I just discovered this thread yesterday and skimmed through it quickly. Fortunately I already had some familiarity with Huck and Ross’s arguments. I really admire Kapoore’s persistence in insisting that his questions haven’t been answered. I agree. I want to put my two bits in, if anyone is still reading this thread. Excuse me for covering a lot of ground. I also apologize for not knowing how to mark links or put titles in italics.
First, Huck indeed hasn’t explained how the Michelino evolved into the Cary-Yale and beyond. The story is probably lost to history, but I have written, for my own amusement if nothing else, one way it could have happened. It’s at
http://mtocy.blogspot.com/.
Second, as to how there came to be 22 trumps. Ross wrote a post a while back (
http://www.tarotforum.net/showthread.php?t=28920) about how the Charles VI deck had little numbers written on some of them--done after the deck was made, but probably in the same century. They show that there were 20 trumps, not including the Fool, and that the “missing” one was either the Popess or the Empress; or perhaps they shared a number. It occurs to me that since other decks at that time did have both ladies, and/or the practice of sharing a number was idiosyncratic (although not unknown), there became 22 by having both a Popess and an Empress, each with their own number, plus an unnumbered Fool. It was a standardization among decks that were slightly different.
Now, trumps and Kabbalah. It strikes me that 20 is just as “Kabbalist” a number as 22—it is the 10 sefiroth twice, and the progress of the soul, once going down and again going up, imitating its journey through the spheres before and after this life. But more people then knew that there were 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet than knew that there were 10 sefiroth. And anyway, there were 11 if you counted the Ein Sof. Since card makers were in the business of making money, 22 was a better number, for customers who wanted to imagine that the cards contained arcane secrets from the time before Moses. So the move to 22 caught on.
So when did Kabbalah and the tarot first become associated? I can suggest a few dates.
At the earliest, 2nd century b.c.e. in Alexandria, Egypt. I don’t mean the cards, I mean some of the ideas behind the cards. Here is what one recent scholar says: “The second century BC sees the appearance and subsequent development of Jewish Pythogoreanism. In concert with early Jewish Gnostic writings in Palestine, this tradition would lay the groundwork for further developments, including the birth, in the following centuries, of Kabbalah, or ‘received tradition’” (Christiane Joos-Gaugier, Measuring Heaven, 2006, p. 97). If you want to see some “origins of the Kabbalah,” one place is in Philo of Alexandria, who applied Neopythagoreanism to Judaism (see Charles H. Kahn, Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans: a Brief History, pp. 100f). Philo may even have been the author of “Wisdom of Solomon.” David Winston entertains this hypothesis in his book Wisdom of Solomon (1979).
In the diaspora, Kabbalah develops out of Neopythagoreanism and the Neopythagorean branch of Neoplatonism (e.g. Iamblicus and Proclus, both of whom were translated by Ficino). Among the gentiles, these same authors are applied to Christianity—by a long line of scholars and mystics, from Clement of Alexandria through Isodore of Seville, through the School of Chartres, to the Italian Renaissance. Kapoore hits the nail on the head when he mentions Pythagoreanism. (I have been writing, so far for my own amusement, an essay on Neopythagorean symbolism in the Sola-Busca pips, using pagan Greek and Latin Neopythagorean texts widely read in late 15th century Italy. This same symbolism appears in Etteilla’s interpretations three centuries later.)
Next date: the summer of 1457. Galeazzo Sforza is visiting Ferrara, perhaps his first time away from home. He doesn’t stay at the d’Este palace, but instead at the Pico della Mirandola residence, where the Count has two sons around Galeazzo’s age. Their cousin, Matteo Boiardo, is around the same age (on the later version of his birth year: see
http://www.tarotpedia.com/wiki/Boairdo or
http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&IUD=71. I would imagine Matteo’s father telling him that it never hurts to make friends with a future Duke of Milan. To while away the rainy days, as Galeazzo writes his father, they play Trionfi (letter of 2 August, in Gregory Lubkin, A Renaissance Court: Milan under Galeazzo Maria Sforza, p. 309). Perhaps the 5x14 decks ordered at that time were for them. Perhaps the d'Este deck in the Beinecke Library (viewable on-line) is one of them. Galeazzo would have known the game in Milan, where they might have had a slightly different deck. At any rate, Galeazzo and the young Pico della Mirandolas (not including Giovanni, who wasn’t born yet) play cards with a proto-tarot. There is no mention of chess. Triumphs was a women’s and children’s game, chess a man’s game. Around this same time, Ferrara is accepting Jewish immigrants from Spain with open arms. Hebrew and the Jewish heritage are all the rage, despite those bigots in Rome. Boiardo and Giovanni, at least, go at it. (But I would appreciate knowing Huck’s reference for Boiardo’s facility in Hebrew.)
Next date: Dec. 1, 1486. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola publishes his 900 Theses, in two parts, both ending with lengthy sections on Kabbalah. They reflect Spanish-Jewish popularizations of the Castille and Gerona Kabbalists, including popularizations of the Zohar. Pico read them in Hebrew as well as in Latin translations--or mistranslations--by a Jewish convert to Christianity who was eager to prove that Kabbalah was essentially Christian. He is not alone: One Kabbalah scholar in Israel said much the same thing about the Zohar. I’ll have to go to the library and find his book. Scholars have been able to tell from some of the wordings that the Zohar was influenced by medieval Christianity, Eriugena in particular; that’s something Scholem apparently missed. I don't recall any scholar suggesting that he read the Sefer Yetsirah.
Thanks to Pico, after 1486 there was thus a summary of medieval Kabbalah in print, along with some ideas on how to correlate it with Christianity, the Corpus Hermeticum, Pythagoreanism, etc. Pico’s summary is not that bad. He at least gets it right that Malkuth was associated with the Moon and not Earth (Thesis 11>48), and that there were 32 “paths of wisdom,” not 22 (Thesis 28.26). Those doctrines, later presented as basic dogma, were not part of Spanish Kabbalah. Even Kircher knew enough to identify Malkuth with the Moon. (The relevant references here are Syncretism in the West, for Pico, Wisdom of the Zohar, in three volumes, for Kabbalah, and
http://www.donaldtyson.com/kircher.html, for Kircher. In Kircher’s drawing, notice the little moon next to the bottom sefira. The books all have great indexes. On-line, you can search another translation of the Zohar, with non-standard Hebrew spellings, at
https://www.kabbalah.com/k/index.php/p=zohar/search. Search e.g. “moon Malchut.” Be aware that the words in caps are interpolated commentary by the translator.)
Thanks to Pico, humanists could now show their erudition in Kabbalah, as well as Pico’s other subjects, while playing cards! Using Pico, and later Reuchlin and Agrippa, they could even develop systems of divination, to do readings and also teach others, for a small fee, all of it based on the ancient wisdom gleaned from their studies. They don’t publish, because one never knows when one will be charged with heresy (“publish and perish”); and anyway, why sell the goose that lays the golden eggs?
One person who seems to express Pico’s Theses is Boiardo. I have explained on another thread (
http://www.tarotforum.net/showthread.php?t=53835&page=8&pp=10) how the vices and virtues in his poem correlate with those in Theses 9-10 of Pico’s section on “Hermes the Egyptian.” Pico is connecting the Kabbalists’ “punishers" with Tractate XIII of the Corpus Hermeticum, as translated by Ficino. You can find an improved version of my argument at
http://15thcenturytarot.blogspot.com/. Further down on that blog I have another essay, correlating Pico’s presentation with the tarot trumps. (None of my essays are connected to Google’s search engine, as they are tentative. But I would appreciate feedback from discerning readers.)
Trionfi proposes Jan. 1487 as the time of Boiardo's s poem, between 1 and 2 months after Pico's Theses came out. That is as good a date as any, although I do not understand why the Lucrezia of the poem had to be the Lucrezia who married then, as opposed to others, such as his cousin, Giovanni's sister, born 1463, or Ludovico Sforza's mistress, or Lorenzo de' Medici's mother or mistress. Perhaps Boiardo is jokingly implying that her getting married, whoever she is, is like the legendary Lucrezia’s suicide after rape. That might narrow the field.
In 1490 Pico had tea with Reuchlin, urging him to study his Hebrew. If Pico did that, he probably at some point gave him a reading list as well. With Pico’s sources, it would have been possible to figure out what he was talking about in his Theses. More recently, Chaim Wieszubski did just that, in his Pico della Mirandola's Encounter with Jewish Mysticism (1989, edited by Moshe Idol), with edifying results. Wieszubski was following up on a 17th century commentary on Pico by Jacques Gafferel, Paris 1651, who quoted extensively from some sources that are now lost. Much of Reuchlin is already in Pico. For example, Reuchlin is often given credit for the idea that JHVH became JHSVH, “Jehovah” becoming “Jesus” by the addition of a Shin (or something like that). But the addition of the Shin is in Pico’s Thesis 11>14 (admittedly so obscurely that even our 1998 translator doesn't get it; but I did read this interpretation somewhere, I think in that Israeli book).
In 1494 Pico gets a reprieve when the Sforzas, thanks to lots of bribes, get their man into the papacy. (You can read about Alexander VI's election on Wikipedia.) Pico has already died prematurely. But his Theses can be printed again. Pico’s book remains popular for the next two or three centuries, according to Farmer in Syncretism.
Final date: 1781. De Mellet’s essay appears in de Gebelin’s Monde Primitif. De Mellet says, in Section VII, writing as if he is describing a practice that already exists, that each tarot trump correlates with a particular letter of the Hebrew alphabet, starting with the World card as Aleph and apparently ending with the Fool as Tau. He says the Fool is Zero, as did the Sola-Busca. The meaning of each trump is then associated with the meaning of the Hebrew letter and perhaps also how it looks. Gimel, for example, means “camel”; hence the Sun card means “renumeration, happiness.” Hey, camels were worth a lot, at least in Paris. De Mellet gives five other examples. Then he says that overlaying the letters Tau and Samech means something pictorially—the brand given to thieves with a hot iron, but also a “cipher,” i.e. a zero (as though the ancients had a zero as such). You can read him at
http://www.tarotpedia.com/wiki/Recherches_sur_les_Tarots. The translation is not the best, but the French original is next to it. Another translation is at
http://www.donaldtyson.com/gebelin.html. A better translation than either is J. Karlin’s in her Rhapsodies of the Bizarre, but it’s not free. In reading de Mellet, you have to bear in mind that by “Egyptian” he includes Alexandria, with its Greeks and Jews. You can tell by the way he alternates between “Egyptian,” “Greek,” and “Hebrew.”
This first explicit account of the divinatory tarot is pretty ridiculous. I don’t mind divination as long as you get good advice no matter what cards you draw, as you will if your system is based on things like the humanists’ Greek and Latin classics and the Zohar literature (covered by a pious Christian veneer and a card game). But de Mellet is a scholar compared to the pseudo-historians who came after him. I am not sure why the tarot remains a useful tool. Perhaps some kind of wisdom actually did get put into the cards in the 15th-17th centuries, beyond Christian dogma. Perhaps more was put there by the Golden Dawn from their study of Agrippa, the Picatrix, and other sources. Like Huck says, that’s not my century... But I m trying to work my way forward.
... there are worlds between us. Complex single researches with special topics had been build up meanwhile on the 5x14-theory, a lot of work, which wasn't done without reason.