le pendu
DianeOD said:Those from what is called the "Dummett-de Paulis" school of thought
Ah... my dear Alma Mater. DdP DdP Rah Rah Rah! DdP DdP Sis Boom Bah!!
DianeOD said:Those from what is called the "Dummett-de Paulis" school of thought
DianeOD said:The tarot consists of 40 + 16 + some number of additional figures.
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But certainly about a century (or so) after we begin hearing of cards and card-use spreading more widely through Europe, the number for Atouts does seem to settle at 22. It is notable that our earliest handmade cards contain no devil - and most contain no tower. I don't think it right to simply assume that our present 22-card Atout is the original. And this is because the non-devil, non-tower series is not only the earliest remaing, but one that is more internally coherent. To suppose that Atouts in later packs must have been 'lost' from earlier ones is not the same as supposing that a pack without a knave of cups always had one. .. I can just *feel* this statement causing trouble.
To you, anyway, I take it.Umbrae said:okay okay okay....There’s a ton of worthless verbiage here…
And what 'proof', may I ask, do you have of that? You seem to make no distinction between what has survived and what was. This is a much-traveled (academic) shortcut towards a palpable illusion of proof. But the simple fact is (as Plato pointed out in chapter 19 of The Republic) that the only things for which there is proof are eternal things, all that is of finite duration being capable of residing only in opinion, albeit this can range from solid to tentative.The question remains.
What PROOF is there, that ANY alphabet – was the ORIGIN of the Tarot, keeping in mind – the Tarot consists of 52 + 26 cards.
I have said it seems more likely to me that the four court cards per suit already existed but that Mamluks -- who might have gotten them from Moors and thence indirectly from the Provence-Languedoc-Catalonia culture, for all we know, the destruction of the latter having been so utterly brutal and complete (especially west of the Rhone?) -- removed the female from the bunch and even the representations of the rest. It would also have been logical for them to have simply dropped the '5th suit' or trump suit, since it consisted entirely of (forbidden) images.Umbrae said:IF there was ever a connection between the 52 card Mamluk/Indian/Chinese decks and tarot, somewhere along the line four courts and twenty some trumps were added.
Does the ‘Bardic’ tradition account for this?
Only for part of his subject-matter, methinks (I was too young to judge whether he was a trained bard or not, so I cannot rule that out).We may as well prove that the alphabet was responsable for Captain Kangaroo.
venicebard said:The solid argument, then, for seriously entertaining the opinion that it was a confluence of bardic and Judaic understanding of the alphabet (and world, I might add) shaped the Tarot de Marseille is the exact fit of what said confluence produces even now when overlaid on TdM.
“It can be seen that the dogmatic mode of thinking fails to recreate any of the qualities that made the traditional mode so attractive. It turns out to be convoluted, rigid, and oppressive. True, it eliminates the uncertainties that plague the critical mode, but only at the cost of creating conditions that the human mind would find intolerable if it were aware of any alternatives. Just as a doctrine based on a super-human authority may provide an avenue of escape from the short-comings of the critical mode, the critical mode itself may appear as the salvation to those who suffer from the oppression of dogma.” George Soros Staying Ahead of the Curve
venicebard said:I have said it seems more likely to me that the four court cards per suit already existed but that Mamluks -- who might have gotten them from Moors and thence indirectly from the Provence-Languedoc-Catalonia culture, for all we know, the destruction of the latter having been so utterly brutal and complete (especially west of the Rhone?) -- removed the female from the bunch and even the representations of the rest. It would also have been logical for them to have simply dropped the '5th suit' or trump suit, since it consisted entirely of (forbidden) images.