Ross G Caldwell
Ross G Caldwell said:When we consider the protectivist spirit that made the Venetians crack down on German cards, the fact that someone interested in cards did not know them as of 1440 while still in Italy (Isabelle), and the rise of Italian self-determination in the end of the Western Schism and that massive international event, the council of Ferrara-Florence (1438-1443), which ended in Rome - i.e. the "triumphal" spirit of the times, especially the second half of the 1430s - I would hazard to guess, if it were possible to know, that Triumph Cards were invented around 1439, by someone who knew the Emperors Game (Emperor = Triumph), but wanted to make a native game that would be the final, greatest game of all - Italy's triumph, taking back the Church, bringing the world together (Council uniting Greeks and Latins (on paper at least) and all the other Churches (Copts, Ethiopians, Syrians, Indians)), crowning the Emperor - the triumph of right order over the misfortunes of the previous century. This is what I think triumph cards signifies and celebrates, and those were the events that occasioned its birth.
This makes it sound like I'm saying the tarot is a political document or nationalist propaganda or something... I'm not!
I think those *conditions* nationally and internationally, were necessary for someone to think of a game like this, that's all. But the real important ingredient is the formal structure of the card-deck, and the traditions of moralizing on it and making new kinds of cards and games.
I don't think you can divorce the trump series from the 56 card pack; the trumps are rooted in the regular pack. For instance, why are there four "papi" (also called the Papessa, Empress etc.), and not just two?
I think the explanation is that the regular pack had four knaves, knights, queens and kings; what's higher than kings? Popes and Emperors! Just as the suits are unranked, I believe the original papi were unranked (as they still are in places). But why not four of each? Because the trumps are only one "suit", not two, so only one series, of four figures, divided equally in two, was needed for the allegory.
And the allegory is for the whole pack of figures, not just the trumps - it represents the game of chance (Bagatella) everybody plays (knaves to popes and emperors), and everyone is subject to Love and War, strives by Virtue, is overturned by chance, time, misfortune and death, but in the afterlife and the heavens lies the certainty of God's justice above all.
In any case, what I want to say is that the structure of the game, in relation to other card games and traditions of the time, is the overriding consideration when interpreting the trumps; but the social and political realities of the 1430s provide the best conditions for understanding all the aspects of the early game - the name "triumph", the time of the earliest records (1442), etc.