The Game of Tarots - Antoine Court de Geblin

Bernice

Comparing de Gébelin with 'Basilius Valentinius' may have some tenuous validity in this thread, but does not warrant more than a short paragraph - a passing mention.

The material by Antoine Court de Geblin was not (primarily) alchemical.

Further lengthy alchemical thoughts are off-topic here.


Bee :)
 

coredil

Surely specialists on AT know that but maybe it is worth mentioning in this thread that it exists a nice commented french edition of "Du jeu des Tarots" from Court de Gébelin.
It is named: "Le Tarot" and it is presented and commented by Jean-Marie Lhôte.

ISBN: 2-900269-30-X

This book is from 1983 by Berg International Éditeurs

Though out of print it appears sometimes on Ebay for not so much.

It is a Facsimilé edition of Gébelin's essay on Tarot and almost each page is annotated and commented.
There is also a 60 pages long Portrait of Gébelin that gives some interesting insight on his life.
Interesting is also the unachieved letter (or plan for a letter) he wrote at the end of his life about his illness and about Mesmer.
At the end of his life, quite ill, Gébelin believed in Mesmer magnetisation theory and he he consulted Mesmer.
It seemed to help first and that is what leaded him to write some enthusiastic lines on Mesmer, but finally he died some months later.

I recommend this book and the presentation of Gébelin's work which is at the same time "sympathetic and critical" (as written on the back of the book) and offers a lot of historical notes on almost each theme touched by Gébelin.

There are a lot of pictures and among them the pictures of the major arcanes as originally founded in Gébelin's book.

Best regards
 

Bernice

Thank you for that recommendation Coredil :)

The book sounds an interesting addition to the information about Court de Gébelin, and the accompanying historical notes may give further clues to de Gébelins' mind-set, especially towards the close of his life.


Bee :)
 

Huck

Gebelin had contact to Abbe Rive, another writer about playing cards, who was then somehow a leading expert about that, what could be known about playing card history in 1780: Eclaircissements historiques et critiques sur l'invention des cartes a jouer / A Paris : De l'Imprimerie de Fr. Ambr. Didot, 1780., 48 p.

So Gebelin was informed ... as good it was possible. But naturally, "48 pages" can't be called a very extended source of information.

http://autorbis.net/tarot/biography/tarot-history-researchers/abbe-rive.html

Rive had a very great library in his background, one of the best of the time.

Gebelin's "first idea about Tarot" is dated to 1776, Gebelin's general direction had been, that he wished to write an encyclopedia with the title Le Monde primitif analysé et comparé avec le monde moderne - with mainly occult and esoterical content and finally with 9 volumes. Book VIII contained about 60 pages about the Tarot from Court de Gebelin, another 30 from an anonymus signing with M. le C de M.***, which was later identified with Louis-Raphael-Lucrece de Fayolle, comte de Mellet (1727 - 1804), the governor of Maine and Perche from 1767 - 1784.
Naturally one cannot expect from somebody, who writes an Encyclopedia, a totally perfect insider knowledge about every detailed point. Though ... he spends 60 pages and he added 30 pages from a "second expert".

??? The volumes seem to have contained 600-700 pages, possibly occasionally some more. If one assumes 600 pages as an average, the work should have contained about 5400 pages and the 90 pages about Tarot would have then something between 1-2 % of the whole work. If we assume that these 1-2 % had been really nonsense, there is no guarantee, that the rest of the 98-99 % didn't present occasionally worthwhile information.

http://autorbis.net/tarot/biography/tarot-history-researchers/court-de-gebelin.html
 

Pagan X

I think Gebilin has utility for historians of Tarot the game--he may have been the first to explicitly put into expression their connection with Hebrew.

As a means of "numbering" the cards, that is, making clear their order.

If Filipas is correct and the images on the Trumps became standardized as a Hebrew alphabet book, then to readers of Hebrew who could read the code the Trumps have been numbered. As cardmakers were often Jewish, and, during periods when Christians were forbidden to play cards Jews still could, it's quite possible that there was a period when Tarot was a primarily Jewish pastime playing with a culturally Jewish deck that has no Cabalistic significance whatsoever.

(In fact, considering the prohibition to the observant against representing the human form, I don't see how the Trumps could have been considered anything less than secular, profane, and rather shady...)

This could also have given Jewish card sharps an advantage in the taverns in playing for money, as numbered Trumps make it easier to treach the game, play the game, and for the skilled player, keep track of what cards remain to be played.

Later the Roman Numerals are added to the Trumps, which makes it more playable for those not literate in Hebrew. Yet the tradition of Hebrew Alphabet Artwork remains too, as late as 1835, as can be seen in the Dotti deck.

Gypsies could have spread both playing cards and Tarot cards as dual-use devices: fortune telling and setting up curse-removal scams by the women, gambling by the men. There is much contact between the Gypsy underworld and the Jewish underworld: it is not a coincidence that both Yiddish and Romany have contributed many words to the language of petty crime & gambling & that both populations in Diaspora have survived through itinerant peddling.

I offer this as a reminder that sometimes: an alphabet is just that, an alphabet. The Hebrew alphabet was and is used by living people going about just living their lives. It isn't always Cabala--in fact, most of the time, it isn't. Tarot as a game has a legitimate place in the history of Jewish household life and pasttimes.
 

Debra

Hi Pagan X. I have two questions.

Pagan X said:
As cardmakers were often Jewish

I'm curious why you say this.

Pagan X said:
Later the Roman Numerals are added to the Trumps, which makes it more playable for those not literate in Hebrew.

I'm curious about this too. The Trumps started bearing Roman numerals long before Hebrew letters, as far as I can see from Kaplan's Encyclopedia and images of the older decks.

So I'm wondering where you learned these things; I'd like to see for myself. Thanks!
 

Pagan X

There is a Jewish tradition of "playing cards to hide Jewish identity".

http://home.earthlink.net/~benven/Card_playing.htm

A card game of trumps with easily seen mnemonic value could have utility even in public -- for all literate Jews, not just students of Kabbala -- and for semi-literate Jews attempting to retain Jewish identity in Spain (namely, women).

Of course, a begged question now, is if there was a Jewish tradition of the game of Tarot as a means of communication -- or just tweaking the authorities' collective nose (awkward metaphor, that) -- why have we not heard of such attached to the game of Tarot in modern Europe?

Part of the answer may be that it was a tradition of the Sephardic community, not the Ashkenazic community. I myself am of Sephardic heritage; my husband is Ashkenazi. Here in Washington State of the US, those two communities actually do not intermingle; some Sephardim in Seattle thirty years ago even went so far as to attend festivals in Atlanta to find suitable marriage partners for their kids instead of intermarrying with Seattle's Ashkenzim.

One of my (elderly and a thouroughly evil man beyond his racism just so you know) Ashkenazi in-laws referred to Sephardim as "Black Jews" and stated he would prefer a member of his family to marry a Black (referring to American Black gentile) over a "Black Jew".

I bring this up because I don't think many non-Jews are aware of such deep (and tragic) divisions within the Jewish community. To speak of "the Jewish religion" and "the Jewish people" is sometimes misleading; there are subdivisions to both.
 

TarotCard

book of thoth

I had hoped that the previous posts would have mentioned two common misconceptions about de Gebelin.

The first: he never states the "Book of Thoth" in his essay (or please send me the page number where he states this). He actually states the Book of Destiny.

The second is that he never goes into the divination although does give a lengthy introduction to the next essay which goes into it.

These are two topics are usually the most objectionable to those who would rather erase Gebelin from "history" and these are two concepts he did not write about.

His essay is really a lengthy description of the cards and how they relate to many things including, Egypt, a Chinese monument and other topics about cards in general. Funny how the Chinese monument is never vehemently repudiated!