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To: alt.magick.tyagi,alt.divination,alt.tarot,alt.pagan.magick,alt.magick From: nagasivaSubject: D'n'D Do Occult Tarot History (Re: History of Early Tarot (Esoteric?)) Date: Thu, 04 Dec 2003 00:40:19 GMT 50031111 00:11am ====================================================== DECKER AND DUMMETT DO OCCULT TAROT HISTORY (DUCKWORTH) ====================================================== summary of (occult) Tarot's origins (in the Foreword). --------------------------------- GAME BACKDROP TO THE OCCULT TAROT --------------------------------- 1420s+ * "only indicated use was for playing a card game." (ix); * spread out geographically but remained a family of trick-taking games (x); * originated in northern Italy with ordinary features: ** suits: Swords, Batons, Cups, Coins (ix); ** ranks: Swords/Batons => Courts...10...A Cups/Coins => Courts...A...10 (EXCEPT in France and Sicily where Cups/Coins duplicated others (see French in 1700s below) (x)); * and some novelties: ** cards: *** Fool: non-numbered non-suited unique card (ix) and *** Trumps: (I=>XXI) using "stock figures" for playing cards, "originally everywhere the same but their order differed markedly in different regions of Italy; *** Court: QUEENS added! (see Chess History!) (ix). ----------------------------------- APPEARANCE-VARIATION IN TAROT GAMES ----------------------------------- 1740s-1790s Germans * adopted French suits to Spades/Clubs/Hearts/Diamonds (x); * varied Trump imagery and distinguished by Roman Numerals (x); * by the end of 18th century these "had, for the purposes of play, replaced the Italian-suited ones everywhere save in France, Switzerland and Italy. French players went over to using them around the beginning of the [20th] century. (x) ------------------------------------ CARTOMANCY GIVES WAY TO OCCULT TAROT ------------------------------------ French (Etteilla) * "the familiar variety" of cartomancy in which "packs of cards were shuffled, dealt and spread in prescribed formats for telling the future" that survives today "descends from French fortune-tellers. First, they assigned divinatory meanings to the cards of the common Piquet pack, which had French suit-signs. Jean-Baptiste Alliette (1738-91), a Parisian diviner better known as Etteilla, transferred his Piquet cartomancy to the Tarot. By this time the game of Tarot had ceased to be played in France outside its eastern region so, to Parsian seers, the Tarot seemed mysterious and exotic. Etteilla and others infused the Tarot with occult sciences. This resulted in the production of new Tarots, to be used for common fortune-telling, yet designed to express some cosmic theme. Here were the beginnings of the trend nowadays called Tarotism [(i.e. '(occult) Tarot')]" (x); * the French constructed a romantic history of *the* Tarot around what was known as the Tarot de Marseille, "derived from a Milanese prototype" (x); these French Tarotists were "unaware of the other orders" of the trumps, ancient and current; they were "equally unaware of the different rankings in the different suits observed almost everywhere but in France" (see above); "these oversights were inherited by Tarotists in other lands"; and interestingly French (Levi) * "Some Tarotists belonged to secret societies, claimants to ancient wisdom; but when they published about the Tarot, they did not necessarily claim to derive their knowledge from arcane instruction. More often, each was proud to advertise his insight as highly intuitive. However, their theories of the Tarot's genesis placed it among secretive types, such as Egyptian priests, magicians, alchemists, Cabalists and Templars. In the most prevalent interpre- tation of the Tarot trumps, they were forced into align- ment with the Hebrew alphabet, so that the Tarot could be interpreted in terms of 'Christian Cabalism'. The Cabala was likewise said to be interpretable only in the light of the Tarot. By this means, a pack of playing cards was integrated into a whole system of Western magical theory. The originator of this idea was Eliphas Levi, the first modern synthesiser of Western occultism" (x-xi). ========================================================= "A History of Occult Tarot: 1870-1970", Ronald Decker and Michael Dummett, Duckworth, 2002; pp. x-xi (Foreword). ========================================================= heavily-weighted on French innovation mystifying a game in pursuit of ostensibly magicomystical objectives, capitalizing on and at times distinguishing between mere cartomancy and some masquerade for the Secret Mysteries. ... the history of Tarot cards is largely of a negative kind, and that, when the issues are cleared by the dissipation of reveries and gratuitous speculations expressed in the terms of certitude, there is in fact no history prior to the fourteenth century. The deception regarding their origin in Egypt, India or China put a lying spirit into the mouths of the first expositors, and the later occult writers have done little more than reproduce the first false testimony in the good faith of an intelligence unawakened to the issues of research." ====================================== "The Pictorial Key to the Tarot", by Arthur Edward Waite, U.S. Games Systems, Inc., 1971; pp. 7-8. ====================================== these sources seem rather in harmony. Waite develops a whole romantic Albigensian theory of origin as a contribution to the oral tradition. "The possibilities are so numerous and persuasive that they almost deceive in their expression one of the elect who has invented them." ====================================== Ibid., p. 9. ====================================== LOL!! what a card! nagasiva
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