The Power of Myth

Teheuti

Starshower, I'm enjoying your rambles. Please, don't stop.
 

Titadrupah

Hello everybody. You could say that there is the re-emergence of a myth, you could also say it has never gone away! Tarot is an artifact that according to its genealogy, from French occultism to British nineteenth century magical systems and ulterior developments, will manifest before your very eyes a resonant fragment of a hidden order, a recognizable pattern within apparent chaos: that of the world and your own. Since William James we hear about a religious instinct embedded in our mind, the necessity of belief.
Personally, I think scientific approaches to “the truth” are just another myth, a myth that started with the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason. Inside the materialistic paradigm, we know reason will simply discard whatever it cannot take hold of. Interestingly, here we can see the opposite. The mental faculties that work when our rational mind is partially at rest (imagination, intuition, faith, etc.) seem to be ignoring what historians affirm.
 

Teheuti

Titadrupa, I think what you say is very important, but I deliberately opened the question within the realm of the historical myth (i.e., the Historical Research section) - in order to couch the discussion from an historical perspective.

So, given that people historically keep wanting to believe certain tarot origin myths, what do these particular myths tell us about the longings of people who are drawn to the divinatory tarot? Are they the same beliefs as any other faith? Is it actually a religious instinct that puts tarot readers in competition with other religions and their myths of origin?
 

Teheuti

Here are the core elements of Court de Gébelin's original tarot myth:

- Thoth/Hermes/Mercury, God of hieroglyphs, magic, medicine,
- wanted to save from destruction
- the Knowledge of the Golden Age.
- He coded it in hieroglyphs [sacred marks] as
- the story of man's journey along the Royal Road of Life.
- It was a cosmology
- disguised as an innocent game.

It was Le Comte de Mellet and, later, Etteilla, who added its divinatory character.
 

Richard

Somehow timeless archetypes seem to have been incorporated into a deck of playing cards. How did this happen? Did they just somehow emerge from the collective unconscious into the minds of card designers? As strange as it seems, that may be a possibility. I think any act of creation involves bringing into consciousness certain unconscious contents of the human psyche. An entire symphony could suddenly appear in its entirety in Mozart's mind while he out was taking a walk, and when he got back home he would write it down rapidly as if taking dictation. (When I was in graduate school my doctoral dissertation came into my mind in a similar fashion, after struggling with the same problem for over two years with no sign of a solution.) However the idea of the images in a deck of playing cards emerging mysteriously out of some amorphous common sea of ideas just doesn't compute, not even for marginally superstitious Tarot fanciers. :) Thus we relocate its origins from a mysterious psychological structure to a remote (but also mysterious) historical past, thus making it satisfyingly concrete. The fact that Court de Gebelin's conjectures made sense to him (and to many others) is not due to any historical connection of the cards to Egypt, but to the fact that the universality of the concepts in the cards parallels a large part of Egyptian mythology (which emerged from the same collective source as the cards). Among many others, Crowley eagerly embraced this parallelism, knowing full well that it was not a matter of historical origins.
 

Debra

Is there any tarot character or image that doesn't have a precursor in European art, architecture or performance? I can't think of one.

The images were already there. Someone added them to the pack, along with four courts.

Why does it seem like these images are cosmically more compelling than, um, er...what, I wonder.

As an experiment it would be interesting to modify the majors in significant ways, and see if the traditional cards still hold more sway over the imagination. (For example, there's no "child" per se in the trumps, but there could be.) Do these images grab us because they are elements of a Christian moral allegory and we all, like it or not, live in cultures deeply imbued with Christian concepts and imagery?
 

Richard

Debra said:
.....Do these images grab us because they are elements of a Christian moral allegory and we all, like it or not, live in cultures deeply imbued with Christian concepts and imagery?
Yes indeed, but the motifs of the Christian mythos are by no means unique to Christianity, which may account for the appeal of Tarot imagery to many who would otherwise be repelled by the blatant iconography.
 

Titadrupah

I find it coherent that being a freemason, the idea of a cosmology in disguise would show in de Gébelin's thought. Masons were disliked and repressed by the same christian establishment that persecuted what they had referred to as heretics and pagans for centuries.
 

Richard

Titadrupah said:
I find it coherent that being a freemason, the idea of a cosmology in disguise would show in de Gébelin's thought. Masons were disliked and repressed by the same christian establishment that persecuted what they had referred to as heretics and pagans for centuries.
That would be another fascinating topic: the role of Freemasonry in the development of the Tarot. There is a wealth of Egyptian mythology in Masonry. The third act of Mozart's Masonic opera The Magic Flute takes place in an Egyptian temple dedicated to Isis and Osiris. I believe de Gebelin was a Christian clergyman as well as a Mason, but he obviously was more enlightened than many of today's fundamentalist Bible-thumpers. (On another forum, not Aeclectic Tarot, someone responded to one of my posts by remarking that God condemns soothsayers and decrees that they be stoned to death. Ouch! Not a pleasant way to go.)
 

Huck

Teheuti said:
There's been a recent controversy about a video by James Wanless in which he claims that Tarot came out in the 16th & 17th century and was first used as "divination games" - horrors! See minute 1:05 :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqpDAkFx_lw

Yeah, I hate to hear this kind of thing, too, and James really should know better. But then we get Oudler's typical video response that is nothing more than publicity for his favorite game.
http://youtu.be/6UgyGC6ADak

He insists he knows the original purpose that the deck was created - for games - (could be true), and overlooks the fact that most people use a deck for the game of tarot that has little in common with the original tarot except for its structure and number of cards. The original pictorial motifs have nothing to do with his concept of what tarot is.

James Wanless advertises his own Tarot and wishes to sell it. He claims, that his propagated object is for the "future", not for the past.
So he doesn't say too much about the past, just, as you state, "that Tarot came out in the 16th & 17th century and was first used as divination games"

Is he definitely wrong?
"Tarot" as expression for card games appears first in 1505, and 1505 is definitely 16th century (and it indeed spread first mostly in Italy and France, as he added). So this part is "not wrong".
Stays the remark "was first used as divination game" ... hm, divination with cards (a very mild form) is proven for Strassburg 1505 (just the same year - more in the manner of a lot book, but - anyway - somehow divination with cards). Actually we don't know, in which manner the first Tarot cards were really used, but anyway, we know, that "divination with various instruments" was rather common, especially well documented is astrology and lot books are assumed to have had a large distribution.

Well, James Wanless advertises his own game, that's simply a commercial interest.

Jim Wickson alias Oudler advertises "with idealism" (no personal deck is sold) the game of Tarot as "game with cards" against a dominant divination industry. He has made "his interest" to propagate it in the English language world. Why not? It's a lot of not paid work, it's a personal interesting aim. A private crusade. It's good, that there are some people, which have "private crusades".

It is historical *fact* that even people who once knew better, are willing to ignore history in the face of tarot's myths. After the TarotL History Information Sheet first came out, I noticed that most books and many websites were paying attention, but there seems to be a lot of back-sliding.

Well, there are a lot of people, who forget a lot of things, when they turn commercial. That's the general cynism in capitalism.
When the TarotL sheet appeared, there weren't many internet pages. So naturally this page was often seen. Meanwhile the internet has developed and many web pages exist. The world doesn't exist only of Tarot.

A lot of the hardcore Tarot historians has turned silent. It is, as it is. For Tarot a new generation appears and doesn't know the hard fought values of the older time ... :) That's common practice in life. Everybody becomes older each day.

So, my question for everyone is: What is the power of myth that people keep returning to it? It's not just to 'sell' more - I'm asking about what's behind all that. The tarot myths fulfill a certain need in the human psyche. What specifically do you think the tarot myths in particular are addressing at the deepest level?

I see this as a historical question, because if historians don't have some understanding of the urge that keeps these myths historically reappearing, then we won't ever understand how to address the issue clearly, and we'll never learn from history - the history of tarot myths and their continual re-emergence!

Myths are simple and history is (naturally) complicated, when taken seriously. Persons, once interested in Tarot history, disappear ... finding other interests, getting too old, etc..
New Fools are born every day. "Where did Tarot come from ... your answer in 3 minutes, please ..." ... :)

Real new Tarot historians are "rare flowers".