Sunday, July 5, 2015

Chapter 19: The occutists, 467-473

I am skipping Dummett's chapter 18, which is about tarot decks with French suits, shortened decks, and non-traditional trumps (animals, industry, etc,). Whatever the symbolism in these decks, it is unrelated to the historical tarot before then. The only continuity with the past is in the games played with such decks.

Chapter 19 of Il Mondo e L'Angelo is on the occultists of the late 18th through early 20th century, who did go back to the historical tarot as represented by the Tarot de Marseille. What is of interest to me is to what extent their "occult" interpretations of the cards might have been rooted in previous practice. I think I have already discussed Etteilla enough. For the rest, Dummett does not give us much to work with. He says very little about their actual systems.The only thing I can find of a systematic nature is occasionally a discussion of how one and another theorist related the cards to the Hebrew alphabet and what significance they attached to that relationship.

That the added cards of the tarot deck are the same number as the letters of the Hebrew alphabet would have been obvious to anyone in the Renaissance, without any knowledge of Kabbalah or anything esoteric. The first written record of a correlation between the two, however, is in de Gebelin, expanded upon by de Mellet. De Mellett correlates the cards and the letters in reverse order, starting with the World as 21 and Alelph, and ending with the Fool as 0 and Tau. This is different from how the ancient Hebrews actually correlated letters with numbers, which was the same as the Greeks: aleph/alpha was 1 and so on until 10; then, for 11-19, they combined the letter for 10 with the letter for the first digit; then they assigned the 11th letter to 20, and so on. In addition, de Mellet associated each Hebrew letter with the particular thing that the Hebrew word signified and interpreted that object symbolically. He writes (http://www.tarotpedia.com/wiki/Recherches_sur_les_Tarots; their translation except for a few obvious corrections):
Le Soleil répondant au Gimel, veut dire, dans ce sens, rétribution, bonheur.
La Fortune ou le Lamed signifie Régle, Loi, Science.
Le Fol n'exprime rien par lui-même, il répond au Tau, c'est simplement un signe, une marque.
Le Typhon ou le Zaïn annonce l'inconstance, l'erreur, la foi violée, le crime.
La Mort ou le Thet indique l'action de balayer: en effet, la Mort est une terrible balayeuse.
Teleuté en Grec qui veut dire la fin, pourroit être, en ce sens, un dérivé de Thet.

(The Sun answering to Gimel, means, in this sense, remuneration, happiness. Fortune or Lamed means Rule, Law, Science. The Fool does not express anything by itself, it corresponds to the Tau, and it is simply a sign, a mark. Typhon or Zain announces inconstancy, error, violated faith, and crime. Death or Teth indicates the action to reap: indeed, Death is a terrible reaper. In Greek Teleute, which means the end, appears to be, in this sense, a derivative of Teth.)
There is more on Tau, corresponding to the Fool, suggesting that for the Egyptians it might have meant, superimposed on Samech, a thief.

Surprisingly to me, the Golden Dawn also used symbolic interpretations of the objects denoted by the Hebrew letters, according to Jean-Michel David at http://newsletter.tarotstudies.org/2005/04/golden-dawn-attributions/. Their assignment of letters to cards was different from Levi's, however.

The next to assign letters to triumphs was Levi. Here is Dummett's summary of that theorist (p. 467f):
Egli [Levi] non pubblicò un’opera a sé stante sul Tarocco, ma ne trattò ripetutamente in tutti i suoi scritti, poiché secondo lui era una delle fonti primarie della dottrina magica.[end of 467] dipendente di teoria magica; piuttosto, egli lo rese parte di una struttura complessa. Lo integrò nel suo miscuglio di dot-trine occultistiche principalmente grazie all’associazione del Tarocco con il simbolismo cabalistico. Secondo lui, i quattro semi corrispondono alle quattro lettere del Tetragrammaton (il Nome Divino), le quattro figure di ciascun seme agli stadi della vita umana e le carte numerali ai dieci sefìroth (emanazioni divine)19. La parte di gran lunga più consistente dello studio di Lévi sul Tarocco ebbe come oggetto i trionfi, che costituivano le «ventidue Chiavi del Tarocco». Come Mellet, egli associava queste carte alle ventidue lettere dell’alfabeto ebraico; grazie a questa associazione, poteva applicare al Tarocco tutto il significato mistico che i cabalisti attribuiscono a quell’alfabeto, secondo cui ciascuna lettera rappresenta una delle ventidue vie fra i sefìroth. Dato l’ordine alfabetico delle lettere ebraiche, Mellet aveva disposto i trionfi in ordine discendente (secondo la numerazione del Tarocco di Marsiglia) per ottenere la correlazione fra lettere e carte. Lévi, al contrario, li dispose in sequenza numerica ascendente, facendo così corrispondere il I ad Alef, il II a Beth e così via. Riguardo al posto del Matto, Lévi propose una soluzione eccentrica: lo mise fra il XX e il XXI (il Mondo), facendo corrispondere il XX a Rese, il Matto a Shin e il Mondo a Tau. L’associazione dei trionfi con le lettere ebraiche era destinata ad avere un ruolo fondamentale nelle interpretazioni del Tarocco da parte degli occultisti successivi.

(He [Levi] did not publish an independent work on the Tarot, but treated of it repeatedly in his writings, because he thought it was one of the primary sources of magical doctrine [end of 467] dependent on magical theory; instead, he made it part of a complex structure. He integrated it into his mixture of occult doctrines mainly thanks to the association of the Tarot with Kabbalistic symbolism. According to him, the four suits correspond to the four letters of the Tetragrammaton (the Divine Names), the four courts in each suit to the stages of human life, and the numeral cards to the ten Sephiroth (divine emanations) 19. By far the largest study of Levi had as its object the Tarot trumps, which were the "twenty-two keys of the Tarot." Like Mellet, he associated these cards to the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet; Thanks to this partnership, all the mystical meaning that the Kabbalists attribute to that alphabet could be applied to the Tarot, according to which each letter represents one of the twenty-two paths between Sephiroth. Given the alphabetical order of the Hebrew letters, Mellet had arranged the triumphs in descending order (according to the numbering of the Tarot of Marseilles) to obtain the correlation between letters and cards. Levi, on the contrary, arranged them in ascending numerical sequence, thus I corresponded to Alef, II to Beth, and so on. Regarding the place of the Fool, Levi proposed an eccentric solution: he put it between the twentieth and twenty-first (World), matching XX to Resh, the Fool to Shin and the World to Tau. The association of triumphs with the Hebrew letters was destined to play a key role in the interpretation of the Tarot by later occultists.
________________________
19. Le Dogrne de la haute magie, ch. X.
At least Levi had Aleph as 1! The only idiosyncratic thing for him was putting the Fool between the Angel and the World and assigning it the letter "shin". Why he did that has been a subject for debate. There is of course no historical precedent for putting the Fool second to last. There is precedent for putting the Fool last in the sequence, and also for the practice of exchanging the last with the next to the last; but it is unlikely that Levi knew about the second of these or cared about either.

When I look at Dummett's reference, Chapter X of Levi's book, I find very little to hang any interpretation on. All Levi says is that Shin applies to "20 or 21" and Tau to "21 or 22", with a verse attached (http://hermetic.com/crowley/aa/Rituel%20et%20Dogme%20de%20la%20Haute%20Magie%20by%20Eliphas%20Levi%20Part_I.pdf):
Resh, 20: When dust to dust returns, His breath can call
Shin, 20 or 21: Life from the tomb which is the fate of all.
Tau, 21 or 22: His crown illuminates the mercy seat
And glorifies the cherubs at His feet.
From that, I can't even tell that the Fool is meant to go between Resh and Tau. It looks more that the Fool, if it is indeed associated with Shin, is either at 20 or 21. That would suggest, perhaps, that the Fool--and we are all fools--can enter Heaven if God is merciful. On ATF, there was a long discussion of why and where Levi made Shin the Fool. Support for the interpretation just given can be found at http://www.tarotforum.net/showthread.php?t=169991&highlight=shin&page=6 post 59, by Kwaw (Steve Mangan). Everyone goes to heaven, even the Devil. However other documentation is on p. 3 of that thread, post 23, by "Teheuti" (Mary Greer) on THF, citing Levi's Clefs Majeures et Clavicules (http://www.tarot.org.il/Library/Levi/Clavicules%20de%20Salomon.pdf, p. 60). Levi says, for the 21st letter:
La lettre schin. Point de nombre:
La fatalité. L'aveuglement. Le fou. La matière abandonnée à elle-même.

(The letter shin. Item number:
Fatality. Blindness. The fool [or madman]. Matter abandoned to itself.)
Put between "the great arcanum of eternal life" and "the resumé of all universal knowledge", the interpretation would seem to be that madness is what you get if you take in the celestial light without the necessary humble attitude and proper preparation.

"Teheuti" also cites The Key of the Mysteries. From what I saw on http://www.naderlibrary.com/lit.keymysterieseliphaslevi.3.htm, a link that no longer works), this is about the 31st path. Given that Levi endorses the Kabbalist idea of "32 paths of wisdom", being the 31st would suggest the next to last, i.e. that it is just before the World card.

Another thing about the Fool is Levi's astrological assignment to that card: fire, which is the entity assigned by the Sefer Yetzira to shin. While there is hellfire, and Levi's identification of shin with the fire between the Devil's horns (http://www.naderlibrary.com/lit.keymysterieseliphaslevi.3.htm, find "horns"), in the passage above, clearly about the Fool, he is thinking of celestial fire. That would correspond to Jesus, who came "to bring fire and the sword". There was a tradition identifying shin with Jesus, which I find first in Pico and Reuchlin, but which Levi also cites (Kwaw at p. 17, post 169. of the ATF thread). When received by "brute man", the result is madness, even if from a divine source. Shin as next to last is a complex concept.

Pico, on the other hand, attached much positive importance to the letter shin (Part 2, section 11 of his Conclusiones, in Farmer's translation. Syncretism in the West p. 527; I omit the letter written in Hebrew):
11>14. By the letter...shin, which mediates in the name Jesus, it is indicated to us Cabalistically that the world then rested perfectly, as though in perfection, when Yod was conjoined with Vav--which happened in Christ, who was the true Son of God, and man.
Since God is Yod he vav he (as Pico says in 11>15), what he means is that Shin is in the middle between the two parts of God's name, completing Yahweh as Yeshua. The four letter name of God becomes the five letter name of God. See also Farmer's explanation of 11>14 at https://books.google.com/books?id=HZLWAAAAMAAJ&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=Jesus. Reuchlin alludes to the same doctrine on p. 73 of On the Kabbalah when he says there will come "a hero whose name will in pity contain these four letters--YHVH" (https://books.google.com/books?id=YSBz8tU2yPgC&pg=PA73&dq=%22hero+whose+name+will+in+pity%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=A6XlU8CRNYv9oATlm4KABw&ved=0CCQQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=%22hero%20whose%20name%20will%20in%20pity%22&f=false). Here he implies "not only these four letters". He spells it out later, but I don't currently have access to that part of the book. A snippet of what I think is the right quote can be seen at https://books.google.com/books?ei=JKblU5KXOZfYoASYnIHQBA&id=5HUNAAAAYAAJ&dq=Reuchlin+Yeshua&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=+Yeshua.)

In any case, Levi's repositioning of the Fool did not catch on, except with Papus and his followers, whom Dummett in this book ignores. Nor did his astrological assignments (not discussed by Dummett, but you can see them in Appendix I at http://www.jwmt.org/v2n17/gurney.html). The Golden Dawn made different associations. Here is Dummett (p. 472f):
La componente principale della dottrina esoterica dell’Ordine, per quanto riguarda il Tarocco, era «l’attribuzione segreta» dei trionfi. Nell’Alba Aurea la parola «attribuzione» veniva usata per indicare il metodo di assegnazione delle lettere dell’alfabeto ebraico alle singole carte e, in questa accezione, è diventata termine standard dell’occultismo. Come abbiamo visto, tale attribuzione è di vitale importanza nella teoria occultistica del Tarocco, poiché essa determina in che modo la teoria debba intrecciarsi alle dottrine cabalistiche. «L’attribuzione segreta», rivelata nel manoscritto cifrato, era in accordo con Lévi nel disporre a questo scopo i trionfi in ordine numerico ascendente; la sua semplice idea originaria era di rimuovere il Matto dal suo posto fra il XX e il XXI e collocarlo all’inizio, scombinando così l’assegnazione di lettere ebraiche di Lévi per ciascun trionfo tranne il XXI. C’era anche un altro dettaglio:[end of 471] VIII (la Giustizia) doveva essere scambiato con l’XI (la Forza). Nei mazzi di tarocchi preparati dai membri dell’Ordine per l’uso occultistico, questi due trionfi erano rinumerati conformemente. Poiché l’Ordine insegnava che Lévi aveva visto il manoscritto cifrato, si doveva supporre che nei suoi libri avesse deliberatamente mentito per ingannare i lettori.

(The main component of the esoteric doctrine of the Order, with respect to the Tarot, was the "secret assignment" of triumphs. In the Golden Dawn the word “assignment" was used to indicate the method of allocating the individual letters of the Hebrew alphabet to cards and, in this sense, has become a standard term of occultism. As we have seen, this allocation is of vital importance in the theory of the occult Tarot, because it determines how the theory should be intertwined with cabalistic doctrines. "The secret assignment," revealed in the cipher manuscript, was in agreement with Levi in placing for this purpose the triumphs in ascending numerical order; its only original idea was to remove the Fool from his place between the twentieth and twenty-first and place it at the beginning, thus messing up the assignment of Hebrew letters for each of Levi's triumphs except XXI. There was also another detail: VIII (Justice) was to be exchanged with XI (Strength). When tarot decks were prepared by members of the Order for occult use, these two triumphs were renumbered accordingly.
So the Golden Dawn, like de Mellet, put the Fool first, but unlike him associated that card with 0 and Aleph, the Magician with 2 and Beth, and so on. This association of letters with numbers is of course not the ancient Hebrew way any more than de Mellet's was. Dummett does not discuss why VIII and XI were switched, as it is not something that was part of the published works of Golden Dawn members. But he does discuss it in his 2002 book with Decker, The Occult Tarot. The Golden Dawn associated the letters with astrological entities by means of the ancient Kabbalist or Jewish mystical book the Sefer Yetzirah. In that text the astrological entity corresponding to the 9th letter (and hence the triumph with the number VIII) is Leo, and naturally the triumph with a lion is Strength. Likewise the entity corresponding to the 11th letter is Libra; that naturally corresponds to the card of Justice. So the TdeM order was in error in this one particular, even though in all other respects the correspondences work perfectly.

Sometimes people point out that there is a historical precedent for assigning the 8th place to Fortitude: in some of the A and B orders Fortitude is indeed the 8th triumph. However in these cases Justice is not 11 and in fact much of the cards' order is different from the Golden Dawn's, which is otherwise that of the Tarot de Marseille, group C.

Could the Sefer Yetzirah have been one basis for the assignment of hidden meanigns to the tarot? Historically, the Sefer Yetzirah was known by Christians in Italy in the 15th century, but they barely mentioned it. It is theoretically possible that it was used for astrological interpretations of the triumphs, but if so either in a more forced way, or else they put in a false order as a "blind" to mislead the uninitiated. Here I need to say that there is nothing historically to suggest that assuming "blinds" was a method of interpretation by Christians in the Renaissance. (I say "Christian", because there is some evidence that Jews may have used "blinds", in that the diagrams of the "Tree" in one of Cordovero's works contradicts what his text explicitly says. But this might be due to an illustrator or editor ignorant who had not studied that text.) Although interpretations could indeed be imaginative, they had to fit what was believed that the author actually wrote, Petrarch had told them, not something else that interpreters were expected to correct. Renaissance writers on interpretation such as Alberti believed that while the wisdom in ancient texts and pictures might be obscure, and in that way inaccessible to the ignorant, they did not not present what their authors believed to be false. This equally applied to the interpretation of their own works, if we can assume the tarot to have been such. All they could assume was that knowledge of ancient classics generally accessible in their time, such as the Sefer Yetzirah, would continue to be accessible.

Even granting this switch of VIII and XI, however, there is a problem with the Golden Dawn's attribution of letters to astrological entities via the Sefer Yetzirah, one that Dummett does not seem to notice: the Golden Dawn's particular attributions of letters to planets occur in no known historical version of the Sefer Yetzirah. The Golden Dawn's order is Mercury (for the Magician), Moon (for the High Priestess), Jupiter (for the Wheel), Mars (for the Tower), Sun (for the Sun), and Saturn (for the Universe) (see Decker and Dummett 2002, p. 97f). The website http://www.psyche.com/psyche/yetsira/sy_planetaryattributions.htmlhtml conveniently gives the Golden Dawn's attributions in the last row. It doesn't don't fit those of any historical version of the Sefer Yetzirah.

Another problem is their correlation of paths on the Kabbalist "tree" to Hebrew letters. It depends upon Kircher's c. 1652 version of the Tree.  The only commonly available picture of the "tree", that on the "Gates of Light" in 1515, had 17 paths (https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBN31f6bpSc8Js3mF0xMEl379xMO6Tu9J4p0NEREDyfAANkUFt67aeMvQwiFBGCzIYgOtOyL792taua5AerZ55vMiiAuFWjTBGl4O_Ix5huVAjVuHh3YcfARccSvChWqlDF6bXnfY3C7Y/s400/01dzyportaelucis1515.jpg). The text itself does talk about paths between sefiroth, but does not give a definite number. It is very specific, however, that there is only one path between Malkuth and any other sefira; the Golden Dawn, however, following Kircher, has three. The first place I see 22 paths is in Moses Cordovero, in a book first published in the West, in Hebrew, in Venice of 1597. He, too, says that there is only one path from Malkhuth upwards.

Also, Kircher's assignments of letters to paths is not even remotely similar to Cordovero's. The Tree has 3 horizontal paths, 7 vertical ones, and 12 diagonals. These numbers correspond in the  Sefer Yetzirah to the 3 elements, 7 planets, and 12 signs of the zodiac. While the Sefir Yetzirah does not assign letters to the lines between seifirot in such an array, Cordovero's letter assignments to paths fits the Sefer Yetzirah's distrubition into 3, 7 and 12 precisely. Kircher's does not, even approximately.

The Golden Dawn actually had two ways of assigning planets to the Tree. The other way, besides paths, was to the sefiroth themselves, assigning Binah to Saturn, Chesed to Jupiter, and so on down the line until Yesod to the Moon and Malkhuth to the Earth. They ignore that the Earth was not considered a planet in traditional astrology, but rather an element. However a 12th century Kabbalist text well known in the Renaissance, the Bahir, does refer to Malkhuth by a word meaning "land", specifically the land of Israel, which is the domain of Malkhut as Kingdom. Also, the Renaissance Kabbalist Yohannan Allemano did assign Binah to Saturn, according to Moshe Idel in Kabbalah in Italy. So there may be some historical precedent for this way of assigning planets to the Tree, although I don't know how the Golden Dawn would have known about it.

Such a system does not, however, correspond to anything in the Sefer Yetzirah, the Renaissance Kabbalists, or even Kircher. The Sefer Yetzirah visualizes the three highest sefirot as a scales, with two pans plus a fulcrum in the middle. That fits the three upper sefiroth on the tree readily enough. It then assigns the planets to the 6 directions plus the "center". It seems to have in mind either a cube, with its 6 sides, or an octohedron, with its 6 vertices, either way representing north, south, east, west, up, and down. Then Malkhuth is at the center of such a solid.  This picture is not any known version of the Tree. But when the sefiroth were put in a two-dimensional array, they could have been made to correspond to the seven lower sefiroth, i.e. from Chesed = Saturn to Malkhut = Moon. However these assignments do not make symbolic sense in terms of traditional astrology. Chesed was Charity, charitas, and Saturn was not associated with charity but the reverse.

I have not found a Hebrew text that deals with this problem. I would expect that one of the many medieval commentaries on the Sefer Yetzirah discussed it, but these are only available in Hebrew, and even then only in manuscripts, most of which are currently in Jerusalem. I have not found any literature in English discussing the issue in terms of these manuscripts. 

One way of removing the problem would be to move Saturn lower down on the Tree and make Chesed = Jupiter. Both Pico in his Conclusiones and Kircher on his Tree adopt this method, but in different ways. Pico assigns Saturn to Netzach, the 7th sefira; he does not attribute his assignments to the "Hebrew wisemen"; rather, it is what he thinks, "whatever other Cabalists say".  Kircher, however, assigned Saturn to Hod, the 8th sefirah. Neither of these corresponds to the Golden Dawn; they made Binah as Saturn. That may have been an historical Kabbalist solution, too, if Alemanno's assignment of Saturn to Binah is continued downward on the Tree, even if it does not fit the Sefer Yetzirah. However in the three other respects--assignment of letters to paths, assignment of planets to paths, and the placement of two of the diagonals on the Tree--there is no correspondence to anything historically Jewish that I have been able to find.

Exactly how the tarot might have related to the astrological entities in the Sefer Yetzirah before the Golden Dawn is a mystery. Elsewhere I have discussed various ways of trying to fit the sequence to the most likely historical versions of the Sefer Yetzirah, the Short and Long versions, published in Mantua in 1562. They are all rather forced, and not at all like the Golden Dawn's.

It is possible to make astrological assignments to cards without reference to any classical text or how the cards are otherwise interpreted. That is what Etteilla did: in the Fourth Cahier (pp. 22-27, reprinted in Holbronn, Etteilla, L'Astrologie du Livre de Thot): he affirmed the necessary astrological correspondences (naturally, those of the "ancient Egyptians") simply by assigning the zodiac, in order, to the first 12 of his cards, independently of what was usually depicted on them. Then the 7 planets and 3 other astrological entities were assigned to his cards 68-77. i.e. the 10 number cards of Coins. The designs he put on the coins, different for each card but showing the planetary god or other symbol, then served as their talismans. There is no symbolic correspondence whatever with what was on any previous versions of these cards; there is just what Etteilla himself put on the first 12 cards and the number cards of Coins. He also has the 4 elements (not 3 as in the Sefer Yetzirah), written on his cards 2-5. There is no relationship between any of this and the keywords on the cards. It is merely a way of generating a horoscope using cards, for which the keywords are not used. I cannot see how the Renaissance would have used such an arbitrary method, unless they actually put the necessary clues on the cards. It goes against their idea of interpretation.

Oddly, Etteilla's order of the planets is not the usual Ptolemaic one going from Saturn down to the Moon, but rather: Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Moon, Venus, Mercury, Sun (4th Cahier, pp.22-25). I have no idea why he interchanged the Sun and the Moon.

The Golden Dawn's interpretation of the suit cards in terms of the Kabbalist four worlds probably to have roots in 17th and 18th century Christian Kabbalah; which in turn was derived from earlier Jewish Kabbalah. The "four worlds" were known in Italy during the Renaissance. at least by Jews familiar with the work of Yitzach of Acre.

The  Golden Dawn's interpretation of cards 2-9 of the suits in terms of the 36 decans has some historical justification in that decans were a part of Renaissance astrology and were in fact used in the "Hall of the Months" at the Schifanoia in Ferrara. However there is no evidence of their use as shown in the meanings of the cards given by Etteilla; the lack of their fit to Etteilla and sometimes even to the Golden Dawn's own card-meanings is demonstrated by Huson in The Mystical Tarot, http://books.google.com/books?id=dVne-RK9UVYC&pg=PA66&lpg=PA66&dq=Huson+mystical+tarot+decans&source=bl&ots=iTdP_qSFsw&sig=L4cFagofbLqbLdtGJSV7qWsVNsg&hl=en&sa=X&ei=69brU7PMCMOgogSL6ICYAg&ved=0CEAQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=%20decans&f=false).

Before the Golden Dawn, Levi also assigned suit cards to decans, at least according to http://www.tarot.org.il/Seventy%20Two/. However these were to the Aces-Nines. After him, Paul Christian assigned decans to suit cards, in yet another way, which also gave them to the court cards. He accomplished that by also assignng planets to suit cards, each to two of them. That accounted for 36+14=50 cards. He assigned the 3s in Cups and Coins to "The Reaper", triumph 13, and the 4 Kings to 4 stars, which he called "the royal stars". The total is 56 (see Wicked Pack of Cards pp. 210-211).

Levi assigned sefiroth to the number cards and to the first ten triumphs as well. Here I think the assignments make a kind of sense, in that it seems to me that both the meanings of the sefirot  and the meanings of these cards are related historically to Pythagorean number theory. Decker recently (The Esoteric Tarot, 2013) proposed a way of assigning sefirot to Etteilla's number cards. It does not work very well; see my post at http://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=971&p=14920&hilit=Etteilla#p14886 and the one following).

Dummett has much else to say about the occultists in his 1993 book, mostly accounts of individual personalities and their activities, most of which as far as I can tell, is repeated in his 1996 book Wicked Pack of Cards, in English with Depaulis and Decker. That book and the one with Decker in 2002 have more information, although still of a summary nature, concerning what the occultists actually said about the tarot and the decks they devised.

The final chapter of Le Monde e L'Angelo, chapter 20,  is about the game of tarot today and a summary. I hadn't known that the game died out in France but had a revival after World War II. The chapter will mostly be of interest to people interested in the game as currently played.

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