venicebard
Eureka!
The historical part of Flornoy's essay leads me to suspect the Templars are the bridge I have been looking for between Cathar-Troubadour days – in which the Qabbalah whose unspoken knowledge is embodied in Marseilles tarot arose from an influx of British bardism into that part of the Continent (the Languedoc) where Judaic Gnosticism flourished – and the first noted appearance of tarot itself in the late 1300s. After all, Templars, if I recall, were reluctant to engage in the Albigensian terrors, being on the whole neutral towards the tolerant Cathars who opposed intolerant Orthodoxy.
I take tarot’s origin to have occurred somewhere in the northern Italy to Marseilles region, the Marseilles designs being the most complete, symbolically, of any I have seen. The origin of their symbols is well known to me: they are the tree letters of bardic lore AND Hebrew letters, but attributed to trumps via bardic numeration, not the Graeco-Judaic (mere alphabetic order), the bardic numeration being symbolic in origin.
The historical part of Flornoy's essay leads me to suspect the Templars are the bridge I have been looking for between Cathar-Troubadour days – in which the Qabbalah whose unspoken knowledge is embodied in Marseilles tarot arose from an influx of British bardism into that part of the Continent (the Languedoc) where Judaic Gnosticism flourished – and the first noted appearance of tarot itself in the late 1300s. After all, Templars, if I recall, were reluctant to engage in the Albigensian terrors, being on the whole neutral towards the tolerant Cathars who opposed intolerant Orthodoxy.
I take tarot’s origin to have occurred somewhere in the northern Italy to Marseilles region, the Marseilles designs being the most complete, symbolically, of any I have seen. The origin of their symbols is well known to me: they are the tree letters of bardic lore AND Hebrew letters, but attributed to trumps via bardic numeration, not the Graeco-Judaic (mere alphabetic order), the bardic numeration being symbolic in origin.
