Hello Mike,mikeh wrote:
Marco wrote,I do not understand Marco's reasoning, that if there are twelve courts, i.e. three courts per suit, it is not a tarocchi deck. How do we know that? Say more.The Court Cards are very interesting. I feel rather sure that this is not a Tarot deck, because there are exactly twelve Court Cards: it is unlikely that this is a coincidence. In the suit of Cups, the Page and the King are replaced by a “female page” and a Queen...
I have written that "I feel rather sure that this is not a Tarot deck" and you ask "how do we know that?". Is the difference between "feeling rather sure" and "knowing" unclear?
Anyway, I try to explain the reasoning motivating my feeling of relative confidence in taking these sheets as non-Tarot:
We have twelve court cards, three for every suit. My favourite hypothesis is that this is a common deck of cards, in which the Page and the King of Cups are replaced by two ladies.
According to this hypothesis, all the court cards of the deck are presented on the sheets in an orderly way: the four Pages are followed by the four Knights that are followed by the four "Sovereigns" (I like intellectual order, so possibly this explains why I prefer this theory).
If this is a Tarot deck, we have two problems to solve (I am lazy, so I tend to dismiss the problems that I can easily avoid):
1) we must explain the order in which the court cards are presented (why does the Queen of Cups appears after the King of Coins? should we conclude that the King of Cups appears in the middle of the other three Queens?)
2) we have a mysterious "female Page of Cups". Do we accept the idea that she replaces the standard male page? If we do, why do we reject the idea that the Queen of Cups replaces the King of Cups? If we do not, than this is not strictly Tarot anyway, because we have (at least) 5 Court Cards per suit (male Page, female Page, Knight, Queen, King).