Tarocchino Lombardo, the long out-of-print soprafino deck published by Il Solleone, fell into my hands recently. This gave me an opportunity to compare it with soprafino facsimiles by Lo Scarabeo and Il Meneghello. The the cards in the illustrations from left to right are: Lo Scarabeo, Il Solleone, Il Meneghello.

If you need a refresher on this deck style, here’s a page with everything you need to know.

The short version: About 1835, the printing house of Gumppenberg in Milan hired the artist Carlo Della Rocca to create an exquisitely beautiful engraved tarocchi deck. Since then, many of the deck’s unique design elements have been used in other decks printed in Lombardy and Piedmont.

Here’s a run-down of the features of each deck:

Il Meneghello

This is the real deal — a facsimile of the deck as it looks now complete with age marks and stains. A thin white line runs along the right edge where it appears the card was not centered exactly on its backing. The card stock is smooth and sturdy. Card backs are printed with subtle dots and circles in gray on cream. Card size: 2 millimeters shorter than the Il Solleone

Il Solleone/Bordoni

This is a facsimile of a soprafino knock-off printed by Bordoni of Milan in1889. The lines are nearly identical to the Gumppenberg original, but close examination shows subtle differences.

The colors are rich and deep – sometimes so dark they obscure the details. Ink, especially the red, slops over the lines. You don’t see this in the other two decks, but it’s not nearly as bad as many stenciled decks. The intense sapphire blue is unique to this deck. It’s found on the Fool’s pants, the Star card’s water, and the sword blades of the ace and court cards of the swords suit. A few cards have minor cropping: The Fool card lost part of the dog’s front leg and the Fool’s bag. The background is cream with no staining. The publisher either worked from a pristine copy or cleaned the cards up.

A few images differ from Della Rocca’s original: The Ace Coins has a Mercury head instead of a woman. The King Rods holds what I can only describe as a pizza pan enclosing a white shield with a red cross.

I especially like the faces on the court cards. I’ve never liked the soprafino faces with their sickly pale skin and artificial pink spots on the cheeks. In this deck, the skin is a healthy flesh color and the faces look more real and robust. But for some reason, color has been omitted on the lips of some court figures. The Queen of Batons looks especially haggard.

The card backs have the Il Solleone logo of a sun and a crowned lion. Card size: 2.25 x 4.3 inches (5.75 x 11 centimeters.)

Lo Scarabeo

This deck is a bit larger than other two, and the colors are brighter, which makes it easier to see details and lines. The cards have a wider right margin with the card name in four languages, as in so many Lo Scarabeo decks. The background has light speckling and faint discoloration, but it doesn’t match the stains on the Il Meneghello deck. It seems Lo Scarabeo cleaned up the original stains then attempted to give the cards an aged look. Card stock is the same as most commercial decks.

Card backs show the Star card printed upright and reversed in sepia. Card size: 2.5 x 4.75 inches (6.5 by 12 centimeters).

Which deck to get if you can only have one.

Il Meneghello is the most historically accurate but not the most aesthetic, in my opinion.

Lo Scarabeo seems to be identical to Il Meneghello with more subtle stains. It’s best for studying details. The borders ruin it aesthetically, but if you can ignore them, it’s a good, inexpensive deck for shuffling.

Il Solleoni/Bordoni:  If I were going to read with a soprafino, I’d use this deck. It feels good in the hand, is sturdy, has strong colors, and is aesthetically pleasing. It’s the kind of deck I would have owned if I had lived in the 19^th century.

Deck information

Tarocchino Lombardo inciso da Carlo Dellarocca, Milano, @1835. Edizioni del Solleone, a cura de Vito Arienti, Lissone, Italia, 1981. 2,500 printed. (Facsimile of a deck printed by Bordoni, Milan, 1889)

Classical Tarots, Lo Scarabeo, Torino, Italy, 1999. Still in print.

Tarocco Soprafino di F. Gumppenberg, Milano 1835. Edizioni Il Meneghello, Milano 1992. 2,000 printed.

Links

Here’s the article again about the Soprafino style

Here’s an article about another soprafino variant originally published by the Avondo Brothers and reprinted by Lo Scarabeo.

Question: Who is the Spanish Captain, and what’s he doing in a tarot deck?

The Short Answer: He’s a character from the Commedia dell’Arte who substitutes for the Papesse in a type of 18^th-century Belgian deck.

The Long Answer: Read the rest of the article.

What is Commedia dell’Arte?

It’s a type of popular theater with roots in the classical world. It flourished in Renaissance Italy and spread throughout Europe, especially France, in the 14^th through 18^th centuries. An array of standard characters appeared in every play like Harlequin, Pantalone, and Pulcinella, who was the prototype for Punch and Pierrot. The audience instantly recognized these characters by their masks, their walk, costume and regional accent, as well as characteristic slapstick routines, stage business, gestures, jokes, and favorite curse words.

The plays were improvised from brief sketches. Favorite story lines included thwarted lovers, stolen children, scheming widows, cross-dressing, and mistaken identity. Physical comedy and slapstick carried the action. If an actor ran out of inspiration he could fall back on stock bits of comic business called lazzi that featured chamber pots, bowls of pasta, pig bladders and enemas. Audience members would eagerly anticipate their favorite lazzi.

Who was the Captain?

He was a bombastic soldier who constantly boasted of his exploits in love and war, but was actually a coward. He would strut and preen in his splendid clothes, challenge rivals to duels, seduce princesses and pretend to be an aristocrat. The Captain was depicted with a huge plumed hat, flowing cape, oversized sword, silly mustache and an affected Castilian accent. His mask had a very long, phallic nose. He had many regional names: Capitain Fracasse (or Ercasse), Spanish Captain, Le Spagnolo Capitano, Capitan Cocodrilo, or Scaramouche. He was the prorotype for Cyrano de Bergerac, Captain Spavento and Ralph Roister Doister.

The Captain was originally Italian. The height of his popularity was the 15^th and 16^th centuries, the age of the condottiere, who were universally despised as they pillaged their way across the countryside. Once Spain got control of most of Europe, the Captain morphed from an arrogant conqueror into a cowardly Castilian, the victim of gratuitous violence and embarrassing mishaps.

Some lazzi associated with the Captain:

• He tries to break up a fight between two armed men. They turn on him and beat him to a pulp.
• The Captain is on one knee serenading a lady under her balcony when a servant accidentally empties a chamber pot on his head.
• A lazzo that has direct bearing on this card: someone describes a beautiful woman to the Captain. The dagger hanging from his belt comes to life, simulating an erection.

The tarot card’s designer was obviously familiar with this last bit of stage business and knew his fellow card players would be too; so he copied the Captain from an engraving and modified the sword handle.

Why a Spanish Captain on a Belgian Deck?

In 1604, Spain seized Belgium and oppressed the people for the next century with heavy taxes and the Spanish Inquisition. When the King of Spain died in 1700, the Bourbons and Hapsburgs fought the War of Spanish Succession from 1700 to 1714, mostly on Belgian soil. The Hapsburgs won and got control of Belgium, which was known as Austrian Belgium until 1795.

In a deck printed by Antoine Jar of Brussels, “Laborne” is printed in large block letters on the Captain’s thigh. Laborne was a Parisian card printer in the very early 18^th century, so it’s possible he designed the Spanish Captain card just as Spain was losing its grip on European politics and it was becoming less dangerous to mock the Spanish overlords.

Belgian Decks

In some places, card makers were ordered to replace the Popesse and Pope with something less controversial, because they were considered either sacrilegious or too Catholic. They were usually replaced with something pagan like Jupiter and Juno or Moorish Kings.

In 18^th century Brussels a group of card makers, including Vandenborre, used the Spanish Captain to replace the Papesse, and replaced the Pope with Bacchus astride a wine barrel. The decks that still exist were printed from 1770 to 1790 at end of Austrian rule; but there may be earlier decks that are lost. These nearly identical Belgian-style decks were printed in Brussels and France by various print shops. See them in Stuart Kaplan’s Encyclopedias referenced below.

The Spanish Captain and Bacchus weren’t the only unique cards in Belgian decks. The Tower was called La Foudre (The Thunderbolt) and showed a shepherd under a tree that’s being hit by lightning. The Devil is in profile breathing fire, with faces in his chest, knees, and stomach. The Star card depicts a man seated in front of a tower holding calipers, while The Moon shows a woman holding a spindle. The court cards and other human figures have short, stumpy legs giving them a slightly squashed appearance.

These cards have predecessors in two decks printed in Paris: Jacques Vieville from about1650 and the slightly earlier Anonymous Parisian deck. This unique imagery also appears on 15^th century decks from Ferrara, and may be evidence of an alternate tradition that eventually lost out to the standard TdM pattern. The Vandenborre deck, the only facsimile Belgian deck on the market, was published in Belgium by Carta Mundi as the Flemish Tarot (Vandenborre Bacchus Tarot) in 1983.

References

Duchartre, Pierre Louis. The Italian Comedy. New York: Dover Publications,1966. (Originally published by George G. Harrap, 1929).

Dummett, Michael. The Game of Tarot: From Ferrara to Salt Lake City. Duckworth, 1980. p. 204-210.

Gordon, Mel. Lazzi: The Comic Routines of the Commedia dell’Arte. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1983.

Kaplan, Stuart R., Encyclopedia of Tarot Volumes I, p. 147-152 and Vol. II, p. 320-330. Stamford CT: U.S. Games Systems, Inc., 1978 and 1986.

Olsen, Christina. The Art of Tarot, New York: Abbeville Press, 1995. (Ferrarese and Parisian decks).

www.wopc.co.uk/Belgium/vandenborre-tarot (World of Playing Cards)

Youtube has numerous videos introducing Commedia characters and showing comic routines.

A special thanks to my good friend and tarot colleague Lady Lea who inspired this article when she presented me with two books on the Commedia dell’Arte.

The poems in this important anthology take us on a ride from black jack tables to the Last Supper. Many poems gently evoke the essence of a card, like lingering incense. Others delight us with new insights, like Tony Barnstone’s paired poems on the same card upright and reversed; or Amy Schrader’s poems on court cards. The Devil has been transformed by Lore Bernier (I am restrained by a lack of restraint) and Amanda Chiado (He was the kid who only ate the icing). On these pages we hear the voice of a rather smug Temperance angel, a tricksterish Fool and a foolish Fool, and Judas as the Hanged Man.

Poetic forms run the gamut from Enrique Enriquez’ word play, to Camelia Elias’ prose, and Karen Harper’s Villanelle on the Queen of Swords. This haiku poet was delighted with Frank Walson’s linked micropoetry sequences that read like free-form renga.

Steve Mangan’s translations of two sonnets by Teofilo Folengo are a treat for history lovers. Published in 1527, these sonnets are the first evidence of tarot being used for fortune telling. Folengo’s poems play on the names of cards laid out to give a message.

I was disappointed I hadn’t heard about this project in time to submit my own poems. But after reading the contributors’ accomplishments, I realized this amateur would have been totally outclassed. All the contributors to this anthology are professional poets with numerous publications to their credit.

Here’s Marjorie Jensen on the Moon:

The path from the sea with its howling
guards supports toes, soles wrinkled and dripping.

These poems immerse us in a phosphorescent ocean of swirling images where we float in a dream or thrash in a rip tide until we emerge transformed. I’ll take up this book often to plunge repeatedly into this great sea of images.

Arcana: The Tarot Poetry Anthology, Marjorie Jensen editor, Minor Arcana Press, Seattle, 2015

Purchase the book at www.minorarcanapress.com

tarotpoetry.wordpress.com features a poet from the anthology each month.

According to a review in the November 2015 issue of Art News, a museum in Bordeaux, France has just wrapped up a 50-year retrospective of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s career. In the photo shown here, peeking out from under the screen, you can see the bottoms of the Tarot de Marseille that Jodorowsky designed with Philippe Camoin. But Jodorowsky is about a lot more than tarot.

Here are some of his accomplishments that were on display in Bordeaux:

• Drawings, paintings and cartoons.
• His work in the 1950s with the post-surrealist performance-art collective Panic Movement.
• Screenings of his films El Topo and The Holy Mountain. In the 1970s these films played for months in New York City arthouses.
• Graphic novels created with the French illustrator Moebius.
• Sketches and storyboards from a film based on Frank Herbert’s Dune which never got off the ground.

Not to mention his role as Psychomagical Trickster and his books on shamanic psychotherapy. On Netflix you can find a disk with one of his films and a documentary showing Jodorowsky turning an informal discussion into an intense Family Constellations session.

The article said Jodorowsky is a Twitter star. I’m not on Twitter and never will be – but it sounds worth checking out.

Here’s the reviewer’s summary:

“Hailed as a visionary, dismissed as a charlatan, Jodorowsky’s work has never left critics indifferent. He belongs to the genealogy of such (in)famous mavericks as Dalí, Yves Klein, Joseph Beuys, and Andy Warhol; as with them, his greatest creation might be himself.”

See photos of Jodorowsky, his Tarot de Marseille deck, and the museum exhibit on the facebook page of the CAPC: Musee d’Art Contemporain de Bordeaux.

Here’s my review of Jodorowsky’s book on reading with tarot cards – The Way of Tarot.

Alejandro Jodorowsky: Musée D’art Contemporain de Bordeaux. Review by Javier Montes, Art News, November 2015.

I associate the Reader’s Digest with seeing copies in a basket in my grandparents’ bathroom. Tarot just doesn’t seem to be aligned with the Reader’s Digest’s market niche; so I was intrigued when I learned that a Tarot de Marseille published by Reader’s Digest was on Ebay. Since it was only $11, I decided to satisfy my curiosity.

I’m very pleased with the quality of the cards and book, a collaboration between Czech artist Jindra Capek and writer Vlasta Duskova. The twenty-two cards are set into a niche at the bottom of a sturdy box which holds a 110-page hard-bound book that’s extensively illustrated in color.

Unfortunately, the book starts with a cringe-worthy history of tarot. Ancient Egypt, Kabbalah, alchemists, witches and Italian tarocchi are mentioned on the same page and given the same weight. The author states that tarot’s purpose is occult initiation into Kabbalistic mysteries. Twentieth century Czech and French esotericists are quoted as being the authority on tarot’s ancient origins. We’re also told that medieval tarot users were burned at the stake for being heretics.

The deck uses the European system of assigning the Hebrew alphabet to the cards. The Magician is Aleph, with the alphabet running up the cards and ending with the Fool as Shin. (In the Golden Dawn system the Fool is Aleph, displacing the letter attributions by one card).

Each card gets two double-page spreads displaying a full-page reproduction of the card, a poem, and a general interpretation. This is followed by a discussion of the number, the Hebrew letter, and two sets of astrological associations. Each card is also assigned an abstract geometric symbol called a Pentacle.

The cards are lovely, with clean lines, bright, pleasant colors, and the associated Hebrew letter on the bottom border. They are a bit larger than most cards — 3.5 by 5.5 inches.

The deck sticks closely to mainstream TdM imagery, with these notable exceptions:

• Le Bateleur has a temple façade behind him and a cactus growing between his feet.
• La Papesse shifts toward occult imagery with pomegranates on the curtain and a crescent Moon on her turban.
• The Emperor’s eagle is carved on a stone block instead of being on his shield.
• The three figures on the Lovers card stand at a crossroads. The younger woman is naked.
• Judgment has flaming wings.

This is a good beginner’s deck if you’re curious about esoteric tarot. It’s also a nice, inexpensive collector’s item.

In the fifteenth century, playing cards were a novelty. Italian aristocrats commissioned hand painted, gilded trionfi decks from their favorite artists, while their counterparts farther north were doing the same with one-of-a-kind playing card decks.

Guinevere’s Games offers four fifteenth-century playing card decks through Gamecrafters. Three of these decks were hand painted luxury items, while the fourth is a basic black and white deck. These are not collectible facsimiles. They are printed in rich colors on smooth paper and could be easily shuffled and used for game playing. Each deck is housed in a tin and accompanied by background information. Here are details on each deck.

The first two decks described below were discovered in the castle of Ambras at Innsbruck, Germany in the 16^th century.

Ambras Court Playing Cards (Hofamterspiel) 1455/60, German

The deck has four suits numbered 1 to 10 in Roman numerals, with two court cards – King and Queen. The suits are distinguished by the arms of four countries: Bohemia (white lion on red), Germany (black eagle), France (fleur de lys), and Hungary (horizontal red and white stripes). Each card depicts an occupation that would support a noble household like Barber, Chaplain and Falconer. The occupation is hand lettered on the cards in German gothic script. The first card in each suit is a Jester. The original deck is hand-colored woodcut, but the work is so fine the cards look like miniature paintings.

Cards illustrated here: One (Jester) from the suit of Germany and Six (Harpist) from the suit of France.

The dimensions are 2.5 inches wide x 3.5 inches tall. The backs are solid gray with a trademark name at the bottom right. The enclosed booklet gives instructions for playing a game with the cards, along with a color thumbnail of each card and its name.

In 1975, Piatnick printed a facsimile edition of 1,000, with a booklet written by four playing card experts including Sir Michael Dummett.

Ambras Court Hunting Deck (Hofjagdspiel), 1440/1445, Swiss; now in the Vienna Museum of Art History

Hunting must have been a popular theme for playing cards as several decks with this theme still exist. This deck, illustrating heron hunting, is attributed to the workshop of Konrad Witz of Basle. The cards were not block printed, like most tarot and playing card decks at that time. The images were drawn with pen and ink then painted.

The deck has four suits: white hounds, white herons, white falcons and brown lures. The ten suit cards do not have numbers. The “tens” are illustrated with a flag containing the suit symbol.

The deck has four court cards: king and queen on a gold background and two knights or knaves on a colored background. The court cards are not labeled, and all court figures are mounted. The court cards of each suit have different colored robes and hold their suit symbol. Playing card decks usually had three court cards in a suit; but having four, as in a trionfi pack, is not unheard of.

Illustrated here: Three of Hounds and King of Herons.

These cards have the same size and appearance as the Ambras Court deck described above. The backs are red. This deck does not come with any explanatory material. According to an online source, two cards are missing. If someone at Guinevere’s Games recreated them, they did an excellent job, as I couldn’t tell the difference.

About 10 minutes into the first episode of Showtime’s The Borgias, there’s a scene where the Borgia Pope’s mistress, the teenage Lucrezia Borgia, and a young boy play cards in a sunny courtyard. The camera focuses on the boy’s hand long enough to see the cards clearly. He’s playing with a large version of this deck, about the size of the original Visconti-Sforza cards. His hand contains: the 6 and 10 of Lures, King of Herons and a Queen whose suit is hard to determine.

Flemish Playing Cards (Flemish Hunting Deck) 1470 – 1480, Burgundy area, Metropolitan Museum of Art

These tall, oval cards are hand painted with gold and silver embellishments. The cards are in excellent condition, evidently seldom handled and certainly not used for game playing.

Suit symbols are equipment related to hunting: Tethers, Nooses, Horns, and Dog Collars. It’s interesting that two of the suits have red suit symbols and two have dark blue. This may be an early example of dividing the suits between red and black. It’s believed stencils were used to ensure uniformity of suit symbols.

The three court figures, King, Queen, and Knave, stand in three-quarter profile holding their suit symbol. They are fashionably dressed in the style popular at the court of the Burgundian Dukes in the late 15^th century.

Illustrated: Six of Hunting Horns and King of Nooses.

The cards are 2.75 x 5.5 inches. The backs are the same tan color as the front background. The deck comes with one sheet of paper giving background information and explaining the suit symbols. Piatnik printed a facsimile edition in 1974 with a descriptive booklet.

Moorish Playing Cards

Simon Wintle, owner of World of Playing Cards website referenced below, found two uncut sheets of cards being used to stiffen the covers of a fifteenth-century book in a museum in Barcelona, Spain. As cards have been recorded in Spain as early as 1414, these cards may be the oldest known playing cards in Europe. They seem to be a link between the Mamluk cards introduced to Europe by Arab sailors in the 14^th century, and the standard Spanish and Italian decks that emerged over the 15^th century.

The suits are: Coins, Cups, Swords, and something curved that may be a scimitar or some kind of baton with a knot in the middle. The deck has three court cards in each suit: a seated king, standing knave, and mounted knight.

Illustrated here: Five of Cups and Knave of Batons.

The cards are 4.5 x 2.5 inches and retain the sharp corners of the original. They are printed on smooth, heavy, uncoated card stock to replicate the feel of the originals as much as possible. The backs are the plain cream color of the card stock.

References and Links

www.GuineveresGames.CA makers of card and board games from the Dark Ages to the Renaissance.

TarotWheel.net has more images from the Ambras Court and the oval Flemish deck as well as the Stuttgart hunting deck which is very similar to the Ambras Hunting deck. This site has links to high resolution scans of each deck.

Simon Wintle’s website www.wopc.co.uk is a huge resource for historic playing and tarot cards.

Clear the Decks: Newsletter of the American Playing Card Collector’s Club. June 2015. Hofamterspiel Playing Cards @1460 by Rod Starling.

The third issue of The Cartomancer just landed in my inbox, and it’s a beauty.

My favorite section contains luscious full-page layouts of decks. I love the black background that intensifies the colors and makes the cards sizzle. One deck caught my attention: the Tribal Secrets Tarot where the creator photographed belly dancers interpreting the cards in their own way.

Some of my favorite articles:

• Bonnie Cehovet, Mindfulness in a Reading, counsels us to take our time and let the cards reveal their story rather than jumping in and imposing our canned interpretations on them.
• Jay DeForest gives some gentle reminders about how to be a good member of the tarot community.
• A review of Giordano Berti’s oracle deck, The Sibyl of the Heart, based on 17^th century Rosicrucian imagery.
• It was interesting to see Major Tom Schick’s deck based on Lotería cards which are used in a game like bingo. After seeing several Lotería decks in a local museum, I became intrigued by the possibilities of reading with them.
• Nancy Elle shares a spread that addresses how your parents’ relationship influences your own.
• The important but confusing topic of trademarks, copyright law and intellectual property rights is explained by Cheryl Fair.
• My contributions: an article on 15^th century aristocrats’ mania for real gold decks, and a review of the Tarot de Marseille facsimiles produced by Yves Reynaud.

This is only a fraction of the articles and reviews in this 62 page magazine.

Get it here at www.TheCartomancer.com

Artist Ofri Cnaani turned a New York Chelsea gallery into a card reading emporium and used her readings to generate unique works of art for her clients. According to a review in the December 2015 issue of Art News, Cnaani used her own custom-made, over-sized cards.

The client picked a card at random, handed Ms. Cnaani a personal item, then selected two more items from a stash of odds and ends hanging on the wall. Cnaani then created a collage using the card and the selected items, plus fabric scraps and beads. A surveillance camera photographed the collage and projected it onto a screen in the shop window.

A similar performance piece was staged at a gallery in Rome in October 2014. Cnaani combined her own objects with objects given her by customers on the bed of a photocopy machine. The video on her website shows Cnaani and the customer laying their hands on the backing sheet in a ritualistic manner as the photocopy was being made. Cnaani immediately signed the photocopy and gave it to the customer, while projecting its image on the wall.

These projects remind me of poets at farmer’s markets and street fairs taking donations to type out spontaneous poetry on manual typewriters. Those of you with mercurial minds and a creative flair, how about ending a reading with an instant poem, a quick sketch, a splash of watercolor, or a collage from items grabbed out of a bin. Encapsulate the quality of the moment in a vivid visual reminder.

See images and read more at OfriCnaani.com. On the Home page, go to Wrong Tools for the card reading piece, and Command + Duplicate for the photocopy project.

I’ve been wanting an oversized Tarot de Marseille for a long time but wasn’t sure one even existed. When someone on Facebook posted a link to such a deck on Amazon, I clicked the “buy now” button sight-unseen.

When the deck arrived, I was delighted to discover it’s a facsimile of a 1760 Conver deck originally printed in Marseille and reproduced by Bounty Books.

Before Yves Reynaud, Osvaldo Menegazzi and others started producing facsimiles of rare TdMs, the gold standard for historic facsimiles was another deck printed by Conver in 1760 published in France by Heron. (The Heron box dates their deck to 1761, but 1760 is stamped on the Two of Coins).

Both the Heron and the Bounty Books decks were printed by Conver in 1760 using the same woodblocks. Let’s compare the two.

The Heron cards have faint, delicate lines. I used to think this was from old, worn woodblocks; or perhaps the deck itself had faded. But it appears that’s how the blocks were inked. The delicate lines show details on the faces clearly. The colors were stenciled on more carefully than on the Bounty Books deck. The delicate lines are often completely obscured by the colored ink — see the red bowl of the Knight’s cup.

On the Bounty Books deck, the inked lines are much darker and heavier. Sometimes they run together and obscure facial details. The colors are more intense, and it appears an effort was made to juxtapose sharply contrasting colors. The stenciling is sloppier than on the Heron deck — see the horse’s hooves and the Knight’s red shoe. In this deck, the hair is left uncolored on all the court cards and many trump figures.

I often do three-card readings with just the suit cards then take their sum to get a trump card as the theme of the reading (see this article on reading trump and suit card combinations). With two deck sizes the trump card from this oversize deck can loom over the smaller cards like a guardian. I used my smallest deck in this illustration, a Claude Burdel TdM published by Lo Scarabeo. See this article for putting layouts in card holders.

Same year, same woodblocks, same print shop; two decks with an entirely different look.

The Bounty Books deck is 5.75 x 3.25 inches; the Heron deck is 4.25 x 2.25 inches; the Burdel is 3.0 x 1.75 inches. The Bounty Books deck comes in a sturdy box with a removable top. The LWB is useless. The few paragraphs of history are execrable, and they give no information about the original deck.

• The Tarot Deck. Bounty Books, London, 2007.
• Tarot de Marseille Conver 1760. Heron, Bordeaux, n/d. (@1980 according to Kaplan)
• Tarot of Marseille, Lo Scarabeo, Torino, 2008

Luxurious playing cards from the 15^th and early 16^th centuries, including two tarocchi decks, are on exhibit at the Cloisters in New York City until April 17, 2016. This is a unique opportunity to see Visconti Sforza and Visconti (Carey Yale) cards side-by-side.  If you can’t make it to New York, you have alternatives for seeing these cards.

The exhibit catalog has 130 lavishly illustrated pages. Larger-than-life card illustrations dominate the explanatory text. The exhibit focuses on German playing cards, while the catalog shows images shared between German block printed and engraved cards, Italian playing cards, easel painting and book illumination. For example, all the suit symbols in the Cloisters hunting-themed deck (dog collars, tethers, horns and nooses) appear together in a breviary page decorated with a hunting scene painted about 1510.

Every artist’s workshop came equipped with pattern books of animals, flowers, and people of all ranks doing various activities. Apprentices copied figures from the master’s book to take when they left to work elsewhere. It’s fascinating to see the same figure pop up in several places.

For instance, a man facing left, his weight on one foot, the hand furthest from us held out, while the other arm is hidden by his cloak appears as the Visconti Sforza Page of Coins and in three German block printed decks from the same decade. The same pair of hounds appears with the Zintilomo V engraving of the so-called Mantegna Tarot, the 2 of France in the Courtly Household Cards, and the Four of Hounds in the Stuttgart hunting deck. I’m going to stay alert for more repetitions as I look at art from this era.

The earliest German block printed cards to survive are the Italian-influenced Liechtenstein Playing cards from @1450. They have Italian suits and the batons look like polo mallets, possibly a lingering Mamluk influence.

The stars of the show are four exquisitely painted decks: The Cloisters (also known as Flemish) playing cards, the Courtly Household deck and the Stuttgart playing cards. My favorite is the suit of Herons from the Courtly (Ambras) Hunting Cards with its exquisitely detailed landscapes. The catalog points out stylistic similarities with Konrad Witz, a painter active in Basel in the mid 1400s. Several of the court cards in this deck are very similar to figures in his religious paintings, so it’s almost certain the deck came from his workshop.

Tarot is a minor part of the exhibit. Only ten of the 35 Visconti Sforza cards held by the Morgan Library are displayed, with only five of the 69 Carey Yale (Visconti) cards. My spy at the scene tells me this latter deck is stunning because the heavily-textured gold glitters in the light.

The most unique deck in the show was printed by Peter Flötner in Nuremberg about 1540. The cards show scenes of peasant and bourgeois life, some bawdy and scatological. Musical notation in four-part harmony appears on the card backs. Each suit is notated with a different part (alto, soprano, etc.) making it possible to sing the music while holding a suit of cards.

A lucky friend who can walk to the Cloisters from her home has seen the show twice and plans to go back at least twice more — the exhibit is that fabulous! Here are other ways to see these cards if you can’t make the trip to New York.

Resources

• Exhibit page of the Metropolitan Museum. Most cards in the exhibit can be viewed from links on this page. There’s also a link for purchasing the catalog.
• Guinevere’s Games makes reproductions of three decks in the exhibit. Here’s a link to my review of the decks with purchasing information.
• Tarot Wheel.net displays cards from three decks in the exhibit (plus a round deck not in the show) with links to high resolution images.

Cards illustrated above

• Page of Coins, I Tarocchi Visconti Sforza, Il Meneghello, 2002
• Five of Herons, Courtly Hunting deck (also called the Ambras Court Hunting Deck), Guinevere’s Games reproduction.
• Three of Bells, Peter Flötner Playing Cards, from the exhibit catalog.

Congratulations to Jadzia and Jay DeForest, Bonnie Cehovet, and everyone else involved with this beautiful publication. The latest edition of the Cartomancer celebrates their first anniversary of publication.

Here are some highlights from this issue:

• Katrina Wynne’s discussion of counseling skills summarizes the essence of her life-changing counseling skills certificate program. She also talks about how to get out of the tarot bubble and integrate with the larger community.
• Linda Marson is in the early phase of developing a radically new set of tarot tools for navigating through life which will be distributed on a flash drive. In the article, she shares her process and a few spreads for understanding yourself and your life journey.
• Cynthia Tedesco presents a vision of Pamela C. Smith painting the Waite Smith cards under the influence of the Sola Busca deck and the orisha Ogun.
• Monica Bodersky’s meditation on the Wheel of Fortune looks at the card from many viewpoints and is illustrated with historic and modern cards.
• My contribution is an article about the first tarot book written in the U.S. in 1915 by a husband and wife team of Christian mystics with Theosophical inclinations.

As always, there are luscious images on every page, plus an entire section devoted to some of the most stunning tarot art being created today.

Links to my reviews of previous issues:

Summer 2015

Autumn 2015

Winter 2015

Get The Cartomancer in print or electronic format at TheCartomancer.com

There’s plenty in this issue of The Cartomancer to keep a history nerd happy!

• While discussing why Justice and Strength switch positions in some decks, Erik K. Lerner gives us a concise 250-year history of occult tarot and tells us how tarot came to be associated with Qabala.
• A good companion to Lerner’s article is Donna Evleth’s comparison of the Waite Smith and Thoth decks.
• Giordano Berti, a prominent Italian historian of tarot and esotericism, has found similarities between Rosicrucian symbols in a 17th-century German book, images printed on an English deck in the mid-18^th century, and a 19^th-century Petit Lenormand. Berti has used the German symbolism to create his own Lenormand deck, the Sibyl of the Heart. A special treat for this student of Italian — the article is bilingual!
• The late Jean-Claude Flornoy is a legend to those of us who love historically correct re-creations of old and rare decks. Bonnie Cehovet gives a profile of Flornoy, who beautifully restored the Noblet, Dodal and Vieville decks. His website is still up and chock-full of fascinating information.
• My article takes us back to the 15th century and the earliest days of the printing industry, when printers divided their output between playing cards and images of saints. I speculate that both types of images were used as magical talismans.
• I’ve reviewed a new Tarot de Marseille that is very faithful to tradition, by South American deck creator Pablo Robledo.

As usual there are several pages of images from new decks printed in saturated color on a rich black background, reviews of several tarot and Lenormand decks, and general interest articles that should please everyone.

Get a print or electronic copy at TheCartomancer.com

Historic deck aficionados now have two versions of the legendary Noblet deck to enjoy. The only original in existence resides at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. The late Jean-Claude Flornoy’s 2007 restoration of this deck with its clean, crisp lines and deep colors has become a popular reading deck. Now Joseph H. Peterson has just released a facsimile of the deck, allowing us to study the original imagery up close at our leisure.

The two decks are nearly the same size. The Peterson facsimile is 6.3 cm wide x 10 cm tall (2.5 X 4.0 inches). The Flornoy deck is one millimeter narrower and 2 millimeters shorter. The Flornoy deck is on thicker, less bendable paper. The most noticeable difference is the white background on the facsimile and the cream background of the Noblet.

Flornoy made some consistent changes to the color: the terra cotta of the original becomes flesh colored, and lemon yellow becomes deep orange in his deck. Most of the white areas of the original are filled in with light blue or blue-gray.

Peterson supplies seven extra cards that correct mistakes on the originals. The obsessively Virgoish who can’t tolerate these mistakes may substitute the corrected card. Two pip cards have roman numerals printed backward, three trump cards have misspelled titles, and Peterson rather arbitrarily touched up the shape of World’s head and arms. The six through ten of Swords are missing and have been re-created.

The biggest change is to the Bateleur. Here we see the Flornoy, the original card and Peterson’s corrected card. On the original and the Flornoy, the Bateleur’s wand is truncated, and he’s missing his middle three fingers. There’s not even a ghost of the missing elements on the original. Evidently, the block carver made a serious omission that no one noticed before printing. Peterson restored the fingers and the rest of the wand, as well as changing the second L to an E in the title. Peterson also supplies a third Bateleur card with the restored image but keeping the misspelled title.

The Noblet deck, printed in Paris @1650, is a Type I Tarot de Marseille. Type II, derived from the Conver and Chosson decks of the early 18^th century, is considered the standard pattern today. Type I decks appeared earlier: Noblet in 1650, Dodal in 1714 (also restored by Flornoy), and a few others about the same time. Historians originally thought that Type II evolved from Type I, which then disappeared. Although Type I appeared earlier, it seems the two existed simultaneously and are parallel styles. Actually, only minor differences occur in the imagery between the two types, most notably in the Star, Hanged Man and World cards.

Which deck to choose if you can only have one? I prefer facsimiles because they bring me closer to history. But I find restored decks more pleasing to look at. If you’re going to read with the deck, the restored version gets the message across more clearly, and is probably easier for clients to relate to.

Peterson’s website, esotericarchives.com is a trove of esoteric and magical writings from the Renaissance, with the bonus of an esoteric timeline.

Flornoy’s website, letarot.com has information on the four decks he has restored, a brief history of tarot with an interesting critique of Paul Marteau’s Grimaud deck, and a discussion of each trump as a step on the path of personal development.

Here’s a page about the early development of the Tarot de Marseille.

Giordano Berti, who brought us the historically important Vergnano and Sola Busca decks, has done it again, producing a small print run of a virtually unknown deck. The Tarocchi Perrin, originally printed in Turin, is a delightfully unique deck that’s heavily influenced by Dellarocca’s soprafino design.

Perrin published richly illustrated non-fiction, especially history, in mid-19th century Turin. This venture into deck publishing was probably an experiment that didn’t work out, since the deck is unknown and doesn’t appear in histories or catalogs of playing cards.

This is probably one of the earliest decks to be produced using chromolithography. In this process, the design is applied to a flat stone or a zinc plate with a grease crayon. Color is applied with an oily paint and the paper is run through a press to transfer the color. A separate stone and separate pressing is required for each color. The process is time-consuming and laborious, but once the stones are prepared the image can be mass produced. In the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, this was the preferred method of making color prints until it was superseded by cheaper methods in the 1930s.

Unlike most TdMs, the subject of each card in the Perrin deck does not float in a void. The background settings and surrounding hatching create a context which brings the figures to life. The deck is just innovative enough to be delightful, but not so quirky as to seem strange. If you read with a TdM you’ll have little trouble adjusting to this deck.

Eleven trump cards are based directly on Dellarocca, while a few trumps are unique: The Fool is a carnival jester thumbing his nose. The Pope and Papesse have heavy draperies behind them and the Pope has no acolytes. The Bagatto is a cobbler as in Dellarocca’s design, but he holds a hammer instead of a wine glass and is in a fully realized workshop. The Hanged Man is suspended from one overhanging tree branch and has a landscape behind him. The Wheel of Fortune, Temperance, Star and World have details that are noticeably different. Although the deck was created in Piedmont, it has none of the details associated with the local tarot style, like the Fool’s butterfly and the Hermit’s rosary. Shown here are three Bagatti: Perrin, Dellarocca and Vergnano.

The pip cards follow the soprafino style with some differences. The foliage in the suits of coins and batons is more stylized and rendered in rich gold, amber and burnt orange. The cups are narrow like Dellarocca’s, but are brighter gold. The swords are entirely silver with minimal vegetation, giving them an austere feeling.

The court cards maintain the same postures as in Dellarocca’s deck, with a few exceptions. The Page of Coins has just pulled a coin out of an open chest, the Page of Batons strikes an arrogant pose with his baton held aloft, while the Queen of Swords looks pensive with her chin on her hand. The men’s striped pantaloons, the women’s tight bodices and the heavy robes give the cards a late Renaissance/Baroque feel.

The box was designed by Letizia Rivetti, who created the boxes for the Vergnano and Sola Busca decks. The box is made of very sturdy corrugated cardboard that opens like a book. Antique gold paper lines the inside cover, and the box is lined with red velvet. The exterior is covered with paper marbled in warm brown with large gold flecks. A card is pasted to the cover and the box closes with a satin ribbon.

The cards are the same size as the Vergnano deck, a bit under 4.5 x 2.75 inches. They have a smooth, silky feel and the corners are slightly rounded, making the cards very pleasant to handle and shuffle.

I have only two minor problems. The extraneous white border is a distraction, and the hatching and stippling blur details, especially in the faces; at least to my aging eyes. The enclosed booklet gives information on Perrin, and juxtaposes images of Perrin’s and Dellarocca’s trumps.

Berti has dropped tantalizing hints that he has access to more rare Piemontese decks. If you’re a collector who needs to narrow down your acquisitions (and I couldn’t possibly be referring to myself) consider focusing on Piemontese decks or decks related to Dellarocca’s designs.

The deck is in a very limited edition of 600 and is sure to sell out soon, as Berti’s other decks have.

See more images and purchase the deck here:  Rinascimentoitalianart.wordpress.com/

Here are articles on the Dellarocca/soprafino style, and Tarot in Piedmont.

Lately I’ve been doing readings with just two cards. I don’t read the cards one-two, past-present, cause-effect. I read the space between them: the field of energy, the tension, the interaction. I ask what must happen for one card to turn into the other, or for one card to reach out to the other and transform it?

A few weeks ago I asked Lo Scarabeo’s Ancient Italian deck what I can do to kick off a summer of creative and artistic experimentation. I got the Star and Nine of Cups: waters of heavenly inspiration cascading through the levels of cups. But the Nine of Cups has a sterile, conformist feel, like rows of soldiers or synchronized dancers. Something stale and dry is being watered. The cards resemble the fountain in my living room where water cascades down several vertical levels of copper flowers.

The owl and the starlight signify the wisdom of the stars — astrology — surfing the planetary energies. Mars was turning direct when I did the reading, and I felt a tidal surge of creative energy move through me.

The water needs an outlet. The Nine of Cups feels like a trap where water will stagnate — like my fountain where the water just re-circulates but never really goes anywhere.

I pulled another card to give the water an outlet: the Knight of Swords. I’ve been thinking of spending the summer focusing on my neglected collage and watercolors. But the cards are telling me my creative libido wants to flow into my writing and my intellectual interests. I think I’ll watch and wait, see where my creative energies want to flow, not force them toward any particular creative product.

Reading Lesson

Go with the flow of energy between the cards. Don’t get stuck feeling you have to read in a left to right, or past-future orientation. If the cards are facing or gesturing in a certain direction, read them in that order. Enhance the interaction among the cards by arranging them vertically, stair stepped, in a circle or any configuration that emphasizes the natural flow of energy. Don’t hesitate to pull more cards until the spread feels complete and the energy is resolved.

Try This Yourself

Pull two cards and feel the energy humming between them. What alchemical transformation wants to emerge from the space between? Do you need a third card? Let me know how this works for you in the comments section below.

Here’s an articleabout Dellarocca’s Soprafino design and its many versions.

The Cartomancy section of this website has several pages of tips for reading with the Tarot de Marseilles and other historic decks.

The Museo dei Tarocchi’s new online bookstore makes it very easy to order their books and decks using Paypal. I celebrated their grand re-opening a few months ago with my usual lack of self-restraint and ordered a pile of books and one very interesting deck. Ordering was a breeze, and it took less than three weeks for my loot to make its way from Italy to California.

Most of their books are in Italian, but there was one bilingual book in my order: Alla Corte Dei Trionfi (In the Court of the Trumps). It has a somewhat dicey history section that spends too much time on Egypt, Gypsies and Cabala for my taste. But there was a very intriguing section associating trump cards with scents using cabalistic references. This differs from Mary Greer’s 1993 book, The Essence of Magic, that uses traditional astrological associations. It’ll be fun to sit down with both books and compare olfactory attributions.

The back of the book has 48 pages with color photos of decks the museum has printed or commissioned. This is worth the price of the book.

The Literatarot decks are an ongoing project where artists in a particular region of the world associate the trump cards with works of literature. The American deck has cards by well-known names like Arnell Ando, Diane Wilkes, Chris Paradis, Marie White and Julia Cuccia-Watts.

A more recent purchase is the Sunrise/Sunset Tarot by Giovanni Monti, published by the Museo in a limited edition of 100. Two sets of collaged trump cards reflect the clarity of sunlight and the mysteries of the night.

Some Italian books that caught my eye:

Tarocchi in Pentola has twenty-two recipes and a witty discussion of why the author associates certain foods with the trumps. The Wheel of Fortune is matched up with beans which were used in many cultures for casting lots. Spinach goes with the Strength card because it contains iron and was Popeye’s favorite.

Their travel books focus on magical places to visit in cities from Turin to Bologna to Ferrara. Be sure to consult them if you’re planning a trip to Italy.

Browse the bookstore here: museodeitarocchi.net

Arnell Ando has set aside a section of her ArnellArt website for information about the Museo and links to their shop. Americans can order some decks directly from Arnell and avoid postage costs from Italy. ArnellArt.com/Museodeitarocchi

Illustrations:

Cover: Alla Corte dei Trionfi

Literatarot America, Museo dei Tarocchi:

Magician by Leslie Cochran based on the book The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett

Justice by Julie Cuccia-Watts based on The Egyptian Book of the Dead

This book came about when the author, an American music professor, discovered a thick, lavishly bound manuscript of secular songs from a mid-1500s convent in Bologna. The following lyrics caught the professor’s eye:

You who’ve got that little trinket,
So delightful and so pleasing,
Might I take my hand and sink it
‘neath petticoat and cassock, squeezing.

Intrigued, professor Monson began his career as a topo d’archivio, an “archive mouse” scurrying about the archives of the Sacred Congregation in Rome, which oversees monastic discipline, looking for clues about what was really going on behind those convent walls.

Aristocratic families of the Renaissance usually groomed one daughter for marriage, providing her with a lavish dowry, while the other daughters were sent to a convent. It’s estimated that in 17^th-century Milan seventy-five percent of upper class women were enclosed a convent.

Sisters and cousins often went to the same convent where the older generation of aunts may have presided for decades. They furnished their private rooms with hangings, paintings, expensive furniture, and musical instruments. Family dynasties controlled the inner workings of the convent, while interpersonal feuds mirrored political tensions in the outside world.

The church hierarchy saw two dangerous areas of interface between the convent and the outside world. One was the parlatorio, a room where nuns and visitors conversed on either side of a large grated window equipped with a ruota, a revolving shelf that allowed supplies and gifts to be passed back and forth under the grate. The other danger zone was the convent church, where the public came to hear the nuns sing. By the mid-1600s, highly skilled choirs of nuns attracted troublesomely large crowds eager to hear pure soprano voices. In response, the nuns shifted their focus from singing for the glory of God to singing for public acclaim.

Music allowed upper class nuns to carve out intellectual and creative niches for themselves. Nuns from the lower classes, called converse, served as laborers and servants, freeing upper class nuns for their creative pursuits. When nuns from aristocratic families misbehaved, these converse often served as scapegoats. By the mid-1500s, in response to the Council of Trent, the church was attempting to repress music in convents. Nuns were forbidden to sing for the public, they could not sing or play instruments in the presence of a man, they could not employ polyphony, and were restricted in the types of musical instruments they could play. But as we see time and again in this book, these petty bureaucratic regulations didn’t have the power to keep down a feisty, politically connected nun with musical talent.

My favorite chapter is set in 1584 at the convent of San Lorenzo in Bologna, the residence of the highest ranking noble women of the city. A viola went missing, and the nuns’ attempts to divine the identity of the thief illustrate popular fortune telling methods. When the Inquisition came calling, several nuns were happy to tattle on their sisters and reveal many popular divination methods:

• Scrying with a bowl of holy water laced with rat’s blood
• Balancing a sieve on the blades of shears and reciting a list of possibilities while waiting for the sieve to shift.
• Picking beans out of a pile one by one while reciting “he loves me, he loves me not”, or some other either/or choice.
• Praying to your shadow on the wall and charging it with going out to execute your will (the shadow was evidently a surrogate for a demon).
• Draw a circle on the floor with a knife then stick the knife in the center of the circle. Stand outside the circle and make a request for information (a garbled version of summoning a demon into a magic circle).
• Baptize a lodestone by hiding it near the altar for a period, then wear it on a string around your neck to attract a lover. The nuns did a brisk trade in baptized lodestones with women on the outside, as well as wearing them themselves to attract men into the parlatorio.

In 1648, Diego Strozzi, one of the richest and most powerful men in Reggio Calabria, died without a male heir but with many spinster aunts and sisters to be provided for. In his will, he decreed that his palace would be converted to a convent and all the unmarried women of his family would become nuns. The women were completely powerless to do anything about their fate. A generation later, when the convent was populated with the nieces of the original nuns, the frustrated and enraged sisters burnt the convent down. Several nuns readily described the plot to Church investigators. The sisters had gathered their belongings before torching the convent, and assumed they would be allowed to go back to their families. This didn’t work out as planned. They were housed in another convent for three years while their own convent was rebuilt. Meanwhile, their powerful and influential families closed ranks around the women and went on a campaign to defame the much disliked Archbishop. An act of rebellion by cloistered nuns eventually spilled over into every aspect of the city’s power politics.

For 60 years in the mid-to late 1600s, the women of the extremely wealthy and powerful Malvezzi family of Bologna dominated life in the convent of Santa Maria Nuova. When one of them became sacristan, she tore down the church and rebuilt it to her own specifications, paying for the project herself. Being at the pinnacle of the religious community’s hierarchy didn’t prevent the good sister from having a hissy fit one day, yanking an exquisitely embroidered silk hanging off the altar railing, tearing it up with her bare hands and later burning it. She said the sister who embroidered it had copied her own design. Actually, her nose was out of joint because a sister from a lower ranking family ostentatiously donated such a lavish embroidery to the church. The resulting tempest dragged on for years, with Rome pressuring the local bishop to discipline the nun, and the bishop dragging his feet because he didn’t want to antagonize the Malvezzi family.

The description of the convent of Santa Maria degli Angeli as it existed in Pavia in the late 1600s is a depressing story of a convent in its decline. The buildings were in ruins, the sisters chronically cold and hungry, and there weren’t enough of them to sustain normal community life. The convent’s reputation was further dragged down when two nuns in love with each other ran away together. Things took an even worse turn several years later when a wealthy nun was appointed abbess with the hope that an infusion of her money would revive the convent’s fortunes. The abbess was a widow, which would not bar her from holy orders, but should have prevented her from being appointed abbess. This detail was overlooked thanks to her money. But later it came to light that the church had also chosen to ignore that the abbess, after her husband’s death, had been the mistress of a Bolognese aristocrat, and had entered religious life through a convent for reformed prostitutes and courtesans.

To bring in tarot, surely packs of Mitelli’s Tarocco Bolognese were surreptitiously shoved through the ruota to help relieve the tedium of those long convent evenings.

This book is packed with delicious tidbits of gossip, secular and religious power politics, descriptions of daily life in the pressure cooker of a cloistered convent, and much about music and its place in the religious and cultural life of the late Renaissance. The young Boccaccio would have loved this book.

Nuns Behaving Badly: Tales of Music, Magic, Art and Arson in the Convents of Italy. Craig A. Monson. University of Chicago Press, 2010.

Tarocco Bolognese di G.M. Mitelli. Il Meneghello, Milano, 1992. Love, Devil, Queen of Coins.

Read about Bologna’s unique tarot decks on the TarotWheel website.

U.S. Games Systems has just reissued their facsimile of the Pierpont Morgan Bergamo Visconti Sforza Tarocchi, originally produced in 1975 and still in print. They’ve added bonus cards with portraits of the Duke and Duchess of Milan, probably by Bonifacio Bembo, who most likely created the original deck in the 1450s. Both editions are the same size as the original cards: 3.5 x 7.0 inches. Let’s compare the two decks.

• Overall, the newer deck has lighter tones, which better approximates the shimmering gold backgrounds of the original cards. In the older deck, the background and the gold embellishments seem nearly brown. The gold on the sword tips and the cups in the newer deck almost shines.
• The 1975 deck shows the original cream border that extends beyond the blue inner border. In the new deck this border has been obliterated and merged into the tan edge. It gives a cleaner appearance but loses authenticity.
• The colors of the foreground figures are not as deep as in the 1975 deck. There’s a loss of richness, and the cards appear a bit washed out.
• Since the colors are lighter, the red smears where the clay matrix bled through the gold leaf are more obvious.
• Much to my dismay, the newer deck retains the same psychedelic and anachronistic Devil and Tower cards as the older deck. These two cards have darker tones than in the 1975 deck.
• The newer deck improves on the Knight of Coins replacement card. Using the Knight of Cups as a template, they flipped the figure horizontally, put a coin in his hand and gave him the same robes as the other three coins court cards.
• The backs of the older deck are solid dark red. In the newer deck they’re red-brown with subtle streaks and tan spots to give the illusion the paint has worn off. The nail holes show through to the back, giving a more authentic feel.

The deck comes in a sturdy fliptop box. The enclosed booklet is essentially the same as the 1975 edition, except it’s printed on sturdier paper and the illustrations are in color. The booklet contains charts with card titles in three languages, plus several variant names for many cards. There’s a history of the Visconti and Sforza families, and a discussion of the heraldic devices that appear on the cards, along with a chart giving the location of all known handpainted cards. In the short discussion on who painted the cards, the booklet goes along with the general consensus that Bonifacio Bembo produced the cards; but some of his contemporaries have their promoters. The upright and reversed divinatory meanings for each card owe much to the Waite Smith tradition. The booklet ends with the inevitable Celtic Cross.

Dal Negro also produced a facsimile deck that’s the same size as the U. S. Games decks. There’s no date, but I believe it was produced in the 1970s or 80s. There are subtle differences in coloring. The gold in the dal Negro deck is lighter than the U. S. Games 1975 version but not as light as the 2015 deck. The colors on the foreground figures are slightly richer, which helps the details stand out. The background on the pip cards is white rather than tan, so the floral decoration pops out. Cards that were originally highlighted with silver leaf, such as the robes on some court cards, are shiny rather than dull dark gray as in both U. S. Games decks. The Devil and Tower are in the same anachronistic Tarot de Marseille style as the U. S. Games decks, but the colors are not as lurid.

Bottom line: I probably own every version of the Visconti Sforza deck ever published. If I had to get rid of all of them except one or two, I would keep the Dal Negro deck for studying, along with Volume II of the Kaplan’s Encyclopedia, which has a huge amount of information on the deck and the Visconti and Sforza families. For shuffling and reading, I prefer Lo Scarabeo’s gold foil deck. It has those awful wide borders with the card names in fifty languages, but the borders are more subtle than in many of their decks so I can live with it; and I love the sparkliness.

Get the deck here at USGamesinc.com

Here’s my adventure seeing these cards in person.

Here’s my review of Race Point’s full-sized restored deck.

The August 2016 edition of The Cartomancer contains two weighty, serialized articles, as well as the usual gorgeous artwork and an intriguing range of topics. The article that anchors this edition for me is Marseille Tarot: A Phylosophical Enquiry by three Brazilian tarotists. In this article, the first of two, the authors describe various philosophical approaches to tarot study. Quite frankly, I had a hard time sorting it out; but here’s how I disentangled the threads into four main approaches to tarot:

• Jungian (Carl Jung and Sallie Nichols). Images on the cards are a distillation of archetypes from the collective unconscious.
• Realist (Michael Dummett). The cards were designed for game playing. One should stick to verifiable facts about the social context and use of the decks.
• Spiritualist (French and English occultists). There is a spiritual reality independent of our minds which manifests in the world through mediums and enlightened masters who see through the illusion of material reality. We can share that vision by purifying our minds, using Tarot is a map of initiation. The deck is designed to convey spiritual truths.
• Sensuous Intuition (Henri Bergson). Focusing on the object itself (card image) opens circuits in the brain that unfold layers of reality. The viewer’s memory and pre-conceptions influence the nature of what is seen. We don’t “rise above” material reality to transcendent realms.

Part 2 in the upcoming issue of The Cartomancer will elaborate on Bergson’s theories. I’m looking forward to this as it seems to agree with my view that the cards are magic carpets to other levels of reality which are implicit in the imagery and our minds; not out there in a separate spiritual realm.

Part 2 of a 3-part article by Eric K. Lerner on the Justice-Strength switch is important for anyone reading with Waite Smith decks. Since they began putting numbers on trump cards in the 16^th century, Strength has been trump 11 and Justice has been trump 8. I knew the switch was made by the Golden Dawn in the late 1800s and enshrined in the Waite Smith deck of 1909. I also knew the switch had something to do with the letters of the Hebrew alphabet assigned to the cards. But, truthfully, I was never interested enough to inquire further about the implications.

The first two articles give a concise background on French occultism of the 18^th and 19^th centuries; how tarot got mixed in with Qabala, the Hebrew Alphabet and the Tree of Life; and what Waite was thinking when he made the switch. There’s a discussion of why Oswald Wirth and Aleister Crowley disagreed with the switch. The next issue will go into the implications of all this for tarot readers.

In my not so humble opinion, if you want to delve into the wisdom behind your deck, rather than just flipping cards for fortune telling, you need to go beyond uncritically accepting the card meanings in your latest how-to-read book. This series of articles is a good start in educating yourself about the deep structure of the tarot deck and the meaning it conveys.

In the Tarot Art section, along with decks based on Maori themes, goddess magic and nineteenth century cabinet cards, we find Tarocchi di Marcelo Inciso. This redrawn TdM is designed to look like woodcuts and stone rubbings, while staying close to traditional imagery. I’m excited to announce that its creator has re-discovered the Happy Squirrel card, which was evidently lost from every known historic TdM.

Decks:

Force, Tarot de Marsella Robledo, Iskander, 2016

Strength, The Rider Tarot Deck, US Games Systems, Inc., 1971

Scoiattolo della Felicità (Happy Squirrel), Tarocchi di Marcelo Incisco, Lynyrd-Jym Narciso, 2015

At least three times in the past few weeks I’ve heard people refer to “the hairdresser Etteilla,” mindlessly repeating disinformation that Eliphas Levi and A. E. Waite rather viciously spread about the founder of modern tarot. Etteilla-bashing hit its stride in the mid-19th century when Eliphas Levi published statements like:

Etteilla or Alliette, an illumine hairdresser, exclusively engrossed by his divinatory system, and the emolument he could derive from it, neither proficient in his own language nor even in orthography, pretended to reform, and thus attribute to himself the Book of Thoth.

This illuminated hairdresser, after working for thirty years, only succeeded in producing a bastard set, the Keys of which are transposed, so that the numbers no longer answer to the signs.

The writings of Etteilla, now very rare, are obscure, wearisome and barbarous in style.

Generations of authors have mindlessly parroted Levi without bothering to learn about the man behind the slander.

Why all the animosity?

Some of it was class snobbery. Etteilla had a clumsy writing style that showed his lack of formal education and his working class origins. High-minded occultists like Levi and Waite were appalled that Etteilla shamelessly used the sacred tarot for the vulgar activity of reading cards for housemaids. (Somewhat hypocritically, Waite managed to overcome his horror and revulsion long enough to include over 150 pages on divination in his book Pictorial Key to the Tarot.) Worse, Etteilla demonstrated monumental ignorance by scrambling the order of the trumps, then assigning alchemical and astrological attributions to the cards rather than the Kabbalistic Hebrew alphabet correspondences that still maintain a grip on esoteric tarot.

Why a hairdresser and not a ditch digger or dogcatcher?

Etteilla’s death certificate was witnessed by two people: a master hairdresser and Etteilla’s son, a grocer, whose address was listed as “the hairdresser’s house.” Somehow these hairdresser references got attached to Etteilla. Actually, his family engaged in various food-related trades. He started out as a seed merchant and later dealt in antique prints and imported tarot cards.

Why Etteilla deserves our respect

He was a one-man cartomantic phenomenon flourishing in Paris just before the Revolution. He wrote the first books we have on card reading and divination with tarot; he operated a school of tarot and astrology; and he wrote numerous books on card reading, palmistry, astrology and other occult subjects. He popularized the use of spreads and reversed cards, and his divinatory meanings for the minor arcana are the bedrock of the Waite Smith system. He was the first person to design a deck illustrating his occult philosophy accompanied by an explanatory book. His deck is still published by Grimaud/France Cartes.

Etteilla devoted his life to studying tarot as a sacred text and a tool for divination. When he died he left a small band of loyal students who carried on his teachings for decades. He deserves respect as the first modern, professional tarotist.

Want to read about other popular tarot history errors?

Rant #1 The Mists of Time

Rant#2 Renaissance Origins

Rant  #3 The Church Condemns Tarot

Rant #4 The 22-Card Deck

References:

A Wicked Pack of Cards: The Origins of the Occult Tarot. Ronald Decker, Thierry dePaulis and Michael Dummett. St. Martins Press, New York, 1996.

Christine Payne-Towler, TarotArkLetters.com, 2007

Illustration: Card 2 from Grand Etteilla Egyptian Gypsies Tarot. Cartomancie Grimaud/France Cartes, 1977.