A Pool Of Cards

Rosanne

Ha! Debra has found me out!
Tarot is full of multi- use images. You can move them in and out of different sets.
Everyone of the images that make 47 can be one thing and/or something else.
How clever is that?
I did laugh when I laid my images out on the floor after spilling the pictures all over the place.
Then the light came on.
No one commented when I said Death was Vanitas.
The messages are delivered visually. Constructing a convincing verbal narrative story-line (why one card should trump another) is probably part of what the game involved.

and more importantly.....
Cards are cards rather than books or a single drawing because flexibility is important. The spirit of this game is dealing with changes of fortune
Debra knows more than anyone how many stories I have linked to the images lol, some true, some fanciful, some decidedly wrong. The historical interest never dies.
~Rosanne
 

Huck

Well, one can move them as one can move CHESS figures. A hierarchy may be an aim of the player, but it's not naturally dominant.
 

Debra

Cards can be "played with" in many more ways than chess.
Cards are not bound to stay "on the board."
They can be given to many players--the game isn't only for two.
The pictures on the cards have visual meanings.
These meanings are interesting and evocative.
Chess pieces have rules for how they can move, but there's no "meaning" in the rules. It's just rule-following.
 

Huck

Cards can be "played with" in many more ways than chess.
Cards are not bound to stay "on the board."
They can be given to many players--the game isn't only for two.
The pictures on the cards have visual meanings.
These meanings are interesting and evocative.
Chess pieces have rules for how they can move, but there's no "meaning" in the rules. It's just rule-following.

... :) ... they had different boards, different figures, different sorts of chess and different rules. The ideas about chess were not so limited, as you present them. Mostly it was seen as a battle, but it was also connected to love and marriage.
It doesn't make so much difference, if you connect a mental idea (= the pool of allegories) to a piece of paper (= playing card) or to a piece of wood (= figurative chess men).

The echecs amoureux of Evrart de Conty had 32 different figures, 16 for the male player, 16 for the female player. The allegories were mostly taken from the Roman de la rose. To this came 16 Greek-Roman gods in unclear relationship. 32 + 16 makes 48 figures.
Tarot cards had 22 elements, Minchiate 41. Evrart's book had about 900 pages, he had a lot to talk about. Old Tarot descriptions are very rare. The longest might be the work of Martiano da Tortana. The text lengths might have 1:50 in comparison with the Evrart text. Boiardo had 3 lines poems for each card. That's also not so much.

In matters of complexity this chess version - much earlier than the oldest Trionfi cards - had more mental space and freedom, I think, it's easy to see this point.
 

Rosanne

. A hierarchy may be an aim of the player, but it's not naturally dominant.
Hi Huck, I can see your analogy....
I think the second part quoted is the more important part. Card players, once they became used to the game in a rigid way (how long after I do not know) needed the set hierarchy, for recognition, for speed, for custom, for habit, ease of betting..the images became less important than the sequence, and from there imagination stopped, and the cards became standardized. It just became, like a site in Monopoly, and the original reason why one site was more valuable than another was lost...buy Purple site, avoid orange site, green sites Ok.. etc. Then all of a sudden,with Tarot, the images were recognized, aside from the game, and esoteric Tarot was on it's way.
If you play with a beautiful set of playing cards all the time, the images lose their meaning, and the little pip in the corner (indice) is all that matters.
It is quite fascinating.
~Rosanne
 

Huck

Hi Huck, I can see your analogy....
I think the second part quoted is the more important part.

Yes. There are mythological and allegorical compositions, which have no hierarchy. It's just a question of the interest of the user, if he demands a hierarchy.

If we take for instance the 12 Olympic gods, then they have none - usually. But Martiano da Tortona found it of value, that they should have one in the Michelino deck, so they got one. Jupiter was the highest, Juno the second, Minerva the third etc.

Manilius, either by tradition or on his own idea, found it a good idea to connect them to the zodiac signs. So they became cyclical. Why not.

Chess doesn't need a hierarchy between the figures, but when played with a die, you could need one:

6 = king
5 = queen
4 = rook
3 = knight
2 = bishop
1 = pawn

... so reported by Alfonso the Wise. If you got a "6", you had to move the king and if this couldn't been done, then ... I don't know, what idea they had about it. Either you had to pass or throw the die a second time.

... :) ... thinking about it, it must be a rather interesting version, if you play with two dice instead of one, each move giving the player two moves. This might become hellish complicated and much better as the usual backgammon. And you likely hadn't so often the result, that you couldn't move at all.

Systems like Geomancy or I-Ching don't need a hierarchical row, but actually the I-Ching had a row. But it was just a row, playing a little bit with signs and numbers, not really hierarchical in the manner, that a higher number would have been better than the lower or vice versa.
 

Rosanne

I loved this from Debra....
the game becomes "storytelling with historical Footnotes and Documentation."
Exactly right.....all below has historical footnotes and documentation!
If you take just one card Le Papa, Pope, Il Papa, and you look through the threads...
Saturn
Jupiter
Prudence
Mars
Flamen (Roman High Priest)
Bootes (Ursha Major)
Actual Pope Head of Catholic Church
Highest state of Man
Particular Historic Pope
Anti Pope
Joke Pope as Husband of Papesse (pair)
Vulcan
Catholic Faith
Catholic Law
Saint Ambrose Bishop of Milan
Bishop in Chess
Various Zodiac sign i.e Taurus
Character from Children of the Planets....

I have most likely missed many more.
So is everyone right?
~Rosanne
 

DoctorArcanus

Chess doesn't need a hierarchy between the figures,

I don't know much about the history of chess, but the different pieces obviously represent a social hierarchy: king, queen, knight, pawn are similar to the court cards. Moreover, the number of the pieces is inversely proportional to their rank: each of the 8 pawns is less worthy than the 2 knights, bishops and towers which are less worthy than the unique king and queen. The king is so important that the goal of the game is to defeat it. A pawn can be “promoted” to a queen: the concept of promotion implies that a queen is more valuable than a pawn. The ranking is also represented by the size of the pieces. As in tarot, a kind of ranking seems to me implied by the very nature and rules of the games. If you remove ranking from chess, you get something different, maybe checkers.

As in tarot moralizations, also chess moralizations reflected the intrinsic structure of the game. See for instance: http://roseandchess.lib.uchicago.edu/chess.html
 

Huck

I don't know much about the history of chess, but the different pieces obviously represent a social hierarchy: king, queen, knight, pawn are similar to the court cards. Moreover, the number of the pieces is inversely proportional to their rank: each of the 8 pawns is less worthy than the 2 knights, bishops and towers which are less worthy than the unique king and queen. The king is so important that the goal of the game is to defeat it. A pawn can be “promoted” to a queen: the concept of promotion implies that a queen is more valuable than a pawn. The ranking is also represented by the size of the pieces. As in tarot, a kind of ranking seems to me implied by the very nature and rules of the games. If you remove ranking from chess, you get something different, maybe checkers.

As in tarot moralizations, also chess moralizations reflected the intrinsic structure of the game. See for instance: http://roseandchess.lib.uchicago.edu/chess.html

.... hm ....
Old Chess was different. The Queen was weak. The bishop was weaker than today. Sure, the potential of the possible moves of a type of figure gave an idea, what a figure might be compared to. The Queen was weak, so it was called Queen, cause women are weak in fight. The rook was often a chariot, so he was bound to use streets. He could move straight vertical and horizontal lines, as far the board it allowed (cause streets allow great distances). The horse in contrast could follow its own ways, a combination of diagonal and straight move and jumping. It could "run through a forest", but this was naturally slower as ion a street. The bishop, which jumped one space diagonal, could reach a point, which all other wouldn't get. So he was often interpreted as a bow-shooter. The King was very slow, and needed to be protected.
In Courier-chess they had a "Renner", a runner, and this could move like a modern bishop. Cause the Renner was quick.
The pawn was naturally a foot-soldier, slow. He wasn't allowed to go back. So he was often killed, more than the officers. In Chinese chess they have a cannon. This can jump over one other figure. In Mongol Chess they had a body-guard. If a foreign figure with quick movement entered its region, it couldn't move further, it had to stop. In Shogi (Japanese Chess), you can place captured figures (prisoners) as own figures on the board. Many different ideas of "chess".

The basic phantasy was made from the technical fighting technique. Naturally there were ALSO phantasies, which compared chess with the relevant society. A court, Towers to expand the kingdom in distance to the court, Knights for nobility, bishops for the church and pawns for the rest of us.

Anyway, looking through all the different versions, there were just many sorts of chess with different interpretations. The basic is the phantasy and the result is something, which finally is adapted by others, cause its interesting enough to be called a game. Or not ... then you can play alone with yourself.

Let's take a very modern version of chess, actually a sort of chess-orgasm: "Civilization" by Sid Meier, the mother of a lot of strategy games. You have a board and it may be gigantic and each field can have a number of special qualities (in some versions the board is 3-dimensional; I know a version with 4 levels ... Air, Earth, Water, Underground). You have a lot of opponents with different possibilities to "react". You have a lot of possible figures with different fighting possibilities. One game move may involve hundreds of figures, which fight or move or make other special activities.

The strongest figures are rather obviously the city founders (settlers ... actually a sort of King as Adam + Eve) and the building workers (the pawns).

You have random elements. In the original the game is mirroring the development of human civilization, you start with the alphabet or pottery and end by building a huge rocket to escape the game.
Well, a very complex game. One game may take months and longer. A sort of chess, no doubt, but very, very different.

A chess game at the Austrian courts (16th century) had 32 figures for each side.
In some Shogi developments also the board-size and the number of figures exploded. Such games also needed their time, they weren't naturally not done in one day.
These examples show the interest for expansion of the game. But in pre-computer time something like "Civilization" was not possible to imagine.

One can call this also "game moralization". But "game advertising doesn't change the game", it just has the function of "Fame", in other words "blowing the trumpet".
 

Rosanne

I have to extend my range in the Pool of Cards.
All because of my beloved PBM Hermit, whom I have come to think of as Judas Maccabeus.
Anyways......
Royal entries.....(Or Triumphs- Trionfi)
..... into a repertory of archways and street-theatres which presented variants of a remarkably consistent visual and iconographical vocabulary."Fortune with her wheel, Fame and Time, the seven Virtues, both Christian and Classical, and the Nine Worthies and other Classical, Biblical and local heroes....
My underlining!
Nine Worthies are standard by the time of Tarot for men. Nine female Worthies far less standard and open to various figures as diverse as Lucrezia to Saint Bridgit of Sweden.
The Nine Worthies are triads of men in History that show archetypes of Virtuous males, as exemplars of Chivalry.
Chivalry of the Old Law
Joshua
David
Judas Maccabeus
Chivalry of Pagan Law
Hector
Alexander
Julius
Chilvary of New Christian Law
Arthur
Charlmagne
Goddfrey de Boullion.
Whilst a modern dictionary defies 'history' as a chronological record of significant events, people in the late medieval ages perceived history differently. For them history had a range of meanings that moved from reality to imagination, and from words to images. This was the flexibility of history- an ability to encompass real and imagined pasts, which we would not really accept as History today. Mind you, I was told a romantic version of how the Maori came to New Zealand- so flexibility was not so far away really!
So in to the pool of cards goes the Nine Worthies.
Now the pool has 56 cards to choose from to make a parade of Trumps.
~Rosanne