Again, the expert consensus is that printing was not a "cheap" thing prior to the late 1430s. The term *sufficiencies" to denote middling goods between cheap necessities and expensive luxuries is from the 18th century, but it may have applied to decks printed early enough to be the mo...

No, I meant Athanasius Kircher used Horapollo as a source for the hieroglyphic inscriptions he analyses. The process of remembering the allegory and forgetting the basic meaning has a long and noble history, especially in Alexandria. Just think of the passage of the term Logos from Septuagint via Ph...

My sense is that there is a general ignorance about the virtue ethic ... I do not think this is correct. I have shown cards to many different people over the world and what they see is remarkedly similiar- even though I always say it is a game. I have a set that has no numbers and titles and I ask ...

In a geneology, what is being explained is the current understanding of an object. This can be based on complete fabrication or on misconstrual of its past. In the case of misconstrual, it calls for an analysis of what is being misconstrued. Kircher's work is a very good case in point. It was believ...

The correspondence theories that underlie Payne-Trowler's and many other occult tarot schemes originate with syncretic priesthoods ("my gods aren't obsolete, they correspond with your gods"). Porphyry and Proclus may have had the same conservationist motive when they introduced corresponde...

I think that if you want to establish that "iconographic traces of [the historical] virtue ethic are being misconstrued as hermetic or archtypical by contemporary occultists" you should begin with the writings and presentations by contemporary occultists. Who exactly do you have in mind? ...

I was being unclear. One could call any research program's hypotheses and methodological canons a framing myth (or more politely, a paradigm). My notion is that many modern occultists take as given that the cards' spiritual dimension stems from kabalistic, hermetic, or otherwise archetypal elements ...

It seems my previous posts about my interest in the fascination by current occultists with the imagery of the tarot have been unclear. I hope I can make it clearer here, and generate a better discussion. What I am giving is not so much a history of the tarot as a genealogy of the current fascination...

My posting this topic appears to have drawn the ire of the Pre-Gebelin Tarot History blogger, who regards the premise I am working on as S.H.I.T. . The real point of the invective appears to be that everything that is of interest in the tarot is completely determined by it being invented by 15th cen...

But the quality of the surviving deck let's one assume, that it very likely wasn't the one and only and "very fine" triumph deck for this wedding. .. so there's just the reason to assume a "later copy" ... perhaps. Or that it had been a celebration deck of a "lower level&qu...