reconsidering a cathar connection

foolish

the assumptions that are made are:
1) that images common to the culture of "religious" art of the time were used to portray other meanings. this was not the first case that this process was done. there is evidence, for example, that the manicheans used similar methods of memory tools in the past. for obvious reasons, the real identities of the cards could not be openly exposed. the very fact that you are questioning this process is evidence in itself that the disguise process works. we should keep in mind that heretics of the middle ages used many different methods of secrecy, including special handshakes, signs and phrases which were only known to other heretics (until the inquisitors forced the information out of them through torture). for example, when a guest entered a home, he may ask, "is there a crooked stick in the house"? at which the owner would reply, "have a seat", if there was no one to fear. my point is that various methods of secrecy had to be developed in order to preserve the messages of the cathars. the creation of the tarot trumps could very well have been just one of those methods, especially since we know that cards were used to convey various forms of information to a genrally illiterate population. which leads me to my second assumption:

2) that the events surrounding the devastation of the cathars and the land owners of languedoc, such as count raymond VI of toulouse, were significant enough that the story would have to be preserved by later generations. it was simply too horrific to let slip away into oblivion. and

3) there doesn't seem to be any other explanation of the development of the tarot which is based in the historical context of the times, other than it was simply an addition to an already existing game of cards. other theories of origin such as the egyptians, the gypsies, petrarch's trionfi, etc. just don't seem to explain the tarot as a whole, in which every card fits into the mold.

the changes which i am refering to are from the italian tarot (which preceded the introduction of the tarot into france) to that of the marseilles decks. i am not saying that the marseilles tarot created a new image, they used the ones that were already in existence, as you have indicated. my question is why did they bother to change them at all? it would have been easier to just copy the italian decks. unless, of course, they chose to impart their own meanings to the cards and decided that other images would suit those meanings better.

i am also not saying that the cards were established soley for the purpose of conveying religious or spiritual messages. in fact, i believe that the first part of the trumps had more reference to historical figures and events. both the historical story and the spiritual messages of the cathars would have been an important part of what these people wanted to pass on.

i believe that i have based my theory in historical facts and it is in this context that the cards can be understood as a historical art form. obviously, i did not have the time or space to present all of these facts on this forum. of course, it is virtually impossible for anyone to prove a theory like this one beyond a shadow of doubt. however, i think think i make my case as well as any other theory out there. i have yet to see anyone come up with something that explains all of the cards in a historical context. most of the tarot "experts" out there have presented ideas of what the cards mean in a philosophical or psychological sense, as in the spiritual progress of the individual, etc. the problem with this type of interpretation is that it is open to a subjective free-association of sorts where the magician is the individual, the star is hope, the wheel is change, force is courage, etc. etc.

i would be interested in knowing what simpler theory you are refering to that is backed up by historical fact and that also explains each and every card.

(i can already see that my anticipation of heated debates and expected resistence is shaping up! good going!)
 

Teheuti

Michael J. Hurst has done an excellent job of explaining "The Moral Allegory of Tarot" in the context of the period. His old website is down and I'm not sure if his blog now contains his overview.
http://pre-gebelin.blogspot.com/

The Iconographic Essays of Andrea Vitali show us what an Italian scholar sees in the cards as mirrors of history and the time:
http://www.letarot.it/page.aspx?id=5

Timothy Betts' Tarot and the Millennium did a thorough, if somewhat flawed, description of how the trumps derive from the Book of Revelation.

Bob O'Neill showed how Betts was on the right track with the Book of Revelation for the final third of the cards, but that other explanations were needed for the earlier part of the deck.
http://www.tarot.com/about-tarot/library/boneill/

Ross Caldwell, Thierry Depaulis and Marco Ponzi recently produced a wonderful small book on the meaning of the tarot pack in Explaining the Tarot: Two Italian Renaissance Essays that tell us exactly how at least two educated Italians saw the deck not that long after its creation.

Jean-Michel David, in the Association for Tarot Studies Journal regularly publishes interesting theories by a variety of people (and sponsors wonderful theorists at their conferences).

I'm sure others can add more.

It is true that you won't find this kind of scholarship and detail in most popular tarot books.
 

foolish

thank you for these references. it will take me some time to reveiw all of these, but you can trust that i will look into them right away. my first suspicion, however, is that moral allegories are always more open to general interpretation ala jungian psychology than they are rooted in any historical context.
also, o'neill's reveiw of the book of revelation theory sounds like it uncovers similar flaws to that of moakley's trionfi and others in which not all of the cards fit into the model being offered. (and i wouldn't say that the book of revelation is anywhere close to the historical context of 15th century italy).
i have ordered the new book by caldwell, et al. and trust that it will be interesting. but i understand from other posts that it too resorts to a moral interpretation of the cards. although this may have great value to those involved with tarot reading or divination, it does not necesarily set the historical context of the cards or explain why certain images were used while others were not.
i look forward to reviewing these.

in the meantime, i have been searching through some of the other forums to see what other people are saying. some of them have found interesting images or points which may have relevance to individual cards, but i haven't found anything that leads to an explanation of the origin of the trumps as a whole. maybe you can point me in the right direction.
 

Huck

foolish said:
..... but i haven't found anything that leads to an explanation of the origin of the trumps as a whole. maybe you can point me in the right direction.

The general 5x14-theory attempts to explain the development of the Tarot cards in close relationship to known documents and forms by this an evolutionary sequence, according which the fixation on the socalled "standard" deck (the Tarot, as we know it commonly, with 4x14+22 card deck structure) happened rather late, maybe something like 250 years after the Albigensians.

According this, the oldest known Trionfi deck is the socalled Michelino deck, commissioned by Filippino Maria Visconti, described by Martiano da Tortona and painted by Michelino da Besozzo, made in the period 1418-25. It had (likely) 16 trumps, 4 Kings and 40 number cards, the suits showed birds, and the trumps were Greek gods.

http://trionfi.com/0/b/

The text is translated at
http://trionfi.com/0/b/11/

Although the pictures are missing, it's indeed an "origin of the trumps as a whole", but likely these trumps are not that, what you expected.
 

Bernice

Apologies for being a bit dense here, but would some knowledgable person please clear up the following question. A simple (brief) explanation will suffice :)

Q) Is it being suggested that the Cathars created the trump cards and then added them to the playing cards (mamluk deck)?

I am only aware of the Michelino deck that Huck has posted about.

Bee :)

ETA:
I made this post shortly after logging in - head full of other things - it now looks rather bald. That was not my intention, I just don't know of any connection between the Cathars and card decks.

Bee x
 

foolish

not dense, but a legitimate point. i am not suggesting that the cathars invented the tarot trumps. early forms of the trumps were added to the game of four suits, as shown in the michelino deck where greek gods and astrological symbols were used. however, as the tarot developed and evolved through various forms, new images were added and others left out. the marseilles style of tarot developed from the earlier italian decks like those of the visconti. as the visconti had certain images added such as the sforza fountain, the embroidered style of clothing with the three interlocking rings, the emperor's seal (black eagle) and their motto: a bon droit, the creators of the marseilles deck also made certain changes. it was at this time that we can see the relevance of the cathar influence more clearly. visconti symbols were eliminated and many images were changed.

the main question is, why? are these changes the arbitrary whims of the new artists' imagination, or are there more purposeful reasons? i believe the latter is true. since the art of the middle ages was mainly used for instructive purposes, it only makes sense that the tarot would also fall into this category. the next question is obviously what were they trying to portray?
 

Bernice

Many thanks for your reply foolish, and for a clear & basic explanation :). I see now where you're coming from.

The changes to the early trumps: "...the next question is obviously what were they trying to portray?
That's a cruical question, particularly as there were a variety of changes made that differed from place to place across Europe. So you suspect that the Cathers introduced a version of their own, and remenents of it are incorporated in the standard 'marseille' pattern. Interesting thoughts.


Bee :)
 

foolish

let me first say that, as a new member of this forum, i am both excited about the amount of information being shared among seriously involved tarot enthusiasts around the world and humbled by the depth of knowledge i already can see exists at this site.

i have had a chance to briefly review the references which teheuti sent me (thanks) and i've come away with the following thoughts:

other than the reference to the book of revelations, which as we have been told is an incomplete and historically displaced attempt at connecting the dots, it seems that many scholars fall into the category of seeing the tarot as a system of moral or ethical instruction. this seems to be based on the fact that many of the images used were taken from existing themes of moral or ethical sources. as vitali indicates, the tarot seems to be drawn from different sources like the mythical gods, the virtues, astrological imagery and christian symbolism (however, the last category still puzzles me, as images of jesus or the cruxifiction - both central themes in christian art - are curiously missing). ohters have noticed refernces to the egyptians, origins of the universe, etc.

what we are left with is a collection of disconnected symbols which although they can be allegorically connected present a sort of hodge-podge of disjointed images. (even in vitalis essays, he describes the tarot as divided into three parts). i guess we can always take things as they appear and leave it at that - that the tarot is just a series of moral lessons intended to instruct people about how to live their lives and possibly reach a spiritual destiny. but we should consider that the images and symbols used in the middle ages were not necessarily taken on face value.

of course, it is a given that the images of the tarot were all borrowed from previous sources. but as o'neill has expained, "the images on the cards are taken from the art of the period. but this does not imply that the designers intended to symbolize precisely the same thing as the original artists". (tarot symbolism, p.210)

vitali tells us that "the iconography fo the figures changed according to the popular tastes of the rergions wher tarots were used". what i believe we can get clues from are the very changes which were made. we need to ask ourselves why these particular images were used. for example, why was the monkey in the Matto and Bagatto illustrations provided by vitali substituted by a dog in the marseilles deck?

we should pause here and agree on one assumption central to the understanding of tarot symbolism: that all images had specific and intentional meanings. nothing was added arbitrarily or for the sake of art. that was simply not done in medieval times. this should serve as a basis for further investigation.

in the example of the dog, shown in the marseilles deck not biting the magician but rather chasing the fool, i believe the artist wanted to show the wandering heretic (the fool) being relentlessly persecuted by the church (the dog). the dog was used often in medieval sources to depict the church, both in literature and art (see St dominic sending forth the hounds of the lord -1369 - by andrea di bonauito). St dominic (a central figure in the fight against heresy) was described by his own mother as "barking at the heretics like a dog". these references give us a historical glimpse of what these images could have meant when the tarot was being circulated, and mean more to me than the original themes being "borowed", as people would have been familiar with the specific references of the time.

perhaps the tarot cards were used by the "underground media" in the same way we use political cartoons today - creating new messages with the use of common cultural images.

lastly, i would like say that i thought that it was very interesting that the illustrations in vitali's link seemed to indicate that if the magician and the fool are not one and the same, they seem to share some significant relationship.
 

Teheuti

foolish said:
i wouldn't say that the book of revelation is anywhere close to the historical context of 15th century italy).
I'm not sure why you reject this. Do you mean because they didn't originate at the same time? The point is that it had a significant influence on the art of the period and comparisons of other illustrations for Revelations from that period are practically the same as many of the tarot cards—especially the woodcut decks.

I haven't found anything that leads to an explanation of the origin of the trumps as a whole. maybe you can point me in the right direction.
I believe that most historians speculate based on what evidence is available. Discussions here have centered (if I remember correctly) on the deck as cosmograph. See also Michael J. Hurst's material comparing the Dances & Triumphs of Death motifs (blog link in previous post).
 

mjhurst

The Wayback Machine

Hi, Mary,

Teheuti said:
Michael J. Hurst has done an excellent job of explaining "The Moral Allegory of Tarot" in the context of the period. His old website is down and I'm not sure if his blog now contains his overview.
http://pre-gebelin.blogspot.com/
Thanks for the shout-out and kind words. I think these links to the Wayback Machine still work.

The Riddle of Tarot (9/19/2004)
http://web.archive.org/web/20040919015803/http://geocities.com/cartedatrionfi/Riddle.html

The Riddle of Tarot (12/23/2007)
http://web.archive.org/web/20071223094152/http://www.geocities.com/cartedatrionfi/Riddle.html

The Middle Trumps (8/23/2005)
http://web.archive.org/web/20050825002756/http://www.geocities.com/cartedatrionfi/MiddleTrumps.html

Teheuti said:
Ross Caldwell, Thierry Depaulis and Marco Ponzi recently produced a wonderful small book on the meaning of the tarot pack in Explaining the Tarot: Two Italian Renaissance Essays that tell us exactly how at least two educated Italians saw the deck not that long after its creation.
This is a fantastic resource. There can be little doubt that most people just played cards with these playing cards. However, if anyone wants to know what Renaissance Italians thought about this card game, when they did take time to think about it, this booklet contains facts rather than speculation. Here is my review of the monograph.

Renaissance Tarot: Two XVI Italian Essays
http://pre-gebelin.blogspot.com/2010/06/renaissance-tarot-two-xvi-italian.html

Best regards,
Michael