Thank you very much, mikeh, for your interest in what I wrote. I am really grateful for your interest and support. This is exactly the kind of dialogue I was looking for and which I cherish a lot.
I want to answer your remarks point by point. You wrote:
Thanks for pointing out your contribution on Platonism and the tarocchi to me.mikeh wrote: 25 Nov 2021, 21:15 On the relevance of Platonism to the tarocchi, I have this, of more limited scope than your vision:
http://platonismandtarot.blogspot.com/
I will read it profoundly and enter a detailed dialogue with you in the future, when I will come back to the “neoplatonic turn” (i.e. the 14 -> 21 transition) forming the tarocchi as I tried to express in the --far too dense -- post above:
[I will not discuss it now because I am still fully involved in the JvR-thread in this very forum and my mind does not allow at the moment to be in deep details in two different threads. Why I am still mentally in the JvR thread, I will explain below.]vh0610 wrote: 17 Sep 2021, 21:12 Next evolutionary step:
Trionfi II or tarocch’(i) = 21 trumps (plus 1, “nisi velint”) = Trionfi + TrPr1 + TrPr3
Trionfi II will be called Tarocchi in the following. This is the neoplatonic turn, prepared by Petrarca in TrPetr placing Plato in front of Aristoteles in the respective triumphal procession, and fulfilled by the Neoplatonism of Ficino […]
You wrote:
Thanks for the support! This is exactly what I tried to express in the post above:mikeh wrote: 25 Nov 2021, 21:15 On minchiate and Dante, it may be relevant that Dante's birth-sign, clearly indicated in the Paradiso, was Gemini, and so the point of departure for going higher, just as it was the point of his soul's entry into the cosmos in life.
In my eyes, Dante’s commedia is very very plausibly the underlying structure for the minchiate-extension [as well as the commedia is decisive for Trionfi and Tarocchi, see my respective post above]. I do not see any other reasoning which has the same high plausibility -- especially, as I tried to express, if you consider first the old name of the game Ge(r)mini [Dante’s zodiac sign] then the reinterpretation of the Devil card as the “House of the Devil” and then the order of the zodiacs ending with the Gemini-Sign as in Dante’s paradiso. And all that happens in Florence, Dante’s city, which had at the time of the invention of minchiate a big problem with his fame and how they chased him away.vh0610 wrote: 17 Sep 2021, 21:12
There is another triumphal procession (called in the following TrPr2) --which is really hard to find-- just before TrPr3 in the celestial sphere of the fixed stars (Par. XXII) on the way to the aforementioned empyreum, which is composed of many stars being led be the zodiacs – and ending with the zodiac sign of Dante himself, in which he finds himself with Beatrice looking at it and his destiny. This zodiac sign is -- Ge(r)mini.
[…]
Next evolutionary step:
Trionfi III or Minchiate or [in its early form:] Ge(r)mini = Trionfi II + Rest of the cardinal virtues of TrPr1 + the four elements of Purg. XXXIII + TrPr2.
Trionfi III will be called Minchiate in the following. Note that Minchiate contains the TrPr1, TrPr2 and TrPr3 in the right order of the commedia. Note that the tower [of Babel, see below the mentioning in DPar] of the lightning card is reinterpreted after the Devil card as the “House of the Devil” (Casa del Dio), since the rest of the cardinal virtues follow in Earthly Paradise of DPurg, then elements etc., hence the card does not lead directly to the “House of God”. It simply marks the escape from hell to a “clear world” as in the commedia (“a ritornar nel chiaro mondo”, End of Inf. XXXIIII)
Note furthermore that the four final zodiac cards of Minchiate form the tetramorph (the four figures of Ezechiel or the four figures for the evangelists) with Dante being the human figure in the Gemini-sign. Note that the tetramorph is leading the TrPr1 in DPurg, reason for being depicted on the world card of Tarocchi (see also Babylonian mythology below). […]
You wrote:
That the sequence from Devil to Sun is compatible with Dante’s commedia and with Plato’s Republic [resp. the cave allegory in the Republic] is exactly what I tried to express with the title of this very thread.mikeh wrote: 25 Nov 2021, 21:15 The nice thing about the sequence from Devil to Sun, and then to the last two, is that it is compatible with several narratives: Dante's Divine Comedy, the darkness-to-light analogy of Plato's Republic, the series of spheres around the earth of the medieval cosmos through which the soul journeys to and from the Empyrean, and the Last Days scenario in which devils terrorize the earth, who are also agents of God's wrath, and the forces of light defeat those of darkness.
With respect to Dante’s commedia, one has to consider in my eyes that the tarocchi order Star – Moon – Sun does not work when simply following Dante’s ascent in his paradiso. Reason is that the first celestial sphere he crosses is the Moon sphere in Par. II to Par. IV, then the sphere of Mercury in Par. V to Par. VII, then the sphere of Venus in Par. VIII and Par. IX, then the Sun sphere in Par. X ff. [Thereafter follow the spheres of Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and the fix stars, which contain the Zodiac with the respective triumphal procession mentioned above being led by the Gemini sign. For this celestial journey, Dante follows the Aristotelian description of the order of the series of spheres around the earth, as in the then famous book “De sphaera mundi” by Johannes de Sacrobosco https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_sphaera_mundi]. So the order does not match, since there are even two stars/planets between moon and sun. It only works out when considering the triumphal procession [trionfi!] in Par. XXIII in which Dante mentions explicitely only moon – sun – star [and being struck by lightning, the preceding card]. The order then comes from Plato’s cave allegory since the game is a philosopher’s game, a ludus philosophorum after the neoplatonic turn [at least I propose to see it this way]. This is what I tried to express with
vh0610 wrote: 17 Sep 2021, 21:12 There is one further triumphal procession (called in the following TrPr3) in the non-earthly paradise just before the empyreum (Par. XXIII), the extracted-from-time city/world/rose/house of god (“maison de dieu”). The TrPr3 is composed of the Moon (named “Trivia” there), the Star (which is Maria) and the Sun (which is the Christ) - and Dante is struck by lightning in a passive-receptive mode when seeing these celestial entities “to be in wisdom and power” (Par. XXIII). […]
Next evolutionary step:
Trionfi II or tarocch’(i) = 21 trumps (plus 1, “nisi velint”) = Trionfi + TrPr1 + TrPr3
Trionfi II will be called Tarocchi in the following. This is the neoplatonic turn […]
With respect to the Last Days Scenario, I have to admit that I do not understand your comment. Do you refer to the biblical Book of Revelation? Could you please provide more details? Thanks.
You wrote
After a time of reflection, I think you are fully right. Thank you very much for this point!mikeh wrote: 25 Nov 2021, 21:15 Of your assumptions, the only one I would question is that games go from simpler to complex. I do not see why that should be true. It depends on what is involved in "complex": complex rules at first, owing to the needs of adaptation from a previous model, can be reduced to a simpler set later, with the complexities of good play unchanged or even enhanced. There is also the example from Dummett in 1989 (“A Comment on Marziano,” The Playing-Card 18:2,p. 74), commenting on the rules of Marziano's game, to which he had proposed a complexity not stated by Marziano:
In this case, Dummett's assumption seems to have been that Karnöffel could reasonably be considered a predecessor game to games with permanent trumps.If this seems complicated, we should remember that evolution sometimes goes in the direction of simplicity; we should recall also the complicated rules about the trump suit in Karnöffel.
I was too fast with this complexity development assumption, I was wrongly based that the idea of “variatio delectat” (Euripides / Aristoteles) in times of leisure is valid for all situations. I forgot that evidently complexity can be reduced when a system undergoes a phase change (as synergetics and complexity science would call it), then a new more simpler behavior might “emerge” on a different level. Or if we consider the case of modelling, since models mostly reduce complexity of the original. And w.r.t. the evolution of cards, there is a lot of modelling (see e.g. JvR) and phase changes (see e.g. the arguments of this very thread). Hence I was wrong.
However, after rereading what I wrote, I realize that I do not need this assumption anymore. For every step where I used it, I have a better explanation now. [Which I will give when coming to the respective point again.]
Perhaps at this moment I should state that after rereading what I wrote, I have to say that I am sorry for having written far too densely [this is why I write in this very post so often: “what I tried to express is”]. As a general rule, I try not to flood this forum with non-reflected arguments -- and I overdid it in the other direction: what I wrote is far too dense and I have to unfold it. I will do it.
However, with the distance I have now to what I wrote, I realize in which direction I am driven: it seems to me that for pre-esoteric tarots (that is before 1783; a notion I owe to Ross Caldwell), we can make it very plausible that the early tarots are one of the finest products of Renaissance based on –and more or less only on-- Dante, Petrarca, Aristoteles, Plato [in its neoplatonic form of Ficino and friends] plus evidently: the bible and the respective Jewish tradition.
In other words: The tarot is not unscientific, it is even more scientific than most people of the general public think of. I do believe that this argument can plausibly hold considering the highly cultured situation at Renaissance courts and the respective material I’ve seen in the last months.
You wrote:
Thanks for this hint. I do think it is very valuable. If one considers Wikipedia for Tarocchini (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarocchini), one findsmikeh wrote: 25 Nov 2021, 21:15 In support of your "drumstick" idea, there is the Tarocchino Fool, a drummer-boy; not the same trump, but close enough.
The Fool is not a trump, it can't beat any cards and is played as an excuse from following suit. The Magician is the lowest trump.
For me, the most important point is that the drummer boy/fool is not a trump, which is very unusual. The first trump in Tarocchini is the so-called “Magician” [I prefer bagatella.]. Hence, this could possibly support the Rosenwald- theory I proposed:
If we remember that the Rosenwald deck has no fool, but only a real bagatella which is depicted as an imposter (some people say that the Rosenwald bagatella looks like an amalgamation of the fool and the bagatella), and if the proposed theory holds that the 14 -> 21 transition took place in Florence, then it has some plausibility that the Bologna-based Tarocchini learned initially from Florence, then re-added a fool in view of other decks containing a fool (which after the theory I proposed is a kind of outsorted stultitia from the 14 trumps trionfi deck). However, they kept from Florence in a de-amalgamation process the drumming aspect and kept also the no trump value for the drummer boy/Fool in the sense that the bagatella is still the lowest trump as in Rosenwald.vh0610 wrote: 17 Sep 2021, 21:12 I propose to see the respective Rosenwald-sheet containing the trumps as the model deck for the transition Trionfi to Tarocchi. […] Moreover, the bagatella of the deck is really a bagatella with simply having the balls on the table (remember assumption A6, evolution from simplicity to complexity) – moreover it is the only bagatella card to my knowledge which makes the sticks in the hand plausible: he has a pair of drumsticks in his hands, calling for his audience. In other words: the sticks –mostly a single stick-- in all other decks, TdMs included, are originally no magic wands, but are derived from the Rosenwald drumstick model.
[In view of the Rosenwald theory: news from Leinfelden museum is that the state Baden-Württemberg allows us to examine the respective sheet “without destroying it”. We will start by trying to find a water mark. I already identified the right expert to do so. Hopefully he joins in the research…]