The Visconti - and the Marseilles

Robert wrote:

"What I have the hardest time with is looking at the 22 trumps as a *whole*."

Well, Robert,

it's near to winter solstice. Lothar said, that I should thank you for your email early in the year about search-engines. Thank you.

I'm not really a card reader, but I'll announce a surprizing goal in the last
minute or so.
Really good Tarot history is not written by card readers, or at least not by persons, which look too often in the cards. Perhaps ... cause the persons, which made the cards, where interested in different aspects.

Milan will win. This time. But only in matters of Marseille Tarot ..

Actually - from the historical view the order of Marseille is not more interesting than understanding the Boiardo deck, the Ferrarese order or others in their intention. And the whole matter is nothing against a solid enlightment about the relationship between I-Ching and Sepher Yetzirah. Or the rich world of Greek mythology. A much bigger world.

Actually Milan had lost the war around Tarot. Once. And probably that's the reason, why nobody understood this ... socalled "stolen" Marseille Tarot.

What will happen, if the mystery is gone ... ... people will search "their" mystery .... ok, there are many others ... for instance, how we'll save world with it's raising problems against all these idiots, who wish to win money and other goal's by making wars.

Well, there is an interesting, not really often observed feature in astrology ... after 499-500 years occasionally it happens, that the planets are near to the position, where they was, 499-500 years ago. As quick planets run quick, this rule is not always true ... but, very rarely it happens.
What happened 499/500 years ago?

We've documents, that in the same year 1505 the name Tarot appeared the first time (at least in our eyes or that what we know) in France and Ferrara.
Unlucky Milan was occupied by French troops and the prospects were bad, more than 20 years of war followed.

Disclaimer: probablly a silly analogy, feel free to ignore this post!

I was just thinking and trying to understand what the meaning of "Ur" is, and I got to thinking about the module on Popular Music that I did as part of my Music degree. The tutor argued that without Elvis, popular music as we know it today would not exist. Elvis wasn't the first solo artisit to sing the kind of music that he sang, but it was the global phenomenon that his music created that paved the way for bands like The Beatles and The Sex Pistols.

So I was thinking that Elvis was kind of like the Tarot of Marseilles of pop music. And the Beatles are like the Rider Waite Smith - a hugely significant band that paved the way for every boy band (RWS clone) to come, but they could not have occured or achieved the success they did without Elvis.

Elvis is the "Ur" of pop music!

But to understand why the phenomenon of Elvis happened - one has to consider the cultural and political history of the times; it was the post-war era. You would also need to understand about the tecnological advancements that were happening - 7 inch records were begining to be made, radio tecnology was advancing. I forget the other important details now, but the main lesson was that the Elvis phenomenon didn't occur in a vacumn, it occured within an important historical context.

I don't think you can understand Elvis's music by thinking "now how would the Beatles or Bob Dylan or Eminem sing that song?" To really understand Elvis, you have to understand the history of the times he lived in.

To really understand the Tarot of Marseilles, you have to understand the social and cultural and political context of the times it was created in.

CharmingPixie said:

To really understand the Tarot of Marseilles, you have to understand the social and cultural and political context of the times it was created in.

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This is a good advice, and it's true for all things, not only Marseille Tarot and Elvis ...
However, there is a special problem, as just the question in in dispute, when the Marseille Tarot really develoiped, nobody really knows, which time he should study first.
And actually .. the object is Tarot, not Marseille and not specifically Marseille Tarot, but Marseille Tarot between a great variety of other artistic expressions to the theme Tarot.

le pendu said:

What I have the hardest time with is looking at the 22 trumps as a *whole*. I have yet to be convinced by any theory as to why the images exist as a group. To me, when I look at the cards I get the clearest impression that there is something MISSING, the story is incomplete. Whoever put these images together, if we assume there was a structure, must have chosen them for a reason. Yet, to me it is a mystery. (...) I'm left with a couple of possible conclusions:

1. We've lost the original structure. Perhaps originally there were more cards that would have made the story cohesive or recognizable.

2. We've lost the original story. Was there a popular passion play, or novel, or ballad that would have told us the story depicted in the cards?

3. The cards are a random collection. Bits and pieces of groups were combined together, Triumphs, Virtues, possibly Vices, the creator choosing their favorite images or the most recognizable.

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Le Pendu, your great post reminded me of this:

The balcony in the upper floor of the main cloister in the Monastery of Jeronimos, in Lisbon (where I live), built and decorated in the 16th century, exhibits a curious series of twenty sculptures. Their identification is not yet fully established, but I will give you the latest views on them. They include the four cardinal virtues (Force, Temperance, Prudence, Justice) with the opposite vices, the three theological virtues (Faith, Hope and Charity) with the opposite vices, two evangelists (Luke and Matthew), the prophet Isaiah, a Sibyl, an allegory to the Victory of the Church over the Synagogue, an allegory of Liberalitas (Abundance), the martyrs and saints Dorothy, Lucy, Catherine, Mary Magdalene and Marguerite, and two other virgins that bear no attributes.

What a mess. Yes, ok, they are all Christian images, and exhibit a clear (?) moral lesson, but… why precisely Luke and Matthew? Why a Sybil, and just one? Why Isaiah? What is Abundance doing there, in a procession of religious allegories and saints? Why these precise images, and why together, and why not any others? And what story do they tell?

And, Robert, this questions – perfectly equivalent to your questioning about the Tarot trumps – stand even if we do have the original structure, as is the case here. Plus, it is not admissible to sustain that there is no story at all in such program, that is, that these images are a random collection. There are no non-semantic (meaningless) representations in religion-compromised art from that time (or in religious art from any time?).

So, we are left with your second possibility - we've lost the original story. Well, not entirely, I must say – in the concrete case I present, we can build a very plausible storyboard where all this images can fit, being interdependent, and where there is a reason to why these particular ones and not any others. And it’s most interesting. I will not expose it here, for the sake of economy and respect for the subject in analysis, but I can guarantee you this: such displays of images, even if making no sense at first sight (or second, or third…), do have an intrinsic and coherent meaning, and constituted, in the time they were made, a strong, recognizable and structuring discourse.

For those interested, the same formulations, very similar in the chosen elements, in their formal types and in the intended doctrinal effect, are also to be found in Spanish and in French art from the same period, as the two most eloquent examples; and this particular Portuguese case has an impressive antecedent in some Loire castles, where private galleries exhibit identical processions of images. One of them is a gallery in the Amboise castle, commissioned by king Charles VIII of France, in 1498. But this whole imagery is, obviously, of mixed French and Italian influence.

The story was not exactly lost, but really hidden under the layers of time… for, as CharmingPixie said, “you have to understand the social and cultural and political context of the times” the images were created in. In the case I present, it had everything to do with the celebration of the figure of the king (king Manuel in Portugal, Charles VIII in France. In this sense, let me remind you of the use of the images of the Virtues surrounding a king as allegorical representations of his most important qualities (one of which, not being a virtue, was Justice).

Silvia

About the socalled "Ur-Tarot"

Ahem ...

sorry, Marseille lost 2:3

http://trionfi.com/0/g/61/

"Give the devil a kick, and invent some Prudentia" - generally also a good advice in many situations of life.

Happy solstice.

How did this great thread turn into a football match?

I guess, cause a collective fixation on specific theories.

Robert,

I want to respond to your latest thoughtful post, with more care and time than I have now: but I am curious about one thing. Why do you only question the 22 trumps, and not all 78 arcana? Why separate them? Some people (or someone) somewhere between Italy and France, for some reason, decided to add to the Nai'bi cards imported into Europe from Saracen lands, 22 trumps (probably more at first, if the Mantegna is anything to go by). That already argues for some kind of systematic vision. Not a unified grand scheme perhaps, cooked up in one secret society - but nevetheless a directing intelligence had the idea of adding one to the other.

So why do you only look at the 22 trumps to answer your puzzle?

Helvetica said:

You have not proven the false dichotomy Vincent, and therefore cannot argue a further point as though you had.

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In modern Tarot, one can do whatever one likes, apparently. As long as it feels good.

But, to address your point of logic, when I say "What you seem to be saying in this post is that because all other Tarots, are not the Ur-Tarot, then the Marseilles must be the one" the argument is not dependent on using any previous false dichotomy as a premise, because the claim of a false dichotomy is not a premise, but an analogy.

Helvetica said:

And since you seem to be suggesting there cannot be an Ur-Tarot, all you can do, in logic, is to reject any tarot tradition as being the bearer of the "Ur-TArot".

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What I am suggesting is that no criteria for an Ur-Tarot has been posited. If your criteria change according to what deck you wish to promote, you will have a plethora of Ur-Tarots. And, to take a modern view, why should there be just one Ur-Tarot. Its so.... elitist. Everyone should have one. And I'm sure, that once the Tarot authors get through with it, everyone will have one.

Helvetica said:

However, most things have an origin, and most traditions have essence at the heart of them - we can trace the first European novels, their precursors and what constitutes, in literary history, the "essence" of the European novel genre.

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So we are not searching for the Ur-Tarot, but the Ur-Essence of Tarot?

Is that correct?

Then why are we not saying that?

I can see why the criteria might change, because when looking for an Ur-Tarot, one might be tempted to look at an ancestor of the Marseilles deck. This inconvenience can be neatly avoided by claiming that it is not the Tarot that is important, but the essence of Tarot.

Helvetica said:

Or perhaps it is the idea that things may be invested with an essence by human beings that bothers you?

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No, not at all. I delight in the sheer nebulousness of the term. A true monument to the Orwellian idea of language changing thought. It's like something that Donald Rumsfeld might use... "No, Saddam didn't have WMDs, but he did have the essence of WMDs".

Helvetica said:

As for the retroactive occult - for some authors, eager for long-hidden mysteries, that might be. But much of the icongraphy of the TdM was around for many centuries, not only on cards: that does not make it less likely it might be the bearer of a message, but more -

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Why does it make it more likely than, say, the printers of the cards put familiar images on the cards to make them attractive to their prospective clients?

And why is this message present in the TdM, but not the Visconti?

And, if this message is present in the Visconti, then apparently the message has nothing to do with the essence?

And, with the absence of any evidence as to what this 'message' might be, all theories become equally valid. Including Court de Gebelin, so we might as well start looking for the Ur-essence of Tarot in the Valley of the Kings.

Or we could take Occam's razor to it and come to the conclusion that it was used simply for playing a Tarocchi-like game, and had no connection to the Hebrew alphabet, or ancient Egypt, or Atlantis, or large dog-headed arachnids from Sirius.

Helvetica said:

since most people couldn't read when Tarot was born, and court people were rather fond of allegorical riddles, together you have all the ingredients for a system that is invested with meaning to its viewers.

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Or, what is more likely, by its viewers

Nevertheless, I don't see how you reach that conclusion from those premises.

Are you comparing this to an instance when such a thing happened in another society?

Helvetica said:

For us, however, many of the symbols are mysteries, since none of use live with the same world-view as 15th C. European men and women. Much of the fun of studying ancient Tarot comes from unveiling that world-view and seeing how elements of it have become universal (while others have been forgotten).

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I agree, but this doesn't mean there has to be any particular message inherent in the cards design, no matter how much fun it is to speculate. I can see the attraction of hidden messages, especially when competing with a symbol set, and occult paradigm, as rich as the Thoth deck for example. I believe it is this competition that drives modern Tarot 'to see a world in a grain of sand'

One other thing, for clarity, when you say ancient Tarot, do you mean the TdM, or something else? I mean no-one really refers to the ancient frescoes of Leonardo, or Michelangelo's ancient statue of David.

Just want to be sure we are discussing the same thing.



Vincent

The Visconti and the Tarot

The question of the whole story or whole pattern or not through the 22 Trumps is intiguing and fascinating. Oswald Wirth, in The Tarot of the Magicians, tries to demonstrate unity and coherence by 3 septenaries and 7 tercets. But how much does he see and how much does he see-into ? His insights are well worth examining. On the other hand, the Fool's Journey, from nothing (Fool) to Everything (World) makes sense to me, as explored by Banzhaf in his Tarot and the Journey of the Hero and by Gad in her Tarot and Individuation. Could the 22 Trump stucture be complete as a panorama - not detaled but essential - of the Fool's pilgrimage to perfection, comparable to epics such as the Odyssey, Divine Comedy, Parzival ? If it may be fragmentary, it may also be complete as an intended concentration of the human story. It could be (and I think is) a living distillation of the Human Soul finding its way through earth and cosmos in 22 "Hieroglyphs."
As to the Ur-Tarot : Why so much concern for beginnings? Even if the Marseilles pre-dates the Milan/ Ferrara Tarots, which historic evidence seems not to evidence, even if the arrangement of Archetypes finds first life and profundity here, the Ur-Tarot must journey on , must evolve, like all living, life-giving conepts and artistic images. Does the symphony of Mozart stand still? Beethoven would disagree. Does rhymed poetry stand still? Whitman and Neruda take it to free verse. Let us reverence the Ur-Tarot as any Tarot that truly, beautifully shows us who we are. Marseilles included, of course.
What does the Wheel of Fortune say about the Tarot? Round and round it spins, spelling itself, no start , no finish.