firemaiden said:
Hi Huck, I am very interested in what you are saying, so please be patient with me.
What is a Schachzabel book? It seems like it is a book of illustrations of professions. But does it have something to do with chess? or were these chess pieces that were then inventoried in a book?
Sort of like an early encyclopedia? Are you suggesting that tarot grew out of books like this? In what way is the book a "second tarot", I am afraid I don't really understand.
I have finally been able to read your post on Hajo's forum. You say that Catboxer's date of 1375 is wrong, but you are only quibbling with about four years, it seems to me, is that right? You are saying that the earliest mention of cards being played was 1371?
1367 in Bern seems to be reliable. It earlier was claimed to be a later addition, added in 20 years later. So it was believed to be another of the forgeries.
The same happened to the Johannes text. It was thought to have been changed in 1429. A recent research came to the conclusion, that it is correctly dated at 1377. So two suspected "forgeries" have now the perspective to be correct that, what they always claimed to be.
"Zabel" was chess or the board of chess. The term changed with the time. Probably - I would guess so - was Zabel the German transformed word for "Schach" (modern German for chess), with - I might err - goes back to a Persian expression Shah ? (I recall only from memory, I'm unsecure), probably near to Schah, with still was the title of Reza Pahlewi in last century, so meaning King or Kaiser or something like this. I should research that.
Caesar, Kaiser, Schah, Zar, probably all the same root. The Persian word - so I assume - changed to Zabel and was common. Then a time came, when the foreign language corrected it again back to the original expression, and the confused German formed Schachzabel to know in any case what he was talking about
It's a second Tarot in the way, that a special iconography (professions) was developed, which was used in books and on PLAYING CARDS, such allegorizing the playing figures and cards.
A left pawn was not simply a pawn, but for instance a fisher or an inn-keeper. This idea, first only used in books about chess and related to chess-figures, was transported to the play, that Johannes saw in 1377 and what he was very delighted about. The number-cards had "professions", they were painted like persons with professions and they presented the folk and the court cards the regents. A very simple normal idea.
Then we see for 80 years nothing of this kind of deck on existent playing card decks, until the Hofämterspiel appears (ca. 1455).
But there are Schachzabelbooks, which deal with the same idea. And there are astrological books, which sort the professions in groups according to planets.
That is all one family ... of iconographical use.
A virtue in comparition (Iustitia for instance) also exists independent from the media, if it is cardplay, a book, or a statue.
It is also part of an iconographical family, this time called "Virtues".
It's a second Tarot in the way that it has pictures.
But I would prefer to discuss further questions in the English forum there, I've posted it to various groups, so discussion is better organized there.