Difference between Wirth and Marseilles?

ihcoyc

catboxer said:
I should have remembered that a comprehensive representation of the entire system of astrology is a part of the Florentine Minchiate. That certainly could be seen as possible evidence that the regular tarot is, at least partly, an astrological vehicle.
Or, at least, that it was seen so by people in Tuscany well before the occult revival.
I also liked what you had to say about the evolution of folk traditions. But is inventing a spurious history out of whole cloth, as the French occultists did, the same thing as evolution and transformation of a folk tradition?
I think we're winning the battle against spurious history, as much as it could be won. Most more recent books on Tarot seem quite happy to concede that the cards appeared around the turn of the fifteenth century in northern Italy. Fewer and fewer people put much stock in the old tales about gypsies and ancient Egyptians. This is about all we can do.

"Inventing a spurious history out of whole cloth" is in fact a stratagem that looms large in these sorts of folkloric and historical traditions. The brothers Grimm made themselves a body of "German" folklore out of mostly French sources. They turned old cautionary tales about the danger the nobleman at the top of the hill posed to your daughter into stories about dark deeds in the woods. On the whole, they improved on their originals, even as they served one aspect of the agenda of Romanticism. And eighty years later, their accounts were taken as essential to the German national spirit, and investigated for clues as to pagan survival.

Sir James Frazer invented a new mythology for the ancient and primitive world from whole cloth. The trick was to ignore anything inconvenient actual sources told you about the meaning of their customs. Any annual custom could be pressed into the system, especially if it involved fire, or vegetation. All it took was a magisterial will to substitute a "true" meaning for whatever it was your sources told you. His invented mythology got into D. H. Lawrence and T. S. Eliot and spawned great literature. It got into pop science fiction and spawned uncountable potboilers. It got into Robert Graves and spawned several new religions.

I'm ranting now, and I didn't mean to start. But this sort of thing is, in a sense, of the essence of human mental life. We aren't going to stop it. We'd do better by adapting to the sort of needs these tales feed, and working authentic material to feed those needs.

Frankly, the time and place of the Tarot's actual creation was a true time of wonder, full of beauty, romance, and intrigue, full of interesting characters and people with vivid lives and real wisdom to share. Much better than those boring toga-clad sots, the Ascended Masters or the Great White Brotherhood. I'd rather spend eternity chatting with Caterina Sforza and Alessandro Borgia than Koot Hoomi and St. Germain. If contemporary people can relate to The Sopranos and The Godfather, they can relate to the Sforzas and the Medici. It's up to us to make reality more interesting than bogus legends.
 

catboxer

Ihcoyc:

That was a hell of a post, and I defer to your well-worded and superior argument. There are indeed many examples of culturally prominent people "making stuff up," usually because what they manufacture is the romanticized, or ideal history that they wish existed. The Grimm Brothers' work is an excellent example of this. I can't comment on Frazier's work, as I have never read "The Golden Bough."

I never really thought of him this way before, but I guess Antoine Court de Gebelin was actually a precursor of romanticism. I've always thought of him as just a pain in the neck, the same way I look at people whose idea of research is looking into transparent stones. What seems to be at issue is a fundamental disagreement over what history actually is. Those whose methods I dislike might tell me that what they are actually doing is researching the past from a spiritual, rather than a material perspective. I've been told that I don't understand such things, and that could be true.

I'm plowing through "The White Goddess" and finding it difficult going. I think a lot of Graves's conclusions are tentative guesses based on possible etymologies of obscure words from numerous dead and nearly forgotten languages. I'm in no position to argue against any of his thesis, however, since I know little about his subject matter or his sources.

CB
 

jmd

Wonderful discussion, catboxer and Ihcoyc!

I do not think we should be too harsh with De Gebelin. What he did, after all, was to try and make sense of the numerous and disparate myths and artefacts in existence and in which he came in contact with, which were without apparent date or meaning. His conclusions, though to our view hasty and in many ways strictly innacurate, were also well thought out - though the manner in which he expressed himself often showed more his enthusiasm for being able to make sense of his surroundings than for what we may prefer to have been a healthy scepticism.

His comments on Tarot are certainly the case. In my previous post, I wrote: 'That De Gebelin made his Egyptian comments for the Tarot is probably both correct and incorrect. It is certainly incorrect if what we are looking for is a deck (irrespective of number of cards included) with a sequence of figures or pictures following the Tarot sequence. On the other hand, and as mentioned a number of times, the past certainly lived as metamorphosised echoes in Europe at that time (as it does, too, now)'. I only re-quote it for I do think that De Gebelin correctly identified certain elements of similarity. Further, these may have been directly connected.

If you recall some posts in the discussion on III the Empress, I attached there some (non-Egyptian) Isis models. From investigating images such as these - and others, undoubtedly - De Gebelin correctly saw a possible connection. A connection which, he would undoubtedly have agreed, had resulted in images being modified over centuries.

Where we are certainly unhappy is in his comment which implies that the Tarot is somehow an echoe of a Tarot which properly existed in Ancient Egypt. I think all contributors to this thread would agree that this is just not so.

As has been mentioned numerous times, however, the mindset of the population at the time in which the Tarot arose - and especially the educated population - included seeking to investigate and understand the fragmented remnants of what was understood as the ancient wisdom. As such, works which appeared had more than an echo of the past, they contained a living vitality of spiritual understanding at the time - which undoubtedly included thoughts descending (transformed) from Ancient Greece and late Antiquity, and thus further back through them.

The Christian element, undoubtely, at the forefront of other considerations.
 

ihcoyc

jmd said:
I do not think we should be too harsh with De Gebelin. What he did, after all, was to try and make sense of the numerous and disparate myths and artefacts in existence and in which he came in contact with, which were without apparent date or meaning. His conclusions, though to our view hasty and in many ways strictly innacurate, were also well thought out - though the manner in which he expressed himself often showed more his enthusiasm for being able to make sense of his surroundings than for what we may prefer to have been a healthy scepticism.
I have never read de Gebelin in the original, and know of his conclusions entirely second-hand.

What I know of him suggests that he was at the beginning of the trend that culminated in Frazer. There was an attempt to unlock hidden secrets and find secret meanings in all sorts of artifacts then. Champollion had unlocked the key to the Egyptian language. The brothers Grimm's best work was in comparative linguistics, and they started off Indo-European studies on a firm foundation.

Who knows what other secrets a comparative method might unlock? De Gebelin, by my understanding, thought he had unlocked the minds of his distant ancestors. So did Frazer. Ultimately, though, the comparative method tended to lend itself to unchecked speculation and intellectual arrogance. Those who thought they had it all worked out felt at ease in sweeping away people's own explanations of their customs and traditions, and substituting their vision of the "true" ones.
 

jmd

I have only read a tiny portion of De Gebelin's work, and only the abridged version of Frazer's Golden Bough. It should also be remembered that De Gebelin wrote over fifty years prior to the decipherment of the Rossetta Stone.

Also, during the Napoleonic conquests of Egypt, the Crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt were thought to be 'mere' elaborate head-dresses. It is partly in this context that a valuation and attempt to understand the cultures were undertaken. There is no doubt that numerous mistakes and over-steps were taken in our own slow journey of progressively understanding ancient cultures. De Gebelin's attempts may contain much which is quite presumptious and inaccurate - but also much which permitted others to further their interest in, and understanding of, cultures distant and seemingly incomprehensible. This giant leap from incomprehension to the-giving-of-meaning is so large that the achievements far outweigh, to my mind, its errors later recognised.

It should be added that it is probably also this search for 'deeper' meaning which has lead to a French tradition of assuming an underlying meaning for the Jeu de L'oie (which can, through homophony, also be translated as the game/investigation of the Law - implying natural, and hence sacred, Law).

The Tarot undoubtedly arose in late Mediaeval/early Renaissance times in Europe... with all ramifications which this implies - especially in the incorrectness in our wanting to compartmentalise areas, depictions, artefacts etc, rather than seeking to understand these in their ambiguous and symbolic - and thus reminiscent of thinking from a far more mythos aspect - inter-connections.

Great posts, ihcoyc!