Howdy Mel,
Obviously I'm not all the way into it since it just arrived last night. It's many pages of deep-fried woo deliciousness.
For those who love woo. The answer for those without time to play the whole round of Clue appears to be "Colonel Etteilla in the Library with a copy of the Cabala."
The key statement Decker makes is this:
"Tarot divination, as we know it today did not emerge until the 1700s. It was first mentioned by a Parisian fortuneteller Etteilla. . . But how had the cards acquired their key meanings? I will eventually discuss the exiguous evidence for a lost system extracted from the Jewish cabala." p.3, Decker, Esoteric Tarot, 2013, Quest.
So he goes through the whole usual (to us) rigamarole with Iamblichus, Neo-Platonism/Neo-Pythagoreanism, Ficino, Malinus, the Picatrix, Agrippa, (he seems to skip ibn Ezra), yadda-yadda-yadda, Pratesi 1750, the mad Etteilla, and so on. He talks about the TdM.
He's been hanging out with Robert Place for about the last decade apparently - the book has a strong The Tarot feel. I'd say more Place than Huson.
It's just stunning to consider his journey from DDD (Wicked Pack) to the Zohar. That's a lot of bridges for a scholar to cross. He does it mostly as an art historian, relying on images, motifs and common symbols of the time to try to build attributions & a provenance.
The question is: what is the re-discovery?!?!? So far I'm not finding anything we haven't been talking about off and on right here since in the History Forum, what? 2005????? It's like he came over here and was HYP-no-tiiiized by the blueberry.
(rofl)
My issue with this I guess is the cards themselves as manufactured material objects. So, ok, Ficino & his merry band of scholars were into this stuff, but so what? How does that get to the cards in common use?
Are you really going to tell me that the brutal condottiero, whose fave past time was declaring folks traitors & chopping them into bits before running off to assassinate the family-member-of-the-week, suddenly decided his tween-age bride had to have a golden pack of hand-painted cards that communicated to her the magical depths of angelic sigils and the Macropropus? Because that's every girl's dream on her wedding day!
Or the drunken apprentice cardmakers of France, slap-stencilling cheap packs as fast as they could to beat the Germans out of card manufacturing, often stopped to reflect on the sacred geometry of Pythagoras and its relation to the Picatrix?
I'm jes' saying. . .
I think it's a controversial book.
Will search the index for more Baked Goods.