Steve, I don't see how your correspondences have anything to do with the SY, other than dropping "earth" from the four elements. The essence of the SY's astrological assignments is that the astrological entities go in a certain order specified by the attributes of the letters. Without that, it's not the SY. All I did was reverse the order of the planets, so that it would be the usual Chaldean one, which is what I think would naturally have been done by someone constructing the "memory theatre" of that type. Otherwise the Bagato would be associated with Saturn, the Popess with Jupiter, the Empress with Mars, the Wheel with the Sun, the Tower with Venus, and Judgment (C order) or the World (A order) with Mercury. Of these a couple make sense, but not enough of them for one-step meaningful associations to be possible for them all.
Then there's the zodiac to deal with. Given your assignments for planets and elements, what are the associations for the signs of the zodiac, Steve?
I don't think the ones I gave were too bad. They have plenty of information in their associations, from the SY astrological entity to the imagery on the card. That's a good thing. Identifying the Sun card, for example, with the astrological planet of the Sun encodes no information. It is a no-brainer; but that makes the association less useful in a memory theatre than other things, unless it happens to fit an SY letter sequence. My object was to construct a Kabbalistically oriented mid-16th century tarot, with both astrological entities using the SY and the sefiroth from Gikatilla, Pico, Reuchlin, etc., such that memorizing the relationships would both be not too hard and be a way of remembering information. It gives you the SY astrological assignments, something about each sefiroth, an additional way of seeing the tarot as a path from and to heaven, via the sefiroth, as well as the operation of Pythagorean number theory in all three Renaissance worlds (divine, celestial, and earthly). These all seem to me handy tools for any 16th century occultist doing cartomancy (which is also part of the framework).
Huck, on the Rosenwald, wrote:
On the Death card, I didn't say No. 14. I said 14th. Here are the A orders again.No early Trionfi or Tarot deck had death as No. 14 ... ???mikeh wrote: I see no problem with Death as 14th; that was normal in the A order (and probably a reason for not putting a number on the card). But not not putting any of the Minchiate cards immediately after the Tower on the sheet is a systematic omission, not an accidental one.
In the Bolognese, Death is 14th, because the numbers start after the Bagato, which is the lowest trump. In the Sicilian, Death is 14th because the numbers start after Poverty, which is the lowest. In the Charles VI, it is hard to say precisely, because we don't have anything lower than the Emperor; but that it is like the Bolognese is one reasonable hypothesis. In the other A orders, it's also hard to say, but the same hypothesis is at least reasonable. The Collona looks like it mght be similar to the Rosenwald. I don't see any of these lists where Death is clearly 13th [added later: except in Minchiate, which is another reason for thinking that the Rosenwald is not a Minchiate]. (I do not count the Fool, because in the game it did not function as the first trump of 22.)
Huck wrote,
It is good that you qualify your argument by adding "in the phase of innovation". Since the majority of the cards have numbers on them as part of the production process, I would assume that the Rosenwald was done after there started being a demand for and acceptance of numbers on the cards, and after there were 22 standard subjects, perhaps even in a standard order, in a given place. That makes it at the very end of the 15th century at the earliest. I wouldn't think that was in "a phase of innovation".The woodblock plates were part of the production costs. If you made one plate, which was used only once in four deck productions, this might have been considered as not economical, at least not ideal. That's especially risky, if you have no guarantee, that the deck type really would sell long enough (in the phase of innovation).
Huck wrote,
Yes, but that is probably true whether it was a tarot or a minchiate. He might get more money if it was a minchiate than if it was a tarot. But since we don't know how much Rosenwald decks (or supplements to regular decks, as you hypothesize) sold for, in comparison to similar decks (or supplements) of tarot or minchiate, that information is not of much use.In the case of the Rosenwald-4-sheets-deck the producer might have sold the 3rd and 4th sheet for more money than the both others.
Huck wrote,
So would I. These are not "influences", they are associations, and they do not start being made until after Pico's publication at the earliest, and more likely after Alexander VI said that Pico was OK. I think I even mentioned Alexander VI in the associations I gave (for Taurus).I would assume, that the SY (or the Kabbala) wasn't popular enough before 1486 to take an influence.