. One is the hand-painted Sola-Busca of probably 1491. It has 22 trumps and 4 suits of 14 cards each. The trumps mostly correspond to Roman heroes mentioned in ancient sources; to that extent it is not a prototype of the designs usually associated with tarot, Another peculiarity is that the number card illustrations are not simply arrays of swords, sticks of some kind, coins, and cups, but rather depictions of people or cherubs in various situations. These unique illustrations were not repeated, as far as is known, until in 1910 many of them were reworked as number cards in the famous Waite-Smith deck. It seems to me possible that the Sola-Busca could have been part of a fortune-telling tradition later popularized by the Etteilla school. I will discuss that hypothesis more fully in connection with the number cards. The Sola-Busca was not completely unique. The so-called "Leber" cards, and a few others that may or may not be part of that deck, known through copies published by Cigognara, are other examples. (10)
Another notable 15th century set of cards is the so-called "tarot of Mantegna," also not a proto-tarot although from the same milieu and with some images like those of the tarot. It has 5 groups of 10 cards each, each numbered from 1 to 10, depicting first the stations of life, then the Muses plus Apollo, then the Liberal Arts, then the Virtues, and finally the Spheres from Luna to the Empyrian. Art historian Stephen Campbell sums up current opinion as to their authorship, that "they were devised by a Ferrarese artist and circulating by the 1460's." A few suggestions have been made as to the artist, but none is definitive. (11)
Renaissance architect and writer Giorgio Vasari, in Lives of the Artists, said of the painter Mantegna, that "among other things, he made engravings of his own Triumphs, which were then held in great account, since nothing better had been seen." Hence the attribution to Mantegna. Modern art historians agree that the the style of the cards is not Mantegna's. (12)
References, The Triumphs of Ferrara and Florence:
1. The trumps can be seen at http://trionfi.com/0/j/d/charlesvi/. Ronald Decker: Dummett, Game of Tarot p. 69. 1422, 1423, 1442, 1457: http://trionfi.com/0/d/. Warsaw etc. deck: http://trionfi.com/0/j/d/ferrasingle/.
2. D'Este: http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/dl_crosscollex/. Search "d'este."
3. Gringonneur: http://expositions.bnf.fr/renais/arret/3/index.htm.
4. Ross G. Caldwell at http://www.tarotforum.net/showthread.php?t=28920.
5. Steele Sermon: http://www.tarotpedia.com/wiki/Sermones_de_Ludo_Cum_Aliis.
6. Boiardo: http://trionfi.com/0/h/. Boiardo and Kabbalah: http://www.geocities.com/autorbis/boiardo.html. Jews in Ferrara: http://trionfi.com/0/d/03/index.php. Ercole d'Este: Jewish physician saves his life: http://www.geocities.com/autorbis/boiardolife.html. His hospitality to Jews: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jews_in_Italy. Many other references on Internet.
7. Corpus Hermeticum: On publication history, see Wikipedia. Other references in Appendix. For a more detailed explication of the parallels between Pico and the Boiardo deck, see
8. Christian values: Michael J. Hurst, "Riddle of Tarot," http://web.archive.org/web/20040919015803/http://geocities.com/cartedatrionfi/Riddle.html. Also stated by Ross Caldwell at http://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=334. Minchiate: the words "trionfi" and "minchiate" appear together in a Florentine poem of 1440. then as a distinct game in 1466 and in the 1470s. See http://trionfi.com/0/p/09/. But the earliest surviving decks are from the 18th century. I use images mostly from one I can no longer access on the web, the so-called "Al Leone" with designs that are more primitive-looking than the deck given on http://www.tarot.org.il/Minchiate/.
9. Discussed at length by Ross Caldwell at http://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=258 and link in note 8.
10. Sola-Busca: http://www.tarotpedia.com/wiki/Sola_Busca_Tarot. On the "Leber" cards, see http://trionfi.com/0/j/d/leber/.
11. Stephen Campbell, Cabinet of Eros, 2004, p. 127, in Google books. Adolfo Venturi, in North Italian Painters of the Quattrocento: Emilia, p. 29ff, 1931, attributed the cards to one Gelasso Gelassi, a Ferrarese painter who according to Vasari moved to Bologna. He saw the same style in two paintings now in Budapest, for a long time in a private Bolognese collection. Georg Gombosi, 1933, gave them to Angelo Perassio (Burlington Magazine 1933, p. 66ff). Luke Syson, in 2002, attributed them to Girardo da Vicenza, based on a resemblance to work on the north wall of the Schifanoia which Syson attributes to his design ("Tura and the Minor Arts: the School of Ferrara," in Cosme Tura: Painting and Design in Renaissance Ferrara, p. 55ff).
12. Vasari: http://www.efn.org/~acd/vite/VasariMantegna.html. Mantegna's tomb: Joscelyn Godwin, The Pagan Dream of the Renaissance, p. 50, citing Giannino Giovannoni, Montova e i tarocchi del Mantegna, 1981.
History IV. Bologna, and the next 200 years. With the church not vigorously opposed, and the lessons taught seeming to be valuable Christian truths, there came into being, at some point in the 15th century, mass-produced decks used for a trick-taking game. One theory, advanced by Ross Caldwell, is that the mass-produced decks came first, in Bologna or less likely, Florence. He has in mind the "Rothschild" sheet, along with a similar sheet in the Academy des Beaux Arts; together they account for 12 trumps.
Renaissance architect and writer Giorgio Vasari, in Lives of the Artists, said of the painter Mantegna, that "among other things, he made engravings of his own Triumphs, which were then held in great account, since nothing better had been seen." Hence the attribution to Mantegna. Modern art historians agree that the the style of the cards is not Mantegna's. (12)
References, The Triumphs of Ferrara and Florence:
1. The trumps can be seen at http://trionfi.com/0/j/d/charlesvi/. Ronald Decker: Dummett, Game of Tarot p. 69. 1422, 1423, 1442, 1457: http://trionfi.com/0/d/. Warsaw etc. deck: http://trionfi.com/0/j/d/ferrasingle/.
2. D'Este: http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/dl_crosscollex/. Search "d'este."
3. Gringonneur: http://expositions.bnf.fr/renais/arret/3/index.htm.
4. Ross G. Caldwell at http://www.tarotforum.net/showthread.php?t=28920.
5. Steele Sermon: http://www.tarotpedia.com/wiki/Sermones_de_Ludo_Cum_Aliis.
6. Boiardo: http://trionfi.com/0/h/. Boiardo and Kabbalah: http://www.geocities.com/autorbis/boiardo.html. Jews in Ferrara: http://trionfi.com/0/d/03/index.php. Ercole d'Este: Jewish physician saves his life: http://www.geocities.com/autorbis/boiardolife.html. His hospitality to Jews: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jews_in_Italy. Many other references on Internet.
7. Corpus Hermeticum: On publication history, see Wikipedia. Other references in Appendix. For a more detailed explication of the parallels between Pico and the Boiardo deck, see
8. Christian values: Michael J. Hurst, "Riddle of Tarot," http://web.archive.org/web/20040919015803/http://geocities.com/cartedatrionfi/Riddle.html. Also stated by Ross Caldwell at http://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=334. Minchiate: the words "trionfi" and "minchiate" appear together in a Florentine poem of 1440. then as a distinct game in 1466 and in the 1470s. See http://trionfi.com/0/p/09/. But the earliest surviving decks are from the 18th century. I use images mostly from one I can no longer access on the web, the so-called "Al Leone" with designs that are more primitive-looking than the deck given on http://www.tarot.org.il/Minchiate/.
9. Discussed at length by Ross Caldwell at http://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=258 and link in note 8.
10. Sola-Busca: http://www.tarotpedia.com/wiki/Sola_Busca_Tarot. On the "Leber" cards, see http://trionfi.com/0/j/d/leber/.
11. Stephen Campbell, Cabinet of Eros, 2004, p. 127, in Google books. Adolfo Venturi, in North Italian Painters of the Quattrocento: Emilia, p. 29ff, 1931, attributed the cards to one Gelasso Gelassi, a Ferrarese painter who according to Vasari moved to Bologna. He saw the same style in two paintings now in Budapest, for a long time in a private Bolognese collection. Georg Gombosi, 1933, gave them to Angelo Perassio (Burlington Magazine 1933, p. 66ff). Luke Syson, in 2002, attributed them to Girardo da Vicenza, based on a resemblance to work on the north wall of the Schifanoia which Syson attributes to his design ("Tura and the Minor Arts: the School of Ferrara," in Cosme Tura: Painting and Design in Renaissance Ferrara, p. 55ff).
12. Vasari: http://www.efn.org/~acd/vite/VasariMantegna.html. Mantegna's tomb: Joscelyn Godwin, The Pagan Dream of the Renaissance, p. 50, citing Giannino Giovannoni, Montova e i tarocchi del Mantegna, 1981.
History IV. Bologna, and the next 200 years. With the church not vigorously opposed, and the lessons taught seeming to be valuable Christian truths, there came into being, at some point in the 15th century, mass-produced decks used for a trick-taking game. One theory, advanced by Ross Caldwell, is that the mass-produced decks came first, in Bologna or less likely, Florence. He has in mind the "Rothschild" sheet, along with a similar sheet in the Academy des Beaux Arts; together they account for 12 trumps.
Caldwell hypothesizes they are late examples of the earliest mass-production designs, c. 1440. His argument is that after nearly nothing in the records, there is an explosion of activity in various cities of northern Italy. Bologna is not in the records, but it is geographically in the middle of the cities that do have such evidence. There is also a record in Ferrara of a merchant from Bologna selling some trionfi cards to the court. Ross also argues that the deck was originally the 22 cards seen there later. His argument is that the Bologna card-makers were extremely conservative, hardly changing at all over the next two centuries, and that it is more logical to assume that the court decks omitted trumps from the 22, when it seems that there were fewer than 22, than that they added them. Against the "conservatism" of Bologna players, I would argue that such conservatism is easily altered by the rulers when it suits them. Bologna went from being a Florence-style republic to coming under the direct rule of the papacy around 1507, a rule that persisted unchanged for the next 230 years. While it is easy to believe that cards remained the same after 1507, whether the cards remained the same before then is unclear. We do know that when the Church after 1507 wanted a change, card makers to some extent gave them what they wanted: the "four papi" became "four moors" in 1725. As far as resistance to change, what is most disconcerting is not adding or subtracting cards, but changing the order of the existing cards. (1)
At some point the French started producing triumph decks, certainly by around 1500. If they had larger workshops, they may have even imported decks to Italy after that time. This would have been especially true after the French conquered Milan in 1499. By the same token, the conquest could have facilitated the spread of the game to France, including the specific form used in Lombardy. (2)
From Milan, many think (although Lyon or Burgundy is possible), there survives a proof sheet, perhaps of this time period, now called the "Cary Sheet," with all or parts of 17 trumps and a few suit cards. The overall style is more similar to the so-called "Marseille" style than they are to anything before then, and for a few cards this is true as regards what is actually represented. Whether the design is native Italian, or a new version brought in from the north, is unknown. I will discuss all these cards in the proper place. For now I will give one tantalizing example, the Moon card. (3).
Obviously the Cary Sheet image has nothing to do with either of the two previous Italian style images, but very much to do with the "Marseille" style image. (The Visconti-Sforza or PMB image here is by the second of the two artists for this deck.) I could repeat this kind of example three more times, for the Fool, the Chariot, and the Star. And a case could be made for a few others.
At some point the French started producing triumph decks, certainly by around 1500. If they had larger workshops, they may have even imported decks to Italy after that time. This would have been especially true after the French conquered Milan in 1499. By the same token, the conquest could have facilitated the spread of the game to France, including the specific form used in Lombardy. (2)
From Milan, many think (although Lyon or Burgundy is possible), there survives a proof sheet, perhaps of this time period, now called the "Cary Sheet," with all or parts of 17 trumps and a few suit cards. The overall style is more similar to the so-called "Marseille" style than they are to anything before then, and for a few cards this is true as regards what is actually represented. Whether the design is native Italian, or a new version brought in from the north, is unknown. I will discuss all these cards in the proper place. For now I will give one tantalizing example, the Moon card. (3).
Obviously the Cary Sheet image has nothing to do with either of the two previous Italian style images, but very much to do with the "Marseille" style image. (The Visconti-Sforza or PMB image here is by the second of the two artists for this deck.) I could repeat this kind of example three more times, for the Fool, the Chariot, and the Star. And a case could be made for a few others.
Currently there is no adequate method of carbon-dating paper. However when we get to the Popess card, we will see that the Cary Sheet Popess resembles a 1495 fresco, for a pope who was closely connected to the Sforza of Milan. Moreover, this pope, Alexander VI, sponsored art on an Egyptian theme for his private apartments. I will be maintaining that there are also Egyptian themes in the Cary Sheet. Thus I agree with the dating to a little before 1500, in Milan. (4)
Around the same time as the French conquest of Milan and Ferrara or a little later (it is first recorded in 1505, in France and in Ferrara, Italy), this special form of triumphs was given the name "tarocchi," or "tarot" or "tarau" in French. Why a special word was needed is that there were now other games that used trumps, but were simply an ordinary suit so designated at the start of play. There are two main theories about the origin of this word. One, argued by professional philologists in the 20th century, holds that it comes from an Arabic-derived Italian word for "discard." This theory is found in the prestigious Grand Robert Dictionnaire de la Langue Francaise among other places. The reasoning, I think first presented by J. Karlin but repeated clearly by Thierry Depaulis in his 2013 Le Tarot Revele, is that there was introduced at the end of the 15th century a rule that the dealer gives himself three or six more cards than the other two players at the beginning; he then discards three or six cards. So Karlin says that it is a "reasonable hypothesis" that the word from the old Arabic word "taraha," pronounced "tarakh," and meaning "to throw away." This word also gave us the English word "tare," meaning a "discarded portion." Tarocchi was the game of triumphs with a discard. Another point in favor of this theory is that another game came into favor in the 1490s, called Scartino, named after the ordinary Italian word for "discard." At the same time, a version of the game of triumphs, called "Triumphs", was introduced using the ordinary pack. Since the word had been coopted, the makers of the special deck formerly called "triumphs" used the Arabic-derived version of the name for the "discard" rule introduced into the game (but not used in the game with the ordinary deck) from Scartino. (5)
Around the same time as the French conquest of Milan and Ferrara or a little later (it is first recorded in 1505, in France and in Ferrara, Italy), this special form of triumphs was given the name "tarocchi," or "tarot" or "tarau" in French. Why a special word was needed is that there were now other games that used trumps, but were simply an ordinary suit so designated at the start of play. There are two main theories about the origin of this word. One, argued by professional philologists in the 20th century, holds that it comes from an Arabic-derived Italian word for "discard." This theory is found in the prestigious Grand Robert Dictionnaire de la Langue Francaise among other places. The reasoning, I think first presented by J. Karlin but repeated clearly by Thierry Depaulis in his 2013 Le Tarot Revele, is that there was introduced at the end of the 15th century a rule that the dealer gives himself three or six more cards than the other two players at the beginning; he then discards three or six cards. So Karlin says that it is a "reasonable hypothesis" that the word from the old Arabic word "taraha," pronounced "tarakh," and meaning "to throw away." This word also gave us the English word "tare," meaning a "discarded portion." Tarocchi was the game of triumphs with a discard. Another point in favor of this theory is that another game came into favor in the 1490s, called Scartino, named after the ordinary Italian word for "discard." At the same time, a version of the game of triumphs, called "Triumphs", was introduced using the ordinary pack. Since the word had been coopted, the makers of the special deck formerly called "triumphs" used the Arabic-derived version of the name for the "discard" rule introduced into the game (but not used in the game with the ordinary deck) from Scartino. (5)
Another reasonable hypothesis is that it comes from a word then in use meaning "fool." Documents with this word occur in 1495 and 1499. "Fool" was the first card, and anyone playing the game would be one. The weakness of this theory is that the use of the word in this sense has been shown only just at this time when the game was being called by a similar word. So maybe the term got applied to players of the game first (the game of the Fool), and then generalized, like we do with a brand-name such as Kleenex or Xerox. (6)
There are other hypotheses less likely than either of these. One says that it comes from an Arabic word for "hammer," as in the hammering of gold leaf, this fits only the earliest gilded cards, when the word "tarocchi" was not used. Another theory is that it commemorates a battle won by the French as the Taro River. Another is that it comes form the name of a town near Lyon called Tarasque. Whether the French or the Italian name appeared first is unknown. (7)
Under its new names, the game of tarot was played all over Europe. But from the next century and a half only a few partial decks remain, plus isolated cards. There are 20 trumps in the full-color deck by Catelin Geoffrey of Lyon; the two of coins card has his name plus the city and year 1557. There is the so-called "Rosenwald" deck--simple designs, mostly boring--with 21 trumps, now dated to sometime not long after 1507. There are also a couple of sheets of 15 or 20 designs, including both trumps and suit cards, now in Budapest and New York. I have already mentioned the Bolognese "Rothschild" and "Beaux-Arts" sheets. Then there some cards in the so-called "Rosenthal", 19th century copies of what might have been earlier designs. There are also the "Guildhall" and "Victoria and Albert", painted cards, of undetermined date 1450-1510 and seemingly derivative from the Milan types. There are some cards that were found in the Sforza Castle at the beginning of the 20th century. These cards are impossible to date precisely. All that can be said is that they were done sometime between the late 1400's and 1700 or so. (8)
Then, up until recently all dated to c. 1650, there survive three almost complete decks, printed in Paris, all with exactly the same pattern on the back, suggesting that they came from the same printer. One is by the so-called "Anonymous Parisian" and is called simply the "Tarot of Paris." Its style borrows from Geoffrey. Recent examination of the heraldics in the deck suggests that it was acually done around the same time as the Geoffroy. A second, by Jean Noblet, is in the style of the Cary Sheet and Milan, although with much modification. A Jean Noblet is registered among the card makers of Paris in the 1660s. This deck shows affinities with the Cary Sheet. The third deck, by Jacques Vieville, from around 1550, combines ideas from the Cary Sheet, including some not used by Noblet, plus some designs in the style associated with Ferrara and Bologna. (9)
There is also a variant on tarocchi in Bologna and Florence called Minchiate, with 40-42 trumps. It may derive from a game of that name that is very early. In December of 1450 Trionfi is listed in the ordinances of Florence as an allowed game, after decades of prohibitions. In 1470 another name appears, minchiate. The images given in the present study are from an 18th century Minchiate that is most likely a copy of a 17th century original. Its designs seem to me related to the Florentine cards, but more in line with conservative Counter-Reformation Roman Catholic tastes. For example, there is no Popess and no Pope, just one very effeminate looking so-called "Grand Duke". (10)
The next big jump after Noblet was in 1672, when an engraver in Marseille named either Francois Chosson (the name on the 2 of Coins) or Guilhem Sallonetz (the "GS" of the Chariot card) put out a set of images like Noblet's but both more elegant and more compatible with Roman Catholic good taste. Ross Caldwell, in April 2008, argued reasonably that Sallonetz was the original engraver; however I will call it, however unfairly, the Chosson deck because that is what it is known as in the literature. (11)
The Sallonetz/Chosson design (which French tarot historian Thierry Depaulis calls TdeM2) was copied by many others, most notably Nicholas Conver in Marseille, first in 1760, and then in 1761 in different colors, more similar to those of 1672. Meanwhile Noblet's style of card (TdM1) continued in Dodal and Payen (virtually identical, c. 1701-1715 Paris and 1715 Lyon), with some modifications perhaps reflecting the TdM2's ideas.
The modifications are sometimes in the direction of the TdM2. For example in the Star card, the Dodal’s arrangement of the two trees, with the added bird, is more like the Chosson than the Noblet. Another example is the Pope card, which we shall see later. (12)
Except for the colors, the designs of Conver's two decks are virtually identical. With other variations in color and detail, these designs were used again and again for centuries in various parts of Europe. And nearly every new deck in the 19th and 20th centuries has been based largely on this "Marseille" pattern, although also borrowing from other designs from the 16th and 17th century, especially Vieville's. (13)
The term "Marseille," for a pattern that we see first in Milan and fully in Paris, was not actually used to designate the Conver design until 1930, when Paul Marteau came out with his version. I say "version" because it is not exactly a restoration of any of the others. Above is an example, the Emperor, whom we have already met in the Visconti cards. Each uses what appears to be the same basic stencil, in four different color schemes, starting with Chosson. As you can see, the colors vary widely. In Chosson, his legs are green and blue. In all the others they are all blue. In Marteau, his vest is blue; in all the others, it is red, although to varying degrees. And so on. None is quite like any of the others. If colors matter, then we need to be aware of this variability. (14)
In 1781, an event occurred that changed the course of the tarot, namely, the publication of two essays in a multi-volume series on the pre-history of Western culture. One was by the series' main author, Court de Gebelin, the other by a mysterious "C. de M." since identified as the Comte de Mellet. Both argued that the tarot images of the "Marseille" deign were of Egyptian origin. Their exact arguments need not concern us. For me they are of interest only to the extent that they shed light on the tarot that they inherited. The same is true of another proponent of Egyptian origin of around the same time, who used the pen-name Etteilla. He designed his own deck and--even before de Gebelin-- popularized the art of fortune-telling. Again, he will be of interest to the extent we can find, in his work and that of his followers, evidence of what came before.
References, Bologna, and the next 200 years:
1. Caldwell: http://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=334. It seems to me that Bolognese conservatism may have been a product of the city's domination by the Papacy for the centuries in question, as opposed to the second half of the 15th century, when under the Bentivoglio, and closely tied to Florence, it was a lively Renaissance city full of innovation and the new ideas. Zorli, http://www.letarot.it/Bolognese-Industr ... 8_eng.aspx, takes the view that the cards started in Bologna, then went to Milan, then back to Bologna. Exactly why they would have started in Bologna rather than Milan itself is not clear.
2. Italian conquest of Milan: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Wars.
3. For Cary Sheet images: http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/dl_crosscollex/. Search "Cary Sheet 3s."
4. For the idea that the Cary Sheet design is French, see Ross Caldwell, http://www.association.tarotstudies.org/newsletters/news25.html. The more orthodox view is at http://it.geocities.com/a_pollett/cards43.htm.
5. Tarocchi. First appearance of name and rule: Place, p. 16. Dummett Game of Tarot, p. 178ff. and, for the other game with "discard," pp. 426-427. Also see my post at http://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=610&start=10. For Arabic word origin, see J. Karlin, http://jktarot.com/faq2.html. Another dictionary that Karlin cites is Tresor de la Langue Francaise.
6. Fool: see Caldwell at http://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&p=6851#p6857 and following. This thread, starting at http://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=610, is a treasure-trove of information.
7. For "Taro river," first propounded by Sylvia Mann, see Kaplan vol. 2 p. 113. More recently Huck Meyer at http://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=610&p=9024 and posts following. For "Tarasque," mmfilesi at http://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=499.
8. Dummett, pp. 72-76. Kaplan, Encyclopedia of Tarot, Vol 1, p. 124ff. The reference to 1557 and Geoffrey's name on the 2 of coins is in Kaplan, p. 132. Geoffrey image: http://www.poker168.com/bwg/bwg_tl6.htm.
9. Noblet and Vieville: Flornoy, website at http://www.tarot-history.com/. Also for Vieville: http://it.geocities.com/a_pollett/cards61.htm. Anonymous Parisian image: http://www.poker168.com/bwg/bwg_tl7.htm.
10. Minchiate: Dummett Game of Tarot p. 19. History of deck: http://trionfi.com/0/p/09/. 1450 Triumphs in Florence: http://www.trionfi.com/0/f/06.
11. Chosson: http://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=53.
12. Images: Noblet and Dodal, Flornoy at http://www.tarot-history.com/. Chosson at http://tarotchoco.quebecblogue.com/ (sidebar at right for TdM Francois Chosson).
13. Dodal and Payen: Flornoy, http://www.tarot-history.com/.
14. On Marteau: http://en.camoin.com/tarot/Explanation-Alejandro-Jodorowsky-en.htm.
5. The Tarot in its Cultural Milieu. So far I have been following the basic idea of the tarot as an instructional game, through an ingenious set of allegories on the path to Christian salvation. But is that all there is? How did the strange idea of a female Pope get in there? Where did the innovative ideas of the Cary Sheet come from? And how did fairly specific divinatory meanings get attached to individual cards, even before the occultists developed their abstract systems? The way Court de Gebelin and the Comte de Mellet talk about the meaning of the cards in 1781, they had divinatory meanings long before they wrote about them. (1)
Some tarot scholars have posited an "underground stream,” Greco-Roman-Egyptian, Sufi, and/or mystical Christian, which passed down a series of initiations, or stages of consciousness, that finally came into the light as tarot. How else could anybody have done anything so profound? (2)
I cannot refute this hypothesis; but I will say that it is unnecessary. Let us give the Renaissance some credit! Portraying life as a series of initiations leading one toward the divine was a familiar plot line in literature. The numerous Grail romances are an example, which fused Christianity with elements of Celtic myth. An example, with illustrations in the same style as the CY and PMB, is in a manuscript done in the 1440s. Dante's Divine Comedy is another example, this time mixing Christianity with Greco-Roman myth. Closer to some images of the tarot is Petrarch's famous poem "The Triumphs," in which a succession of tableaux on wagons passes by, expressed in both Greek and Christian terms, each one expressing an aspect of human existence and each triumphing over the one before. (3)
Under its new names, the game of tarot was played all over Europe. But from the next century and a half only a few partial decks remain, plus isolated cards. There are 20 trumps in the full-color deck by Catelin Geoffrey of Lyon; the two of coins card has his name plus the city and year 1557. There is the so-called "Rosenwald" deck--simple designs, mostly boring--with 21 trumps, now dated to sometime not long after 1507. There are also a couple of sheets of 15 or 20 designs, including both trumps and suit cards, now in Budapest and New York. I have already mentioned the Bolognese "Rothschild" and "Beaux-Arts" sheets. Then there some cards in the so-called "Rosenthal", 19th century copies of what might have been earlier designs. There are also the "Guildhall" and "Victoria and Albert", painted cards, of undetermined date 1450-1510 and seemingly derivative from the Milan types. There are some cards that were found in the Sforza Castle at the beginning of the 20th century. These cards are impossible to date precisely. All that can be said is that they were done sometime between the late 1400's and 1700 or so. (8)
Then, up until recently all dated to c. 1650, there survive three almost complete decks, printed in Paris, all with exactly the same pattern on the back, suggesting that they came from the same printer. One is by the so-called "Anonymous Parisian" and is called simply the "Tarot of Paris." Its style borrows from Geoffrey. Recent examination of the heraldics in the deck suggests that it was acually done around the same time as the Geoffroy. A second, by Jean Noblet, is in the style of the Cary Sheet and Milan, although with much modification. A Jean Noblet is registered among the card makers of Paris in the 1660s. This deck shows affinities with the Cary Sheet. The third deck, by Jacques Vieville, from around 1550, combines ideas from the Cary Sheet, including some not used by Noblet, plus some designs in the style associated with Ferrara and Bologna. (9)
There is also a variant on tarocchi in Bologna and Florence called Minchiate, with 40-42 trumps. It may derive from a game of that name that is very early. In December of 1450 Trionfi is listed in the ordinances of Florence as an allowed game, after decades of prohibitions. In 1470 another name appears, minchiate. The images given in the present study are from an 18th century Minchiate that is most likely a copy of a 17th century original. Its designs seem to me related to the Florentine cards, but more in line with conservative Counter-Reformation Roman Catholic tastes. For example, there is no Popess and no Pope, just one very effeminate looking so-called "Grand Duke". (10)
The next big jump after Noblet was in 1672, when an engraver in Marseille named either Francois Chosson (the name on the 2 of Coins) or Guilhem Sallonetz (the "GS" of the Chariot card) put out a set of images like Noblet's but both more elegant and more compatible with Roman Catholic good taste. Ross Caldwell, in April 2008, argued reasonably that Sallonetz was the original engraver; however I will call it, however unfairly, the Chosson deck because that is what it is known as in the literature. (11)
The Sallonetz/Chosson design (which French tarot historian Thierry Depaulis calls TdeM2) was copied by many others, most notably Nicholas Conver in Marseille, first in 1760, and then in 1761 in different colors, more similar to those of 1672. Meanwhile Noblet's style of card (TdM1) continued in Dodal and Payen (virtually identical, c. 1701-1715 Paris and 1715 Lyon), with some modifications perhaps reflecting the TdM2's ideas.
The modifications are sometimes in the direction of the TdM2. For example in the Star card, the Dodal’s arrangement of the two trees, with the added bird, is more like the Chosson than the Noblet. Another example is the Pope card, which we shall see later. (12)
Except for the colors, the designs of Conver's two decks are virtually identical. With other variations in color and detail, these designs were used again and again for centuries in various parts of Europe. And nearly every new deck in the 19th and 20th centuries has been based largely on this "Marseille" pattern, although also borrowing from other designs from the 16th and 17th century, especially Vieville's. (13)
The term "Marseille," for a pattern that we see first in Milan and fully in Paris, was not actually used to designate the Conver design until 1930, when Paul Marteau came out with his version. I say "version" because it is not exactly a restoration of any of the others. Above is an example, the Emperor, whom we have already met in the Visconti cards. Each uses what appears to be the same basic stencil, in four different color schemes, starting with Chosson. As you can see, the colors vary widely. In Chosson, his legs are green and blue. In all the others they are all blue. In Marteau, his vest is blue; in all the others, it is red, although to varying degrees. And so on. None is quite like any of the others. If colors matter, then we need to be aware of this variability. (14)
In 1781, an event occurred that changed the course of the tarot, namely, the publication of two essays in a multi-volume series on the pre-history of Western culture. One was by the series' main author, Court de Gebelin, the other by a mysterious "C. de M." since identified as the Comte de Mellet. Both argued that the tarot images of the "Marseille" deign were of Egyptian origin. Their exact arguments need not concern us. For me they are of interest only to the extent that they shed light on the tarot that they inherited. The same is true of another proponent of Egyptian origin of around the same time, who used the pen-name Etteilla. He designed his own deck and--even before de Gebelin-- popularized the art of fortune-telling. Again, he will be of interest to the extent we can find, in his work and that of his followers, evidence of what came before.
References, Bologna, and the next 200 years:
1. Caldwell: http://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=334. It seems to me that Bolognese conservatism may have been a product of the city's domination by the Papacy for the centuries in question, as opposed to the second half of the 15th century, when under the Bentivoglio, and closely tied to Florence, it was a lively Renaissance city full of innovation and the new ideas. Zorli, http://www.letarot.it/Bolognese-Industr ... 8_eng.aspx, takes the view that the cards started in Bologna, then went to Milan, then back to Bologna. Exactly why they would have started in Bologna rather than Milan itself is not clear.
2. Italian conquest of Milan: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Wars.
3. For Cary Sheet images: http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/dl_crosscollex/. Search "Cary Sheet 3s."
4. For the idea that the Cary Sheet design is French, see Ross Caldwell, http://www.association.tarotstudies.org/newsletters/news25.html. The more orthodox view is at http://it.geocities.com/a_pollett/cards43.htm.
5. Tarocchi. First appearance of name and rule: Place, p. 16. Dummett Game of Tarot, p. 178ff. and, for the other game with "discard," pp. 426-427. Also see my post at http://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=610&start=10. For Arabic word origin, see J. Karlin, http://jktarot.com/faq2.html. Another dictionary that Karlin cites is Tresor de la Langue Francaise.
6. Fool: see Caldwell at http://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&p=6851#p6857 and following. This thread, starting at http://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=610, is a treasure-trove of information.
7. For "Taro river," first propounded by Sylvia Mann, see Kaplan vol. 2 p. 113. More recently Huck Meyer at http://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=610&p=9024 and posts following. For "Tarasque," mmfilesi at http://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=499.
8. Dummett, pp. 72-76. Kaplan, Encyclopedia of Tarot, Vol 1, p. 124ff. The reference to 1557 and Geoffrey's name on the 2 of coins is in Kaplan, p. 132. Geoffrey image: http://www.poker168.com/bwg/bwg_tl6.htm.
9. Noblet and Vieville: Flornoy, website at http://www.tarot-history.com/. Also for Vieville: http://it.geocities.com/a_pollett/cards61.htm. Anonymous Parisian image: http://www.poker168.com/bwg/bwg_tl7.htm.
10. Minchiate: Dummett Game of Tarot p. 19. History of deck: http://trionfi.com/0/p/09/. 1450 Triumphs in Florence: http://www.trionfi.com/0/f/06.
11. Chosson: http://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=53.
12. Images: Noblet and Dodal, Flornoy at http://www.tarot-history.com/. Chosson at http://tarotchoco.quebecblogue.com/ (sidebar at right for TdM Francois Chosson).
13. Dodal and Payen: Flornoy, http://www.tarot-history.com/.
14. On Marteau: http://en.camoin.com/tarot/Explanation-Alejandro-Jodorowsky-en.htm.
5. The Tarot in its Cultural Milieu. So far I have been following the basic idea of the tarot as an instructional game, through an ingenious set of allegories on the path to Christian salvation. But is that all there is? How did the strange idea of a female Pope get in there? Where did the innovative ideas of the Cary Sheet come from? And how did fairly specific divinatory meanings get attached to individual cards, even before the occultists developed their abstract systems? The way Court de Gebelin and the Comte de Mellet talk about the meaning of the cards in 1781, they had divinatory meanings long before they wrote about them. (1)
Some tarot scholars have posited an "underground stream,” Greco-Roman-Egyptian, Sufi, and/or mystical Christian, which passed down a series of initiations, or stages of consciousness, that finally came into the light as tarot. How else could anybody have done anything so profound? (2)
I cannot refute this hypothesis; but I will say that it is unnecessary. Let us give the Renaissance some credit! Portraying life as a series of initiations leading one toward the divine was a familiar plot line in literature. The numerous Grail romances are an example, which fused Christianity with elements of Celtic myth. An example, with illustrations in the same style as the CY and PMB, is in a manuscript done in the 1440s. Dante's Divine Comedy is another example, this time mixing Christianity with Greco-Roman myth. Closer to some images of the tarot is Petrarch's famous poem "The Triumphs," in which a succession of tableaux on wagons passes by, expressed in both Greek and Christian terms, each one expressing an aspect of human existence and each triumphing over the one before. (3)
So now I will try to say more precisely what the cultural milieu was in which the tarot emerged and developed.
Cultural Context I: Greek and Latin scholarship. During and after the Renaissance, there were numerous amateur and professional scholars, well-read in Greek and Latin, together with private and public collections of ancient art. Some of these would have been at the disposal of the card-designers. These scholars were highly esteemed in the Renaissance courts and could easily have influenced the designs of the "courtly" decks, by including references to classical Graeco-Roman sources. (At the same time, I wish to emphasize, there was a rich heritage of Christian symbolism to draw from, as developed over the course of the previous thousand years.)
Cultural Context I: Greek and Latin scholarship. During and after the Renaissance, there were numerous amateur and professional scholars, well-read in Greek and Latin, together with private and public collections of ancient art. Some of these would have been at the disposal of the card-designers. These scholars were highly esteemed in the Renaissance courts and could easily have influenced the designs of the "courtly" decks, by including references to classical Graeco-Roman sources. (At the same time, I wish to emphasize, there was a rich heritage of Christian symbolism to draw from, as developed over the course of the previous thousand years.)
Plato's works were among the first to receive translations. Only the Timaeus was known in the Middle Ages. Then the Phaedrus received an important and controversial translation, up through its famous allegory of the charioteer. The Republic was translated twice in Milan early in the 15th century for Duke Filippo. Some of Plutarch was available in Latin by the beginning of the 15th century, and much more followed. Cosimo di' Medici sponsored translations of all of Plato in the mid-15th century, accomplished by the philosopher Ficino. In the mid-15th century, Nicholas V sponsored large translation projects of Plutarch, Strabo, Diodorus, Herodotus, etc. Both the Greek originals and the Latin translations received print editions in the classically oriented editions of Aldus in Venice, starting around 1500. (4)
In the Middle Ages there were mythology handbooks about the Graeco-Roman gods, but with not much attention to reporting sources accurately, more on using the myths as an occasion to do Christian moralizing and show the superiority of Christianity to pagan belief. So there was "Ovid moralized" and various books expanding on Fulgentius, an early Christian account using the gods for Christian allegorical purposes. This tradition continued even in the 16th and 17th centuries. An example in English is the Mystagogus Poeticus, or The Muses Interpreter, Explaining the historicall Mysteries, and mystical Histories of the ancient Greek and Latine Poets, by one Alexander Ross, London 1648.
By the early 16th century, there came substantial mythology handbooks, written in Latin but translated into all the languages of Europe: Cartari and Conti are the main examples. Along with them were the emblem books: Alciato, Ripa and Valeriano are the most well known. (These are listed in Wind's bibliography and described more extensively by Seznec). These were used not only by artists, but also and more often by emblem-makers, in designing erudite coats of arms, banners, and signet rings for the nobility. The handbooks cited sources for the images they conjured up, and they provided a kind of common symbolic language by which to interpret what on the surface were perplexing images. (5)
Cartari and Conti were straightforward paraphrases of ancient texts about the gods; subsequent editions included illustrations based on those descriptions. The emblem writers, like Ripa and Alciato, used images that were explained by epigrams that were either composed for the occasion or came from ancient Greek and Latin poetry. (6)
Cultural context II: hieroglyphs. Valeriano entitled his book (in several volumes) Hieroglyphica and provided so-called “hieroglyphs,” combinations of images that put things together in an enigmatic way.
A few early writers on tarot--before de Mellet in 1781--describe tarot cards as "hieroglyphs" (Ross Caldwell at http://www.tarotforum.net/showthread.php?t=94755). An "anonymous discourse" of 1570 speaks of "XXII hieroglyphic images." ("figure geroglifiche" in the original Italian). Then in 1607 we hear of one Luque Fajardo, speaking of hieroglyphs as "silent figures who speak only by their appearance and represenatation." In 1670, talking of the game Germani, a version of Minchiate, Paolo Minucci says, "In these Tarocchi cards are depicted different hieroglyphs and celestial signs, and each has his number, from one to 35..."(In queste carte di Tarocchi sono effigiati diversi geroglifici e segni celesti: e ciascuna ha il suo numero, da uno fino a 35).
A few early writers on tarot--before de Mellet in 1781--describe tarot cards as "hieroglyphs" (Ross Caldwell at http://www.tarotforum.net/showthread.php?t=94755). An "anonymous discourse" of 1570 speaks of "XXII hieroglyphic images." ("figure geroglifiche" in the original Italian). Then in 1607 we hear of one Luque Fajardo, speaking of hieroglyphs as "silent figures who speak only by their appearance and represenatation." In 1670, talking of the game Germani, a version of Minchiate, Paolo Minucci says, "In these Tarocchi cards are depicted different hieroglyphs and celestial signs, and each has his number, from one to 35..."(In queste carte di Tarocchi sono effigiati diversi geroglifici e segni celesti: e ciascuna ha il suo numero, da uno fino a 35).
So what is up with "hieroglyphs"?
To educated northern Italians, pictures could function as what they called "hieroglyphs," a term their scholars knew from Herodotus, Apuleius, Plutarch, Diodorus, Pliny the Elder, Tacitus, Macrobius, Isadore of Seville, and other sources. (See my posts on the thread http://www.tarotforum.net/showthread.php?t=94755, starting on p. 5, post 43, for numerous quoted examples.). The study got new impetus from two new texts. First was a manuscript that the Florentine Poggio brought from St. Gallen, Switzerland in 1417. It was written by the Roman general Ammianus and described inscribed pictures on stonework as "hieroglyphs," Greek for "sacred inscriptions." It also gave translations for some of the pictures.
Next--not first, as some suppose, but just the icing on the cake--came a Greek text by a certain "Horapollo" purporting to translate Egyptian hieroglyphs entered Florence in 1422. That book, dating from the 4th century or so, had many more examples of "hieroglyphs" and their translations, giving scholars the most impetus to look further. Only then did it occur to the Florentines who were reading these works that the strange inscriptions on the obelisks in Rome might be examples of hieroglyphs (verification was made by Poggio and Niccolo on a visit to Rome, 1422-1444).
Although these ideas began in Florence, scholars associated with them moved to all the cities then associated with the tarot. Filelfo, in Florence 1427-1433, moved to Milan in 1440; his colleague Filarete went there a little later, by 1450. Filarete wrote about hieroglyphs in a treatise on architecture published c. 1462. It occurs in a dialogue between him and a duke--I would imagaine that such interactions occurred in real life--and he explains that the hieroglyph of an eel means envy. Filarete cites Filelfo as his source. And indeed Filelfo had taken a copy of Horapollo with him to Milan. Charles Dempsey writes:
Filarete’s memory, at least on this one point, did not fail him, for a letter written by Filelfo in 1444 to Scalamonti, the biographer of Syciacus of Ancona, refers to Horapollo and specifically cites the eel as meaning envy ("Renaissance Hieroglyphic Studies,” p. 354, in Hermeticism and the Renaissance: Intellectual History and the Occult in Early Modern Europe).
Syriacus is another of the early investigators of hieroglyphs. According to Dempsey, he probably had an abridged translation of Horapollo with him when he visited Egypt in 1435 and copied the inscriptions he saw there at Giza. Syriacus then toured the courts of Italy. He wrote about his visit to the Duke of Ferrara in 1459, although we don't know if they discussed Egypt.
Dempsey mentions that Giorgio Valla translated both Herodotus and Horapollo. Valla was tutor to the younger Sforza children in Pavia (per Wikipedia). He was there 1465-1485; then he took up a university chair in Venice. His translation of Horapollo is now in the Biblioteca Trivulziana, Milan, ms. 2154, according to Roberto Weiss (The Renaissance Discovery of Classical Antiquity, p. 155). So it is quite clear that the Sforza court was familiar with the idea of hieroglyphs.
Another influential Florentine interested in hieroglyphs was Leon Batista Alberti, whose early literary output includede a play with 22 scenes in Bologna 1425. He became friends with Leonello d'Este, Marquis of Ferrara, around 1438, at a papal conclave there. His early writings playfully discuss "hieroglyphs" of his own invention, and his treatise on architecture, a draft of which was completed by 1452, talks explicitly about them as sacred pictures whose meaning was meant to be hidden from the unlearned. Alberti told Leonello's sister that the book was written for Leonello, who died in 1450.
1499 saw the publication in Venice of the Hypnerotomachia (Strife of Love in a Dream), a book probably written by 1467. This lavishly illustrated work invented and then deciphered hieroglyphs for its intrigued readers.
Finally a translation of Horapollo was published in 1505; as we have seen, likely an abridged one had already been circulating since the late 1420s. There is much more to be said about hieroglyphics in the Renaissance, but I will stop here. (7)
The tarot, on this line of reasoning, is in the "hieroglyph" tradition, perhaps as early as the nobles' decks of Milan and Ferrara. On this view, the meaning of the cards was hidden from the ignorant, although in plain sight and known to the wise, among whom were the humanists in the 15th century courts. Then later, after the publication of the "emblem" books in the later 16th and 17th centuries, similar interpretations of the tarot could exist without being tied to individual humanists, universities, and courts. Its images were ones that people with a classical education would be able to recognize without knowing any “underground stream.”
The tarot, on this line of reasoning, is in the "hieroglyph" tradition, perhaps as early as the nobles' decks of Milan and Ferrara. On this view, the meaning of the cards was hidden from the ignorant, although in plain sight and known to the wise, among whom were the humanists in the 15th century courts. Then later, after the publication of the "emblem" books in the later 16th and 17th centuries, similar interpretations of the tarot could exist without being tied to individual humanists, universities, and courts. Its images were ones that people with a classical education would be able to recognize without knowing any “underground stream.”
There are those who insist that the cards have no more meaning than an average Church-going but otherwise uneducated public would understand. I do not agree. It seems to me that an orthodox Christian interpretation of the trumps is certainly there, to instruct people on the proper road to salvation. That much would protect the cards against the worst diatribes and onslaughts of Christian extremists who viewed all card games as tools of the devil. To be sure, such diatribes still happened, but there could also be meaningful retorts. Yet the Renaissance delighted in ambiguity and meanings known only to the few.
The noted Swiss Egyptologist Erik Hornung, after surveying the hieroglyph tradition of the 15th and 17th centuries, said in 2001:
Great art sprang from the soil od these new Hermetic mysteries in the Renaissance, art that took great joy in symbolic encoding. The works "were intended for the initiated, and they thus require an initiation' (Wind, p. 26). Overall, the artists sought to discover or express a secret meaning, and there must have been hermetically-oriented secret societies as early as the sixteenth century, long before the Rosicrucians. (Secret Lore of Egypt, English trans. p. 91)Emblems and artworks of the time were puzzles to be solved and appreciated. This is where the distinction between "esoteric" and "exoteric" interpretations of the cards breaks down. They are not "esoteric" in the sense of the exclusive property of a cult of secrecy; however they are also not, like Christian associations, ones immediately recognizable by most people; they would have been appreciated by those who supplemented their Christianity with more specialized domains. These associations might have been passed to others as part of the benefits of belonging to such societies, secret or not, as Hornung mentions.
Through the use of such references, people who knew them would have an advantage when playing the game. Although the precise rules at the beginning aren't known, it was clearly a trick-taking game where an important part of being able to win was being able to remember what important cards (mainly, the trumps and kings) had already been played. Classical references would have enabled players to construct narratives as they went along. To remember which cards had been played, all that players had to do was repeat to themselves the story they had constructed up to that point. The more references, the easier it would be to construct such narratives. A similar procedure enabled orators and actors remember long speeches. (8)
In the 17th and 18th century "secret societies" developed which may have imparted some of the less accessible information to its members. To the extent that this information, taken literally, went against Christian doctrine, there would have been reason, in these heresy-hunting times, to keep it secret. However I want to stress that it is not the information itself that would have been secret, as anyone with a knowledge of Greek and access to a good library would be able to get it; it is the endorsement of such data, as important in the business of self-realization, that would have been kept from those in the business of persecuting heterodox ideas.
Cultural Context III: Egyptian and Greek "Mysteries." In 1958, Edgar Wind's Pagan Mysteries of the Renaissance provided a framework for understanding some Renaissance art as an attempt, drawing on classical texts and images, to metaphorically recover ancient mysteries of Greece and Rome. Wind gave vivid examples, primarily in visual art, but also in poetry and drama. Art historians ever since have been following Wind's lead. I am going to apply the same approach to tarot cards.
In this context, the myths of Dionysus and Osiris are of particular interest. The Florentine philosopher Marsilio Ficino wrote:
The spirit of the god Dionysus was believed by the ancient theologians and Platonists to be the ecstasy and abandon of disencumbered minds, when partly by innate love, partly at the instigation of the god, they transgress the natural limits of intelligence and are miraculously transformed into the beloved god himself: where, inebriated by a certain new draft of nectar and by an immeasurable joy, they range, as it were, in a bacchic frenzy. In the drunkenness of this Dionysiac wine our Dionysius expresses his exultation. He pours forth enigmas, he sings in dithyrambs... To penetrate the profundity of his meanings....to imitate his quasi-Orphic manner of speech, we too require the divine fury... (quoted in Wind, p. 62).By "our Dionysius" (with the -ius ending) Ficino meant Dionysius the Areopagyte, the Athenian disciple of St. Paul (Acts 17:34) to whom some mystical Neoplatonic writings, actually composed in the 5th century, were attributed (Wind p. 20). The Dithyramb is a verse form associated with Dionysus (the god). As for the Orphics, these are the participants in a late extension of Dionysians particularly favored by Ficino and his pupil Pico della Mirandola. Ficino is reported to have set Orphic hymns to music and sung them.
Exactly when the Orphics began is unclear. Probably it was sometime in the 5th century b.c. in the Greek colonies of southern Italy. They may have been an offshoot of the Pythagoreans. Late in the Roman Empire (4th century c.e. according to Harrison in Prolegomena to Greek Religion, p. 624, in Google Books) they are characterized by an allegiance to a set of poems called "Orphic hymns," mythically attributed to a man named Orpheus. These hymns reworked the old myths, especially the myths about Dionysus, into a new framework and cult. Eventually it became so close in practice to early Christianity that Christians charged that it had been invented by the Devil as a clever trap! Plato and the his followers show considerable Orphic influence. (1)
For Roman-era writers about mythology, Dionysus and Osiris, despite being gods of different countries, Egypt and Greece, were treated interchangeably (Wind, p. 174, cites Herodotus II, 48; Plutarch Isis and Osiris 28; Servius, In Georgica I.166). Their cults were separate but interconnected. The differences did not bother the Roman-era writers.
In mid-15th century Italy, Bessarion and, for the time he was in Italy, his teacher Plethon, were earlier Greek mystery-loving Christians. Bessarion's home in Rome functioned as a kind of unofficial academy of learning. A letter he wrote to the sons of his deceased teacher Plethon gives the tone:
Il cardinale Bessarione saluta Demetrio e Andronico, figli del sapiente Gemisto. Ho appreso che il nostro comune padre e maestro ha deposto ogni spoglia terrena e se n'è andato in cielo, al sito di ogni purità, per unirsi al coro della mistica danza di Jacco [id est il Dioniso dei Misteri di Eleusi - ndr] con gli dèi olimpici. (http://www.ritosimbolico.net/studi2/studi2_22.html)Bessarion was papal legate in the city of Bologna at the time of this letter. After Bessarion retired to Ravenna, the philologist Pomponio Leto organized a "Roman Academy" dedicated to classicism. It allegedly was a hotbed of "neo-Paganism" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Academies), with Leto as "pontif maximus." Its members were all arrested on order of Pope Paul II in 1468. They were tortured and later pardoned. Leto himself was acquitted, after torture produced no compromising results (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Pomponius_Laetus). He continued teaching for another thirty years.
(Cardinal Bessarion greets Andronicus and Demetrius, children of learned Gemistus. I learned that our common father and teacher has deposited everything earthly and gone to heaven, the site of every purity, to join the choir of the mystical dance of Jacco [id est the Dionysus of the Mysteries of Eleusis - ed.] with the Olympian gods.)
For Bessarion and, most likely, the humanists of the Roman Academy, the myths of the Greco-Roman world were not to be taken literally, but metaphorically, as Plato treated them in his works. to represent in sensory terms the inexpressible experience of the divine, as well as for their moral lessons. That is how the Grail stories were taken, and why Dante put pagan mythological figures in his Divine Comedy. Some went further, into Kabbala as well. For Pico della Mirandola, as Wind summarizes him (p. 21), "Cabbalistic thought and pagan imagery might...become new handmaidens of Christian theology."
Pico talks about the Greek mysteries as something to be attained anew. In his Oration he proclaims:
...These initiates, after being purified by the arts which we might call expiatory, moral philosophy and dialectic, were granted admission to the mysteries. What could such admission mean but the interpretation of occult nature by means of philosophy? ... then, smitten by the frenzy of the Muses, we shall hear the heavenly harmony with the inward ears of the spirit. Then the leader of the Muses, Bacchus, revealing to us in our moments of philosophy, through his mysteries, that is, the visible signs of nature, the invisible things of God, will make us drunk with the richness of the house of God... (http://history.hanover.edu/courses/excerpts/350pico.html)Such words would be an inspiration to European intellectuals for at least four more centuries.
I propose that students of Greek and Latin combed the classics for references to Dionysian "mysteries" and that some of the results are suggested in the Marseille-style tarot. I am developing here a theory about the Marseille tarot that has been presented in French on the Web by "Daimonax" (http://www.bacchos.org/tarothtm/index.html). But his theory of how Dionysian mysteries got into the tarot, that they were preserved in the initiation rituals of acting companies, is hard to believe; the classics alone can account for what he finds.
Another source for "mysteries" starting in the 15th century was the so-called "Chaldean Oracles," a group of sayings probably from 2nd century Hellenized Syria, known through quotations by the so-called Neoplatonists of the 4th and 5th centuries. They seem to be a fusion of Middle Platonist philosophy with Babylonian religious rituals, probably Zoroastrian in origin. Italian humanists became aware of them as a distinct group through an edition and commentary by Gemistos Plethon, a Greek who visited Forence in 1439-1440 and lectured there during a conclave that sought to unify the Greek and Latin churches. This edition and commentary someohow came to Ficino in the 1460s, and perhaps to others as well, the most likely being Filelfo in Milan. Plethon's edition was based on an earlier one by Michael Psellos, and it, too was translated by Ficino. Other sayings besides the ones Plethon included were also known, even in the 1460s by Filelfo, and an expanded collection of "Oracles" was published in 1597. I will endeavor to show similarities between the tarot and these sayings.
Cultural Context IV: Neopythagoreanism. Fragments of Pythagorean philosophy found in Aristotle and other ancient writers had exerted an influence on Christian writers since Clement of Alexandria, particularly in the School of Chartres of the 13th century.
There were two sorts of ancient Pythagoreans. First, those referred to by Plato and Aristotle, of the 6th century, followers of Pythagoras, who according to legend founded a school in Italy in the 6th century. Then there was a revival of Pythagoreanism called Neopythagoreanism, starting in the first century b.c. and continuing through the Neoplatonists Macrobius, Porphyry, and Iamblicus.
Neopythagorean number theory focused on the numbers one through ten. Several ancient texts were available during the early years of the tarot, in both Latin and Greek. The most extensive, and the one I find applies most readily to the tarot, is the Theologumena Arithmeticae, or "Theology of Arithmetic," a text that was initially part of the collection of Bessarion, the Greek prelate turned Roman Catholic Cardinal. After Bessarion's 1469 death, his collection became the nucleus of the Biblioteca Marciana of the Republic of Venice, available for borrowing by qualified citizens. There were copies of Bessarion's manuscript in Florence and Naples. The copy in Florence reportedly contains marginal notations in the handwriting of the Florentine scholar Poliziano. He may have been the one who introduced Neopythagoreanism into the tarot, perhaps with with his friend Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. Poliziano and Pico traveled together to the various libraries of Italy in the late 1480s. They both had homoerotic leanings--a tendency quite noticable in the Sola-Busca deck--and were killed together in Florence in 1494, by arsenic poisoning; whether it was intentional or through using it as a medicine is not known, but they died shortly after a banquet that both attended.
A copy of the Theologumena Arithmeticae arrived in Paris eventually, and in 1547 the Greek text was printed in Paris. The next translation had to wait until 1988, with Robin Waterfield's translation into English.
There were also writings in Latin that presented Neopythagorean number theory, notably Macrobius's Commentary on the Dream of Scipio and Martinus Capella's Marriage between Mercury and Philology, continuously available in manuscript and in print starting in the late 15th century. In the 16th century there was a section on the first ten number of Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy, 1533. In addition, various Church Fathers, notably Origen and Augustine but also to some degree Irenaeus, had written on the first ten numbers, adapting Neopythagoreanism to Christian purposes. In the Middle Ages these writings had their own exponents writing in the same spirit.
In the 16th and 17th century there were writers who explicitly applied Pythagorean theory to playing cards. In 1584 Piedmont there was Guillaume D'Ocieux's so-called "tarotica" passage, in which the tarot featured as one of a long series of instances where the number four is prominent, part of a longer work going through examples for each of the first ten numbers. This text was discovered by Andrea Vitali and described, with tentative translations, at http://www.letarot.it/page.aspx?id=293 (to get to an English translation, click on the British flag at the top right of the page). In 1582 another author writing in French, Jean Gosselin in 1582, wrote La signification de l 'ancien jeu des chartes pythagoriques, in which he applied Pythagoreanism to the 32 card deck, of 4 suits each with 8 cards, as used to play the game of Trente e Un. See my account at http://www.letarot.it/page.aspx?id=608.
Cultural context V: Kabbalah. Another current of thought which could be brought to bear on the tarot early on is Kabbalah, as it was accessed during the period 1450-1650. It seems to me that the main texts that would have played a role are those that were available in Latin during that period. That leaves out the Zohar and the writings of the 16th century Kabbalists in the Eastern Mediterranean such as Cordovera and the followers of Luria. One of Cordovera's books was published in 1597 Venice, in Hebrew, with no translation into any language until the late 20th century (into English). It is true that there was a translation of the Zohar done in the 16th century, by Postel, but it was never published ("the Postel translation was never printed to this day": Joseph Dan, "Christian Kabbalah: From Mysticism to Esotericism," in Western Esotericism and the Science of Religion, p. 123).
What was available was mainly the following: first, the Kabbalistic Theses in Pico della Mirandola's 1486 900 Theses; secondly Reuchlin's 1517 book Art of the Kabbalah; third, Paul Ricci's 1515 abridged Latin translation of Gikkatilla's c. 1300 Gates of Light, which dated from about 1300; and fourth, Agrippa's 1533 Three Books of Occult Philosophy. Of these, the first three are by and large consistent with one another; Agrippa seems to have had additional sources. (It is true that Agrippa wrote a version of his Three Books in 1510. But that version contained no Kabbalah, according to Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl in Saturn and Melancholy. "The cabbalsitic element was entirely lacking," they declare (p. 352), based on a detailed examination of the manuscript.)
All of these works discuss the ten sefiroth, some more and some less. It seems to me most natural that Christian esotericists of the time. if they applied Kabbalah to the tarot at all, would have applied the doctrine of the sefiroth. There were 11 entities, if one included the En Sof as well as the 10 sefiroth. Gikatilla even used another concept, "Da'at," but it mostly meant the middle line rather than an independent entity of its own. Being based on 10, they are a natural complement to Neopythagorean number theory.
At the same time, none of these works discuss "paths" between sefiroth, except in terms of the flow of energy down the tree. (For example, for Gikattilla, Tifereth got energy from both sides, and so did all the sefiroth below them.) These did not become important in Kabbalah until Cordovera assigned one to each of the 22 Hebrew letters in 16th century Palestine. The early pictures of the Tree of Life show fewer than 22. I count 15 on the Tree shown on the frontispiece of the Portae Lucis.
I also will not be using the Sefer Yetsirah, or Book of Formation, another work of Jewish mysticism that may even predate Kabbalah. It correlates the planets, signs of the zodiac, and three of the four elements with the 22 Hebew letters. It is possible that letters correlated with cards, but the assignments to planets do not correlate with what I see in Pico. And Agrippa has something else entirely. I do not see what these correlations add to what is already a rich association to Greco-Roman imagery; at best they suggest a dogmatic narrowing of possibilities. I would rather focus on gods and myths than planets and zodiac signs.
One early parallel to tarot has to do with a poem that Mateo Boairdo wrote having a stanza for each of 78 cards of an imagined card game, 22 trumps and four suits. Two of the suits represent vices and two represent virtues. In the poem, each vice has a corresponding virtues, so that a particular virtue opposes and "drives out" the corresponding vice. The same structure can be found in the account of virtues and vices in the Corpus Hermeticum Tractate 13, where 12 vices "retreat before" 10 virtues. Pico calls attention to this passage in the part of the 900 Theses on "Mercury the Egyptian"; he says that the vices there correspond to the Kellipoi, or evil powers, in Kabbalah; but he cannot say more because it is secret. Pico's work was published Dec. 1, 1486. The date that Trionfi.com suspects for the appearance of the poem (at a d'Este wedding in Ferrara) is Jan. 1487. Boiardo was Pico's older cousin.
Cultural Context VI. Alchemy. The 14th and 15th centuries were a major period of popularity for alchemy, which continued into the 16th and 17th centuries. Alchemical works used a combination of text and pictures. It presented its material in discreet stages, many with accompanying illustrations, with both a spiritual and a material goal. The stages usually involved symbolic death, transformation, and spiritual rebirth. Like the tarot, the alchemists used Greco-Roman myth as well as Christian imagery. Their numerous arrays in the form of trees, with circles placed on them designating planets or alchemical stages, also suggest the Kabbalists' Tree of Life. Robert O'Neil (Tarot Symbolism pp. 264-291) found points of contact between alchemy and tarot in every one of the trumps. I will be following in his footsteps.
Some surviving alchemical texts antedated or were contemporaneous with the first tarot. The Turbo Philosophorum, an anthology of Arabic sources, was part of the Visconti Library in Milan.
A so-called "Arnaldian" work (from Arnald of Villanova) called the Rosarium Philosophorum existed in manuscript by the end of the 14th century. Urszula Sculakowska, in The Alchemy of Light (2000), says that illustrated versions circulated by 1400, called “Rosarium cum figuris” (p. 25, at http://books.google.com/books?id=ZJox8E ... um&f=false).
Before that, Chaucer spoke of it, and in anthropomorphic terms, in his “Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale” (late 14th century). In the “Rosarie” of “Arnold,” the Yeoman tells us, Sol and Luna are said to be the father and mother of the dragon Mercury and his brother "brimstoon"(lines 1418-1447, at (http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl- ... an-can.htm). This is not the plot of the Rosarium, but of some other Arnaldian work; but the passage shows how early and widespread the Rosarium and other Arnaldian works were known, and the metaphors they used.
A German work called the Heilege Dreifaltigkeit (Holy Trinity) existed by 1408 and survives in several early 15th century manuscripts. A copy was owned by the father of the Duchess of Mantua, Barbara of Brandenburg; she in turn was a close friend of Bianca Maria Sforza, who is intimately connected with the early Milanese tarot.
Another set of alchemical illustrations occurs in a book that doesn't even discuss alchemy, a commentary on the early Christian writer Fulgentius. It is nominally about the Greco-Roman gods; but the illustrations are unmistakably alchemical in character, as Stanislaus de Rola analyzed them in his 1973 Alchemy: the Secret Art.
We will have occasion to visit all these texts and illustrations many times, for their parallels in the imagery of the early tarot.
Cultural Context VII: Fortune telling. Finally, there is the popular tradition of fortune telling. Although the deck was primarily used in a trick-taking game, it is possible tht the cards were also used for divination, as there are 21 number-combinations of two dice, for which there were divination manuals. There were also "lot books" of 20, 22, or some other number of verses with advice or predictons; a German one exists that dates to 1450, and surely they existed before that. These lot books have some affinity with tarot, especially the Florentine version with more trumps known as Minchiate. Ross Caldwell discovered a mention of sortilege with tarot in the writings of Pico's nephew. Ordinary playing cards were also used in sortilege, probably more so than tarot. (11)
One device for divination was "Pythagoras' Wheel": one asked a question and the fortune-teller did a number-letter correlation for one's name or birthplace, added the numbers, and looked for it in the center of the card. If the number was on the top half of the card, the answer was yes; if not, no (Heninger, Touches of Sweet Harmony: Pythagorean Cosmology and Renaissance Poetics, p. 238; the image was originally in Christophe de Cattan, The Geomancie, trans. Francis Sparry, London 1591, but according to Heninger the "wheel" is from Venice a century earlier.)
An early example using cards with numbers attached is described in Cartwright, Isabella d'Este, marchioness of Mantua, 1474-1539; a study of the renaissance : she reads the "mystic numbers" in a game called "lotto." Cartwright speaks of "the Lotto cards with the mystic number XXVII, vinti sette, signifying that she had vanquished all her foes." "Lotto" is Italian for "lot" or "fate." Although here the year is c. 1523, these cards with "mystic numbers" are first referred to in the account of her life in c. 1490, the beginning of her years in Mantua. (12)
An example explicitly from tarot is in the 1527 epic poem "The Chaos of Triperuno," by the Italian poet Teofilo Folengo. In one section of the poem, Folengo has one of his characters, named Limerno, recite five sonnets that he composed relating to the tarocchi. Limerno says that four people, two men and two women, drew five trumps each and constructed their "destinies" based on it. They asked the character to compose sonnets incorporating the five cards. The sonnets are not exactly "destinies" but rather moral advice in a narrative using the five titles of the cards. (13)
That, too, counts as divination, it seems to me. When astrologers cast horoscopes to determine favorable days for their patrons to wage war, they, too, were giving advice based on what the "stars" said. Divination was not a matter of predicting an inexorable future or "fate.
I have no idea when divination assumed the importance it suddenly had in the late 18th century for Etteilla and his school. His first book, c. 1771, had to do with a Piquet deck, that is, ordinary cards with the 2-5's omitted. The only sign before that is in mid 18th century Bologna (http://www.tarotpedia.com/wiki/Bolognese_Tarot_Divination). Decker et al in A Wicked Pack of Cards suggest, based on the evidence of Etteilla, that there was a tradition of French cartomancy about which we know nothing:
Note that in Etteilla's numeral cards, there is nothing peculiar to Hermetism. It is therefore abdundantly demonstrated that Etteilla's Tarot, the first cartomantic Tarot pack commercially available, is largely fed from older French cartomancy. (Wicked Pack of Cards p. 94.)This is the "underground stream" I will be trying to fathom, one starting in the Renaissance and finally coming to light with Etteilla. It is also one that the late 19th century occultists tried to reconstruct--not, however, with scholarship but with fabricated documents, mistranslation, and false assurances. Yet they covered much of the same ground as I am: Egyptian and Greek mysteries, alchemy, Kabbalah, divination.
Anothing thing that is clear from Etteilla is that whatever stream fed his brand of cartomancy, it did not include astrology. The subject is not mentioned in his first book of 1773, and it only appears in the fourth Cahier as a kind of afterthought. Using the correspondences that he assignes between the 12 signs of the zodiac and the first 12 trumps, and those between the 10 number cards of Coins and the planets plus 3 other planet-like attributes of horoscopes, one may do a card-reading based on a the astrological configuration present at a person's birth. But that is astrology's only role in Etteilla's system. It plays no role in the reading once the cards are chosen. It is probably for that reason that the divination manuals of the Etteilla School make no mention of astrology whatsoever.
References, Cultural Context:
1. In J. Karlin, trans. and ed. Rhapsodies of the Bizarre. Another good translation is at http://www.tarotpedia.com/wiki/Du_Jeu_Des_Tarots.
2. Hidden stream: Christine Payne-Towler, The Underground Stream. An unfavorable review at http://www.aeclectic.net/tarot/books/underground-stream/. A summary by her is at: http://tarot.com/about-tarot/library/essays/history.
3. Petrarch: Gertrude Moakley, The Tarot cards painted by Beonifacio Bembo for the Visconti-Sforza family, 1966. A translation and analysis of Petrarch's poem is at http://infomotions.com/etexts/gutenberg/dirs/1/7/6/5/17650/17650.htm.
4. Handbooks: The best is Vincente Cartari, Imagines Deorum, Qui Ab Antiquis Colebrant, 1551, at http://www.uni-mannheim.de/mateo/camenaref/cartari.html. Italian edition,
Imagini delli Dei de gl'Antiche, 1647, reprinted 1963. Digitalized, Italian text only, at http://www.bibliotecaitaliana.it/xtf/view?docId=bibit000718/bibit000718.xml. Seznec: Jean Seznec, Survival of the Pagan Gods. Much of this book is on-line at http://books.google.com/books?id=YOISgWIQE7AC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Seznec+Survival+of+the+Pagan+Gods&source=bl&ots=UtV_j-iMxo&sig=0LHy9CxXqq0CEVvHw9eEp8LEPEI&hl=en&ei=RfqxTcTfIomusAOQqpn-Cw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CCoQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q&f=false.
7. On tarot as hieroglyphs, for full documentation see my posts on Aeclectic Tarot Forum on the thread http://www.tarotforum.net/showthread.php?t=94755, starting on p. 5 at post 43. Another presentation, with some discussion, is at http://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=603.
8. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_of_memory. The classic account is Frances Yates, The Art of Memory.
9. Jane Ellen Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion - Google Books Result Also numerous other studies, cited as we go.
10. "Daimonax," at http://bacchos.org/. Greco-Egyptian: Mary Greer, http://marygreer.wordpress.com/events/. On a possible Greco-Egyptian connection, Michael Poe, http://www.denelder.com/tarot/tarot034.html, is not credible as he presents it, and has not been verified by others (see http://www.luxlapis.co.za/at/serapis_02.htm). However his proposed images do correspond to those of the Egyptian-style cults of the Roman Empire.
10a. For documentation on the Chaldean Oracles, see my posts at http://www.tarotforum.net/showthread.php?t=160976&page=3 and following, starting bottom of this page 3 and going on for many pages.
11. Divination: Place, Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination, pp. 118 ff. Also http://geocities.com/cartedatrionfi/Fragments/1480-1539.html, scroll to "Lot Books I."'
12. Quoted by Huck at http://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=432.
13. Kaplan, Enclyopedia of Tarot Vol. II, pp. 8-9. See also the thread on Tarot History Forum starting at http://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=759.
22 Invocations of Dionysus. To summarize the cards and the myths as an initiatory sequence relating to the cult of Dionysus, based on documented mythic imagery in ancient works of art or literature, I have written a set of one-line Invocations. Each one addresses the god with a different one of his numerous Greek epithets, each starting with a different letter, following the order of the Greek alphabet. Although the Greek alphabet has 24 letters, I could find no epithets for Dionysus starting with the letters Rho (R) or Upsilon (Y). Along with the 22 Invocations, I have put explanations for each. (1)
My idea for these invocations was stimulated by a set of ancient epithets of various pagan gods that was attached to the cards in 1936 by a Swedish scholar named Sigurd Agrell. People after him, of course, have suggested that this system was in use during the Roman Empire and then became the basis for the tarot. Each Latin epithet begins with a different letter of the Latin alphabet, which then corresponds, in order, for 22 of its 23 letters (Yes, there are now 26, but "w" was added in the Middle Ages, and "u" and "j" in the 18th century; "y" was never used to start a word, and then only for Greek words imported into Latin). Since the list is one that easily could have been made up in the 20th century, I decided to try doing the same with just the epithets for Dionysus. I wish to emphasize that I claim no ancient origin for these invocations, just for the epithets themselves. (3)
The cards they are meant to correspond to are the trumps of the Marseille pattern, the one which began in the Cary Sheet, has its first full expression in Noblet, 1650, and its most popular version in Conver 1760 and 1761.
Unfortunately most of these historical decks are not for sale in the United States. But much of it is reproduced, in variable quality, on the Web. Among the historical "Marseille" style decks, Jean-Claude Flornoy has published a deck restoring the original colors for the Noblet; the trumps are available for viewing on his website along with the originals, and the same for the Dodal which came a little later. The 1761 Conver has been "restored" by Camoin and Jodorowsky, viewable on their website; however they have added details and distributed colors on some of the cards differently from the originals; for that reason if I use their version of a card, which is often quite stunning, if it departs from the original, I will say what they have added. More often I use the Heron's reproductions of the 1761 Conver original, and sometimes the 1760 version by the same publisher (which has a less effective choice of colors), and sometimes the "Chosson" of 1672. (4)
Plan of this Study. To look at how the tarot was understood in its first known 230 years, I will first examine its Christian associations, for the tarot was of necessity a game that wanted, and on the whole got, acceptance by the Church. Then there are Egyptian associations, mostly from Greek sources, for those who wanted the cards to reflect the mystery tradition of Isis and Osiris. Third are the Dionysian and other Greco-Roman associations, as reflecting what the Renaissance would have imagined for Greek and Roma cults grounded in Greco-Roman myth. In one case, the Pope card, I have also found Mithraic imagery. Then I will discuss Pythagorean, Kabbalist, and alchemical associations, connecting the imagery of the cards with writings accessible in the period.
The Pythagorean associations for the cards have mostly to do with the numbers that are on the cards in the Marseille-style sequence. The Neopythagorean account of the number has many points of contact with what is on the card and what the other cultural associations bring out. At the same time, the Pythagorean account seems to relate to the corresponding suit cards as well. Here the imagery on the Marseille-style cards, except for the Aces, is rather meager. So I rely on two other sources: first, the word-lists that were published by the Etteilla School in around 1791. These probably draw from an earlier cartomantic tradition. And second, the Sola-Busca suit cards of 1491. These are the only complete deck before the Waite-Smith of 1910 to have specific scenes drawn on the number cards, similar in style to those on the trumps. I see an uncanny correlation between the cards and the Etteilla School lists, which also correlate with the Neopythagorean accounts of the different numbers in the Theologumena Arithmeticae.
References, Invocations and Plan of Study:
1. Epithets: several lists on-line: e.g. (a) http://www.theoi.com/Cult/DionysosTitles.html. (b) http://www.wildivine.org/dionysos_epithets.htm. Search "epithets Dionysus." I also include an amalgamation of all the epithets I could find as an Appendix. Greek alphabet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_alphabet.
2. 12 step programs: e.g. at http://www.12step.org/.
3. Sigurd Agrell: see p. 122ff of Hermetic Magic: The Postmodern Magical Papyrus of Abaris - Google Books Result. An extended application to tarot is at: http://www.latintarotkey.com/. It claims to be a Mithraic analysis but is in fact pagan eclectic.
4. Flornoy is at http://www.tarot-history.com/. For Camoin-Jodorowsky, see http://en.camoin.com/tarot/-Home-en-.html. Various decks are as follows:
"Anonymous Parisian": http://www.poker168.com/bwg/bwg_tl7.htm
Brera-Brambilla (2 triumphs): http://www.storiadimilano.it/Arte/carte_gioco.htm. Scroll down.
Cary-Visconti (Cary-Yale): http://www.tarot.org.il/Cary%20Yale/. or, for suit cards, too:
http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/dl_crosscollex/. Search "Cary Visconti."
Cary Sheet: http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/dl_crosscollex/. Search "Cary Sheet 3s".
Castello Ursino (3 out of 4): http://trionfi.com/0/j/d/charlesvi/.
Catelin Geoffrey: http://www.poker168.com/bwg/bwg_tl6.htm
Chosson 1672 (search "Chosson"): http://tarotchoco.quebecblogue.com/tdm-edition-de-francois-chosson-photoshoped-arcanes-majeurs/
Conver 1760 original: http://en.camoin.com/tarot/Tarot-Marseilles-Nicolas-Conver-1760.html
Conver 1760 recreated by Camoin 1960:
http://tarotchoco.quebecblogue.com/tdm-de-nicolas-conver-edition-du-bicentenaire-camoin-arcanes-majeurs/
Conver 1761 original
http://www.interhobby.net/tarot/viCard.php3?Code=545÷ID=AM.
Conver 1761, Camoin-Jodorowsky 1999 "recreation":
http://en.camoin.com/tarot/Tarot-cards-Slide-show.html
d’Este: http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/dl_crosscollex/. Search "d'este."
Dodal originals and recreation: http://www.tarot-history.com/Jean-Dodal/index.html
Gringonneur (Charles VI): all 16 triumphs at http://www.poker168.com/bwg/bwg_tl4.htm. Better quality of 12 of them, plus the 1 suit card, at http://expositions.bnf.fr/renais/arret/3/index.htm
Minchiate: http://www.unics.uni-hannover.de/rrzn/endebrock/coll/pages/i31.html
Noblet originals and re-creation: http://www.tarot-history.com/Jean-Noblet/index.html
Rosenwald Sheet: http://trionfi.com/0/j/d/rosenwald/.
Rothschild sheets (2 of them, here called "Bolognese tarocchi"): http://trionfi.com/0/j/d/bologna/.
Rothschild card (which I do not use; Emperor is only triumph): http://trionfi.com/0/c/40/.
Sola-Busca: http://www.tarotpedia.com/wiki/Sola-Busca_gallery.
Tarot of Mantegna: http://trionfi.com/0/j/d/Mantegna/.
Visconti-Sforza (PMB): http://www.tarot.com/tarot/decks/index.php?deckID=35. Among the trumps on this site, the Devil and Tower cards are modern additions; the card names are modern, too.
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