Marseilles Courts - General comments

Interesting topic.

As Ihcoyc has pointed out, the earliest 52-card decks in Europe were clones of their Islamic ancestors, and the all-male trio of courts seems to reflect the uncompromising male dominance of those societies. In addition, the Arabic courts were abstract patterns, not representations, because of the Islamic prohibition of representation of the the human form (considered idolatrous).

It's not surprising that the Italian originators of tarot wanted to add a little sex appeal and romance to their decks, and so introduced a female element. Renaissance thinkers may have been members of a paternalistic Roman Catholic society, but they were also newly-minted humanists.

Lots of people, including Dummett and Kaplan, believe that the Cary-Yale Deck was a sort of very early tarot prototype -- one of those Italian variations that was similar to, but not exactly like the true tarots that followed it. That pack solved the gender imbalance problem by adding not just queens, but female knights and female pages, so each suit had six courts, 16 cards altogether. There are some decks, too, in which the knights are males and the pages females, which is another way of achieving gender balance.

Personally, I've never liked the idea of 14 cards in a suit, even though it's the standard and time-honored tarot configuration. Thirteen is the magic number nonpareil -- the ancient prime number that designates a complete life cycle, as it is also the number of lunar months in the year. In addition, the King-Queen-Jack configuration suggests the eternal trio of mother-father-child.

And ignoring for a moment all the talk about neoPlatonism and Kabbalah, I've often wondered whether the popularity of the Arthurian legends throughout Europe, with their romantic influence, didn't have something to do with the advent of females in card decks. In any case, what good are card decks, or what good is life for that matter, without women. I know there are differences between men and women, and I say vive la difference.

aah - such wonderful reflections. Again, historical investigations add to our store of knowledge. Yet the interpretations of the evidence needs to be carefully looked at. We are, after all, looking at Tarot, and not other, though possibly connected, cards or games.

As with the Major Arcana, in which there were other picture cards in use which were not Tarot, it is also clear that there were other courtcards used in certain games (naipes, for example) which were not Tarot. Is it the case that a Queen was added?

Another way to look at this is that the early Tarot, incorporating depictions of the nobility, would have of necessity needed to include a Queen - especially if early Tarot had southern French, Troubadour, Bogomil or Cathar influence, influence which, it should be remembered, pervaded society from which Tarot emerged.

Contra ihcoyc, then, I would venture that the Queen, though undoubdtedly not found in the military and early saracene influenced decks, is intrinsic to the Tarot: the Queen is included from the earliest Tarot decks.

With regards to the four elements, I agree with Diana that, as these were well known and especially accepted amongst both Mediaeval and proto-renaissance French intelligentsia, the suits may very well have been so perceived at the time. I should also take the opportunity on briefly adding a comment with regards to the four classes: it is the military which is linked to the nobility, not the merchants (except, maybe, in Switzerland ).

With regards as to whether there should be thirteen or fourteen cards per suit - and I won't here repeat earlier posted comments regarding the number of lunar months in a year - fourteen does give a sense for the lunar cycle which thirteen doesn't, for it is the number of days in either its waxing or waning aspect.

To my mind, that there are four suits adds to the sense that there ought also be four courts per suit. As to the gender of the Page, it remains, to a very large extant, indeterminate out of a particulaar context.

I would agree that the presence of the Queen is the less conspicuous addition that distinguishes the Tarot from the earlier non-Tarot decks of playing cards. Moreover, the presence of the Queens in the non-Tarot French/international decks, and the fact that the Queen is outranked only by the King in those decks, shows that ordinary playing cards themselves were derived from, or at least influenced by, the Tarot.

The sex of the lowest court card probably ought to be indeterminate, if the Tarot courts represent a household rather than an army. The valets seem to have been reinterpreted, away from being footsoldiers, to represent the servant classes universally present in the households of the nobility. As such the people they represent could be either sex. My understanding is that it was the lowest court card in the Portuguese Latin-suited decks of playing cards that became female, rather than the Queen.

Were the Court cards designed to depict actual historical figures? I mean, do they resemble any royalty, or important people of the time? Does anyone know?

I strongly suspect that any depiction of actual historical figures is a later depiction which may have occured for specific hand-painted decks - if at all (though I'm sure that this did occur).

Later still, with non-Marseilles type depictions (such as the Tarot which emerged following, and depicting, the revolution, or the hunting Tarot of Germany) may very well have incorporated individuals.

Earlier - and later, for that matter - decks, however, I am quite sure, depicted more the station and the suit - irrespective of who may have been similarly thought of.

ihcoyc referenced a site with information about the queen's absence from the deck, from a history of playing cards. I must warn all that playing card and tarot card aficianados are as different as clowns are to mimes. I hear they frequently battle on another in public parks!

Or maybe a better analogy would be downhill and cross country skiing. Of course, the Tarotists would be parallel with the more aesthetic cross country skiiers.

Believe it or not, people who study the history of playing cards are not a separate species from tarot afficionados. In fact, students of playing cards and tarot wonks are frequently the same people. The reason for that is because exactly 52/78ths of a tarot deck is also a complete playing card deck.

Tarot did not begin as a single idea, despite the persistence of some in believing that it represents a conceptually hermetic and seamless body of thought. This is because the earliest packs had two purposes; they were:

*A philosophic statement, and

*A game.

Or to put it another way, they were a philosophic statement that was used as a game. I suppose an imperfect analog would be a modern playing card pack that consists of pictures of important people in American history; its only use would be as a game, but it would also convey a philosophical statement of sorts.

The sources of the philosophic statement expressed by the sequence of trump images, and consideration of what that statement might be, have been gone into at length on this board. One of the more interesting sidelights of that discussion focusses on the so-called Tarot of Mantegna, so-called because it's not a tarot deck, or even a card deck (it was printed on paper sheets), and was not drawn by Andrea Mantegna. It is, however, likely intended to represent a sort of blueprint of the universe. It consists of 50 images divided into five groups of 10 pictures each, and each group is arranged in a strict hierarchy, starting with the lowest (group one starts with "Il Misero" the beggar, a close relative of Il Matto the Fool) and ending with the highest (the final image is "First Cause," a universe consisting of 15 circles with the earth in the middle). It may have predated the Visconti-Sforza tarot (see Kaplan I: pages 35-47), and some of its images are very similar to trump images in the tarot decks that were contemporaneous with it (see, for example, the Mantegna's "Mars" and the Chariot in various tarot decks). It seems reasonable to conclude that the tarot trumps articulate some sort of philosophic statement, similar to the esoteric architecture represented in the Mantegna.

But, as others have pointed out, at most, the trumps are imbued with a symbolic meaning. The suited cards, excepting the queens, existed before the tarot deck, and were incorporated into it in order to facilitate its use (gaming), but not its philosophy.

We know that the early decks were used for a game. We assume they also had a philosophic statement.

In a 52-card deck, there are 13 tricks in a normal trick taking game (Bridge, Spades, Hearts).

Add a court card and we have 14 tricks.

Add 21 Trumps, and we now have 77 cards total, which equals 19.25 tricks.

Add Le Mat, a Non-Trump Trump (it frees you from the obligation of having to play a trump or follow suit – but cannot win any tricks) and you now have 19.5 tricks per hand.

I have a feeling we are missing something here, and should look towards the game, to determine why the card count came to 56+77+1.

Alternatively, did the game evolve around the philosophical ‘archetypes’?

Which came first?

Because if the Archetypes indeed came first, we have to chuck the whole shebang, and go back to “What did Le Fou mean in 1350”, and NOT what did “Le Fou” mean in 1760 or 1910.

There was a difference in “just coming out of the dark ages” and “the age of reason” that has never been adequately rectified. There was a profound difference in how the archetypes were perceived at either side of the 400-year span.

Jung was filled with his own ideas and knew little on pre-Christian Europe. His entire upbringing was colored by the church (being a pastor’s son).

Or perhaps I am rambling…

Umbrae said:

In a 52-card deck, there are 13 tricks in a normal trick taking game (Bridge, Spades, Hearts).

Add a court card and we have 14 tricks.

Add 21 Trumps, and we now have 77 cards total, which equals 19.25 tricks.

Add Le Mat, a Non-Trump Trump (it frees you from the obligation of having to play a trump or follow suit – but cannot win any tricks) and you now have 19.5 tricks per hand.

I have a feeling we are missing something here, and should look towards the game, to determine why the card count came to 56+77+1.

Click to expand...

You're assuming that tarot was a four-player game, but most of the tarocchi games I know are designed for either three or six players. If we assume the original game of tarot was a six-player game, the number of cards makes perfect sense: 13 x 4 = 52, and 13 x 6 = 78.

Just a thought.

-Baneemy

Some of this discussion of course assumes that the early Tarot was mainly used for a card game - it certainly was following its unification of minor and major arcanas, but I am yet to be persuaded that the major arcana were designed with that intent.

Still, the point made by Baneemy is worthy of consideration, especially given that there are a number of period card-tables with three sides.

The game of Tarot, as commonly played, in France, still has a minimum of three players, with the preferred number being either this basic three, or, failing this, five. It seems to me that the rules for 4, 5, & 6 players are modifications of the basic ones for 3-players.

Two consideration we haven't really discussed are, on the one hand, why or when the courts standardised to four per suit (as opposed to either three or six), and, on the other, how came it that cards depicting, in images, the courts were used by, presumably, Muslim Moors (who abhor such depictions)?

Though these are important for our sense of history, they are still considerations of the proto-Tarot - for the Tarot itself has four courts per suit, in a deck of a full seventy-eight cards.