"tarot History" versus historiography

Debra

Ok, it appears that Diane did not intend any papers to remain on her site. http://www.tarotforum.net/showpost.php?p=1230855&postcount=28

It would be helpful to have links but if someone's trying to protect intellectual property, I can certainly understand that. On the other hand, if one doesn't have a published presence--on the web or in print--then, well, welcome to the barnyard where the rest of us chickens are just scratchin' around...
 

mac22

Debra said:
Ok, it appears that Diane did not intend any papers to remain on her site. http://www.tarotforum.net/showpost.php?p=1230855&postcount=28

It would be helpful to have links but if someone's trying to protect intellectual property, I can certainly understand that. On the other hand, if one doesn't have a published presence--on the web or in print--then, well, welcome to the barnyard where the rest of us chickens are just scratchin' around...

Yep yep :D :D

mac22
 

DianeOD

Please define your problem.

I am not sure why Debra feels so personally outraged.

Debra -

If you are just one of the "chickens scratching around" then by all means feel free to take the time and trouble to scratch around and hunt out my deleted papers with the aim of reading them.

If you feel no interest in what you read, by all means ignore it.

If you don't understand it, I'm happy to clarify.

If there's a particular point you like to follow up, and want references, I'm happy to give them.

If you feel objections to - the evident fact - that others are finding my work of interest, and some value to their own needs, then I think an exploration of your motives would be advisable.

The world of learning is a big barnyard, and I'm sure I shan't mind if you choose to exercise your talons in another part of it.

Just in passing: we were always taught that its not quite the thing to discuss people in the third person when they are present. I have not cancelled by membership in the forum, and will be 'present' until I do.

Perhaps you might like to use the PM option for that sort of slag-posting, or even send me a PM if making such personal and offensive comments gives you pleasure.
 

mac22

DianeOD said:
I am not sure why Debra feels so personally outraged.

Debra -

If you are just one of the "chickens scratching around" then by all means feel free to take the time and trouble to scratch around and hunt out my deleted papers with the aim of reading them. .

Well I did.... and I have.... And I must say I was favorably impressed with the theories & research....:)

Don't know why you felt you had to delete them[unless you fear plagiarism].

if you do I understand ....I still have copyrighted material floating around the net from 10 yrs ago.

However Mary, Huck JMD & others post stuff all the time, so it can be done....

Mac22
 

Debra

Oh dear. This must be a misunderstanding.

I'm not outraged. I'm curious. I know from what I saw on other threads and from pm messages that I'm not the only one.

Posts by someone new--"Diane OD"--started appearing with lots of information and some provocative and original (at least, new to me) hypotheses. I read some of the threads but not all of them.

Obviously, a few others here with expertise know who you are and what you've done, but how are the rest of us to know? We have no way to know if you've posted here or elsewhere under another name; no way to know if there's more on other sites, in other words. You didn't put anything in your profile, and you didn't introduce yourself.

Thus, I asked. And then I did a bit of looking around to see what I could find, thanks also to some links posted by Mary Greer.

In the barnyard--no insult intended--but in the barnyard, we're equals. If some animals are more equal than others--and they well may be--then credentials, evidence, etc. are relevant, and thus my curiosity.

I intended no insult and am amazed and dismayed that you feel you've detected one.
 

mac22

So DianeOD,

Do you see each trump of the European decks[e.g. TdM] as a rebus?

Mac22
 

DianeOD

Rebus question

Ah-ha. That old curly question. Feel like saying "render to the ecclesiastics what is due to the ecclesiastics, and to tarot writers what is due to them."

OK. sensibly:

The Latin "rebus" means simply "picture".
From the time when scribes in Europe - I mean those whose labour was in the scriptoria - were taught techniques to ensure that they made fewer errors in transcription, and more accurrately committed to memory what they could read... the term 'rebus' comes to mean something more specific.

It begins, I think one can fairly say, with a form of marginal 'figure' whose purpose is little more than to help one find one's place in a finished manuscript.

But soon those 'figures' become 'figura' so that you can actually follow the written sequence, simply by following the series of pictures. "the story road" as it were.

But this kind of 'figura' becomes increasingly more elegant, and more complex.
THe term "rebus" comes to mean a figure within which specific words or passages are incorporated as literal elements in the picture.

The best of the Charles VI cards are extraordinarily brilliant *rebuses* by that definition. Others may be less brilliant, because incorporating fewer layers of relevant text and allusion, but hold to a clear understanding of what the figures were about.
Others again become mere gabble - some by trying to be clever and modern, and re-interpret the scholarly figures to amuse. Or because a printer decides to make money by mass producing a pack which he may have bought, but doesn't understand beyond its superficial appearance.

If you would like specifics on how the actual words of a text are embodied in imagery of the medieval period, one good source is my constantly-urged basic reading: Carruthers' Book of Memory.

Once the allusions to the older matter blur and distort in the cards produced, cards' relevance to my study ends. For the most part, my interest and study ends/culminates with a discussion of the distinctions in content and intent that are evident between the Charles VI Atouts and the Visconti counterparts.
 

mac22

DianeOD said:
Ah-ha. That old curly question. Feel like saying "render to the ecclesiastics what is due to the ecclesiastics, and to tarot writers what is due to them."


If you would like specifics on how the actual words of a text are embodied in imagery of the medieval period, one good source is my constantly-urged basic reading: Carruthers' Book of Memory.

I'm quite familiar with Yates' _Art of Memory_ and have used the Memory Theater for many years.

I don't recall Yates, in her other works, ever mentioning the Tarot as a memory & teaching tool.

DianeOD said:
Once the allusions to the older matter blur and distort in the cards produced, cards' relevance to my study ends. For the most part, my interest and study ends/culminates with a discussion of the distinctions in content and intent that are evident between the Charles VI Atouts and the Visconti counterparts.

I see....

Mac22
 

DianeOD

Yates and tarot

Quote:
I don't recall Yates, in her other works, ever mentioning the Tarot as a memory & teaching tool
QUOTE

I don't believe she ever did. Neither does Carruthers.

And even after troubling to transcribe the account of the English advocate memorising his "brief" by images drawn one after the other from his "scrip"... she says that she thinks these 'images' are merely conceptual.

I disagree - but not because I want these to be tarot pictures, but because a range of evidence leads me to an opposite conclusion, even as late as that lawyer, and even granted that he is in England.

My question was why on earth the figures from the old sphaera "barbarica" should suddenly turn up in Europe. The nature of the images in the Charles VI set - if one recognises them as astronomical figures - show they are pictures of that sort called "rebus".

Carruthers well explains the theory and some of the practices of 'global/universal memory' . She also talks about the plan of the arca noe as a pattern recommended to students in Europe.

From this - I could see just why a grid which is essentially that of the eastern mariner would have appeared an attractive system of universal divisions for some medieval people.

And so on, hunting the trail....

If Yates or Carruthers had said in their own books that the pack was a memory-aid, I would not have been obliged to do so much work to get the answers to my question.
 

mac22

DianeOD said:
Quote:
I don't recall Yates, in her other works, ever mentioning the Tarot as a memory & teaching tool
QUOTE

I don't believe she ever did. Neither does Carruthers.

And so on, hunting the trail....

If Yates or Carruthers had said in their own books that the pack was a memory-aid, I would not have been obliged to do so much work to get the answers to my question.

Hehe SOO true..... but your research sure raises some interesting ideas & speculations.

It's like Mary's comments to an author got him interested in writing the ONLY decent book on Anna Bonus Kingsford....:)

mac22