The Four Humours

Bernice

Back - fleetingly.

Kwaw,

Found an online reference. It isn't the place where I originally came across it, that's somewhere here at AT - and very recently. Additionally I believe the posting mentioned 'Latin'.

THE GAME OF TAROTS: by Antoine Court de Gébelin (translated from the French by Donald Tyson)
http://www.scribd.com/doc/6306862/The-Game-of-Tarots-By-Gebelin-Translated-by-Donald-Tyson

You have to scroll down to the section, "V" Comparison between these attributes and the values that one assigns to the modern cards for divination.

The text reads:

The Hearts, (Cups), announce happiness.
The Clubs, (Coins), fortune.
Spades, (Swords), misforune.
Diamonds, (Batons), indefference and the countryside. [It is to be noticed that in their symbolic writing system the Egyptians emplioyed squares to express the countryside.]

I must assume that the AT poster has read this book. Unless this particular association of 'suit & name' also exists elsewhere.

Bee

EDIT: Kwaw - see my post 18:

Please note that I added the " = humour" to clarify my post for the previous poster with regard to the humours. The original quote did not include the temperaments/humours. Just want to make that clear.

B.

kwaw

Bernice said:
I must assume that the AT poster has read this book. Unless this particular association of 'suit & name' also exists elsewhere.

It is one of several variations on French to Latin suit conversions; this one that has a certain following in some occult school traditions is rooted in the speculations of Mellet/Gebelin in all probability.

MacGregor Mathers uses the same (following Gebelin/Mellet probably) in his book 'The Tarot: Its occult significance and use in fortune telling and method of play'.

kwaw

Bernice said:
"V" Comparison between these attributes and the values that one assigns to the modern cards for divination.

De Mellet:

V Comparison of these Attributes with the values assigned to modern Cards for the purpose of divination.

Our Tellers of good-fortune not knowing how to read Hieroglyphics, withdrew all the images and changed the names of cups, batons, denier & swords, while understanding neither the etymology nor the expression; substituting hearts, diamonds, clubs & spades. But they retained certain turnings & several expressions by which we can retrace the origin of their divinatory meanings to the original suits. According to them, the Hearts (Cups) announce happiness. The Clubs (Denier) fortune. Spades (Swords) misfortune. Diamonds [note that in the symbolic writing system of the Egyptians diamond squares represent the countryside ] (Batons) indifference & the countryside. The nine of spades is a disastrous card. The nine of hearts, the card of the Sun; the nine of clubs they also look upon as a happy card. The aces announce Letters, News: indeed which is more capable to bring news than the One-eyed one(the Sun), which traverses, sees & lights all the Universe?

See post here:
http://www.tarotforum.net/showpost.php?p=705183&postcount=10

Etteilla also made the same french suit to latin suit conversion, probably on the authority of Mellet, see my recent post here:

http://www.tarotforum.net/showpost.php?p=1959297&postcount=8

None of this has anything to do with your original point however:

Bernice said:
Hi Kwaw,

It was later discovered that the translation of Tiles to Diamonds was a mis-translation. The word 'tiles' apparently refers to the suit of what we call 'clubs'.

Which from your example appears to be the result of some confusion. There is no mistranslation between tiles/diamonds and clover/clubs; if there is any contention it is in the conversion of French to Latin suits, not between French and English names of the French suits. There is as shown above an occult tradition connecting tiles/diamonds with batons and clover/clubs with deniers that appears to be rooted in the speculations of Gebelin/Mellet and popularized by Etteilla. Another correspondence is pike/swords, tiles/deniers, hearts/cups and clover/clubs that makes more sense in terms of gaming and naming conventions; for example in the game Hombre there is the reversal of order between red and black suits, reflecting the reversal of order between Latin long and short suits; and the Ace of Clover/Clubs is called 'Baste' (club) and the Ace of Pike/Spades 'Espadille' (sword). In English too the name Spades is probably rooted in Spadille (sword) and 'Club' is a translation of 'Baste/Baton'. These conventions are far older than the speculations of Mellet/Gebelin. However, as shown above it is possible to offer some support for the Mellet convention by cross referencing various sources such as the shepherds calendar, Agrippa, Ringhiero, etc; but one should be aware that there variations in 'historical' correspondences as there are in modern, and it is possible to dig up 'historical' authorities for a range of preferred correlations.

Bernice said:
Please note that I added the " = humour" to clarify my post for the previous poster with regard to the humours. The original quote did not include the temperaments/humours. Just want to make that clear.

Nor did Gosselin make any reference to the Latin suits.

Kwaw

kwaw

kwaw said:
... for example in the game Hombre there is the reversal of order between red and black suits, reflecting the reversal of order between Latin long and short suits; and the Ace of Clover/Clubs is called 'Baste' (club) and the Ace of Pike/Spades 'Espadille' (sword).
Kwaw

In the link in a post above for example:

http://www-bsg.univ-paris1.fr/la_reserve/expos/jeu/enseignes.htm

Where there is an image of the front page of Jean Gosselin' s La Signification de l'ancien jeu des chartes pythagorique...

If you go further down the page to the book on the game of Hombre:

III-3 Le " royal " jeu de l'hombre

Le Jeu de l'hombre, comme on le joue presentement à la cour & à Paris, avec les pertintailles...

...and you click on the left hand image to enlarge it the ace of spades you will see is called 'Espadille' and the ace of clubs 'Baste'.

Game rules for l'hombre:

http://www.pagat.com/lhombre/lhombre.html

Kwaw
*1. E. sp. espadilla „diminutif de spada, epee, le pique etant marque par une epee sur les cartes espagnoles".

kwaw

kwaw said:
Another correspondence is pike/swords, tiles/deniers, hearts/cups and clover/clubs that makes more sense in terms of gaming and naming conventions; for example in the game Hombre there is the reversal of order between red and black suits, reflecting the reversal of order between Latin long and short suits; and the Ace of Clover/Clubs is called 'Baste' (club) and the Ace of Pike/Spades 'Espadille' (sword). In English too the name Spades is probably rooted in Spadille (sword) and 'Club' is a translation of 'Baste/Baton'.

In Turkish the suit of hearts is called kupa, meaning cup, goblet, mug.

The suit of clubs is called sinek, meaning fly. If there is any correlaton with a baton of sorts, maybe it is with a sineklik - a flyswatter

kwaw

kwaw said:
In Turkish the suit of hearts is called kupa, meaning cup, goblet, mug.

The suit of clubs is called sinek, meaning fly. If there is any correlaton with a baton of sorts, maybe it is with a sineklik - a flyswatter

Batons = peasants, peasants work with manure, and in Turkish the King of Clubs is literally 'lord of the flies'

Gypsyspell

Thanks Kwaw, not sure what i will do with this information, lol---But it is Summer in Australia so probably could do with a few flyswatting Batons! Taa

nisaba

kwaw said:
and in Turkish the King of Clubs is literally 'lord of the flies'

You know, Golding was *quite* cultured enough to have known that.

Ross G Caldwell

Regarding the equivalence of tiles=diamonds - Gosselin uses the same names as are still used in modern French for the suits, which are the same suits we use in English cards, since our cards are French in origin. Here "carreaux" (literally "tiles") is our diamonds, and "trèfles" (literally "clovers") is our clubs. There is no mis-translation or mistaken equivalence.

Here is the original text of Jean-Marie Lhôte, quoting Pratesi quoting Gosselin, reference at the end (this is the text whose translation I made that Kwaw quoted in post 17 of this thread) -

"'Premierement, il convient considerer, qu'en un ieu de chartes vulgaires, il y a quatre manieres de characteres : qui sont quarreaux, trefles, coeurs et picques. Lesquels nous representent les quatres Elements, dont toutes choses naturelles son composees [...] - Les quarreaux, qui sont peints aux chartes, signifient la terre : car tout ainsi que la terre soustient toutes choses pesantes, aussi le quarreaux sont propres, pour soustenir les choses pesantes qu'on met dessus iceux. - Les trefles, qui sont peints aux chartes, nous representent l'eau : a raison que le trefle est une herbe que croist en lieu humide, et se nourrist par le moyen de l'eau qui l'arrouse. - Les coeurs, qui sont peints aux chartes, nous signifient l'air : pour autant que nos coeurs ne peuvent vivre sans air. - Les picques, qui sont peints aux chartes, nous representent le feu : Car tout ainsi que le feu est le plus penetrant de quatre Elements : aussi les picques sont instruments de guerre très penetrans, et de chacun des characteres susdits, sont marquees treize chartes en un ieu : qui valent somme toute, cinquante-deux chartes'

(cité par Franco Pratesi, dans "As de trèfle", juillet 1992) Observons que les relations données par Gosselin entre les enseignes et les éléments sont
différents de celles proposées dans ces pages, et largement admises : terre/carreau, eau/coeur, air/pique, feu/trèfle. Par ailleurs, dans les jeux de Ringhieri se trouve exprimée une relation entre les enseignes des cartes et les vertus : Coppe/Tempérance, Colonne/Force, Spade/Justice, Specchi/Prudence (voir Ringhieri, 1551, jeu LXXXI)".

(J.-M. Lhôte, "Histoire des jeux de société" (Flammarion, 1993) p.
652 n. 18.)

Ross

kwaw

Humours, Elements & Tarot Suit Emblems:

Quote:

"In no way should we dismiss as merely poetical the oracle that Virgil gives us in the sixth book, where, following Mercurius in part and Plato in part, he describes four passions, which four are a consequence of the humors, since it seems appropriate that appetite is born from the fiery bile, pleasure from the airy blood, fear from the earthy black bile, and grief and weakness from the watery phlegm."

end quote from Platonic Theology Vol. 6, Book XVIII, Chap. X.17 by Marcilio Ficino, trans. Michael Allen.

These, under varying names, are the four classical passions of joy, sorrow, hope and fear, the four primary passions of Stoic philosophy, to be found for example in Cicero. They were a well-known theme in the italian renaissance.

quote
"The most popular foundational set includes four: joy, sorrow, hope, and fear. Although the earliest reference to these four is by Plato (Laches, 191C), Zeno of Citium and the Stoics are attributed with developing a theory of the passions based on these. The fullest surviving account of the Stoic theory is given by Cicero in his Tusculan Disputations. In Cicero's discussion, the four most primitive passions are joy (laetitia), grief (aegritudo), desire (cupiditas or libido), and fear (metus). Joy and desire are the result of good circumstances whereas grief and fear are the result of evil. Further, joy and grief result when a circumstance or object is actually present, in contrast to desire and fear which arise when one anticipates a future circumstance. The division is as follows:

___________Good Object_____Evil Object

Present_____joy____________grief

Anticipated__desire_________fear

In Roman and medieval philosophy, the Stoic division of the passions was widely endorsed by writers such as Virgil, Augustine, and Boethius."

end quote from:
http://www.utm.edu/staff/jfieser/vita/research/passion.htm

St. Augustine, following Cicero, describes them thus:

quote:
"The right will is, therefore, well-directed love, and the wrong will is ill-directed love. Love, then, yearning to have what is loved, is desire; and having and enjoying it, is joy; fleeing what is opposed to it, it is fear; and feeling what is opposed to it, when it has befallen it, it is sadness. Now these motions are evil if the love is evil; good if the love is good."
The City of God 14.7

These four passions of the soul are the basis of the four passions to be found as suits in the Boiardo Tarot pack:

"Four passions of the lady soul
they have forty cards in this game ...
... Love, Hope, Jealousy, and Fear
are the passions, and a tercet have the cards,
in order not to leave, who plays, in error."

Thus it may be said that the earliest of the existing tarot decks consisting of four suits and 22 trumps is one in which the four suits are related to the elements and humors via their association with the four passions.

The Four Humours

Bernice

kwaw

kwaw

kwaw

kwaw

kwaw

Gypsyspell

nisaba

Ross G Caldwell

kwaw