robert wrote:Are we stuck? Add it or leave it off until clarification?

I'd say it needs a clarification. So we are stuck for the moment, unless some less unclear entries show up, which can be added in the meantime.

What do you think?

Also, if this is the manner of proceding, how are we to debate any given point? Will you take it down as soon as there is an objection?

Ross G. R. Caldwell wrote:

robert wrote:Are we stuck? Add it or leave it off until clarification?

I'd say it needs a clarification. So we are stuck for the moment, unless some less unclear entries show up, which can be added in the meantime.

What do you think?

Also, if this is the manner of proceding, how are we to debate any given point? Will you take it down as soon as there is an objection?

I'm not sure. I was thinking that we could start a thread to discuss anything that raises objections to discuss it further?

Should we add items to the list but mark them somehow as "under debate"?

Maybe we could end up with some sort of "jesus seminar" style of voting at the end of each debatable item and end up with something like:
Red= All members agree
PInk=Most members agree
Grey=Most members disagree
Black=All members disagree

Honestly though, I am really hoping that we can create at least a basis from which we all do agree, and then we can move out from there. What are the common ground items that we can all agree with? And when we do move out from there, what can we offer for why we move out from there?

For instance, someone might very likely come into this thread and say "The Visconti's are the oldest decks in existence", and we might all agree on that. If they said "The Cary-Yale is the oldest existing Tarot Deck, then we might have some discussion on the subject", if they said "The Visconti Family invented tarot", then we'd have a harder time of it.

What I'd really love to do, at least at first, is get as many items as possible that we can all agree on, and then maybe we can go out from there?

I'm open to anything, I was just trying to establish some common ground. After the common ground, maybe we can tackle the "almost" common grounds and move from there? I was hoping that as a community, we could agree on at least some basic premises for tarot history!!!

Or maybe it's a waste of time?

These two seem very different to me:

1. Tarot was played as a game in the 15th century.

3. The trump series originally had a coherent meaning.

1 is a fact that is proved by a lot of evidence.
3 is a theory, which I think is true, but that could be wrong.

What do you think?

Marco

marco wrote:These two seem very different to me:

1. Tarot was played as a game in the 15th century.

3. The trump series originally had a coherent meaning.

1 is a fact that is proved by a lot of evidence.
3 is a theory, which I think is true, but that could be wrong.

What do you think?

Marco

I think you are right on both counts Marco.

3 is a theory, but I think it is a better theory than thinking that they are random subjects because that raises the question of why 21 and Fool - or why 22 - and why did everyone for a certain time agree on these subjects and just arrange them slightly differently, and why is there no evidence of random unnumbered subjects that everybody just understood and played with?

To me the fact that the earliest tarots are unnumbered and are still arranged in at least three broadly similar sequences suggests that the earliest spread of tarot was with unnumbered trumps, and that people felt the need to order them, but that - they understood the order. This means there was a narrative, that I call the synoptic narrative.

Dummett and a few others recognized it as having three levels, a human level, a moral level, and celestial level (which can include Hell of course). All three orders respect this division, except for the placement in Ferrara/B of Justice between the Angel and the World. This exception doesn't seem to cause any problem with commentators however, who usually dismiss it as obviously secondary - not least because it is a blatant reference to the Last Judgment, which should portray the Archangel Michael and not the standard image of the virtue Justice.

The B order thus illustrates the instability of the Virtues in a standard - yet still unsettled - order of the triumph cards.

Ross

Thank you Ross.
So our building blocks will include both facts that are known to everybody and theories that everybody, for the time being, considers to be true.

I think that maybe this is off-topic, but: if 3 were wrong, how would it be possible to prove it? Which facts could prove that the trump series originally had no coherent meaning?

Marco

Ross G. R. Caldwell wrote:

Yves Le Marseillais wrote:hello all,

My opinion is:

Tarot game is a 78 cards decks who has a global sense (I means a Code).

But may be it is not the good place to say this.

Best,

Yves

Yves, by "code", do you mean "secret code"? Or do you just mean "meaning"?

Ha.... That's the point
In fact both because I think that/
Firstly Tarot is made of an ensemble of 78 parts with inter relations beteween all parts.
Secondly this knowledge is not easy to understand unless one have understood his inner structure.
And this structure is codified.
A code is the answer but not everybody have access to it unless/until it has discovered the code.

Question: Something that you have not yet discovered is it automaticly "secret" ?

Nature is full of secrets so. As Life and Death.

I hope I am not "out of subject".


Yves

marco wrote:Thank you Ross.
So our building blocks will include both facts that are known to everybody and theories that everybody, for the time being, considers to be true.

I think so, yes. Robert is trying to find the consensus here. The consensus can never be on the facts, which are indisputable since they really exist and must be accounted for, but only the interpretation, which usually falls into a consensus opinion.

I think that maybe this is off-topic, but: if 3 were wrong, how would it be possible to prove it? Which facts could prove that the trump series originally had no coherent meaning?

Marco

I don't think you could prove that without a document that said "I am the inventor of this new game, and I chose these subjects randomly, out of a hat of a hundred such images".

Otherwise, the weight seems to be in the direction of a meaningful series of images. A narrative.

Ross

I think Ross could reword number 9 so that it is not such a bitter pill to swallow...and we might actually still all agree on the gist of what it says. Somehow say, none of those things were built into the trumps, but what the people at the time may have seen in them is up for some reasonable speculation.






*(and by reasonable I of course mean anything within reason ie mermaids, aliens, atlantians, lemurians and Elvis....)

I would change #9 to:

There is no esoteric, alchemical, kabbalistic, numerological, geomantic, heretical, magical in the narrative of the trumps.

Instead of the current:

There is no esoteric, alchemical, kabbalistic, numerological, geomantic, astrological, heretical, magical, or any other message than what an averagely educated 15th century Italian would recognize, in the narrative of the trumps.

1. I believe there might be astrological elements in the original narrative. I think that a cosmology of the XV century had to be somehow astrological.

2. It is not clear to me what "averagely educated" means. I am not sure that the meaning of the sequence would have been clear to most people. I agree that many people would have understood it, at least in part.

If we keep esoteric in the list, than there was no "code" in the sequence. It was meant to be understood by people with a certain level of culture (which I think was not so basic). I agree that tarot was not meant to be esoteric, and I do not think it was meant to be a code.

Marco

Obviously, the idea of every card having an astrological meaning, like say the decans or something, is a later "reinterpretation" of the trumps.

I do see some hint in the Stars/Moon/Sun's placement that is perhaps implying that these bodies have an influence in the realm of human experience.


Devil/Tower......Celestials.....Judgement/World

Death/Traitor.....Fate/Time...Triumphal Chariot/Love

Folly/Trickery...Church/State...Imp&Pape


I may be a crackpot, but I reckon there is a vertical equivalency here, similar to the Mantegna series -

Time and Fortune over the fate of 'Empires" - Celestial bodies over (implying causation) Time and Fortune. Certainly not 'occult', but may suggest the astrological 'world view'.