Who historically put magic in The Magician?

[kwaw]

Hi Marco,

We had a discussion about what was on the table and now I can't find it anywhere, I wonder if we lost it (among a few threads) when AT was hacked last year?

My memory says that the final conclusion was that it was probably a hat. I remember some people suggesting it might be a purse, or a cake.

robert

Yes I wrote about the connection between cake, magic and the art of memory. The thread seems to have been lost in the hack attack.

Kwaw

 

[stella01904]

MM ~ It looks like a hat to me, but a cake would take you right back to magic. Think ritual cakes. And for some reason, I am reminded of one of Sharyn McCrumb's books, it had a recipe for something called a "scripture cake", you had to do some bible-cracking to get the ingredients. Freya Aswynn talks about baking cakes with runes on them and eating them to take in the runes power. Cakes have a spiritual dimension, they transform in the oven, they are the final product of the harvest, right? BB, Stella

 

[wandking]

The thread seems to have diverted toward symbolism, which is fine; however, my question was in reference to written accounts of the card. I simply can't accept that Levi was the first author to embue The Magician with an ability to perform high magic.

 

[stella01904]

MM ~ I wouldn't know where to begin to find the first author, but a card with what are obviously ritual tools would do it for me. The one Raven mentioned could probably be verified easily enough. I know some people here correspond with Kaplan. I don't want to bug Raven to go through his notes as he is moving, teaching, lecturing, promoting the College and the upcoming Witches' deck, etc. Even if someone could find the original Cary-Yale Visconti image online....it exists, I'm sure of that. BB, Stella

 

[DoctorArcanus]

Even if someone could find the original Cary-Yale Visconti image online....it exists, I'm sure of that. BB, Stella

I couldn't find the Cary-Yale Bagatto, but I found this site with high quality images of the 11 known Cary-Yale Visconti (Visconti di Modrone, in Dummett's naming) deck....the are so beautiful
http://tarot.org.il/Cary Yale/

Marco

 

[le pendu]

MM ~ I wouldn't know where to begin to find the first author, but a card with what are obviously ritual tools would do it for me. The one Raven mentioned could probably be verified easily enough. I know some people here correspond with Kaplan. I don't want to bug Raven to go through his notes as he is moving, teaching, lecturing, promoting the College and the upcoming Witches' deck, etc. Even if someone could find the original Cary-Yale Visconti image online....it exists, I'm sure of that. BB, Stella

Hi Stella,

I appreciate your participation in this thread, so I hope you will take the following comments as an encouragement to continue to participate and add to the discussions. All voices should be heard, and all questions hopefully lead to thought and perceptional adjustments. I value your insights and opinions. I'm excited to learn, and am willing to looking at everything involving the history of Tarot with an open mind.

In the study of Tarot History, there are a few names in recent years that have helped us to obtain a better understanding of the origin of the Tarot. Among these, Stuart Kaplan, Robert O'Neill, Michael Dummett, Ronald Decker and Thierry DePaulis come to mind; they have devoted years, decades, lifetimes, to the study of Tarot. I'm also an enormous fan of the authors of the sites listed here:
http://www.tarothistory.com/tarothistory.html

I wouldn't want to bug Stuart Kaplan with this question, especially since he gave the answer in his Encyclopedias, and I can look them up.

In The Encyclopedia of the Tarot, Volume 2, page 45, Mr. Kaplan has a chart of every Visconti card in existence. According to the chart there are 2 out of the 15 collections that have a Magician card... "The Pierpont Morgan Visconti-Sforza" card which I linked to earlier but will link to again for clarity:
http://quatramaran.ens.fr/~madore/visconti-tarots/large/arcanum-01-magician.jpg

and the "Lombardy I" card of which on page 11 he says "The twenty-three Lombardy I cards precisely match fifteen Major Arcana and eight court cards out of the thirty-five cards owned by the Pierpont Morgan Library."

He even has an image of the Lombardy I Magician.. which to my eye does indeed look nearly exactly like the Pierpont Morgan. I've scanned it in case you don't have the Encyclopedias (which if you don't own, I would highly recommend, they are essential for Tarot History research):
http://www.tarothistory.com/images/lombardy.gif

In the LWB that comes with the Cary-Yale Visconti deck, written by Stuart Kaplan, he says the deck consists of 11 Major Arcana cards. They are the same 11 displayed in DoctorArcanus' link above.
http://tarot.org.il/Cary Yale/

It seems to me based on these references that, if a discovery of a Cary-Yale Visconti Magician occurred, it would be mentioned by one of these experts. Since all of them agree that there are only 11 Cary-Yale trumps in existence, which don't include the Magician, I will continue to rely on them until someone produces proof otherwise.

This is not to say in any way that I discount the information from Raven Grimassi. I am sincerely interested in learning about what he can add to this discussion. If there was a discovery, I'd like to know about it as it will very much effect the way I view the history of Tarot and the Cary-Yale deck.

best,
robert

 

[le pendu]

Something that has been bothering me...

If the Bagatto is a seller of trivial things, what is the wand in his hand for?

 

[le pendu]

The thread seems to have diverted toward symbolism, which is fine; however, my question was in reference to written accounts of the card. I simply can't accept that Levi was the first author to embue The Magician with an ability to perform high magic.

I hope I haven't diverted too far from your intent, but so far, it does seem to be Levi that embued The Magician with an ability to perform high magic.

Before Levi, what does that leave us?

robert

 

[wandking]

Wands can be held by stage magicians too, which is why I feel a discussion of imagery is ludicrous. Perhaps it is simply a cake, which is straight-forward but arguable. In TDM we certainly see some spiritual items on the table and Levi was likely influenced by that deck. What i seek is quotable written sources of The Magician as a practitioner of high magic, prior to Levi. I strongly suspect that written evidence exists. I only find Kaplan questioned as a Tarot source on these boards; no where else. I do agree that ANYONE can make a mistake in researching Tarot but if Kaplan did it, no one other than a few on message boards noticed it, which doesn't discount message board opinions. Who knows exactly what the Court said about this card in that much earlier Tarot reference?

 

[kwaw]

My understanding of the word Bagatto is that it means "A Trifle" ... a detail that is considered insignificant, something unimportant or minor. In the case of the Tarot, I'm under the impression that it refers to the POSITION of the card.

robert

From trivia, three roads. The third road is unimportant in that the choice is illusionary, the road you take being the one you were destined to as foretold by the delphic oracle. Related to the myth of Oedipus, who realises he has fullfilled the oracle when his wife/mother, mocking the power of oracles who 'failed' when they said her husband would be murdered by his son, tells of the murder of her husband/his father at the place where 'three roads' meet by a mad brigand. Maybe the seller of 'trivial' things is a seller of fortunes

Oedipus is connected in some decks through the sphinx, but there is also another connection in that the myth of Oedipus in medieval times was conflated with Judas Iscariot [hanged man?].

Kwaw