Hi Mary,
Teheuti said:
Have you gotten any response from other members of the International Playing Card Society about your article in the journal? Do you see any sign of the history of playing card divination being "officially" revised or are your examples seen only as insignificant aberrations?
There really isn't anything "official" in this subject. Just a body of work and research that has to be addressed before anything one might presume to add to it, if you want to be taken seriously by those you respect. It's still an amateur - or interdisciplinary - discipline, the history or sociology of playing cards. Dummett's research and opinions are no longer the last word - they're just the dominant word, because he cared enough about the subject to comment on it in a systematic way, and collected just about everything known up until 1980. By the same token, if you absorb what he and others have found, and go on to do your own research, then you have a basis for arguing with his conclusions or analysis.
Thierry Depaulis organized the conference that year, and it was he who asked me to speak. He helped me select the topic from among the things I was working on, and saw the draft of the paper. In other words, he found nothing objectionable. He even gave me additional new information, that I reported in the talk. What does he really think? Hard to say. I don't think he cares very much about when and how cards were used for divination - he just loves doing history.
Several members gave me positive feedback, and some additional information (like on the Jungling card, fragments of playing cards and tarot cards in reliquaries and monstrances, other "secondary uses"; one fellow gave me a 2 of hearts from the 18th century). They liked it. One person in particular thought it was refreshing. I got no negative criticism (like "that's nonsense!"), and haven't yet. I don't expect any. My facts were ... facts, and my opinions/interpretations given as such.
Mostly the members of the IPCS are collectors and hobbyists with a wide variety of interests in playing cards. Only a few are particularly interested in Tarots. So the subject of when and how cards were and are used for divination is an obscure subject, and if you are interested in it you go to the few trustworthy sources that discuss it authoritatively (i.e. backed up with primary research and clear reasoning) - Dummett, Decker-Depaulis-Dummett, Berti and Vitali (eds.), and more specific sources for particular traditions like Bologna; not too many overall.
So - there aren't very many people one is knowledgeably addressing when one is addressing the question of "when were playing cards first used for cartomancy?" There isn't an academy one appeals to for official sanction - just a meritocracy based on good scholarship.
On that basis, if you think my work and the discoveries others have made recently and presented here and elsewhere (including Karlin's discovery - for the cartomantic world - of Martin's work, which I credited to him in my talk) somehow change a perceived orthodoxy - I agree with you.
I think the main points to be taken from the recent discoveries are that, in Spain at least, there were professional cartomancers in the 17th century, and they used layouts with multiple cards and positional significations.
Kwaw's discovery of the "Jack the Gyant-Killer" reference shows that layouts were used too, although the play also says that it was a "new" art (in England).
Both cases contradict Etteilla's statement that until his invention, cartomancers only used simple single-card draws as a form of lots.
Kwaw's other discovery, in the
Whartoniana (1727), shows that diviners could use the play of a regular game as a form of divination.
For tarot cards, common sense would say that it should exist too, wherever tarot cards were commonly used. In Bologna we have evidence for it from before 1750, but the evidence in France before Etteilla is only late, in 1772, and it is indirect - Cauvin is sentenced with a bonnet of a sieve surrounded by tarots, which are to be torn up after she completes her sentence. The presence of tarots here only makes sense if she used them, like the sieve, for divination.
And in Spain we should not expect Tarot at all, of course. Common sense says that "witches" used everyday objects, especially objects that could be explained away if discovered - Tarot was not common in Spain, while regular cards were. The Venetian examples are to be expected by this logic, because Tarot was common in Italy in the 16th century.
Ross