Dummett's Chapter Five starts out with a question (p. 109):
That is not the question he actually answers. What he answers is something more comprehensive: When were tarot cards first used for predicting the future and as a source of theory and occult symbolism? Actually, these are two uses of the cards: (1) predicting the future; and (2) as a source of theory and occult symbolism. His answer is that neither was done until around 1770 in France. In fact, it seems as though he wants to say that about cards in general, not just tarot cards.I tarocchi sono utilizzati per due scopi del tutto diversi. Sono usati per un particolare tipo di gioco di carte e sono usati per predire il futuro e come fonte di teoria e simbolismo occulti. In paesi quali l’Inghilterra e gli Stati Uniti, dove non sono mai stati molto popolari come gioco, la maggior parte della gente che li ha sentiti nominare li conosce solo per questo secondo uso; ma in Italia, come in molti altri paesi d’Europa, si sa altrettanto bene che servono a giocare. La nostra domanda è: per quale di questi due usi furono originariamente ideati?
(Tarot cards are used for two completely different purposes. They are used for a particular kind of card game and are used to predict the future and as a source of theory and occult symbolism. In countries such as England and the United States, where they have never been very popular as a game, most of the people who have heard of them know them only for this second use; but in Italy, as in many other European countries, they are known just as well for their use in games. Our question is: for which of these two uses were they originally designed?)
About the original purpose of the game, in my view if we have only vague ideas about what the deck originally consisted of or who invented it, speculation about why it was invented won't get very far. If in an early phase it was an expansion of Emperors and incorporated the seven virtues and the seven Petrarchan-Boccaccian virtues, that suggests that it was not invented for the purposes of cartomancy. As far as any hidden meanings, that is impossible to determine, because the chances of our actually knowing what the original tarot looked like are slim. The original order is unknown, for example; if the order had anything to do with the meaning of the sequence, it is hidden from us. Players like their decks to look reasonably the same as what they are used to. But had the hand-painted decks that have come down to us been used in casual play, they would probably have fallen apart before now. We have no idea what the original deck looked like.
The earliest decks that have come down to us, however, have many odd details that many have speculated about but none convincingly. One of the Cary-Yale scenes has a lady with trumpets on the top and knights and castles at the bottom. Whatever the meaning, it is far from clear to us and probably would have been hidden from most people then. Another card has two horses, one rearing and the other, with a groom, calm; meanwhile a lady on top carries a golden shield. Is the meaning obvious? Would it have been obvious at the time? In the next known deck, the PMB, there is a similar chariot lady with two winged horse? Is the meaning obvious? Then there is the lady holding the moon in one hand and an unidentified object, perhaps a bridle, in the other. The meaning? Another early hand-painted card has a naked person of unclear gender on the back of a stag. To me the meaning is obvious, and perhaps it was then. But I don't know of anyone who has actually published what seems to me obvious. So it probably isn't. And so on. It is only by dismissing such details as irrelevant that one gets to an obvious meaning. But that is a logical error known as assuming what is to be proved.
So let us forget about "hidden meanings" unless they have some direct relationship to cartomancy. The question for me, as for “hidden meanings” and meanings generally, is whether there are any reasons for supposing such a purpose and such meanings might have influenced the deck (tarot and otherwise) and its use as it developed and afterwards, but before 1770? I say "developed" because the images are quite varied in the 15th century. Then one style, that of the Milan, the Cary Sheet, and perhaps a few other places (I am thinking of the Budapest/Metropolitan sheets) continues developing in France, while another style develops further in Florence, Bologna, Rome, and a few other places, including an expansion into the Minchiate deck.
One argument against the presence of "hidden meanings" is that there are no reports of such uses, and it is something we would expect to have been reported, starting with the "Steele Sermon". Speaking of that preacher, Dummett says (p. 112):
It is not easy to speculate on someone's motives a long time ago. Either the preacher didn't know or didn't want to publicize this use. If he publicized it, it might get people interested in that use who hadn’t known about it before. If he didn't know, it might have been because there was good reason not to tell a preacher such as this one. There is likewise no reason to assume that "the magical aura would have been pasted on them". That is part of the point of the appeal to "hidden meanings": they are not "pasted on" the cards.Possiamo solo concludere che, mentre gli erano perfettamente noti la composizione del mazzo dei tarocchi e il suo uso per il gioco, non aveva il più lontano sentore di qualsiasi altro uso. Se i trionfi del mazzo dei tarocchi fossero stati originariamente ideati per scopi divinatori o comunque occultistici, l’aura magica sarebbe rimasta loro appiccicata: ma di quest’aura non troviamo traccia prima del tardo XVIII secolo.
(We can only conclude that, while the composition of the tarot deck they were perfectly known, and its use for the game, he had not the most distant hint of any other use. If the trumps of the tarot deck they were originally designed for divination or otherwise occult purposes, the magical aura would have been pasted on them: but we find no trace of this aura before the late eighteenth century.)
It is easy to see why such uses would not have been "pasted on". Ross Caldwell (http://www.academia.edu/6477311/Brief_h ... cartomancy) has documented some examples of card-reading for fortune-telling in Spain of the 16th century, and they are all in witchcraft cases, or about fictional witches. If there aren't any for Ferrara or Lombardy, it may be because the records of the Lombard Inquisition were all destroyed in 1788 (documented by Caldwell at http://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=917&p=13698&hilit=Inquisition#p13698). Most of what is known is from the memoirs of Inquisitors, who boasted of what amounts to about 60 burnings a year in the area northwest and northeast of Milan. (See Michael M. Tavuzzi's 2007 Renaissance inquisitors: Dominican inquisitors and inquisitorial districts in Northern Italy, 1474-1527.) The Lombard Inquisition, assigned to the Dominicans, had jurisdiction over Ferrara, Milan, Bologna, and points north, east and west, except Venice. Although the Estensi did what they could to minimize its role in their cities, according to Tavuzzi, this did not apply to smaller jurisdictions. especially if requested by their rulers. Giovanni Francesco Pico della Mirandola, the more famous Pico's nephew, did request the aid of the Inquisition and even wrote a defense of their successful prosecution of and burning of 15 in his domain, 1522-23, described in Witchcraft and Magic in Europe, Volume 4: The Period of the Witch Trials, by Bengt Ankarloo, Stuart Clark, and E. William Monter, p. 45, in Google Books). In 1506, he had already written against divination, including that with "images depicted in a card game" as one kind of sortilege (literally, the "reading of lots"), Caldwell documents in "Brief History of Cartomancy". Tarot is not mentioned, however, just "figures",which might mean court cards. Tarot is not mentioned by name until 1772, and then in the context of a female fortune-teller in Marseilles being punished by having to stand in a certain place during three consecutive market days for an hour wearing a bonnet "surrounded by tarots", a means by which she plied her trade.
Dummett goes on:
Well, of course the final sentence does not follow from what came before., even if it were true that some scholars might not think they need evidence. The question I ask is, what counts as evidence?E assai frequente, per esempio, che gli studiosi suggeriscano, senza traccia di prove, che un qualche tipo di mazzo di carte — mettiamo, il mazzo mamelucco — sia stato usato per scopi divinatori: non viene loro in mente di aver bisogno di prove per un’ipotesi del genere più di quanto non pensino che occorrano prove per dimostrare che le spade erano usate per combattere. Questo atteggiamento è del tutto errato. Come il nome stesso suggerisce, le carte da gioco {chartae lusoriae, cartes à jouer, Spielkarten, playing cards) furono fin dall’inizio considerate strumenti per giocare, come gli scacchi: parecchi secoli passarono dopo la prima introduzione delle carte in Europa prima che venisse in mente a qualcuno usarle per la divinazione.
And very frequently, for example, that scholars suggest, without a trace of evidence, that some kind of deck of cards - say, the Mamluk deck - was used for divination purposes: it does not come into their heads that they need evidence to such a situation, any more than they think that there must be evidence to show that the swords were used for fighting. This attitude is totally wrong. As the name suggests, playing cards (chartae lusoriae, cartes à jouer, Spielkarten, carte da gioco) were considered from the outset instruments for play, like chess: several centuries passed before after the introduction of the cards in Europe before it first came to anyone’s mind to use them for divination.)
Mamluk cards did have writing on them, adages or proverbs. Here are some examples (from http://www.wopc.co.uk/egypt/mamluk/index.html):
They are like Chinese fortune cookies. Some of these even have predictions, either of the "If...then" variety or vague promises of future happiness. Is this evidence of divination? I myself don't think so, but others don't agree.. It is clearly instruction of some sort, and thus shows that there was no dichotomy between instruction and game-playing.“With the sword of happiness I shall redeem a beloved who will afterwards take my life“ - “O thou who hast possessions, remain happy and thou shalt have a pleasant life.” - “Let it come to me, because acquired good is durable; it rejoices me with all its utility” - “Pleasures for the soul and agreeable things, in my colours there are all kinds” - “Look how wonderful my game is and my dress extraordinarily beautiful” - “I am as a garden, the like of which will never exist” - “O my heart, for thee the good news that rejoices” - “Rejoice in the happiness that returns, as a bird that sings its joy”. “As for the present that rejoices, thy heart will soon open up“ - “I will, as pearls on a string, be lifted in the hands of kings” - “May God give thee prosperity; then thou will already have achieved thy aim” - “Rejoice for thy lasting happiness” - “Rejoice in the pleasant things and the success of the objects” - “I am as a flower, a string of pearls is my soil?” - “The alif rejoices and fulfils your wishes” - “Whosoever will call me to his happiness, he will only see joyful looks”.
However then it appears that even if cards were used in fortune-telling, that is not what cartomancy consists of, in Dummett’s view (112f):
He has denied that cards were used for "divination" before the late 18th century. Now he seems to be back-pedaling. He doesn't deny that cards were to used to predict the future, but not in the right way to be called "divination"..He distinguishes "divination" from "cartomancy", a distinction that is none too clear.La predizione dell’avvenire non è da identificare con lo studio serio delle scienze occulte o con la pratica seria della magia. La divinazione può essere un semplice passatempo, senza che coloro che vi partecipano vi prestino fede; oppure può basarsi sulla pura superstizione, sfruttata dagli indovini di mestiere. Per gli occultisti sinceri, d’altronde, la teoria delia magia è una scienza profonda, e la sua pratica una disciplina ardua, che si può esercitare solo sulla base di una conoscenza della teoria: secondo loro, bisogna celare sia la teoria che la pratica al volgo, che le fraintenderebbe e ne abuserebbe. Perciò essi disdegnano gli indovini di mestiere e i loro clienti; disdegnano anche quelli che si dilettano di predizione senza essere istruiti nelle scienze occulte. Gli occultisti ritengono che nessun vero mago venderebbe per denaro la sua perizia. Di conseguenza, gli indovini di mestiere sono ciarlatani, e i dilettanti sono frivoli: desiderano i frutti della magia, senza la fatica di ottenerli.
Benché, fuori dell’ambito degli occultisti impegnati, po- [end of 112] chissimi abbiano una vera fiducia nella magia, molti nutrono una credenza parziale. Questi non suppongono che ci si possa rendere invisibili, per esempio, o far apparire gli spiriti dei morti. Pensano, comunque, che un mago possa essere capace di scacciare la sfortuna, per mezzo di talismani o incanti, e di predire la sorte. Per questa ragione, la divinazione è l’abilità principale che la gente si aspetta dal mago. La gente comune non sa niente delle teorie grandiose degli occultisti; per essa, la magia è interessante solo se produce risultati e il primo risultato che si aspetta è la predizione.
Per gli occultisti la divinazione è uno degli scopi della loro tecnica magica; ma le attribuiscono poca importanza, appunto a causa della sua pratica da parte degli indovini di mestiere, che essi disprezzano. Inoltre, essi usano solo metodi basati su un’intera teoria magica del cosmo, che postula sistematiche connessioni fra fenomeni diversi. Un occultista, dunque, di solito non userà come strumento di divinazione un qualsiasi artefatto che gli capiti per caso fra le mani: userà solo cose che, a suo parere, abbiano un significato cosmico e non esiterà a lasciare agli indovini di mestiere e ai dilettanti molte tecniche per predire la sorte. La divinazione per mezzo di foglie di té o di fondi di caffè, per esempio, non potrebbe essere integrata in una teoria del cosmo; per gli occultisti è solo una tecnica inautentica. Da lungo tempo questi predicevano la sorte per mezzo dell’oroscopo; l’astrologia non era principalmente un metodo di predizione, bensì una scienza genuina basata sul principio della corrispondenza fra il macrocosmo e il microcosmo, che forniva la struttura dell’intera teoria occulta dell’universo.
(The prediction of the future is not to be identified with the serious study of the occult sciences or with the serious practice of magic. Divination can be a simple pastime, without those who participate lending it their faith; or it may be based on pure superstition, exploited by the soothsayers of the trade. To honest occultists, on the other hand, the theory of magic is a deep science, and its practice arduous discipline, which can be exercised only on the basis of a knowledge of the theory: according to them, you have to conceal both the theory and the practice from the crowd, who misunderstand and have abused it. Therefore they despise the soothsayers by trade and their customers; they also despise those who delight in prediction without being instructed in the occult sciences. The occultists believe that no true magician would sell for money his expertise. As a result, the soothsayers of the trade are charlatans and are frivolous amateurs: they want the fruits of magic, without the trouble of getting them.
Although, outside the ambit of the committed occultists, [end of 112] very few have a real belief in magic, many have a partial belief. These do not assume that you can become invisible, for example, or bring up the spirits of the dead. They think, however, that a magician may be able to ward off bad luck, by means of talismans or charms, and by fortune-telling. For this reason, divination is a skill that people expect from the wizard. Ordinary people do not know anything about the theories of the great occultists; for them, the magic is interesting only if it produces results and the first result that expect is the prediction
To occultists divination is one of the aims of their magical technique; but one to which they give little importance, precisely because of its practice on the part of fortune tellers by trade, whom they despise. Moreover, they use only methods based on an entire magical theory of the universe, which postulates systematic connections between different phenomena. An occultist, therefore, does not usually use as a tool of divination any artifact that happens by chance in his hands: he only uses things that, in his opinion, have a cosmic significance and will hesitate to leave it to the magicians by trade and amateur many techniques to predict fate. Divination by tea leaves or coffee grounds, for example, could not be integrated into a theory of the cosmos; for occultists it is only an inauthentic technique. For a long time those predicted by the fate of the horoscope; Astrology was not primarily a method of prediction, but a genuine science based on the principle of correspondence between the macrocosm and the microcosm, which provided the structure of the whole occult theory of the universe.)
Dummett never actually says what he thinks divination is. Instead, he describes the practice of astrology as done in medieval and Renaissance times. and also the practice of those who use talismans to "ward off bad luck". But the prescribing or use of talismans is not divination, any more than the prescribing of herbs is. Also, astrology was not usually considered divination. Divination involves knowing something from a non-natural source; hence the term. Astrology only goes as far as the stars and planets, which of course are natural phenomena, whose movements were eminently predictable by natural means. Divination typically involved interpreting data that could not be predicted beforehand. Sometimes it took skill, sometimes it didn't. What was important was the connection with the divine source.
We might ask, is predicting the future by means of Newtonian mechanics an example of occultism? By Dummett’s definition, it would seem to be, because Newtonian mechanics involves a mysterious force called gravity. Galileo refused to believe that the moon affected the tides because "the theory smacked of the occult", as a US Public Broadcasting Service article puts it (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/earth/gali ... stake.html).There is also the germ theory, which before the invention of high-powered microscopes would be an example of "occult" agents of disease.
For Dummett cartomancy, or perhaps I should say "divination by means of cards" is intrinsically part of a larger magical repertory. This may have been true for Levi etc.. If there were such cartomantists in the 15th-16th centuries, it is not surprising that we don’t know about them. Magic was linked with witchcraft. Even the mildest sort, i.e. wearing certain gems in order to bring down certain celestial influences, was considered heretical by powerful Dominicans, as Ficino found out (described in vol. 9 of his letters). In his case, the Inquisition withdrew, due to Ficino's powerful friends. Reuchlin was not so lucky; he spent his health and his money defending himself against the Inquisition. Nothng was ever resolved one way or the other. The real question is whether it is reasonable to think that some kind of advanced occultism involving divination might, earlier than the late 18th century, have included cards. Is it absurd, or is it a reasonable hypothesis? That is, can evidence be marshaled to show its reasonableness? That is of course a rather tall order, one that not many have addressed; nor has Dummett.
First let us be as clear as possible what "divination" is, and what "cartomancy" is. The word cartomancie is first attested in 1789, in a piece by the Parisian cartomancer who called himself Etteilla. Decker, Dummett, and Depaulis, in Wicked Pack of Cards (1996), p. 96, cite an article by Etteilla in 1789; he is objecting to a disciple's book because it uses the word cartomancie. Etteilla calls the word "illogical" and says that the correct term is cartonomancie. Before then, in the 1782 Paris censors' record (Wicked Pack p. 99) the word cartonomanie occurred in reference to a book that Etteilla was seeking to have published. Permission was not then granted; my guess is that the word is a misspelling of cartonomancie by an unsympathetic censor. It is not clear whether Etteilla coined cartonomancie so as to distinguish his type from other people's, or indeed he was the first to use anything like that term. What is clear, however, is that Etteilla's term for his system of fortune-telling was cartonomancie and not cartomancie. Meanwhile the word cartomancie entered general usage as a generic term for the practice of predicting the future using cards, as can be seen from any dictionary (this is in fact the definition of the term in the Grand Robert Dictionnaire de la Langue Francaise, 1986: "Chercher l'avenir dans les dispositions fortuite des cartes", to seek the future in the fortuitous disposition of cards). It combines the word "carte", card, with "-mancie", from the Greek mantike, divination concerning the future. Just as since ancient times there had been, for example, geomancy, hydromancy, aeromancy, pyromancy, etc. there was now cartomancy, divination with cards. In each case the method was to use something outside anyone's conscious control--meaningful patterns in earth, water, air, and fire--as a means for getting insight into the future by some kind of supernatural means.
Divination, in turn, is an old word that existed with much the same meaning in Roman times The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as:
The action or practice of divining; the foretelling of future events or discovery of what is hidden or obscure by supernatural or magical means; soothsaying, augury, prophecy.In a similar fashion, the Grand Robert Dictionnaire de la Langue Francaise has:
action de découvrir ce qui est caché par des moyens qui ne relèvent pas d'une connaissance naturelle ou ordinaire; pratique permettant cette découverte.In this conception it is not necessarily prediction of the future. For example, divination might obtain information on where a lost object or person is. Many people believed in divination. Marsilio Ficino (1432-1500) wrote in favor of divination in an early letter that was among those edited by him before publication in 1495. In his 9th letter, "On Divination and the Divinity of the Soul" (Letters, Vol. 1, p. 49f of English translation). His example of a prophetic dream is one his mother had of his father's falling off a horse, something that happened in reality three days later. He says that he could have given many more examples. The most striking example is one his grandmother and grandfather had at the same time in different cities. In both dreams, their daughter, who had just written each a letter saying she was well and would be seeing them the next day, said good-bye to them, that she had to leave this world. They both rushed to where their daughter was, only to find she had died in the night.
(action to discover what is hidden in ways that are outside of natural or ordinary knowledge; practice making possible this discovery.)
In Three Boois of Occult Philosophy Agrippa also wrote about divination. He did not mention cards but did endorse divination by lots, of which laying down random cards would be an example. He even gave an explanation, which Fludd later turned into a diagram.
Agrippa in Book II, Ch. LIV, attributes the efficacy of lot-drawing, i.e. sortilege, to two types of influence. One is "the help of other spirits". I will discuss that later, in connection with some practices described by Cicero and Apuleius. The other involves the soul or mind of the one drawing the lot.
Now that there is in man's soul a sufficient power and virtue to direct such kind of lots, it is hence manifest, because there is in our soul a divine virtue, and similitude, and apprehension, and power of all things; And as we said in the first Book, all things have a natural obedience to it, and of necessity have a motion and efficacy to that which the soul desires with a strong desire;...
Agrippa's
idea is that if the soul has a
strong enough desire, it can direct a person's hand to the right lot,
using celestial influences. Tyson in his note to this sentence directs
us to book I, ch. LXVII, which has the title "How man's mind may be
joined with the mind and intelligences of the celestials, and together
with them impress certain wonderful virtues upon inferior things".
Desire extends outward from the soul to those of others; for example a
happy soul spreads happiness, and likewise the unhappy. And somehow the
mind itself takes a "more convenient hour" for a particular action.
Similarly, the soul
connects with the souls of the celestial world, which if favorable
direct the hand to
a lot congruent with his desire. The same would apply to dreams: if one
wants a prophetic dream, one would ask for it before going to sleep,
as guidance from higher realms. In such a situation, there is no
question of "proving scientifically" the efficacy
of lots. It is all contingent upon the will of the higher orders and the
efficacy of one's connection to them. This connection between the mind
of the prophet or dreamer in Agrippa is probably what is behind the
upper part of a well-known engraving in the Tomus secondus de supernaturali, naurali, praeternaturali et contranaturali microcosmi historia,
1619, of Robert Fludd (1474-1637). It shows a direct channel between
the "Mundus Intellectualis" and the human brain.There is then the problem of how to interpret the card or lot. Agrippa uses the example of astrology:
And this is that ground and foundation of all Astrological questions, wherefore the mind being elevated into the excess of any desire, taketh of itself an hour and opportunity most convenient and efficacious, on which the Figure of the heaven being made, the Astrologer may then judge in it, and plainly know concerning that which any one desires, and is inquisitive to know.The mind itself picks a day and an hour as being most efficacious, without knowing its astrological significance; the astrologer then interprets the astrological signs at that time to tell the person what he wants to know. That is not hard to extend to cards: the mind itself picks the card, even though consciously it does not know what is on it.
From a Platonic perspective, there is a world higher than that of the "celestials", namely, the world of the archetypes, imprinted on our minds before birth but then forgotten until examples of them are noticed in the world. As such, its access is not so much natural magic as what Idel calls "magia supranaturalis" (p. 256), a phrase that he applies to influx from beyond the astral realm of "natural magic", as high as the Kabbalists' sefirot.
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola seems to have believed in divination, in the particular sense of knowledge of the future attained by occult Kabbalistic practices. In the magical and Kabbalist sections of the 900 Conclusiones, 1486, he describes the means as what he calls "magical arithmetic" (conclusion 9>23) "through the use of letters" (9>25), which means, his modern translator tells us (Farmer, Syncretism in the West, p. 501f, footnotes), gematria, the process of converting a word to a number and drawing equivalences to other words with the same number. By such means, (in 11>9, but without saying how), he could predict a date for the end of the world: January 1, 2000. We know the trouble that Pico got into for his Conclusiones. The Pope ordered every copy turned over to be burned; anyone caught with in his possession was subject to excommunication.
Pico's Jewish Kabbalistic colleague Johannan Allemano also stated that Kabbalist practices could yield accurate knowledge of the future. Moshe Idel writes in his book Kabbalah in Italy (in Google books):
If they or their followers had thought to apply these techniques to tarot cards, perhaps supplemented by the combinatorial Llull's combinatorial techniques, then the result would be something like "occult divination". In this case, it would probably not be gematria but rather the ars combinatoria of Raimon Llull, the late 13th-early 14th century Catalan philosopher, who shows much influence from the Kabbalah then current in Barcelona.Thus, when dealing with the moment of revelation, Alemanno combines elements found in ecstatic Kabbalah, especially the concept of a "science of prophecy" and the "sphere of letters," with an Avicennan and Ibn Tufayl's theory of "sudden vision," a form of intuition that is sometimes also called prophecy, and with a concept of nature.
Pico refers to the Kabbalist technique of letter permutation in his Conclusiones as "the science of the revolution of the alphabet" (11>2). In the Apologia he wrote afterwards, to explain himself more fully, he adds (quoted in Harvey J. Hanes, The Art of Conversion: Christianity & Kabbalah in the Thirteenth Century, 2000, p. 1, in Google Books):
Unam quae dicitur hohmat ha-zeraf id est ars combinandi et est modus quidam procededendi in scientiis et est simile quid sicut apud nostros dicitur ars Raymundi, licet forte diuerso modo proceda...The reference is to Raimon Llull, of course, as numerous commentators have pointed out. Of the two procedures, gematria and Llull's Ars, it is the latter that seems to me to have the more applicability to the tarot.
that which is called hohmat ha-zeraf [revolution or combination of letters] is a combinatory Art and it is a method for gaining knowledge, and it is similar to that which we refer to as the ars Raymundi, although it proceeds in a very different manner.
One work in particular was much studied in Italy, Llull's Ars Brevis, which according to the English translator Bonner reached Padua around 1440. This is confirmed by the flyleaf of one Latin translation, which lists as owners one that university records show as attending starting in 1430, and a second who received his Ph.D. there in 1444, according to Hames. It was much studied in the 1450s, Hames said. It was translated into Hebrew in 1474, quite possibly by Flavius Guillelmus Raimundus Mithridates, a suggestion Hames made in 1999 ("Jewish Magic with a Christian Text: a Hebrew Ars Brevis'", Traditio, Vol. 54, 1999, pp. 283-300, available on JSTOR). This based on the manuscript's colophon, which seems to suggest a translator by the name "Raimundus" and not merely the author. In later essays Hames is silent on this hypothesis. But the argument still seems to me to have merit. You can see the arguments for and against at http://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=1049&p=15852&hilit=padua#p15852. Alemanno was in Padua studying for a doctorate in the 1460s. Pico
was in Padua in 1480-1482, according to Wikipedia. He was studying with the Jewish scholar Elijah del Medigo.an author, named "Raimundus".The Ars Brevis uses combinations of concepts, in six sets of nine each (below). Bonner puts them in a table. Llull himself did not represent them as a hierarchy, picturing them instead on the circumferences of circles. But it is hard not to see the "subjects" column as anything other than a hierarchy. Thus his Parisian disciple used ladders in his anthology of Llull's works entitled the Breviculum, cod. St. Peter perg. 92, f. 5r ( upper left, an illustration to the Ars Magna, or Great Work; image from http://quisestlullus.narpan.net/eng/81_brev_eng.html).
By combining these concepts, representing associated axioms shared by all the major religions, Llull hoped to create a rigorous, deductive theology that would persuade Muslim and Jews of their errors.
It is not hard to connect these concepts to both the sefirot and the tarot subjects. (Hames notes the similarit to sefirot on p. 130, in Google Books.) The triumphs relate to the first, fourth, and fifth columns, and in a negative way to the sixth. The second and third columns relate to the number cards and to the idea of bringing a question to the divination session. Any concepts not used by the triumphs can also be applied, as well as others, to the suit cards. Just as Llull combined concepts to get to the particulars of faith, a tarot interpreter could combine the concepts and associated axiomatic truths to yield advice of a particular nature to someone who had drawn the cards under unconscious supernatural influence.
Dummett denies such a system was applied to the tarot then. Given the presence of the appropriate techniques, the belief in their efficacy, and a strong motive for keeping it quiet, I cannot see how Dummett can be so sure it didn't exist; perhaps he has divined it. We cannot prove that such secrets existed. But we can prove, at least in general terms, that the means, the theory, and the will were present at the time and place in question and for some time thereafter. That is evidence of a sort.
For more elaboration of this theme, see my blog at http://16thcenturycartomancy.blogspot.com/2015_05_01_archive.html, from which I have taken selected passages here.
EXAMPLES IN ART
Dummett moves on to examples in art that have been thought to suggest cartomancy. It is not clear whether he means "predicting the future with cards", which any unlearned soothwayer can do, "divination with cards", or what. One is a painting he has already discussed in Game of Tarot, p. 94. Mary Greer has a nice discussion of it, with pictures, at http://marygreer.wordpress.com/2009/11/ ... %E2%80%9D/. She says Lucas van Leyden did it at age 14, in 1508. I don’t know how she knows that; to me it merely seems the earliest possibility, and it is not even clear that he did it. An inaccurate engraving was made of it for a French magazine in 1842, whether she was playing cards or not was unclear in the original, because only her part of the table was visible; the engravng showed much more of the table, with nobody at it. Here is Dummett (p. 114f):
Il dipinto mostra davvero una donna seduta a un tavolo nell’atto di maneggiare carte, ma del tavolo se ne vede molto meno e non c’è motivo per ritenere che la donna non stia semplicemente partecipando a un gioco di carte con altri giocatori che non compaiono nel quadro. Sia nel dipinto che nell’incisione, la donna sta ricevendo — o forse glielo sta dando — un giglio da un giovanotto in piedi alla sua destra, che si leva il berretto davanti a lei; ma, nel quadro, le è molto più vicino e in atteggiamento meno supplice. Il professor Hoffmann ritiene che il quadro raffiguri il figliol prodigo che dissipa i suoi beni in una vita dissoluta. Devo confessare che la gente ritratta nel quadro non mi sembra particolarmente dissoluta; ma, quale che sia il soggetto del quadro, non c’è nulla in esso che implichi che ci troviamo di fronte a un [end of 114] episodio di divinazione, né, per quanto ne so, esiste alcuna prova che il titolo ‘Filippo il Buono che consulta l’indovina’ sia mai stato attribuito al quadro prima del 1842
(The painting actually shows a woman sitting at a table in the act of handling the cards, but of the table we see a lot less and there is no reason to believe that the woman is not merely participating in a game of cards with other players who do not appear in the picture. Both in the painting and the engraving, the woman is receiving - or perhaps is giving him - a lily from a young man standing at her right hand, who holds his cap before her; but, in the painting, has the much closer and less suppliant attitude. Professor Hoffmann believes that the painting depicts the prodigal son who dissipates his property in dissolute living. I must confess that the people portrayed in the picture does not seem particularly dissolute; but, whatever the subject of the picture, there is nothing in it that implies that we are facing an [end of 114] episode of divination, nor, as far as I know, is there evidence that the title 'Philip the Good, who consults the seer' has ever been attributed to the painting prior to 1842.)
It seems to me that if she were playing cards with others, there would have been some indication in the painting. Ot else it is intentionally ambiguous. Greer says that the central figure is thought by some to be Margaretha of Austria and Savoy. She has an interesting history. She was born in Flanders in 1480, daughter of Maximilian I and Mary of Burgundy. At the age of 3 she was betrothed to the Dauphin of France but was sent back to her family at age 10 when Charles VII married someone else (his stepmother, actually, per a treaty agreement made by his father). So from age 3 to age 10 she is with the French court somewhere in France, where she becomes friends with Louise of Savoy; then she's back to Flanders. In 1494 she becomes stepdaughter of Bianca Maria Sforza, daughter of Galeazzo Maria Sforza. It is not clear if they actually met. In 1497 she marries the son of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain and goes to Madrid. He died 6 months later and her child was stillborn. In 1501 she married Phillip of Savoy, whom she loved greatly and who supported Ludovico Sforza against the French until "they made him an offer he couldn't refuse", Greer says. He died, her brother Phillip the Handsome died, and in 1506 (Wikipedia) or 1507 (Greer) she became Regent of the Netherlands. She vowed never to remarry and took the motto "FORTUNE . INFORTUNE . FORT.UNE, meaning “Fortune, misfortune, and one strong to meet them.” She ruled wisely, apparently. She and her sister-in-law Louise negotiated the Treaty of Cambrai. Greer's discussion on Aeclectic says that Cornelius Agrippa was her "panegyrist." I do not know what that means in particular. (http://www.tarotforum.net/showthread.ph ... 534&page=5).
Greer thinks it's either a commemoration of her accession as regent of the Southern Netherlands, with important political personnages around her, or an allegory of fortune, with the person in back of the lady as a professional Fool. If it's about fortune, she would either be playing some game or seeing what the cards foresaw for her. Solitaire wasn't invented yet. It is objected that since she only holds a few cards it wouldn't be fortune-telling. But maybe these are the ones she's drawn. It did not take many cards to read a fortune. There is a hint of more at the lower border, probably the deck she drew from.
It certainly looks to me like she's saying something that the people around her find disturbing. The painting is probably around the time of her vow not to remarry. So I'd guess it has to do with that. Maybe the person in back is a suitor, or perhaps her husband or brother; admirers were sometimes portrayed with guitars to serenade their beloved with (there is a guitar on the man's back). In that context, the cards she has drawn, so far as we can see, contain no court cards. A common interpretation of court cards in Etteilla's method was to predict a romantic interest in the near future: a Jack of Hearts meant a young blond man, etc. The examples of cartomancy that Ross Caldwell reported on from Spanish witchcraft trials sometimes involved laying out cards and seeing what Queens came up next to a certain Jack that designated the husband of the woman wanting to know if he was faithful. There are no men in Margaretha's future, in other words. This is not necessarily a formal card reading--that would be important to be able to deny, if there was suspicion that someone was endorsing witchcraft). Actual hands of a game also were interpreted symbolically (as in a humorous round of Piquet in a 1727 book reported at http://marygreer.wordpress.com/2008/04/ ... ing-cards/). The person on our left might be her dead husband or brother, or another suitor (although a bit young). Her husband had called her a flower, Greer says. Her name is the French word for daisy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisy_%28given_name%29). The flower he offers her is not a daisy, but perhaps that was considered too common a flower to give her.
Her song-book, posted by M.J. Hurst at has a tarot-like "ranks of man" picture (http://pre-gebelin.blogspot.com/2013/02 ... nkind.html)
The other painting Dummett discusses appears not to have been discussed in Game of Tarot--or anywhere else that I can find. Here is Dummett, footnote 8 on p. 119):
It is not at all clear that divination requires a well-ordered arrangement. That is a projection of present practice onto a much earlier time. How can he claim to know what the practice in other forms of divination were, such that this particular method is excluded from being applied here? Throwing objects down and interpreting events from the way they lie is described is described in a 14th century poem about Roland. Andrea Vitali talks about it at http://www.associazioneletarot.it/page.aspx?id=449. He says:8. Un articolo di Gunter Grzimek, ‘Warum stets nach dem dernier [corrected from my "demier"] cri?’, in Die Weltkunst, Jhrg. XXX, n. 13, 1 luglio 1960, pp. 5-6, riguarda un quadro, riprodotto, che fa parte della collezione privata dell’autore, a cui egli dà il titolo ‘La cartomante’. Il quadro, che egli data al 1648 circa, mostra una vecchia che guarda dritto davanti a sé con la palma della destra alzata verso lo spettatore. La sinistra poggia su un gran libro aperto, su cui sono buttate alla rinfusa carte con semi francesi, alcune in procinto di cadere dal bordo del libro. Anche se la datazione del dottor Grizmek è corretta, cosa di cui dubito, c tutt’altro che chiaro che la vecchia stia divinando dalle carte, azione che richiede una disposizione ben ordinata. Questo quadro non può essere usato come prova di una pratica della cartomanzia nel XVII secolo.
(8. An article by Gunter Grzimek, 'Warum stets nach dem Dernier cri [corrected from "demier Christian]?',in Die Weltkunst, Jhrg. XXX, no. 13, July 1, 1960, pp. 5-6 relates to a picture, reproduced, which is part of the private collection of the author, to which he gives the title 'The cartomant'. The painting, which he dates to 1648 or so, shows an old woman looking straight ahead with the palm of her right hand raised toward the viewer. The left rests on a large open book, on which are thrown higgledy-piggledy cards with French suits, some about to fall off the edge of the book. Although the dating of Dr. Grizmek may be correct, which I doubt, it is far from clear that the old woman is divining by cards, an action that requires a well-ordered arrangement. This picture cannot be used as evidence of a practice of cartomancy in the seventeenth century.)
Il cerchio, le ossa di morti impiccati e le parole infernali sono componenti comuni della ritualità magica. A proposito del cerchio occorre ricordare, in riferimento all’utilizzo delle carte a scopo divinatorio, che un verso del Canto XX del poema La Spagna Istoriata, un romanzo cavalleresco composto nel XIV secolo ma stampato a Milano solo nel 1519, fa riferimento al sortilegio con il quale Rolando cercò di scoprire i nemici di Carlo Magno: “Fe’ un cerchio e poscia vi gittò le carte” il che vuol dire, come argutamente suggerisce il Lozzi in un suo articolo del 1899, che “non gittò le carte come si fa nel giuoco, o nella gittata de’ dadi, ma le gittò entro al cerchio, per iscoprire dalla loro giacitura, determinata da virtù magica (sortilegio) quali fossero e dove si trovassero i nemici dell’imperatore” (9). Non sappiamo di preciso quale tecnica volesse intendere l’autore del poema nello scrivere questi versi, cioè se facesse riferimento ad una lettura di carte utilizzate come gli astragali, in cui il responso intuitivo veniva emesso dall’osservazione del disegno complessivo che gli ossi venivano a creare una volta gettati a terra o se invece si trattasse di una vera e propria lettura come conosciamo oggiIt strikes me that the book in the painting might have served as a substitute for the less witchlike magic circle.
(The circle, the bones of dead hanged ones, and infernal words are common components of ritual magic. About the circle it should be recalled, in reference to the use of the cards for divination, that a verse of Canto XX of the poem Storied Spain, a chivalric romance composed in the fourteenth century but only printed in Milan in 1519, makes reference to the sortilege with which Roland sought to discover the enemies of Charlemagne: "He made a circle and afterwards threw the cards", which means, as Lozzi pointedly suggests in his article of 1899, that "he threw the cards as is done in a game, or in the throwing of dice, but threw them within the circle, to discover from their arrangement, as determined by magic power (sortilege) who were the enemies of the Emperor and where they were to be found" (9). We do not know exactly what technique the author of the poem meant in writing these verses, that is, if it refers to a reading of cards used as knucklebones, in which the response issued was an intuitive observation of the overall design that the bones created once thrown to the ground or whether it was an actual reading as we know it today.)
LOT BOOKS
Dummett acknowledges that there were books on how to tell fortunes using playing cards. But he insists that these are not examples of cartomancy. One was Francesco Marcolino da Forli, Garden of Thoughts. published in Venice in 1540. It uses a Trappola pack, that is, an ordinary deck with the 2s through 6s removed. Dummett observes (p. 114f):
Dummett objects (p. 115):Ciò che rende il processo così diverso da qualsiasi tecnica usata dagli indovini moderni è il fatto che il libro non è un semplice manuale di istruzioni, ma fa esso stesso parte della procedura. All’inizio del libro c’è una lista di domande, alcune per uomini, altre per donne, altre ancora per entrambi, fra le quali la persona che lo usa deve sceglierne una, per esempio se la donna che ama lo ricambia. A fianco di ciascuna domanda c’è il numero di una pagina del libro a cui il richiedente deve andare. Su questa pagina sono rappresentate tutte le quarantacinque coppie di carte che si possono formare con un mazzo di trentasei carte se si trascurano i semi e l’ordine delle due carte. Il richiedente estrae allora due carte dal mazzo e guarda la coppia corrispondente sulla pagina; qui trova le istruzioni per andare a un’altra pagina e a una delle cinque sezioni (quattro quadrati e una croce) su quella pagina. In quella sezione sono riprodotte tutte le nove carte singole che possono essere estratte (se si ignorano i semi); a questo punto, egli estrae ancora una carta e guarda nel punto appropriato di quella sezione. Le istruzioni gli assegnano una carta (non necessariamente quella che ha estratto) e lo invitano ad andare a un’altra pagina ancora, una pagina doppia. Qui sono di nuovo raffigurate numerose coppie di carte diverse (ancora una volta igno- [end of 114] rando i semi e l’ordine); il richiedente estrae allora un’altra carta, la combina con quella assegnatagli e va sulla pagina doppia al punto che mostra questa coppia di carte. Lì, finalmente, legge una terzina che gli fornisce la risposta alla sua domanda: per esempio che la dama al momento lo ama ma è volubile ed egli potrebbe perderne l’affetto se non sta attento.
(What makes the process so different from any modern technique used by fortune-tellers is the fact that the book is not a simple instruction manual, but is itself part of the procedure. At the beginning of the book there is a list of questions, some for men, some for women, and still others for both, in which the person who uses it must choose, for example, if the woman who loves him reciprocates. Next to each question is the number of a page of the book to which the questioner has to go. Represented here are all forty pairs of cards that can be formed with a deck of thirty cards, neglecting the suits and the order of the two cards. The questioner then draws two cards from the deck and looks for the matching pair on the page; here are instructions to go to another page and one of its five sections (four squares and a cross). In that Section are reproduced all the nine single cards that can be drawn (ignoring the suits); at this point, he or she draws one card more and looks at the appropriate point in that section. The instructions assign him or her one card (not necessarily the one drawn) with an invitation to go to yet another page, a double page. Here are again depicted several pairs of different cards (once again ignor-[end of 115]ing the suits and order); the questioner then draws another card, combines it with the one assigned and goes on to a point on a double page showing this pair of cards. There, finally, he reads a triplet that provides the answer to his question: for example, that the lady at the moment loves him but she is fickle and he may lose her affection if he's not careful.
First, he says, the procedure is different from modern technique because it uses a book. I do not understand. Every deck published includes a Little White Book with divinatory meanings in it for the cards of that deck. If the fortune-teller does not want to use that book, he or she has to use some other book, by a follower of the Golden Dawn or some such. She may not bring it to the reading, but she's read it thoroughly and remembers much of it. Books are an essential part of the process.Questo gradevole passatempo non ha nulla a che vedere con l’occulto ed è impossibile immaginare che qualcuno possa prenderlo seriamente come oracolo. A nessuna delle carte viene attribuito un significato simbolico: le carte sono semplicemente usate come espediente per la distribuzione delle probabilità;,,,
(This pleasant pastime has nothing to do with the occult and it is impossible to imagine that anyone could take it seriously as an oracle. None of the cards are assigned a symbolic meaning: the cards are simply used as a device for the distribution of probabilities;...)
Also Dummett says of lot books, "it is impossible to imagine that anyone could take it seriously as an oracle". First, how does he know what would be taken seriously? People in those days did not have a scientific world-view. Many relied on astrology. The Druids cast runes to find the most favorable days for battles, and Agrippa reports it seriously. Looking at Wikipedia's article on divination, I see that a fixed ritual is often an important part; this book has just such a ritual, and the cards, like runes of old, thereby are seen as holding the sacred energy that goes beyond this world. Caldwell cites examples of people going to "witches" for card-readings to find out if their spouses are faithful to them. The methods--seeing whether certain Jacks or pairs turn up--might appear to us absurd, but people believed them and consulted the "witches" again, at great personal risk. If people didn't take the lot books seriously, why did they buy so many of them, including translations in various languages, as happened to Spirito's book? If people didn't take them seriously why were they put on the Index of Forbidden Books in 1559 (for my reference find "1559" below)?
All cartomancy, even with "occult" meanings attached to the card, is a matter of the random drawing of lots. That is what "drawing straws" is. That is what buying a lottery ticket is. That is what getting a "hand" in a card game is. And that is what laying down cards face down from a thoroughly shuffled deck is.
Drawing the lot at random is a necessary ingredient for it to be divination. It is what allows the divinity to direct the selection, as opposed to the human agent. In Book One of On Divination, Cicero puts the argument for the power of divination by lots into the mouth of his brother Quintius. Here is a passage from I. 18 (translation by David Wardle, 2007):
quae tamen ductae ut in rem apte cadant, fieri credo posse divinitus. quorum omnium interpretes, ut grammatici poetarum, proxime ad eorum, quos interpretantur, divinationem videntur accedere.For "philologists" the other translation has "scholars", which seems to make more sense as interpreters of poets. Here I think "lots we are told sprang form the earth" fits, as a well-known example, ones at the oracle/shrine of Praeneste, which he describes in similar terms and mentions by name in Book II of the same "On Divination".
The lot itself is not to be despised, if it also has the sanction of antiquity, as in the case of those lots which we are told sprang from the earth. I believe, however, that under divine influence it may happen that they can be drawn so as to fall appropriately. Those who interpret all these things seem to approach very closely to the divine intention of those they interpret, just as philologists do for poets.
Two centuries after Cicero, the Platonic philosopher Apuleius, in On the God of Socrates, a Latin work found by the humanists at Monte Casino and printed with the other works associated with him in 1469, enlarged on that passage in the Apology. The Apuleius, published by Conrad Sweynheyn and Arnold Pannartz, was one of the first books printed in Italy. Here is a modern translation of the relevant passage (The Unknown Socrates, translated by William Musgrave Calder, p. 256, in Google Books):
The Greeks call them daemons, and between those who dwell on earth and those who dwell in heaven they act as couriers of prayers from here and of gifts from there .... Through these same powers, as Plato avers in the Symposium, all revelations, the various marvels of the mages, and all kinds of predictions are conducted. In fact, from their number designated individuals attend to matters according to their given sphere of influence: fashioning dreams, dividing entrails, controlling birds of good omen, training birds of ill omen, inspiring prophets, hurling thunderbolts, shaking clouds, and all the rest of the phenomena by which we know the future.Somehow the gods knew the future, and sometimes, if asked in the right way, they would share some of this knowledge with the humans concerned, via daemons. Although Apuleius does not mention lots here, the same principle would readily apply to them: by guiding one's hand, they could communicate what they saw in the future to someone in the present.
If it weren't random, it wouldn't count as divination: it would be a trick of some sort. Apuleius in the Golden Ass, Book 9 Ch. 8, printed in the same volume as his other essay, described a group of scoundrels calling themselves "eunuchs". Standards must have been much relaxed by his time, because there are no prayers or purification. What is fraudulent in this example is not the drawing of lots as such, but rather the particular method he describes (I give the Adlington translation of 1556 as revised in 1905):
Sorte unica pro casibus pluribus enotata consulentes de rebus variis plurimos ad hunc modum cavillantur. Sors haec erat: Ideo coniuncti terram proscindunt boves, ut in futurum laeta germinent sata.Another translation (by Joel C. Reihan, p. 182, on Google Books) has:
..they had one lot wherein was written this cheating answer, which they gave for every inquiry, thus: "The oxen tied and yoked together, /Do plough the ground to the intent that it may bring forth her increase."
They had one single response for all the lots they drew from, fit for a wide range of circumstances, and in this way they hoodwink the wide range of all those who came to consult with them about various matters. This was the response: "For this the team of oxen plough the furrowed earth, / So fertile fields of grain may sprout in times to come."Or as Robert Graves put it in his rather free translation: "Yoke the oxen, plough the land, /High the golden grain will stand."
Either there was only one object used as a lot (pebble, piece of wood, etc.), or they wrote the same verse on all of them. Then if a man came inquiring if he should marry, he was advised to take up the yoke of matrimony and he would beget many children. If it was a business trip, he was told to yoke up his animals and expect much profit. If it was a soldier after bandits, he was advised to put the necks of his enemies under the yoke, that he might profit richly from the spoils. And if he was a farmer, the literal meaning would apply. This is a good example of how a saying on a lot can fit many questions, but it is not divination, because there is no opportunity for the gods to communicate their will by this means, given that there is only one choice. (These two sources, Cicero and Apuleius, are discussed in more detail in "Sorte unica pro casibus pluribus enotata: Literary Texts and Lot Inscriptions as Sources for Ancient Kleromancy", by Christiano Grottanelli, in Mantike: Studies in Ancient Divination, edited by Sarah Iles Johnston and Peter T. Struck, 2005.)
I would also ask, regarding Dummett's claim that the lot-book "could not be taken seriously" e, why does that make it not count as cartomancy? In the next chapter Dummett quotes Etteilla as not taking his own method seriously in 1770 (p. 468f):
Even if he doesn't take it seriously, however, it is still cartomancy. In fact, people these days usually don't take tarot-reading seriously at first. It is when a prediction has turned out to be (or seem to be) uncannily true that someone takes it seriously. It was already cartomancy before the person took it seriously, however.Il primo accenno all’uso divinatorio dei tarocchi si trova nella prima edizione del libro Etteilla, ou manière de se récréer avec un jeu de cartes del 1770. Questo è il primo di molti volumi e trattati scritti da un indovino di mestiere che si chiamava Etteilla. Il Etteilla descrive l’uso di un mazzo normale francese di trentadue carte più una carta supplementare per una tecnica di « cartonomanzia» (cartomanzia) — termine questo coniato da Ettella. Verso la fine del libro egli dice: «ci sono molti metodi di divertirsi con la divinazione... fra quelli più in voga sono i tarocchi,... i fondi di caffè, la chiara d’uovo» 1. Questa osservazione è omessa nelle edizioni successive (1773, 1782, 1791). A quel tempo Ettiella non prendeva la divinazione molto sul serio, ma solo come un modo di ‘divertirsi’. Il passo attesta tuttavia l’esistenza in Francia di una pratica di divina- [end of 468] zione per mezzo dei tarocchi. Nella stessa epoca fioriva indipendentemente a Bologna una pratica simile in cui venivano impiegate trentacinque carte del Tarocco bolognese 2.
(The first reference to the use of tarot for divination is in the first edition of the book Etteilla, ou maniere de se récréer avec un jeu de cartes, 1770. This is the first of many books and treatises written by a fortune-teller by profession who called himself Etteilla. Etteilla describes the use of a standard deck of thirty French cards plus an additional card, for a technique of 'cartonomanzia' (cartomancy) - a term coined by this Ettiella. Towards the end of the book he says, "there are many ways to entertain oneself with divination... among the most popular are tarot,... coffee grounds, egg whites" 1. This observation is omitted in subsequent editions (1773, 1782, 1791). At that time Etteilla did not take divination very seriously, but only as a form of 'fun'. The passage, however, attests to the existence in France of a practice of divination [end of 453] by means of tarot cards. In the same period a similar practice flourished independently in Bologna in which thirty-five cards of the Bolognese Tarot were employed 2.
___________
1. Etteilla, Amsterdam, 1770, p. 73-4.
2. See M. Pratesi, ‘Tarot bolonais et cartomancie’, L’As de Trefle, n. 37, May1989, pp. 10-11.
There are degrees of seriousness. Oner reason Etteilla might have put "s'amuser" in his title might have been because he didn't want people committing crimes, like suicide, or other serious, irrevocable acts in the event of a particular reading. Although the cards may not lie, there is always a chance of error in interpretation--taking a metaphor literally, for example. On the far side of seriousness, I myself take even Chinese fortune-cookies seriously; they have good things to say, and for all I know, my Guardian Angel is speaking to me through them.
Another reason for "s'amuser" in the title was probably to get the book past the censor. That books on cartomancy weren't being published in most countries then probably has to do with the Index's prohibition on lot books. Etteilla's book involves interpreting a bunch of cards drawn by lot.
Dummett gives other reasons for not considering the procedure in the book he summarizes cartomancy. All it does, he says, is "distribution of probabilities". If by that he means that it is a random-number generator, that is precisely what Etteilla’s method of card drawing is, too.Etteilla, too, considers pairs of cards; they are not always the sum of their parts. To find out the meaning, one has to look in a book of instructions, or have memorized it. The book is part of Etteilla’s procedure, too, as well as most procedures for card-reading since.
This is not to say that either Etteilla’s method or this book have anything to do with the occult, i.e. hidden symbolism connecting the macrocosm and the microcosm. I know that Etteilla says his method is "haute science", "Cabala", "Egyptian wisdom", etc., but in fact he gives no justification of his keywords in such terms; it is just window-dresssing. It is possible that at some point in the past his keywords were inspired by some system, but if so Etteilla does not know it,
That at last we have a system that is "magical" on its surface--mysterious images, and keywords that seem to come out of nowhere--is merely a sign of the times. It is now permissible, in Paris of the 1770s and 1780s, to write and distribute such books. (I am not sure whether it was permitted to actually print them; Etteilla's seem to have been done in Amsterdam.)
It is similarly possible that the verses in the lot book were inspired by some system; for that one would have to look at their content in the light of various philosophical writings. The monks of the Middle Ages didn't copy many philosophical works from the Roman world, but they did preserve numerous books of adages. However many of them simply seem made up for the occasion.
The question seems to me not that of whether the user of the book is an occultist, but rather whether it is cartomancy, using Etteilla as our standard. That there is no apparent symbolic relationship between the triplet and what is depicted on the corresponding pair of cards is true of the Etteilla’s interpretations of pairs of number cards, too.
Dummett allows that single cards, too, were interpreted by means of lot-books. The “Losbücher” were designed originally for dice. One was entitled Eyn loszbuch Ausz Karten der gemacht, first printed in Mainz between 1505 and 1510. He observes (p. 117):
But Etteilla's cartomancy in fact does use random number generation: cards are shuffled and laid out in a way that gives every card an equal probability. The result is then a "keyword" for each of five cards. The difference is that the keyword is printed right on the card, and that losbücher do not appear to have asked their readers to spin the ponter five times. That would have required some integration of the verses into a single narrative, which the losbücher didn’t encourage.Il tipo molto primitivo di pratica di oracoli esemplificato da questo libro non è la cartomanzia ma l’uso di un Losbuch: si conoscono molti altri Losbücher dell’epoca e tutti funzionano allo stesso modo, facendo ruotare un disco con indicatore, ma la maggior parte non è basata sul mazzo di carte ma su qualche altra classe di oggetti, per esempio animali 5 Ci troviamo di fronte solo a un metodo semplicistico di divinazione attraverso il ruotare di un disco e la consultazione di una pagina su un libro; il fatto che, in questo particolare esempio, si utilizzino carte da gioco per illustrare gli oracoli non ha alcun significato particolare.
(The very primitive type of practice of oracles exemplified by this book is not cartomancy but the use of a Losbuch: many other Losbücher of the time are known, and they all work the same way, by rotating a disk with indicator, but most are not based on the deck of cards, but on some other class of objects, for example animals 5. We are faced with only a simplistic method of divination through the rotation of a disk and the consultation of a page of a book; the fact that, in this particular example, playing cards are used to illustrate the oracles has no particular meaning.
___________________
5. Hellmut Rosenfeld has shown, in fact, that the verses in the Mainz Losbuch are adaptations from one published in Basel in 1485, in which fifty-two oracles were illustrated by different animals; he believes that the book of Mainz may represent a re-edition of one published in Ulm. See H. Rosenfeld, 'Losbücher vom Ende des 15. Jahrhunderts', Börsenblatt fiir den deutschen Buchhandel, Vol 17, 1961, p. 2381-6 or Archiv fiir Geschichte des Buchwesens, Vol IV, 1961, p. 1117-26, and 'Das Mainzer Kartenlosbuch von 1510 und die Spielkartentradition', Gutenberg-Jahrbuch, 1962, pp. 212-8. For a facsimile of the Losbuch animals, cf. Losbuch: ein scherzhaftes Wahrsagebuch gedruckt von Martin Flach um Basel in 1485 by Ernst Voullième, Berlin, 1925. In the exhibition catalog of playing cards at the Albertina in Vienna in 1974, entitled Spielkarten: Kunst und ihre Geschichte in Mitteleuropa, p. 229, Dr. Fritz Koreny believes that the Mainz Losbuch is to be dated between 1495 and 1500.)
Any collection of 32, 36, 52, or 78 numbers, or method of generating such numbers, will do just as well, as long as one has the interpretive key. Given a key, dice with the required number of faces would work just as well. In this regard cards merely have the advantage of having more possible numbers to use. In this they are no different from many other types of divination, geomancy for instance. There is no relationship that I can tell between the names and meanings of the geomantic figures and what they look like. To generate them, some books suggest that it is not necessary to poke holes in the ground; flipping a coin four times will do as well. Geomancy is listed in Agrippa’s Three Books on Occult Philosophy, along with a few other fortune-telling devices that depend on random pattern generation: looking at flames in a fire (pyromancy), patterns in water (hydromancy), a random word or sentence on a random page (bibliomancy).
In many cases in Etteilla’s instructions, there is no discernible relationship between a keyword and what is on the card. In other cases there is, but it is just the “manifest” meaning, like “Marriage” for a card with a man, a woman and a priest in between, or a variation on it, e.g. “love affair” on the same card when reversed. The art comes in making anappropriate narrative out of these keywords.
In the eyes of many and of ancient tradition, random number generation, when done by a special procedure by special people, was not just random. When the Greeks cast lots under the walls of Troy (in the Iliad) to see who would be sent on a dangerous mission, it was a means of determining the will of the gods, and of bringing the gods into their midst. Even today, people open the Bible randomly, put their finger on a random verse, and declare that they were guided by the Holy Spirit.
The ritual aspect of the procedure is also important, as long drawn out as people could stand. After all, when a priest did a certain lengthy procedure with wine and bread, he was bringing down a certain power into these substances that involved a conditional prediction about the life to come. The macrocosm worked in mysterious ways, and ritual is important.
Presumably by “occult” Dummett has in mind someone who knows books of the sort that Decker cites—Pythagoran, Hermetic, astrological, Kabbalist--and has applied them to a procedure with cards. Someone using lot books is not using such books, unless the inventor of the verses did so. But this part is missing from Etteilla, too, for all his talk of “occult sciences”—and from Waite's Pictorial Key and all the Little White Books of today. By Dummett’s criteria, there is no evidence of cartomancy before Levi, and only a few people after him. That seems to me an absurd view..
Dummett argues that the use of random-number methods proves that there was no method of divination using cards (p. 115):
But divination was always by random-appearing events, as I have said: the flicker of flames in a fire, the holes made by a stick in the earth, the number of birds flying overhead, one’s time and date of birth, and so on.L’esistenza stessa del libro è di per sé prova che non esisteva a quel tempo una consuetudine di divinazione con le carte; se ci fosse stata, infatti, l’autore di un tale lavoro avrebbe fatto qualche tentativo di adeguarvisi, anzi ché far ricorso a un metodo così puerile.
(The very existence of the book itself is evidence that there did not exist at that time a practice of divination with cards; if there were, in fact, the author of such a work would have made some attempt to adapt it, rather than making recourse to so childish a method.)
There may have been some method of adapting Pythagorean, astrological, and hermetic texts to a deck of 78 cards, some of which, unlike dice, had pictures on them. But if so, it probabily involved some intuition as well, as these methods could produce a variety of results. Over time the most relevant and helpful associations could be found. It takes time to develop something that people will believe. Also, propounding such methods very likely would get a humanist in trouble, because it is too much like magic. The practice of magic, in the sense of bringing down occult forces to accomplish certain deeds outside the normal system of causation, was heretical, except for ordained priests in ordained ways. For the Church, the only approved methods of divination, and magic, were on its terms. The Eucharist, for example, was magic, and the priest was a magician. An example of divination is the opening the Bible randomly to a certain page and letting one's finger drop on a certain verse. Even then, it had to be interpreted by the supervising pries.Otherwise only witches practiced such magic, and witchcraft was punishable by burning.
Dummett continues (p. 117):
1690 is just one year after England passed a Bill of Rights guaranteeing freedom of the press except in case of national security. It was finally safe to print such a book. Whether the meanings are on the cards or in a book is irrelevant. It is the procedure that matters. Putting the procedure on the cards is simply a matter of convenience. To follow Etteilla’s method, even though the keywords were printed on the cards, also required, for best results, consulting a book, for "synonyms and related meanings". Later, when variations on the Tarot de Marseille were used instead of Etteilla's cards, the keywords--a list of them--were put in the Little White Books instead of on the cards.Alla fine del XVII secolo fu prodotto in Inghilterra un mazzo particolare al solo scopo di predire la sorte: la più antica data di pubblicazione pervenutaci è il 1690, che è, con ogni probabilità, quella dell’originale, ad opera di Dorman Newman. Le incisioni per questo mazzo furono in seguito rilevate dal fabbricante John Lenthall che ne fece di nuove per alcune carte; Lenthall divenne apprendista di William Warter nel 1699, suo socio nel 1708 e ottenne [end of 117] l’esclusiva proprietà della ditta nel 1709. Lenthall è famoso per la produzione di svariati mazzi istruttivi, parecchi dei quali erano in realtà ristampe di mazzi precedenti, inclusi alcuni ad opera di Warter, e il suo nome ha finito per essere collegato a tutti questi mazzi, fra cui quello per divinazione che, negli studi sulle carte da gioco, è identificato come ‘mazzo Lenthall’ 6. Ciascuna delle carte di questo mazzo presentava, su un pannello superiore, uno dei segni di seme del sistema francese e un numero romano dal I al XIII, insieme a un nome (Pharoh, Wat Tyler, Dido, Merlin, Dr Faustus, ecc.). Il corpo di ciascuna carta presentava un disegno collegato unicamente al suo uso per predire la sorte; come giustamente osserva Detlef Hoffmann, ci troviamo essenzialmente di fronte a una trasposizione al mazzo delle carte del metodo proposto dal libro di Marcolino, dal momento che le domande e le risposte e, in forma enigmatica, le istruzioni intermedie sono stampate sulle carte stesse 7. Questo rappresenta un progresso verso la pratica di [end of 118] predire il futuro con normali carte da gioco, poiché svincola l'utente dalla necessità di consultare un libro: ma non è ancora un passo molto significativo poiché rimane essenziale l’uso di un mazzo di carte del tutto particolare. Non ho trovato alcuna traccia di divinazione con carte normali, non specificamente disegnate per questo scopo, prima del XVIII secolo 8.
(At the end of the seventeenth century a special pack was produced in England for the sole purpose of fortune-telling: the oldest publication date that has come down is 1690, which is, in all probability, that of the original, the work of Dorman Newman. The engravings for this deck were later taken over by the manufacturer John Lenthall who made it new for some cards; Lenthall was apprenticed to William Warter in 1699, his partner in 1708, and obtained [end of 117] the exclusive proprietorship of the company in 1709. Lenthall is famous for the production of a variety of instructional decks; several of them were actually reprints of earlier decks, including some by Warter, and his name has come to be attached to all these decks, including one for divination that, in studies on playing cards, is identified as a ' Lenthall pack' 6. Each of the cards in this deck appeared on a top panel, one of the suit signs of the French system and a Roman numeral from I to XIII, together with a name (Pharaoh, Wat Tyler, Dido, Merlin, Dr. Faustus, etc.). The body of each card had a picture that connected only to its use for predicting one’s fate; as rightly pointed out by Detlef Hoffmann, we are essentially faced with a transposition to a deck of cards of the proposed method from the book of Marklinen, since the questions and answers and, in enigmatic form, the intermediate instructions, are printed on the cards themselves 7. This represents a step towards the practice of predicting the future with ordinary playing cards, since it frees the user from the need to consult a book, but it is still a very significant step because it remains essential to the use of a deck of cards of its own. I have found no trace of divination with normal cards, not specifically designed for this purpose, before the eighteenth century 8
He continues:
It can certainly be conceded that the cards were not designed for divination. But we already know that the cards were invented in a milieu in which almost anything was used to predict the future, including cards. Given that everything else was used to predict the future, and that even the rulers were very superstitious—Filippo Visconti, Ercole d’Este, Ludovico Maria Sforza, Bianca Maria Sforza (but not, to all appearances, her husband)—what really needs to be explained is why, out of all the methods of divination, playing cards, including tarot, wouldn’t have been used, too.Ora, qualcuno potrebbe dire: può darsi che le cose stiano così, ma i tarocchi non sono carte normali e il mazzo dei tarocchi potrebbe essere stato ideato per la divinazione, anche se ci vollero altri trecento anni prima che a qualcuno venisse in mente di utilizzare, per questo scopo, il normale mazzo. Al contrario: si cominciò ad usare il mazzo dei tarocchi per la cartomanzia simultaneamente alle carte normali; il primo accenno a un tale uso in Francia è del 1770, e a Bologna della stessa data circa, o forse di uno o due decenni innanzi 9. Da quanto si è detto in precedenza, risulta chiaro che il mazzo dei [end of 119] tarocchi non fu inventato in un ambiente in cui era pratica consueta usare carte di qualsiasi tipo per predire la sorte. Pertanto, se fosse stato ideato per un uso così totalmente nuovo, fra i numerosi riferimenti ad esso nel XV e, soprattutto, nel XVI secolo, ce ne sarebbero sicuramente stati molti con allusioni a tale uso. Invece, con un’unica eccezione, quando pur si accenna all’uso dei tarocchi, se ne parla come di strumenti da gioco proprio come nel caso delle carte normali.
(Now, someone might say, it may be that this is so, but the tarot cards are not normal and the tarot deck may have been designed for divination, although it took another three hundred years before someone had the idea to use the normal deck for this purpose. On the contrary, they began to use the deck of tarot cards for divination simultaneously with normal ones; the first mention of such a use is in France in 1770, and Bologna about the same date, or perhaps one or two decades before 9. From what has been said above, it is clear that the tarot pack was not invented in an environment where it was standard practice to use cards of any type to predict one’s fate. Therefore, if it had been designed for use as a totally new among the many references to it in the fifteenth and, above all, in the sixteenth century, there would certainly have been many allusions to such use. Instead, with one exception, even when it mentions the use of tarot cards, it is spoken of as tools to play just as in the case of normal cards.)
My hypothesis is that card-reading—specifically the art of interpreting cards with pictures on them and forming narratives from groups of cards with and without pictures--unlike other methods of divination, was associated with witchcraft. Cards were new; so were witches, as a mass phenomenon. At first the Inquisitors probably didn’t even ask about cards, because they used manuals with standard questions. Since medieval heresy trials hadn’t asked about cards, they didn’t come up, until spontaneously they did. And when a question is asked, the right answer will be forthcoming one way or another
Lotbooks, I theorize, were tolerated at first, because the cards themselves were clearly just numbers to be looked up in a book. No "art" was involved, of the sort required to interpret pictures symbolically and combine mysteriously derived meanings derived (even if they were what someone happened to think of) into a single narrative predicting someone’s future. It was tied to special people, not just anyone who could read a book.In order to interpret picture cards and combinations of cards, imagination or “intuition” was requireed, as though summoned up from an unknown, i.e. occult, source. This method applied to future events is ominous at least, witchcraft at most.
Soon enough, as I have said, in 1559, divination books of all kinds were put on the Index. As I recall, the most common types were even listed: geomancy, pyromancy, chiromancy, hydromancy. These are all types talked about in the Greco-Latin classics and so there would be no harm done in publicizing them. Cartomancy is not there; but there is an “and others of that sort”, at the end, in a Spanish author quoted by Caldwell. There is also an 18th century note that applies this type of thinking to the Index,, by Apostolo Zeno in his posthumous (d. 1750) Annotazioni to the Biblioteca della eloquenza italiana of Giusto Fontanini ((I get this quote from the article “Le Risposte di Leonora Bianca: Un gioco di divinazione del tardo Rinascimento” by Eleonora Carinci, p. 170 (http://books.google.com/books?id=w6Kyui ... ca&f=false). Carinci’s main theme is a lot-book published by one Leonora Bianca, which Gianmaria Mazzuchelli in Scrittori d'Italia suggested might be the pseudonym of Aurora Bianca d’Este, a vernacular poet in Venice at that time (but not listed in any d’Este genealogy, according to Carinci, p. 171). Bianca’s book combines the 28 Mansions of the Moon, the 16 geomantic images, and a journey to Dante’s Hell, in order to get rather whimsical answers to the usual questions). Here is the quote from Zeno (p. 170):
Father Menestier (d. 1705) is best known these days for having declared the “Charles VI” tarot to be the work of the artist Gringonneur in 1392. Carinci observes, about the condemned books (p. 175):Tutte queste baje non meritavano che se ne parlasse, ma l’esenipio di Monsignore mi ha dato eccitamento. Il Padre Menestrier (l.c. pag. 407) condanna a ragione tutte queste sorte di giuochi, asserendo, che in verun modo non possono esser permessi, non solo a riguardo di tali indovinamenti, i quah sono mere fanfaluche, e chimere, ma perche in esse si fa abuso di cose sante, impiegandovi i nomi de’ Profeti, per dar mano a bugiarde risposte in quisiti vani, e profani; e pero a ragione tutti questi hbri di Ventura e di Sorti furono condannati dall’indice Tridentino (in Fontanini 1753, 190).
(All these below do not deserve to be spoken of, but the example of Monsignor gave me excitement. Father Ménestrier (l.c. p. 407) rightly condemns all this sort of games, asserting that in truth they cannot be allowed, not only in respect of such divination, which is mere balderdash, and chimaras, but because in essence they abuse holy things, impugning the names of the Prophets, giving into the hands of liars responses to vain and profane questions; so it is with reason that all these books of Fortune and Fates were condemned by the index of Trent (in Fontanini 1753, 190).
In other words, not only is divination offensive, but the use of images of the prophets to do so. Tarot is of course more of the same, with its images of Pope, Popess, and Angel. I suspect that behind this prohibition is the idea that images have power, especially sacred images (think of all the votive images, for example); lot-books misuse and degrade that power.Se prendiamo in considerazione gli altri esempi di libri di Sorte che ho citato all’inizio, possiamo notare che nel libro di Spirito i responsi vengono dati dai Profeti Biblici (motivo principale della messa all’Indice, oltre che per il riferimento alla divinazione)...
(If we look at the other examples of books that I mentioned at the beginning [she is referring to Italian lot-books of the first half of the 16th century], we can see that in the book of Spirito the responses are given by the Biblical Prophets (the main reason to put [it] on the Index, as well as the reference to divination)...
But that is not to say that in Italy cartomancy did not develope further in the interim, in isolated areas where people and confessors could be trusted not to tell the Inquisition, or in closed groups such as the gypsies, who were always quick to pick up some marketable and portable skill (and who arrived in Italy at the right time). We have no way of knowing. All we know is that the various traces we have of non-gaming uses of cards when put together come close to what we see two centuries later.
Suddenly in 1730 England a method of card reading for normal cards is described in a stage play called Jack the Gyant Killer, as Ross relates (http://www.academia.edu/6477311/Brief_h ... cartomancy). It involves picking a significator (representing the questioner) and then spreading out the cards in rows looking to see where varous cards are in relation to it and the four kings. Spades is a suit of sorrow, the others not, just as for de Mellet in 1781.
Then in around 1750 (Caldwell’s estimate) in Bologna there are some words associated with normal cards, and in 1770 Etteilla in Paris presents a fully developed method, mentioning tarot as well. In 1772 or so a woman is arrested in Marseille in conneciton with the tarot. In the 1780s, Etteilla presents his system, which is still the basis of most cartomancy books. In Etteilla’s books there is no clue to how he arrived at the keywords he did. There is only information about what one needs to know in addition to the keywords in order to tell a proper fortune. I myself find it hard to believe that Etteilla made them all up himself, precisely because they have been so enduring. Even Waite bases himself on them in 1909.
What is new in Etteilla is that he does not use just one card, or pairs, or the whole pack, but certain specific patterns, “spreads”, that are pictured in his book (The BNF has unhelpfully not included these layouts in their reproduction of the book, but they are described in the text.) He then develops a narrative for the person’s future based on the spread. He says he is the first to do such combinations of cards.
FOLENGO
I have my doubts that Ettella invented the practice of reading cards in combination, because the English stage play also reads a spread, if in a line. Moreover, there is the example of Folengo’s tarocchi sonnets, which has much in common with Etteilla’s practice. One of Etteilla's "spreads", probably the most popular, was simply to lay down five cards and construct a narrative in relation to the questioner. Actually, he advised laying down several sets of five cards, in case nothing relevant came out of the first five. Groups of five also show up in the Spanish Inquisition records cited by Caldwell:*the reading was done from the characteristics of the first five cards shown" one early 19th century record shows; in the 17th century "cards were arranged in five rows" (http://www.academia.edu/6477311/Brief_h ... cartomancy).
One difference between Folengo and Etteilla is that Folengo does not use keywords; he uses the usual titles of the cards, plus some associated words connected with that title as illustrated on the card. For example, for "Love", he has "Cupid" as wekk; for "Fire" he has "Torches" as well. However some of Etteilla’s keywords are names of the cards, too: Justice, Temperance, Force, Prudence, Fool, Marriage, Fortune. Others are not far off: Enlightenment, for his Sun card, Betrayal for his Hermit (he is anti-clerical), Irresistable Force ("Force Majeur") for his Devil. For both Folengo and Etteilla, five such words, plus other associated words, are used as stimulus-words to say something about the future of the person who randomly drew these cards.
It is not a prediction, except in the most general sense: to a certain man involved in politics, don’t count on the Pope to fight the Turks; to a naive man who is susceptible to being taken advantage of by women, he gives a warning, he urges a shy woman to actively seek happiness, and so on. It seems to me that Dummett is quite wrong in assuming that the Pope's action does not "touch" Falcone. We are to assume, I think, that he is a man in government or the military.
Dummett finds the comparison of wanting. He begins by quoting and summarizing Folengo. In what follows, I mostly use Anne Mullaney's translation of Folengo. at http://www.folengo.com/Chaos%20with%20English%20DRAFT%20Feb%2017%202014.pdf. She translates the Italian word “sorte” sometimes as "chance", sometimes as "fate" or "destiny". Since in Italian it is always the same word, I have put that word in brackets. "Chance" by itself does not work. The Italian word“sorte” does not exclude the meaning “fate, destiny” while the English word “chance” does. "Fate" or "destiny" excludes "chance". Probably the word "lot" is the best overall translation; it covers everything. The understanding of this word “sorte” is of key importance, which Dummett realizes. I use the word "triumphs" to translate Folengo's "trionfi", as I have been throughout this blog. Here is Dummett’s summary of Folengo (p. 120f):
L’unica eccezione è fornita da un passo singolare nel dialogo II Caos del Triperuno di Merlin Cocai (pseudonimo di Teofilo Folengo (1491-1544)). Questo libro, pubblicato a Venezia nel 1527, è molto strano nell’insieme. Il passo comincia con Limerno che parla:
Limerno continua recitando il suo sonetto sopra Giuberto, che ha estratto i trionfi Giustizia, Angiolo, Diavolo, Foco (che equi* vale alla Torre) e Amore. Il tema del sonetto è che il fuoco d’amore, anche se pare essere un Angelo, è in realtà il Diavolo «che la Giustizia spinse del ciel fora». La morale è che «amor di donna è ardor d’un spirto nero... ch’è fraude e non Giustizia ».:... heri Giuberto e Focilla, Falcone e Mirtella mi condussero in una camera secretamente, ove, trovati ch’ebbeno le carte lusorie de trionfi, quelli a sorte fra loro si divisero; e volto a me, ciascuno di loro la sorte propria de li toccati trionfi mi espose, pregandomi che sopra quelli un sonetto gli componessi.
Triperuno: Assai più duro soggetto potrebbevi sotto la sorte che sotto lo beneplacito del poeta accascare.
Limerno: E questa tua ragione qualche bona iscusazione appresso gli uomini intelligenti recarammi, se non così facili, come la natura del verso richiede, saranno. Ora vegnamo dunque primeramente a la ventura ovvero sorte di Giuberto; dopoi la quale, né più né meno, voglioti lo sonetto di quella recitare, ove potrai diligentemente considerare tutti li detti trionfi, a ciascaduno sonetto singularmente sortiti, essere quattro fiate nominati sì come lo aiuto de le maggiori figure si comprende.
Nello stesso modo Limerno recita il secondo sonetto, «nel [end of 120] quale la sorte di Focilla contienesi»; la loda come «una temperata forte e bella donna, che di splendor le Stelle passa», ma che «la instabil Rota tien umile e bassa». Tuttavia, quando Limerno viene «a l’oscurissimo soggetto de li disordinati trionfi di Falcone», declama un sonetto che non tocca Falcone in nessun modo, ma invece censura il Papa Clemente VII (1523-34) perché non ha combattuto i Turchi (rappresentati, nelle carte, dalla Luna). Viene infine il turno di Mirtella, il cui sonetto è un memento mori: «Morte, su’l Carro Imperatrice, affretta/ mandar in polve nostra umana prole»10.
(The only exception is provided by a unique passage in the dialogue II Caos del Triperuno by Merlin Cocai (pseudonym of Theophilus Folengo (1491-1544)). This book, published in Venice in 1527, is very strange as a whole. The passage begins with Limerno, who says:
Limerno...yesterday Giuberto, Focilla, Falcone and Mirtellasecretly led me into a room where, since they’d found playing cards of trumps [Tarot], they dealt these according to chance [sorte] among themselves, and having turned toward me, each one of them explained to me the specific destiny [sorte] of the trumps received, entreating me to write a sonnet about [start of p. 139] them for each person. You might receive a much harder subject by chance [sorte, lot], than by the choice of the poet.
Triperuno. A much harder subject could fall to you under fate [sorte] than under the request of the poet.
Limerno: And this reason of yours will earn me good excuses from intelligent people, if the sonnets will not be so effortless (as the nature of verse requires). So then now let us come first to the future or rather the destiny of Giuberto, after which, I want to recite no more or less, the sonnet of that [destiny] to you, where you will be able to diligently consider all the trump cards mentioned, sorted one by one to each sonnet, to be named four times so that with the help of the major figures [Mullaney has "Arcana", which is surely what is meant, but that is not the literal translation] it is understood:
In the last quotation I have departed from Mullaney; she has "The Empress hurries to send Death on the Chariot..." Hers makes more sense;; minedoes not add the definite article to "Empress" and follows the Italian word order and punctuation.. Footnote 10 is the page reference in the works of Folengo. Fortunately the whole text is online at , Here is Dummett’s assessment (p. 121):Limerno continues reciting his sonnet on Giuberto, who drew the triumphs Justice, Angiolo, Devil, Foco (Fire, equivalent to the Tower) and Love. The theme of the sonnet is that the fire of love, even if it seems to be an angel, is actually the Devil, "which Justice pushed out of Heaven" The moral is that "Loving a woman is the ferver of a black spirit, ... which is deception and and not Justice." "Black Spirit" counts as one of the five titles he is repeating in the various stanzas; it is another word for "Devil".
In the same way Limorno reads the second sonnet, [end of 120] “which contains the chance [sorte] of Focilla "; he praises her as "a temperate, strong and bautiful woman, who surpasses the stars in splendour," but whom "the fickle Wheel keeps humble and low." However, when Limorno comes to "the obscure subject of the scattered triumphs of Falcone," he recites a sonnet which does not touch Falcone in any way, but instead criticizes Pope Clement VII (1523-34) because he has not fought the Turks (represented, in the cards, by the Moon). Finally, he turns to Mirtella, whose sonnet is a memento mori: “Death, on its Chariot Empress, hurries to turn our human race into dust ” 10.
Are these sonnets not cartomancy? What makes them so, I think, is the setting. The cards have been drawn at random. The group of cards each gets display, to one with wisdom, a pattern. They suggest a certain "fortune" that applies to each. This meaningful coincidence is unexplainable by natural means.Benché il Folengo usi la parola «sorte», è chiaro che il passo non descrive un metodo sistematico di leggere il carattere o l’avvenire di un individuo. Nessun significato esoterico è attribuito ad alcuna delle carte: rappresentano semplicemente i soggetti di cui portano i nomi. Infatti, la scelta dei cinque o sei trionfi non determina l’analisi del carattere dell’individuo in questione: tutti sono incorporati nel sonetto relativo, ma potrebbero essere stati incorporati altrettanto facilmente in un altro sonetto di contenuto del tutto diverso. I sonetti non presentano in realtà analisi di caratteri individuali: i loro temi sono completamente generali, e uno dei quattro sonetti è di carattere politico. La fantasia di Folengo è solo un espediente per introdurre quattro sonetti, ciascuno basato su una scelta di trionfi, insieme con un quinto che menziona tutti i trionfi. Questi sonetti formano insieme una variazione del tipo di versi chiamati ‘tarocchi appropriati’, del quale abbiamo parecchi esempi del XVI secolo e dei secoli successivi.
(Although Folengo uses the word "sorte" [lot, fate, destiny], it is clear that the passage does not describe a systematic method of reading the character or future of an individual. No esoteric meaning is attributed to any of the cards: they are simply the subjects of which they bear the names. In fact, the choice of five or six triumphs does not determine the analysis of the character of the individual in question: all are incorporated in the related sonnet, but they could just as easily be incorporated in another sonnet of a different content altogether. The sonnets are not actually analysis of individual characters: their themes are completely general, and one of four sonnets is of a political nature. The fantasy of Folengo is just a gimmick to introduce four sonnets, each based on a choice of triumphs, along with a fifth mentions that trumps all. These sonnets together make a change in the type of verse called 'Tarot appropriati ', which we have several examples of the sixteenth century and the following centuries.
They are words of advice, based on the individual circumstances of four people, each one incorporating the titles of the relevant cards. I take the man to whom the sonnet about the pope and popess is directed to be in politics. Limerno is predicting that, if current practice continues, the Pope will not fight the Turks but rather continue fighting other Christians. In the other one, a particular man is likely to fall victim to female wiles if he is not careful; in another, a particular woman will find happiness if she actively seeks it. Divination is to be expected from someone whose name is an obvious anagram of Merlin. But divination was against the Christian faith as interpreted then, where sanctions were in fact employed against violators. It doesn't hurt to be ambiguous. we should look at the similarities to Etteilla as well as the differences.
It is true that the words could just as easily be made into a different sonnet. But in this work of fiction, Limerno is characterized as a magician. His name is an anagram for Merlino, who besides being another chararacter is also the name of a famous magician in the Arthurian romances. The cards that magically appeared are interpreted in a wise way, by someone who somehow in touch with divine wisdom. One of the people needs to be warned about being taken advantage of by women, because that is his weakness. Another has to be warned about the hypocrisy of the Pope, because his weakness is there. A woman is cautioned not to let life pass her by. And so on. In this regard it like what an Etteilla-schooled tarot reader does. Behind good card reading is wisdom about life. .
Lot-books are one expression of what in Folengo uses the titles of cards instead of the number on a regular card plus a book. Over time, particularly successful card-readers make particular associations in a particular state of mind; these are then imitated by others, and over the course of time a system develops. At every stage there will likely be more than meets the eye.
The passage in Folengo is useful also for its message about fear of the authorities if one says too much. For the sonnett for Falcone, about the Pope, Folengo in his first edition leaves many words blank, so that the sonnet is less explicit in its criticism. It reads, with the blanks:
My [dear] Europe, when does it ever happen thatthe one part of you, which the traitorous Turk holds,the Pope or the Emperor frees for you, while theyhave the keys in their hands for their [own] Fortune?
Alas, the Traitorous one placesin the hand of.............the honor of ....... ..and maintains ....... furor only against the lilyand not against the Moon.
Since the omitted words will mostly be Pope, Popess, or Emperor, it is not hard to figure out what he is saying. The third edition, included after the first, put the omitted words back in. And actually, "a woman" substitutes for Popess somteimes, "Peter" for Pope sometimes, "Imperial" for Emperor, and he also omitted the name "Marcin", meaning "little Mark", i.e. Venice.Because if the ....... were not a ....... who holds .......Hanging by one foot, I would see
the Moon in the clutches of the eagle.
But these ....... ....... of mine act so, that my Popess
comes to make herself the Moon,
and I want to Hang myself.
Folengo tells us explicitly that fear of the authorities is a factor restraining his pen. Here is what follows the sonnet:
TRIPERUNO: In this sonnet, my Master, you often play the mute.If it is not safe to put in the words "Popess" and "Pope", it is not safe to write clearly about cartomancy.
LIMERNO: It was always praiseworthy.
TRIPERUNO: What?
LIMERNO: The truth...
TRIPERUNO: To confess?
LIMERNO: No, to keep silent.
TRIPERUNO: The reason?
LIMERNO: To circumvent hate.
TRIPERUNO: This hate is of little consequence, if persecution were not to follow it. [Di poco momento è questo odio, se non vi susseguisse la persecutione.]
LIMERNO: However a bridle was found for the mouth. [Però lo freno fu trovato per la bocca.]
The main difference between Etteilla and Folengo is that Etteilla’s examples--I don't know how typical they are of his practice--involve fairly specific predictions (of which we hear the successful ones, of course); Folengo’s do not. They are merely general observations. To have made specific predictions would have been against the Christian faith by putting oneself up as a separate channel to the divine.. Folengo is not about to do that. Other than that, there is no particular system in either, beyond the keywords. It is the use of imagination/intuition grounded in wisdom (which can be folk wisdom as well as any other) and stimulated by the keywords. Etteilla, as I recall, claimed to have predicted the French Revolution. That has nothing to do with a particular individual. It is also something that would not have been hard for an anti-monarchist to do. It is a small step from Folengo to Etteilla, one that would not have had to take 250 years to make.
Etteilla has a fully developed system for 36 cards, at a time when there is much anti-clerical sentiment. It appears out of nowhere; his book explains how to tell fortunes but does not explain the rationae for his system at all. It is the same a few years later with his system for 78 cards. His works give no clue to how he arrived at his system of card-meanings. Either it is obvious (e.g. Justice, Marriage) or it is unknown. I cannot see how it can be other than a system that developed gradually over the years, adding, to be sure, many original contributions, especially for the tarot sequence. That he was first to publish is related to the particular situation in France that eventually allowed Court de Gebelin to be chosen one of the king's censors, that is to say, a liberalization of censorship in his direction.
It most likely did not develop in Paris, because Etteilla cites the examples of people thrown in prison for cartomancy in the 1750s; Ross confirms the same for Strasbourg. Probably they were from somewhere in the South, or they would have known better. Then thanks first to the Enlightenment and then to the Revolution, which for a while absolished censorship, the written record of cartomancy could develop further with a core of followers. Even Etteilla says that his system came from elsewhere, a certain "Alexis Piemontese", descendant of a famous author of a book on folk-medicines that his group of nobles in Naples had tested and found to be effective (see Wikipedia). Interestingly, the French historian of culture Paul Lacroix (aka bibliophile Jacob) talks about another Piemontese fortune teller, who came to Paris in 1494 to make his fortune and did so (https://archive.org/stream/lescartesjou ... g_djvu.txt, p. 324f). Piedmont-Savoy is a likely place for card-reading to have survived, with its isolated valleys full of Waldensian heretics that the Inquisitors never wiped out and with French its language of government.
CONCLUSION
I hypothesize that there was a cartomancy that developed slowly using a system of random number generation but with elements of simple symbolism based on the images presented: e.g. the Devil meant a supernatural evil power, the Pope meant religious authority, and so on. Ross comes to a similar conclusion, but about Spain, after surveying Inquisition records, ending in the early 19th century (http://www.academia.edu/6477311/Brief_h ... cartomancy):
I do not see why the same shouldn't have been true in Italy, perhaps with more participation in the Italian courts early on. The Inquisition records were destroyed in 1788, and probably a good deal else after the imposition of the Index in 1559.Unfortunately the exact details are not given in the records, But we can see that there was a continuously evolving underground tradition among Spanish cartomancers for at least two centuries.
A similar conclusion was reached 150 years ago by Lacroix. I do not cite him as an authority; I only want to use his distinction between "inferior" cartomancy and the sort that came later, with Etteilla. If you read what follows these quotes, you will see that he is no friend to cartomancy or the occult.
Then, after reviewing the lack of evidence of cartomancy in the courts, even that of Catherine de' Medici, he concludes:A quelle époque commence à être en vogue la cartomancie? Cette question ne se résout pas facilement.
Pour ce qui est de la cartomancie inférieure pratiquée dans les foires, on peut, on doit même affirmer qu'elle date juste du jour où les cartes ont été introduites en Europe.
(In what epoch does cartomancy begin to be in vogue? This issue can not be resolved easily,
As regards the lower cartomancy practiced in the fairs, we can, we must even affirm, that it dates properly from the day when the cards were introduced into Europe...
There is also the question of the "superior cartomancy"? Is there anything to it, besides empty talk? I don't mean, did it work? but rather, did anyone work out such an occult system, comparable in some way to that attempted by Levi, Papus, and the Golden Dawn? That is a topic I have developed elsewhere.Ce n'est qu'au siècle dernier, dans le siècle des philosophes, que la cartomancie étend son empire en dehors des chaumières et des cabarets, et que les cartes s'installent sans façon à côté des merveilleuses fioles mises à la mode par Cagliostro.
La révolution française a été favorable à ces envahissements. Jamais on n'a vu les hommes et les femmes tourmentés d'une plus inquiète avidité d'oracles; jamais il ne s'est produit un aussi grand nombre de devins. La baguette de coudrier, les miroirs magiques, tout l'attirail de la sorcellerie était discrédité, et, comme il fallait s'improviser prophète, le jeu de cartes, facile à acquérir, facile à manier, fit fortune.
(t was not until the last century, the century of the philosophers, that cartomancy extends its empire outside the cottages and cabarets, and cards are installed without affectation beside the marvelous vials made fashionable by Cagliostro.
The French Revolution was favorable to these invasions. Never have we seen men and women tormented by a restless avidity for oracles; neve were produced so many soothsayers. The hazel wand, magic mirrors, all the paraphernalia of witchcraft was discredited, and, as was necessary to be an improvised prophet, the deck of cards, easy to learn, easy to handle, made fortunes.
We also have to ask, finally, how much Etteilla differed from those that came before him. In my view very little. It is only in the packaging, a pretended system of hard to understand calculations falsely based on the ancient "science of number" of the Pythagoreans. In my view there is no relation between his calculations and his keywords. That does not mean that there is no relation between his keywords and Pythagoreanism. Either he didn't know it or he found it too simple-minded to use on an educated but gullible public. However this, too, is a hypothesis, based on my initial and imperfect reading of Etteilla's works. It requires further study.
I have a few thoughts, which I relegate to appendices.
APPENDIX ONE: MORE FROM LACROIX OF SIGNIFICANCE TO "INFERIOR DIVINATION"
Although there wasn't a tradition of tarot appropriati in France, they did have the practice of naming their court cards, starting around the time of Charles VII. Here is the relevant page in La Croix's Arts of the Middle ages and Renaissance, English translation from 1474 edition (http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=u ... p;seq=179; ignore the first four and the last four lines on the page):
On the next page he has more: during the time of the Medici queens, they
acquired Italian names; even Louis XIV got in the act, dictating his
preferred names to the card makers.
It strikes me that these names have an allegorical significance. He says "Sans Souci" (No Worries) is a sobriquet that squires acquired when they were proving themselves worthy of knighthood. But if so, why is it the title of a king? "Tromperie" means deception. "En Toi te fie", if Joan of Arc, also suggests a faithful woman. Later there is another dubious queen, this time Persabee, Bathsheba; she at least had an illustrious son. The queen of Hearts is Heleine, doubtless for Helen of Troy. These names represent stereotypical personality types and could easily be adapted to cartomancy.
In fact, these cards are very much as de Mellet describes them (http://le-miroir-alchimique.blogspot.com/2012/03/court-de-gebelin-du-jeu-des-tarots.html, English from J. Karlin, Rhapsodies of the Bizarre with minor corrections):
It strikes me that these names have an allegorical significance. He says "Sans Souci" (No Worries) is a sobriquet that squires acquired when they were proving themselves worthy of knighthood. But if so, why is it the title of a king? "Tromperie" means deception. "En Toi te fie", if Joan of Arc, also suggests a faithful woman. Later there is another dubious queen, this time Persabee, Bathsheba; she at least had an illustrious son. The queen of Hearts is Heleine, doubtless for Helen of Troy. These names represent stereotypical personality types and could easily be adapted to cartomancy.
In fact, these cards are very much as de Mellet describes them (http://le-miroir-alchimique.blogspot.com/2012/03/court-de-gebelin-du-jeu-des-tarots.html, English from J. Karlin, Rhapsodies of the Bizarre with minor corrections):
Toutes les peintures représentent les Personnages dont il peut être question; la premiere qui arrive est toujours celle dont il s'agit.
Les Rois sont l'image des Souverains, des Parens, des Généraux, des Magistrats, des Vieillards.
Les Dames ont les mêmes caractères dans leur genre relativement aux circonstances, soit dans l'Ordre politique, grave ou joyeux: tantôt elles sont puissantes, adroites, intriguantes, fidelles ou légeres, passionnées ou indifférentes, quelquefois rivales, complaisantes, confidentes, perfides, &c. S'il arrive deux Cartes du même genre, ce sont les secondes qui jouent les seconds rôles.
Les Valets sont des jeunes Gens, des Guerriers, des Amoureux, des Petits-Maîtres, des Rivaux, &c.
The Kings are the image of the Sovereigns, Parents, Generals, Magistrates, the Old men.
The Queens have the same characters relative to the circumstances, that is to say in the political, solemn or joyful Order: sometimes they are powerful, skilful, intriguing, faithful or fickle, impassioned or indifferent, sometimes rivals, obliging, confidants, treacherous, etc. If two Cards of the same kind turn up, in fact the seconds play the second roles.
The Jacks are young men, workers, Lovers, Minor Chiefs, Rivals, etc.
Etteilla has much the same with his court cards. For the Queen of Swords, i.e. Spades (as in the Tchaikovsky opera), he has for the reversed meaning "Femme Méchante", i.e. "Wicked Woman." It has merely been transferred from diamonds to spades. For that same card the upright meaning is "Veuvage", widowhood, and a sad woman holding a sword. Such a sad woman is also on the d'Este card. The wife of a military man would fear widowhood.
For the Queen of Cups, i.e. Hearts, Etteilla has for the reversed "Femme Corrompue", Corrupted Woman, which could apply to Helen of Troy. The upright meaning is ""Femme Irrépprochable", irreproachable woman, which could apply to Judith or Rachel. (Judith would also fit "tromperie", but irreproachably.)
For the Queen of Batons, Etteilla has "Devotion" for the reversed and "virtue" for the upright. These relate well to Joan of Arc and Rachel.
Something similar applies to the Kings. Caesar was a wealthy king, hence Diamonds. Charlemagne was a Christian king, hence Hearts (Cups). David was the mighty warrior, hence Spades (Swords). Negatively, a Apollin would be a warrior-god, on Lacroix's interpretation. I am not sure what Arthur would have represented.
In Etteilla, it is similar. The upright keywords tend to represent the professions most readily associated with the suit significations articulated by de Mellet and de Gebelin: a judge for Swords, an upright man (probité) for Cups and Batons, and a businessman for Coins. The reverseds have wicked men for Swords and Coins, a dishonest man for Cups, and an indecisive man for Batons.
In Italy, the Sola-Busca did something similar, only drawing from two related stories (about Troy and Alexander) and the four temperaments. Each could easily have been adapted to divinatory use, commenting on a particular temperament, with other details supplied by other cards.
In Etteilla's divinatory system, all the cards have a number, meaning that there is a hierarchy among suits. This also occurs in some card games. The best argument I can see for a hierarchy among suits in the 15th century is the "Mantegna", with its ABCDE (http://www.trionfi.com/0/c/karn/wheel2.html)
where in the later series E is changed to S for Spade.A means Atutto (trumps)
B means Bastoni (batons)
C means Coppe (cups)
D means Denari (discs, coins)
E means Espadone (swords)
This works in French, too
A means Atout
B means Bastons
C means Coupes (in the sense of "chalice")
D means Deniers
E means Epées
For the names of the French suits, of course, it doesn't work, because there are 2 c's (Carreaux and Coeur), a P (Piques) and a T (Trefles) if Deniers=Carreaux, Coupes=Coeurs, If they are arranged alphabetically we might have, ignoring the Atouts and with numbering suggested by shape, according to a suggestion by "Huck" (Lothar Teikemeir) on THF
0 is Carreaux (perhaps related to German Bells, and thus a circle)
1 is Coeurs (we only have one heart, but two of many other body parts)
2 is Piques (two ends of a sword or spear--or of a leaf, or its sides, whatever)
3 is Trefles (three petals, perhaps related to a stylized acorn, but I don't know how)
This is only one part of a rather interesting theory in which this ranking is one example of a "wheel" of suitt-ranks that embraces many card games with ranked suits. Moreover, the red suits are together at the top and the black at the bottom, and French suits are seen to have evolved from German suits in the way that Dummett supports. His presentation of the theory is at http://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=1019&p=15450&hilit=German+bells#p15450.
For me, it is enough that a hierarchy can be constructed using the alphabetical order in the French language, regardless of any wheels. Such a hierarchy corresponds exactly to Etteilla's ordering of the suits in his 1770 book on fortune-telling with a Piquet deck, which has no triumphs. For the tarot, the order of suits was in terms of the French translations of the Italian suit-names: Batons (cards 22-35), Coupes (cards 36-49), Epées (cards 50-63), and Deniers (cards 64-77), with the Atouts being first (cards 1-21) and the Fool as 78.. This order is not alphabetical in either French or Italian.
However, Etteilla's order of tarot suits would follow the same order as his ordinary deck if Carreaux =Batons and Trefles=Deniers. In fact this is an equivalence that de Mellet makes in his account of the divinatory meanings of the suits that he says the fortune-tellers make. He writes (http://le-miroir-alchimique.blogspot.com/2012/03/court-de-gebelin-du-jeu-des-tarots.html; English translation from Rhapsodies of the Bizarre, by J. Karlin)
Selon eux ["nos Diseurs de bonne-fortune"],Thus Batons = "the country and indifference", and so do Carreaux. And Denari = happiness, money, and so do Trefles. These equivalences go against our normal associations to the suit-signs: the diamond shape suggests wealth and good fortune, while the black color of Trefles suggests an affinity with the other black suit, Piques, misfortune, as does the English word "clubs", which exactly describes the look of the Spanish suit-sign corresponding to Bastoni. The oddness of the equivalences that de Mellet makes suggests to me that he did not make up his divinatory interpretations but got them from some otherwise unrecorded tradition. Moreover, it corresponds quite well to Etteilla's book written 11 years before de Mellet (and of which he shows no other sign of knowing). which is counter-intuitive in the same way as de Mellet's as well as corresponding to his later tarot suit-order (and also, on the whole, suit-interpretations).
Les Coeurs (les Coupes,)annoncent le bonheur.
Les Trefles [les Deniers), la fortune.
Les Piques (les Epees), le malheur.
Les Carreaux [note: Il est à remarquer que dans l'Ecriture symbolique les Egyptiens traçoient des carreaux pour exprimer la campagne] (les Bâtons), l'indifference & la campagne.
....According to them [our Fortune-tellers]
The Hearts (the Cups) represent happiness
The Clubs (the Coins), wealth.
The Spades, (the Swords), misfortune.
The Diamonds [footnote: It is notable that in the symbolic Scripture the Egyptians marked off squares [diamonds] for indicating the countryside] indifference and the countryside.
I have already given an iconographic rationale for the equivalences Carreaux=Bastoni and Trefles=Denari at the end of my discussion of Dummett's Chapter One, where I criticized Dummett's strained derivation, except for Coeurs, of French from German suits.
Lacroix also offers us some interesting examples of number cards. It seems that the Sola-Busca wasn't alone in presenting little scenes on them. In Germany, Lacroix shows us specific moralistic scenes portrayed on number cards, two women fighting and a fool with money (p. 170):
These again suggest to me a ready adaptation to divinatory use. But I don't know the rest of the cards, to see if there is any system. The number cards of the Sola-Busca are similar, but more elusive, for a more sophisticated audience. Elsewhere I have suggested a Neopythagorean rationale for them, along with corresponding divinatory meanings
APPENDIX TWO: MAFFEI ON "DIVINATION GAMES"
This has to do with an argument in Game of Tarot, about an Italian writer named Raphael Maffei. Lacroix says (p. 158)
Naturally I wanted to know about this description of tarots. In Vol. 1 of his Encyclopedia, p. 33, Kaplan says he looked in this work and found nothing about the tarot. Dummett also looked and found nothing. Ross Caldwell looked and found nothing (http://tarotforum.net/showthread.php?p=3925639). I look on the Internet for quotes from this source in scanned old books and find only a report of someone else looking and finding nothing (Rodolfo Renier, 1894, at http://www.tarock.info/renier.htm, trying to substantiate Lacroix)....Raphael Maffei, who lived at the end of the fifteenth century, has left in his "Commentaries" a description of tarots, which he says were, he says, "a new invention"--in comparison, doubtless, to playing cards.
What people do find is a remark by Garzoni in La Piazza Universale di Tutte le Professioni del Mondo, e nobili et ignobili (Venice, p. 574 of 1586 edition), and a corresponding remark in Maffei, although it does not use the word "tarocchi". Dummett, in Game of Tarot p.389, note 2, discusses these remarks at length, starting with Garzoni:
Ross (http://tarotforum.net/showthread.php?t=167088&page=2) observes that most of the passage that Dummett is citing comes from Citolini, La Tipocosmia (Venice, 1561); Garzoni has added only the phrase "of recent invention, according to Volterran" after "tarocchi". For his part, Dummett notes that "for some reason, Garzoni's reference to tarocchi is much the best known of the sixteenth century ones, and cited by a whole string of later writers". But what in Maffei (Volteranno) corresponds to it? Dummett says:Garzoni's turn of phrase is curious: he says,'Alcuni altri son giuochi da tauerne, come la mora, le piastrelle, le chiaui, e le carti, ò communi, ò Tarocchi, di nuoua inuentione, secondo il Volteranno: oue si vedono danari, coppe, spade, bastoni, dieci, noue, ...', and continues by listing the remaining twelve cards of each suit, followed by the trumps in descending order and finally the Matto; after a mention of the French suits (as used 'con le carte fine'), he lists a number of card games, beginning with Tarocchi and Primiera. (In English, the quoted passage runs, 'Some others are tavern games, such as mora, quoits, keys and cards, either ordinary ones, or tarocchi, recently invented according to Volterrano: in which are to be seen Coins, Cups, Swords, Batons, the 10, the 9, ...'....)
However there is one sentence in Maffai that might explain Garzoni's remark. It is unclear who found it; in Google Books the first mention I find is the Parma 1802 Materiali per servire alla storia dell' incisione by Pietro Zani, p. 172, at http://books.google.com/books?id=zu0TAA ... di&f=false. This text is quoting something even earlier. In any case, here is Dummmet's take on it:Garzoni's phrase 'secondo il Volteranno' appears, however, to relate, not to the list of trumps, but to the apparent observation that tarocchi are a recent invention. Even on this interpretation, the remark is baffling, since Tarot cards are nowhere referred to in the Commentariorum Urbanorum XXXVIII libri of Raffaele Maffei, called Volterrano after his place of birth, which were first published in Rome in 1506, nor, so far as anyone has discovered, in any other of his writings, as was observed by Robert Steele in 1900; moreover, the Tarot pack had existed for a hundred and fifty years when Garzoni was writing, and for at least fifteen when Maffei was born.
There are two problems with this explanation. First, he says that he doesn't know what Maffai meant. If so, how can he be so sure that he wasn't talking about fortune-telling with cards, but Maffei's editor garbled the sentence? The sentence as it stands doesn't make much sense. Divination and lots were not new. Only cards were new. and even they only relatively so. Tarocchi is what, in 1480 when Maffei was writing, were new. Perhaps the 1559 edition (and also a 1544 edition) corrected a typographical omission.The explanation appears to be that Garzoni meant that playing cards in general were a recent invention, and that he was alluding to the remark by Maffei that 'Chartarum vero & sortium & divinationis ludi priscis additi sunt ab avaris ac perditis inventi' ('To the ancient games have been added those of cards and of lots and of divination, invented by covetous and dissolute men'). This remark occurs in the section 'De ludo diverso quo summi viri quandoque occupati fuerunt' of book XXIX of the Commentaria Urbana (p. 421 verso of the Rome, 1506, edition, p. 313 verso of the Paris, 1511, edition, and p. 694 of the Basle,1559, edition; the second ampersand, present in the 1506 and 1511 editions, is missing from that of 1559). Maffei is meaning to convey by this observation no more than that the games he is referring to were not played in classical times. Garzoni was not, therefore, quoting him in support of any thesis that tarocchi were of recent[/] invention, only as saying that playing cards are of modern, as opposed to ancient, origin. (I am uncertain to what Maffei was referring as [i]sortium & divinationis ludi, but I do not think the passage can be treated as evidence that cards were used for fortune-telling; we have in all three modern types of game, cards, lots and divination, and the mention of avari suggests that Maffei has gambling games principally in mind.)
The second problem is that, regardless of what we make of the earlier editions, there is still the wording of the later editions to deal with. Why would Garzoni, writing in the 1580s, necessarily have consulted the 1506 or 1511 edition, as opposed to later ones? According to Dummett, the 1559 edition has:
Kaplan (vol. 1 p. 33) cites what he calls the 1530 edition to the same effect (actually, it probably is the 1544 edition, because it is that which was auctioned off as part of the Kaplan Collection, http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/lot/ ... ID=4740403). As you can see, one ampersand has been removed. What this sentence means Dummett doesn't say. I found an old German translation (1878), citing the 1544 edition (http://books.google.com/books?id=9TIFAA ... di&f=false), which has:Chartarum vero & sortium divinationis ludi priscis additi sunt, ab avaris ne perditis inventi.
I translate that as:die Wahrsagerspiele mit Karten und Loosen sind der frühern Spielen hinzugefügt worden.
to which we should add, after a comma: "invented by covetous and dissolute men".divination games with cards and lots have been added to the earlier games.
In other words, instead of "of cards and of lots and of divination, games ancient are added" (literal translation) which equals "games of cards and of lots and of divination to the ancient ones are added", we have "of cards and of lots of divination games ancient are added", which equals "games of divination, of cards and of lots, to the ancient ones are added."
This version is of course more interesting, as it says that divination games with cards were now being practiced, as well as divination games with lots, both of which are newly added to the ancient games. In other words, it is not games with cards and games with lots that are new additions, but divinatory games with cards and lots. In 1480, when Maffei was writing, that makes sense. Card games had been around for a century, but lot books were new--and so, apparently, was the use of cards for the same purpose, divination.
It looks to me as though the 1544 and 1559 editions correct a typographical error that was present in 1506 and 1511. Admittedly I can't be sure about that. What does seem more certain (although still not completely so) is that in 1544 whoever edited the work thought that there were divinatory card games and that they existed in Maffei's time and place (i.e. c. 1480 Italy). This editor might have been wrong about what was present in Maffei's time, but surely he was not likely to be wrong about his own time, i.e. 1544.
Then there is the issue of how Garzoni interpreted this comment by Maffai. Dummett says that Garzoni interprets him as referring to playing cards in general as a recent invention. That is a very strained interpretation of the sentence. Here it is again:
after which follows a list of the other cards, including the trumps. It certainly looks as though "di nuoua inuentione" is meant to modify "Tarocchi", which comes right before, just as "oue si venono danari..." etc. certainly does (since the list includes triumphs). Also, while tarocchi were conceivably a new invention to Maffei (writing in c. 1480, having just returned to Tuscany from a long residence in Rome and some time in Hungary), playing cards in general weren't.'Alcuni altri son giuochi da tauerne, come la mora, le piastrelle, le chiaui, e le carti, ò communi, ò Tarocchi, di nuoua inuentione, secondo il Volteranno: oue si vedono danari, coppe, spade, bastoni, dieci, noue, ...'
(Some others are tavern games, such as mora, quoits, keys and cards, either ordinary ones, or tarocchi, recently invented. according to Volterrano: in which are to be seen Coins, Cups, Swords, Batons, the 10, the 9, ...'....)
Dummett insists that Maffei, too, was not speaking of tarot, but rather of "gambling games" generally, as shown by his mention of "avari". But how are games with lots and divination forms of gambling? Tarocchi was not primarily a gambling game either, in the sense of purely a game of chance. It was not a game preferred by those addicted to gambling, who liked simpler card games. For Garzoni to have read Maffei as talking about Tarocchi, when all he meant was playing cards generally (for gambling purposes), would have been a very incompetent misreading. There is no indication that Garzoni was that incompetent, since, as a careful reading shows, he is not attributing the list of card subjects to Maffei.
If we reject Dummett's view of how Garzoni read Maffei, how are we to account for Garzoni's inference that Maffei meant tarocchi as a game "of new invention"? It seems to me that the most likely hypothesis is that Garzoni was reading the 1544 or 1559 edition--which is reasonable, since he was writing in the 1580s--and assumed that when Maffei spoke of "divinatory card games" (the wording of 1544 and 1559), he meant with tarocchi, as the deck par excellence for divinatory purposes. Such, I infer, was the reputation of tarocchi at the time and place Garzoni was writing (1585 NE Italy)--in other words, no different from the reputation it has most places today. It is this sort of game, one of divination, with which tarocchi cards were thus associated, and this sort of game--not even tarocchi cards, but the divinatory use of them--which was newly invented at the time Maffei was writing.
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