Right, given complete ignorance, the precise order is not self evident. Especially things like the Virtues, which occur in every possible ordering (T-J-F, F-J-T, T-F-J, etc., abstracting them from their context in the series in some cases). But they were not in complete ignorance. It is unlikely, in other words, that somebody who knew nothing of the game at one time found an unnumbered deck laying around and decided to order the cards in a certain way to play them, and thus began a tradition. If so, we might have wildly different orderings than we do. But that is not the case.
I think we have to imagine that the inventor intended a particular order and had reasons for so doing, and that order would have been known in the immediate first circle of players. I tend to believe there was a basic rulebook or at least a book explaining the sequence.
The people who transmitted the game to various places must have learned it from someone else, and with that an order. Over time, it got changed, but local traditions obviously developed, which account for the "Three Families" of orders.
One observation Dummett and others made was that the series - whatever series - falls into three classes of subjects. The first class, the human ranks or types, is easy to see. Then you have the Devil and above him the order is fixed in every series - Devil, Fire, Star, Moon, Sun. There can be no doubt this was the original and intended order of these five cards. The subject matter has been variously categorized, as celestial or eschatological.
This leaves the "middle section", which has been characterized as "moral", since it includes the virtues and Fortune, as well as rise and downfall, and finally Death.
So, to answer Robert's question about, for instance, why is a traitor above the Pope? Because he is in a different category. He is not a particular person or rank in the narrative, but a moral lesson, an exemplum. When learning the game, the first five cards must have been shown as an unbreakable unit. There was no question about this group after that. We might also deduce that since the sequence "Traitor-Death" is invariable in ALL families, that this particular part was emphasized as such in learning the order (since it is not self-evident or intuitive). Traitor-Death, Traitor-Death, Traitor-Death... whether or not any meaning was attached to the order.
For the last 7 cards, the sequence was pretty easy to grasp too. But in the middle part is where most of the shuffling goes on, although Fortune is always more or less central, and it always ends in Death.
There must have been an easy way that these basic parts were taught in the earliest period as the game passed from one locale to another, since they are broadly similar.
Re: The ordering of the trumps
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Last edited by Ross G. R. Caldwell on 12 Jun 2009, 13:27, edited 1 time in total.