Egypt - she said, ducking quickly
JMD and others,
I've been perfectly happy with the "tarot started as a game in Italy" history - it certainly seems to make sense. However, recently I've come across this interview with Ron Decker (hardly a lightweight in academic terms)
http://www.tarotpassages.com/deckerint.htm
The interviewer, Alma Puissegur, reports that:
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Ron believes that almost all of the occult beliefs about the tarot are correct, but skewed. He says that, with this assertion, he will offend the historians who think tarot is nothing but a game.
Decker believes the following: the intuition of non-historians is correct: numbers mean something, astrological symbols and indicators mean something on the psychological level--the psyche moving through growth through vices and virtues--and also on the alchemical level. Decker is particularly interested in finding the particular written mystical texts he thinks the decks are illustrating.
He doesn’t believe the cards themselves go back to Egypt, but that the actual theories that the cards illustrate do come from there. Decker doesn't think that the Cabala is part of the original design, but says the ideas are quite similar: "There are 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet that were considered mystical. Christians knew this was important to the Jews and just that limited knowledge was enough to contribute to the number of triumphs."
He thinks the designer of the “original deck” was trying to create the idea of Egyptian hieroglyphs because it was believed that the hieroglyphics were more than mere language, and that they also had hidden truths and double meanings. One meaning was contained in everyday language and words that the ordinary reader could understand, and then the second, hidden meaning existed that was only known to the "initiated" reader.
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What do you make of this? I'd be very interested to know your opinions and if anyone has taken up this theory and written more about it.
Thanks! Great thread.
Karen