Ross G Caldwell said:
But they are always called "trumps", not letters; the pips are never called "sefirot", and the four suits are never called after the four letters of the divine name nor after the four worlds, nor are what are pictured on the suits related in any way to the sense of the names of the four worlds. And there are many other essential doctrines of the Kabbalah (meaning, say, the Sefer Yetzirah, the Bahir, the Zohar) that aren't represented in the tarot pack.
On the contrary, it is the separating-out of the four worlds as Bahir-fire-Atzilut-clubs-unity (spirit), SY-air-Beriyah-swords-duality (air-splitting, thought), Zohar-water-Yetzirah-cups-triplicity (containment, form), Hermetic-earth-Asiyah-coins-quadruplicity (planetary cycles) that
is clearly pictured. For the first, the Sefirot in their original form, are the first ten of twelve spokes (thirteen middot, counting return to the first) of a wheel: the 1-10 of Batons. The second bunch represent division—Swords—just as SY defines Sefirot in polarities (and trumps define them as
each split in two). The third bunch (Tree as known today) represent the forms of man . . . but I won’t go into that now. And the fourth—look at them—are rounds, cycles, and stand for the planetary cycles between eternity (1) and ‘today’ (10).
Oh, I see what might be your objection, taking Swords as inconsistent with Beriyah as ‘creation’. Well, you have to realize that creation is a hollowing out, in forest for example, to create a dwelling, and this is done with iron tools. Even more fundamentally, creation is called ‘forging’, and the ‘creator’ a smith.
I am sure many people had abaci back in the day, could count, could compare, or whatever, and they didn't seem to notice it. Does this mean they were stupid? Does it mean that those who made the comparison deliberately hid it for some reason? I don't think so. If you think so, why do you think so? Where is the suggestion in all of the knowledge of tarot from the 15th to 18th centuries that anybody thought it was dangerous, or was suppressed in some way, or even a hint that it illustrated an esoteric teaching?
We know a whole
culture was suppressed, in the Languedoc. The survival of tarot-card making in places like Marseille and Lyons must have been like the glue that gets pushed out beyond the edges when you squish two pieces of something together to rejoin them.
As for evidence of TdM's esoteric content, this resides in the trumps’ consistency with tree-letter symbolism (and much else besides) along with the latter’s ability to explain the shapes of Hebrew and proto-Canaanite letters, Libyan and tifinag letters, and runes. Oh, and the fact that the pillar Jachin is established in the King of Batons (yod of yod), the pillar Boaz in the Queen of Swords (vav of vav).
I think a better answer is, the people that were interested in Kabbalah (or Cabala) weren't interested in tarot cards, or that even if they knew about tarot cards, they didn't think to compare them because it took esoteric developments that hadn't happened yet to be able to make that comparison.
Here’s where we fundamentally differ, because the only ‘developments’ I see happening later were the loss of the tradition. You don’t think it is intact today, do you? I can show you that it is not.
But most importantly, there are better reasons in the early 15th century for why someone may have chosen 21 trumps and a Fool to add to an already changing pack of cards. This is because the analogy of 21 pips on a die was well-known, and since the trumps seem to represent a moralization about chance and fortune (Game-player, Wheel of Fortune, Instable world) and fate, it seems the strongest connection is there.
Forgive my ignorance, but what exactly do you mean when you say ‘21 pips on a die’? It sounds like something I should know.
Also possibly connected is the fact that Italians wrote their alphabet with 21 or 22 letters in the early 15th century (Tuscany used 21, north used 22). The alphabet might then have represented the number of a "complete" series of something, even if there wouldn't have been a one-to-one correspondence.
You lose me here, but partly simply because the one-to-one correspondence with the 22 letters becomes so clear once they are numbered properly. But how could you have “a complete series
of something” without there being “one-to-one correspondence”
with it?
Neo-platonic thought in the middle ages is full of tens, and refers to spiritual development like this.
I’m not expert in neo-platonic thought. I have never run across neo-platonic speculations that seemed free of error to me, whereas I find Qabbalah flawless, as revealed through Bahir, SY, the Zoharic Tree (and Lurianic interpretation), and Hermetic science, but only as regards the Sefirot (minus later rabbinic speculation), not the alef-bet, for which one needs bardic correction for numbering and placement.
But the question is - since the card pack came from China via Mamluk turks,
I don’t take this as proven. Chinese cards do not resemble Western cards in any respect that I can see (everyone counts). It is certainly plausible in the sense that the
idea of cards might have come, say, through the Mongols (who had Chinese siege engineers), as Huck suggests, yet Mamluks were their enemy, not ally.
...and this latter pack had this 10x4 pip structure, were they trying to illustrate the divine name with the sefirot in the four worlds this way? And why did they leave out the 22 letters if they did?
It actually strikes me as more plausible that the Mamluks might have gotten cards, through the Moors, from Troubadour Provence, for the simple reason that it would then be understandable why trumps and queens were removed—to fit Muslim sensibilities with regard to images and sex. It
could have been pips first, trumps later, but I somehow doubt this. Still, that the Sefirot were the exclusive property of the Jews we both reject (for different reasons), and there is even a shamanic drum-slash-altar found in north-western Europe that had ten round (wheel-like) legs and thirty holes around the sides (illustrated in the Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology).
The tradition concerning the Name would have been a little less widespread or accessible than that of the Sefirot, though the insular Kelts most likely knew it (or of it). It has one female because only vav occurs on the nature or female side of the round (of twelve simples, once restored to their original order). My understanding is that it stands for tension between the inner and outer horizon (pointed to by yod and vav, respectively), compelling events whose purpose is to relieve said tension.
I don't know about Barddas, but from the introductions to the copies available in various places on the internet, it seems not to be a primary source for anything earlier than the 19th century. Does it mention tarot?
No (and I read a considerable portion of it). It is surprising what did survive of bardic lore, though, even up to today (through the efforts of such as O’Flaherty and Graves, in part).
Barddas is quite uneven, being a compilation, but Lewis Spence, I find, defends it passionately and eloquently in a chapter of
The Mysteries of Britain. Its very unevenness speaks to its authenticity, as I see it, for otherwise Mr. Morganwg would have tried to be a little more consistent.
I hope no-one misreads my "tone" - I just worry that if I had to worry about how my style might be misread, I would rarely write at all. I haven't written many posts I could have already because some people get offended when their ideas are challenged, and they read it as an attack on them personally.
Not a problem, at least with me: rest easy on that score.