Tarot History Forum

A symposium on literature and "occulture" was held in the University of Rouen in 2023, the conference papers of which were published a year ago online in their entirety.(in French).

https://publis-shs.univ-rouen.fr/ceredi/1530.html

The second half of the symposium was devoted to cards, tarot and literature, and a number of the papers are of some significance, especially the first two and G. Beuchet's article on André Breton's Arcane 17, in my view.

I looked at one of them, the first one you drew attention to, by Laurence Danguy. Full of misinformation, with a very poor standard of research. It's hard to believe that this was written by a professional academic, yet that appears to have been the case. Yet another example of very poor quality work in the field of tarot history by an art historian – it's depressing how often that happens. Is it really that hard to do the tiny amount of research required to find works like Dummett's Game of Tarot or Depaulis' Tarots enluminés?

Perhaps the other articles are of higher quality; I did not look at those because they appear to be concerned solely with divinatory tarot, whereas my interest is solely the history of playing-cards.

I had started to write my own critique of that very article, as it happens, but haven't yet finished it. The chief reason being that I found some of the points raised to be interesting, factual errors notwithstanding - and I had noted enough of those. That said, I think your assessment is both fair and accurate, if uncharitable. To the best of my knowledge, aside from the books you cite, there are not many papers or books dealing with these aspects of Tarot history, and as such the enterprise as a whole is noteworthy.

Too often, interdisciplinary can be a euphemism or excuse for sloppiness. It seems too easy to focus on wider questions without doing the necessary research to support one's conclusions. I'll write more about this later.

The second paper of the second section, "Comment regarder le tarot de Marseille ?" by Laurence Danguy (https://publis-shs.univ-rouen.fr/ceredi/1808.html) is thought-provoking, in my view. It raises many questions, relating to art history, cultural history, iconography, hermeneutics, and philosophy, and does not attempt to answer them all (see section 6).

However, one can only regret uninformed and all-too categoric statements such as: "Alliette (dit Etteilla), sur le compte duquel on sait très peu de choses" when a substantial biography will be found in A Wicked Pack of Cards, and the lengthy entry by Antoine Faivre in the Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism. There is also an early biography in French, Recherches sur le Dernier Sorcier by Millet-Saint Pierre.

The author is correct in identifying auctoriality as a 'problématique', however, from Robert Klein’s seminal 1967 article « Les tarots enluminés » to the 2022 exhibition catalogue « Tarots enluminés. Chefs-d’oeuvre de la renaissance italienne », the question of the authorship of the early Italian tarots continues to exercise researchers, and the definitive anonymity of these early cards is far from being a given.

Similarly, Paul Marteau's deck was not a composite Besançon/Marseille hybrid, since an original Marseille-type deck is extant, printed by Lequart in 1890, and has been known for some years now. (https://tarot-de-marseille-millennium.c ... llery.html) This type of factual inaccuracy, rather than being an insignificant error, undermines the entire thrust of the argument as a whole, and demonstrates the need for greater rigour and research.

(That said, the question warrants investigation, for as we have noted in this particular instance, neither Marteau's claims to authenticity, nor his colour scheme and the finer details of his work have been subjected to a critical analysis, aside from G. Beuchet's treatment, which I've translated on my blog.)

As an aside, and regardless of what one may think of either Messrs Jodorowsky and Camoin, it seems unfair to compare their work with AI-generated imagery, simply because they processed the images of their deck using a computer (in 1997...). The aspect of artistic creation underpinning their deck - a truly composite deck, if ever there was one - lies less in its (dis)respect of an established visual canon than it reflects their decidedly maximalist editorial choices in pursuit of a putative Ur-Tarot. (see viewtopic.php?t=2669)

The implication being, it seems to me, that the rationale behind an established canon - in this instance, the Tarot of Marseille such as it has been engraved on woodblocks over the centuries - is somehow comparable to that of an AI dataset driven by prompts, and I think that that is misleading. More generally, the debate over AI-generated imagery is misplaced here, and perhaps a separate issue entirely to that of computer-assisted editing. There would of course be a lot to say on the matter, but that is another discussion.

Another article by the same author is also available online here: https://serval.unil.ch/resource/serval: ... 4.P001/REF

In spite of the standard references being cited, one will still find the type of inaccuracies mentioned above.

The third article of the second section, on Court de Gébelin, is perhaps one of the more intelligent and accessible presentations of his work for the Tarot-inclined reader, although it fails to mention a number of key works, in my opinion, such as Monique Streiff-Moretti's article « L'Isis des Tarots » or Jurgis Baltrušaitis' « Quête d'Isis. » (https://publis-shs.univ-rouen.fr/ceredi/1946-1.pdf)

A number of points come to mind:

The identity of Court's correspondent, M. Le C. De M*** as de Mellet is now well established, and Alexander Statman's recent work on hitherto unknown archival material has revealed even more information on this rather obscure character.

In the conclusion, the author gives the Jungian interpretation of the Tarot a recent place in the history of the uses to which the cards have been put, seemingly unaware that this date could be placed almost a century back - if, in effect, Jung himself wrote nothing of substance on Tarot, he had attended Bernoulli's talk on the subject in 1934, later published in the Eranos Jahrbuch, and a number of his students did attempt interpretations of sorts in the 1940s. Moreover, the elective affinities between occultism and nascent psychology, not to mention their overlapping circles on the Venn diagram of the history of ideas, would also require further study.

These are but minor things, and overall the article is a balanced introduction to Court's ideas where Tarot is concerned.