Thank you, Delaforge.

Mark quoted Paul Huson:

I, on the other hand, for the very same reason, believe the trumps to have been pregnant with meaning from the start, their symbolism drawn from the world of medieval drama, of miracle, mystery, and morality plays, with a hint of Neoplatonism evident here and there, which lent itself very readily to esoteric uses such as divination.

Furthermore, we shall see that the court cards in the so-called Minor Arcana spring from a heady brew of pagan and medieval myth, also handy for the would-be diviner.

Six of one, half-dozen of the other? I wonder whether the discussion hinges on defining the word "esoteric."

At what point do cards drawing on symbolism well-known in the Medieval and Renaissance worlds, used for card-games and fortune-telling, become tools for self-transformation?

All of it seems to have started around the time of Romani gypsy people arriving in Europe in late 14th century.It must have taken some time for the characters to Europeanize.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of ... _in_Europe

The South of India already has a card system of prediction based on 27 nakshatras.

http://skyscript.co.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?t=8592

Add to that the 52 playing cards and you are very close to 78 card for divination.

A theory that I personally favour is that the Tarot was partially inspired by Alchemical iconography. The following thread on the Aeclectic Tarot board seems to be quite conclusive.

http://www.tarotforum.net/showthread.php?t=223881

This as well as a neo-Platonist influence has been mentioned already earlier on our thread here. I agree with both views, and they support the idea of the Tarot being rooted in metaphysics right from the start.

Pankajdubey wrote:

All of it seems to have started around the time of Romani gypsy people arriving in Europe in late 14th century.It must have taken some time for the characters to Europeanize.

From what I have read the first person to suggest that Tarot originated with the migration of Roma/Gypsy people into Europe was Antoine Court de G?belin (1725?1784).

However, most scholars of Tarot seem to have concluded long ago the idea was a fable. Not least as there seems to be historical evidence of Tarot in Italy in the century before the arrival of the Roma/Gypsy there.

Mark

I found this link on the Golden Dawn astrological associations for the Tarot interesting. Especially, on the Minor Arcana as I hadn't seen them all listed together before.

http://www.biddytarot.com/tarot-astrology-golden-dawn/

Here is another useful article covering a variety of traditions of assigning elements, modes and signs to the individual court cards.

http://www.tarotmoon.com/articles/Astro ... Court.html


Mark

Mark wrote:I found this link on the Golden Dawn astrological associations for the Tarot interesting. Especially, on the Minor Arcana as I hadn't seen them all listed together before.

I had always assumed the Golden Dawn assigned a sign within each triplicity to the Knights, Queens and Kings. However, that doesn't appear to be the case.

http://www.biddytarot.com/tarot-astrology-golden-dawn/

Mark

Palmer's list is incomplete in this regard. The GD indeed attributed a sign of each triplicity to a Court Card of the corresponding suit. (To be more precise, the first two decans of a sign, along with the last decan of the prior sign.)

There is an additional system of 4 x 4 elements in use, covering all the Court Cards (including the Knaves), thus the Queen of Discs represents Water of Earth, etc.

Hi Michael,

I changed that post before you posted. So my quoted comments are no longer there!

As I stated above I found a more extensive piece on the varying astrological attributions for the Court cards:

Here is another useful article covering a variety of traditions of assigning elements, modes and signs to the individual court cards.

http://www.tarotmoon.com/articles/Astro ... Court.html

Mark

Hi Mark,

All that is clear is that there is as little agreement among "Tarologers" as there is among Astrologers.

Here is a nice article by the German Astrology and Tarot expert Hajo Banzhaf regarding the relationship between Astrology and Tarot, most importantly their particular strengths in practice:

www.tarot.de/artikel/AstrologyTarot.pdf

Michael Sternbach wrote:

Hi Mark,

All that is clear is that there is as little agreement among "Tarologers" as there is among Astrologers.

Indeed!

Michael Sternbach wrote:

Here is a nice article by the German Astrology and Tarot expert Hajo Banzhaf regarding the relationship between Astrology and Tarot, most importantly their particular strengths in practice: www.tarot.de/artikel/AstrologyTarot.pdf

Yes that is an excellent piece. I think I have a book by this author tucked away somewhere.

Personally, I find some of his his 'convincing associations' less than convincing at times! But I guess this just underlines the point you
made above.

I have worked out my own astrological association system for the Major arcana. I am thinking of responding in some depth to your earlier piece on the GD attributions to cards and the zodiac signs. for the Major Arcana. I think quite a few of these are really unconvincing. Especially the GD associations for the Hierophant , the Charioteer, and Temperance.

It seems the Dutch astrologer Thierens was an important pioneer in this area. He seems to be the first to assign Neptune and Uranus to Major Arcana cards. However, unlike many English speaking astrologers today he assigned Uranus to the Tower (not the Fool) and Neptune to The World (Not the Hanged Man) in his 1930 book I cited earlier in the thread.

By the way Anthony Louis in his book Tarot: Plain And Simple
has a table of astrological associations for the Tarot Major Arcana from the Spanish speaking world. Its completely different from anything else I have seen. I cant locate my copy of Louis book at present. If I do I will stick up his list of associations from the Spanish speaking tradition.

Mark

Michael Sternbach wrote:A theory that I personally favour is that the Tarot was partially inspired by Alchemical iconography..

Last year I visited 2 exhibitions in the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan: one was about Visconti Sforza deck
http://www.brera.beniculturali.it/Page/ ... ml?idp=602

and another about Sola Busca deck
http://images.brera.beniculturali.it//f ... a_english2

and the museum tended to agree with your idea. In fact they showed some alchemical texts: it's of those years Ficino's translation of Corpus Hermeticum (see paragraph 7 of Solabusa_english2).

Since I'm a lover of tarot decks I visited the Biennale of Venice too, only to see the original cards from Crowley's deck, painted by Frieda Harris. Fantastic!

Margherita,

This information about the Sola Busca Tarot is wonderful!

Grazie mille!

Michael

Margherita wrote:

Last year I visited 2 exhibitions in the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan: one was about Visconti Sforza deck
http://www.brera.beniculturali.it/Page/ ... ml?idp=602

and another about Sola Busca deck
http://images.brera.beniculturali.it//f ... a_english2

and the museum tended to agree with your idea. In fact they showed some alchemical texts: it's of those years Ficino's translation of Corpus Hermeticum (see paragraph 7 of Solabusa_english2).

Sounds fantastic. I wish there were some exhibitions like that in the UK!

Margherita wrote:

Since I'm a lover of tarot decks I visited the Biennale of Venice too, only to see the original cards from Crowley's deck, painted by Frieda Harris. Fantastic!

Yes that must have been amazing. I have only seen reprints of the Thoth deck cards in contemporary Tarot decks but even they are visually stunning.

I think the artist Frieda Harris deserves much more of the credit for the final outcome of these remarkable cards than is normally given to her. I believe the artistic style was purely her idea. Crowley had envisioned a fairly conventional Tarot deck and was initially hesitant about her approach.

Mark