Elemental correspondences?

Cheiromancer

I'm mostly curious about the controversy over swords = air/fire and wands = fire/air.

Anyone know how and when the elemental correspondences got assigned to the four suits of minors?
 

Abrac

The system of the four elements was known since the time of Pythagoras (5th century b.c.). As far as I know the first clear use on cards was the Minchiate. The date the Minchiate originated isn't certain (to me at least); Huson says 16th century but Kaplan says late 17th to mid 18th century.

I don't think there's any one right answer. Different schools had different systems of interpretation depending sometimes on their geographic location. But very often it just depended on the background and personal views of a deck's creator(s). Swords and Wands aren't the only suits to be switched. Many decks have all kinds of different correspondences.
 

Cheiromancer

I'm mostly interested in the reasoning behind things. Especially reasoning that goes a little deeper than "you can make torches out of wood, so wood is fire".

I've been trying to search the forums, but much of the most interesting material seems to be referenced by links, and links to threads do not survive being archived. In Suits and elements—what happened?, for example, jmd refers to a thread about El Gran Tarot Esoterica but the link is dead and google reveals too many pages of threads about that deck.

This is the kind of thing I am looking for: in Direction and the four suits, there is a very nice discussion that relates coins to the south, wands to the east, swords to the north, and cups to the west. I don't know how that would translate to the elements, but I bet it would be different!
 

Huck

The system of the four elements was known since the time of Pythagoras (5th century b.c.). As far as I know the first clear use on cards was the Minchiate. The date the Minchiate originated isn't certain (to me at least); Huson says 16th century but Kaplan says late 17th to mid 18th century.

I don't think there's any one right answer. Different schools had different systems of interpretation depending sometimes on their geographic location. But very often it just depended on the background and personal views of a deck's creator(s). Swords and Wands aren't the only suits to be switched. Many decks have all kinds of different correspondences.

The word "Minchiate" appeared in 1466 (Pulci letter to young Lorenzo de Medici), 1470/71 in a juristic case and 1477 as an "allowed game" in a Florentine city statute.
"Germini" (another name for "Minchiate") appeared first 1517 and 1519 (recent finding).
"Sminchiate" appeared c.1508/10 in a theater play (recent finding by Andrea Vitali) and 1526 by Berni.

If these were all the same game and if the early Minchiate was already like the later Minchiate, is not clear.
During 16th and 17th century mostly Germini was used, in the 1690s Minchiate was used in public documents and was then the common expression.
Minchiate had been then (around 1690 and some time later) perhaps more popular than Tarocchi. Florence and Toscana didn't produce then Tarocchi (only Minchiate) and proceeded to do so all 18th century.
Toscana exported Minchiate (especially to Rome) and Minchiate was also produced in other regions (Bologna, Sicily, Genova, Liguria).
 

Teheuti

The Gosselin material has been discussed in several places by Ross Caldwell and Michael J. Hurst. This is from Ross at the Tarot History Forum:
"The earliest I know of is 1582, in a book by Jean Gosselin. Michael Hurst gives my translation of the relevant part at his site.

The order is:
Tiles (Diamonds)=Earth
Clovers (Clubs)=Water
Hearts=Air
Pikes (Spades)=Fire

The reasoning is this (which I quote from Michael's site because I wrote most of it) -

"A book by Gosselin (La Signification de l’ancien jeu des chartes pythagorique) associates the four suits with the four elements, in a 52-card French-suited deck. (One Tarot author noted that the term “Pythagorean” in the title is an example of the inflated manner in which the label was used at the time. It was slapped on to anything concerned with numbers to add a false patina of age and wisdom, and cards had numbers.) Franco Pratesi summarized the attributions as follows:

“Firstly, it will be seen, that in a common pack of cards there are four types of characters: which are Tiles, Clovers, Hearts and Pikes. These show us the four Elements, of which all natural things are composed…

— The Tiles, [Diamonds] which are depicted on the cards, signify the earth: for just as the earth sustains all heavy things, so the tiles are used to bear the heavy things placed on top of them.

— The Clovers, [Clubs] which are depicted on the cards, represent water: for the reason that the clover is an herb that flourishes in moist places, and is nourished by means of the water that makes it grow.

— The Hearts, which are depicted on the cards, signifies to us air: since our hearts could not live without air.

— The Pikes, [Spades] which are depicted on the cards, represents to us fire: for just as fire is the most penetrating of the Elements, so the Pikes are very penetrating weapons of war; and with each of the above-said characters are marked thirteen cards in a deck, which gives the sum of fifty-two cards.”

(From a TarotL post by Ross Caldwell; quoted from Franco Pratesi in Jean-Marie Lhôte, Dictionnaire des jeux de Société, note 18 page 652.)
Of course almost every correspondence possible has been made by somebody with their own justification for why theirs is correct.