Kingdubrock
This is exactly my point. Occultist throughout history have been a rather talkative bunch, despite their reputation for reticence. Were the cards originally constructed to convey a certain spiritual code, as modern Golden Dawn decks do, some sort of documentation would have survived (probably, maybe). Like my spiral broccoli, patterns exist everywhere.
I recommend you look at the Historical forum, I'm far from the best person to argue this point in any case.
I may or may not have made your point I dont know.
Consider:
1) There is documentation from the Compagnons in the form of song. There is one for example which explicitly states what each colour represents.
2) There is documentation in the cards themselves. The adoption of the colour code in the song.The woman in the Star for example has one eye on the viewer, one eye on the water jugs (the water pourer, an overt reference to aquarius even in its earlier and most "exoteric" game variety in the Visconti) and her navel has been turned into an eye. These were not there before the Noblet Deck, made by Compagnons. A community of artisans who viewed their livelihoods, growth from boyhood, to adulthood to master as not only sacred, but inseparable from their craft. No one outside such communities necessarily needed to understand the teachings in the cards, although they very well may have. By the time the Conver decks arrived, gung ho Masons decided to "enhance" what was already clear to them with masonic symbolism and allegory.
3) Alchemy and Sufism for example are profound, coherent systems, but nevertheless encoded, written about in cryptic images, language and poetry, which even to this day are hard to definitively decipher. For a member of a medeival Sufi order, not so hard, assuming he/she has developed insight through training and living. Zen is another example where the "meanings" of Koans have never been published to this day, yet books containing Koans abound. I would call these systems "super-profound" but not necessarily "occult" (if, again, by occult we mean cabala, grimoires, ceremonial magic etc). Finding profundity in these systems is not a matter of seeing spirals in broccoli.
I recommend reading Alejandro Jodorowsky's book called The Way of Tarot. Not because it is definitive, but because it will help people glimpse the vast profundity and sacred interconnectedness of the Marseille, a much neglected deck and aspect of Tarot practice and scholarship.
i have read through the history section of the forum as well as the writings on "scholarly" websites like Trionfi, and books, and lectures and so on etc. I held the same view and loat interest in Tarot from about 1991 onwards until fairly recently from rediscovering the Marseille (the first deck I ever bought was a Marseille in 1989, but there were no books on it in english), discovering the current Marseille "revival", the proliferation of facsimiles and reproductions of obscure decks and the wonderful restorations and research of people like JC Flornoy. It is understandable that the "game-only" scholarship has missed the utterly essential nature of certain marseille decks but no longer excusable.