Well, we cannot rely on the condition, that we know all parts of the puzzle game "how cartomancy developed". I've drawn the Minchiate Francesi out of the nothing, and found then, that they had some studied reality, when I searched for it. How many decks had been there, and nothing has stayed of them? The English Hooper 1775 deck is a new variant, also apparently "relative new to myself", although I had already a lot of opportunity to see them, and indeed, it has some Tarot relevance. Actually I would like to see the 1770 deck from Liverpool. Both decks show, that Etteilla was not alone.mikeh wrote:Your idea that Etteilla borrowed from the first 9 of Poilly for the first 8 of his tarots is a good one, even compelling for the first 5 or 6. De Mellet is the one who has been considered by others to be Etteilla's source, since most of the later trumps of the Marseille (17-21 except for 20) are at the front end of Etteilla's deck(2-5); but the correspondence to Poilly is closer, as far as the themes and the order, even though the imagery is closer to the Marseille.
Your idea about what happened to Temperance and Faith is interesting. I assume that the designer of the 1775 cards felt they should somehow be there, but put them as "Fidelity" and "Bottle" instead. But I don't know why he would have gone to the trouble to make these changes (unless the mutation happened before 1730, and the Poilly we' re seeing is different in this respect from the 1660 Minchiate Francesci).
This German deck is presented by Hoffmann 1972, 18 century, without much detail. Very primitive, each card seems to have 3 divination sentences.
This is a nice page ...
http://www.gamesetal.net/
... but it's just a playing card dealer. Especially this one ...
http://www.gamesetal.net/cis.html
A series of curious decks ... all English.