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The Bones You Have Cast Down – A Novel by Jean Huets

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Hop on a magic carpet and let Jean Huets fly you back to 1447, when a war between Milan and Venice had northern Italy in turmoil, the Sforzas were still a few years away from ruling Milan, and tarot was a novelty.

The book opens when Bianca Sforza hires our heroine, Taria, as her lady’s maid. We’re immediately immersed in a servant’s world — on the fringes of wealth and opulence but with very little personal autonomy, way too much petty gossiping and backbiting; and where friendships and alliances determine your safety and status. Taria is fortunate to have the painter Bonifacio Bembo and his sister as allies, and to have an admirer, a young page named Micchele.

Things get interesting and magical when Taria is given a drawing of Sister Manfreda as the Papessa in the Visconti-Sforza tarot deck. The drawing helps her time travel back to 1298 to visit a small group who revere the charismatic Sister Manfreda (or Maifreda, as she’s called in the book) as the spirit of a renewed Church.

Maifreda’s followers know that most of them will be killed by the Inquisition and allPortrait of Bianca Sforza by Bonifacio Bembo knowledge of Sister Maifreda will be erased. Even her distant relative, Bianca, will be unaware of her existence. Taria is charged with summoning all her courage to serve as a link between the two times. Her task is to ensure that the Inquisition in 1298 will record proof of Maifreda’s existence, then bring this to Bianca’s attention in 1448 so Maifreda will once again receive the reverence she deserves.

As the editor of Stuart Kaplan’s Encyclopedia of Tarot, Jean Huets is an expert in 15th century history and tarot. Vivid details of food, dress, court etiquette and stomach-turning trips by wooden cart in freezing weather immerse us in the times. This is the kind of book I love: solid history with a touch of magic. After reading this book you will never see the Visconti-Sforza deck the same way.

Illustration: Portrait of Bianca Sforza by Bonifacio Bembo, reproduced by U.S. Games, Inc.

 


J-P Payen and the Tarot de Marseille Type I

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Yves Reynaud has produced facsimiles of historically important decks like the Madenié, Burdel and Conver. Now he’s done it again with a recreation of the 1713 Jean-Pierre Payen Tarot, one of the few Tarot de Marseille Type I decks available to purchase. If you’re familiar with any of Reynaud’s decks, the Payen is the same high-quality, limited-edition production housed in a sturdy box. Let’s put this deck in context with the Tarot de Marseille tradition.

What’s a TdM I Tarot?

The designations Tarot de Marseille Type I and Type II originated with playing card historian Thierry Depaulis in his 1984 exhibit catalog Tarot, Jeu & Magie.

TdM type II is the deck we think of when someone mentions the Tarot de Marseille. It’s the standard French TdM first printed by Madenié, Chosson and Conver in the 18th century. Grimaud, Lo Scarabeo, Fournier other major European card publishers currently print their own versions. Most modern reproductions, like Pablo Robledo’s Tarot de Marseille, the CBD by Yoav Ben Dov, and the Jodorowsky Camoin deck are TdM Type II.

The TdM Type I is identical to the Type II but with ten minor differences. Historians used to think the TdM I was an earlier version of Tarot which the TdM II evolved from. Recently we’ve discovered that the Madenié deck of 1709 is earlier than the two oldest TdM I decks we know of, the 1710 Dodal and the 1713 Payen. It seems the two types are parallel traditions. The TdM I’s distinct imagery was used from the 17th to 19th centuries in decks from many regions.

This Page shows the ten unique TdM I cards next to the comparable TdM II cards. If you aren’t familiar with the differences, I suggest you take a look now before reading on.

Origins of TdM I imagery

Cary Sheet of cards from 1500The first evidence we have of the distinctive TdM I style is the Cary Sheet housed in the Beinecke Library of Yale University. This fragment contains 6 complete and 14 partial cards. It was probably printed in Milan about 1500, but there’s no solid proof.

Shown here is the section of the sheet with the most complete cards. A few images are like the standard TdM II, but some are distinctive, like the Devil spearing a child. A few cards have TdM I imagery: the Moon facing forward and the blank shield on the Chariot. The Pope has a bishop’s crook, not the triple cross of the TdM Type II, and not the bulb and folded top of the TdM Type I. This deck is too unique to call it a prototype of either the TdM I or II. But it shows that some TdM I imagery existed in the early 1500s.

In the early 20th century, when a well at the Sforza castle in Milan was cleaned out, they discovered fifty-eight cards from numerous decks dating from the early- to mid-16th century at the bottom. One card was the distinctive TdM I World with her leafy belt and uncrossed legs.

It seems Italian decks displayed the distinctive TdM I details very early in tarot’s history, and they travelled to France at the same time as the traditional TdM II.

Tarot de Marseille Type I Decks

The first complete deck we know of with TdM I imagery was printed in Paris in 1659 by Jean Noblet. This deck has seven out of the ten TdM I details. Exceptions are the Emperor, who doesn’t have the 4 in front of his face, and the Chariot which has the card maker’s initials on the shield. The Noblet Pope has a bishop’s crook like the Cary Sheet. For the most part, the rest of the trump cards conform to the standard TdM II pattern.

Jean Noblet Tarot Fool and BateleurThe Noblet Fool is unique – this is the only deck where he’s called Le Fou rather than Le Fol or Le Mat. Paired with the Bateleur and his truncated wand, it seems Le Bateleur is holding the Fool’s penis which the dog is about to bite off.

This deck is close to being a standard TdM type I, but not entirely. Two versions, by Jean-Claude Flornoy and Joseph H. Peterson, are currently available.

The Rolichon deck from mid-1600s Lyon only exists as a drawing in a book printed in1919. It’s very similar to the Dodal deck from a half-century later and may show us what the standard tarot deck looked like before the TdM II became standard. Or perhaps the Rolichon-Dodal style deck was a parallel tradition that was swamped by the TdM II thanks to economic and marketing trends, just as the Waite Smith deck edged out any other style of deck in the USA by the mid-20th century.

A deck printed by Jean Dodal shortly after 1700 in Paris is the earliest deck that has all the significators of a TdM Type I. Jean Dodal Hanged ManIt’s a near contemporary of the first known TdM Type II by Pierre Madenié in 1709, and is nearly identical to the Payen Type I deck. Jean-Claude Flornoy produced a reconstructed deck, and a version printed by Dusserre is out of print and rare.

Jean-Pierre Payen’s deck printed in Avignon, 1713, is so similar to the Dodal it may have been directly influenced by it. Yves Reynaud has produced the only version of the Payen deck on the market.

Two TdM I decks appeared in Italy in different centuries. Four of the Toso trumps printed in Genoa @1770 are in the TdM I style (Kaplan’s Encyclopedia Volume II, page 339). Giacomo Draghi of Liguria printed a TdM I deck before 1860 (Kaplan’s Encyclopedia Volume II, page 350).

TdM I imagery on non-standard TdM decks

TdM I details often appear in decks that deviate from the standard TdM II pattern.

Besançon-style decks with Juno and Jupiter instead of the Papesse and Pope were printed in Besançon, Strasbourg, and Switzerland from about 1720 to the early 1800s. Five cards conform to the TdM I pattern: Le Fol, the Lovers, the Chariot’s scalloped canopy, the World, and the Knight as Chevalier.

Tarocchi Vergnano DevilThe distinctive Piedmont style has elements of the TdM I. The Pope has a bulb and flower on his staff instead of the triple cross. Cupid flies in from the right on the Lovers card, but he’s not blindfolded. The chariot has a scalloped canopy, and the Devil is a TdM I type with a face in his belly.

Decks with TdM I details were printed from Paris to Piedmont over three centuries. This style has infiltrated numerous decks in many times and places, and is a nearly forgotten alternative to the ubiquitous TdM II. Thanks to Jean-Claude Flornoy, Giordano Berti and Yves Reynaud the TdM Type I deck is now available for all everyone.

 

 

 

Decks shown in this article

The Lovers, Tarot Jean-Pierre Payen 1713, Yves Reynaud, 2016.  http://www.tarot-de-marseille-heritage.com/

Cary Sheet, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.  http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/

Le Fol and Le Bateleur, Jean Noblet Tarot, Jean-Claude Flornoy, 2007. http://www.letarot.com/

The Hanged Man, Jean Dodal Tarot de Marseille, Jean-Claude Flornoy, 2002. http://www.letarot.com/

The Devil, Tarocchi Vergnano, Giordano Berti, 2014. https://rinascimentoitalianartenglish.wordpress.com/catalog/

 

Downsizing & Moving – 100 Tarot Decks and Books $5 Each

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Here’s a list of 100 tarot decks and books I’m offering to friends and colleagues who follow my blog and hang out with me on facebook.

  • Every deck and book is $5 plus priority shipping.
  • Deck/Book sets are $10 plus shipping
  • Order 1 item that fits into a small box – total price is $12
  • Order 2 items that fit into a small box – total price is $17
  • Order 3 items that fit into a medium shipping box – total price is $29
  • Orders that need a large shipping carton – add $19 to the price of the items. The large shipping box holds at least 15 items. At these prices you can afford to go crazy.
  • International orders – shipping will be at least $22.

 Instructions:  email me at 22TarotTrumps @ gmail.com, or send me a facbook message, with your shopping list, mailing address and Paypal address. I will confirm if the items are available and the total price, then I’ll send a Paypal invoice. When I receive the money, I’ll ship your items and send you the tracking number.

Don’t hesitate to contact me with questions about condition or contents.

Please share this with your friends as I don’t want to be too self-promotional.

DECKS – $5.00

  • (TdM) 1JJ Swiss Tarot Cards – USGames/AGMuller, 1974. Jupiter/Juno cards
  • After Tarot – Lo Scarabeo – standard Waite Smith figures projected a minute into the future, unused
  • African Tarot – US Games, 1996 – Marina Romito, cards 2.25 x 3 inches, corrugated cardboard box, simple childlike images
  • Arcana for the New Dark Age – William Kirchner – Pomegranate Press – Large Postcards bound in a book – post-apocalyptic feel – 22 trumps
  • Dolphin Divination Cards – Nancy Clemens – 2 inches diameter, dolphins on back, just words on the front.
  • Dame Fortune’s Wheel Tarot – Lo Scarabeo, 2008 – Paul Huson. Trumps based on the Estensi Tarot of Ferrara. Suit cards taken from renaissance art, alchemical emblems, various influences. Includes a description of the minor arcana and divinatory meanings downloaded from Huson’s website.
  • The Heart Tarot – Lo Scarabeo – Maria Distefano – Heart shaped cards, red borders, 5 x 5 inches, heart shaped box and LWB
  • Halloween Oracle – Stacey DeMarco
  • Healing Cards – Caroline Myss and Peter Occhiogrosso. 50 cards. Image and inspirational words. Booklet expands on the message of each card.
  • New Vision Tarot – Lo Scarabeo – WS figures seen from behind, cards have slight curve, unused
  • La Nuova Cartomanzia – Modiano. Fortune telling cards focusing on relationships. Images of 1930s people. Card name in 3 languages, card meanings in Italian, playing card image in top left corner.
  • Llewellyn Deck – Anna Marie Ferguson – Major arcana only, Welsh/Celtic myth, no box
  • Tarot the Complete Kit – Running Press, 78 cards, 2.5 x 3.3 inches, black backgrounds, unopened
  • (TdM) Tarot Pointner, Piatnik, 1974, no box – psychedelic
  • The Psychic Tarot Oracle Deck – John Holland – 65 cards. Sort of tarot – 22 major arcana cards, 4 suits of 9 cards each and 7 chakra cards. Thick booklet, gold edges on cards.
  • The Rider Tarot Deck – US Games – Yellow box, standard Waite Smith deck, unused
  • Silicon Valley Tarot – Steve Jackson Games
  • Tarot of Mermaids – Lo Scarabeo
  • Tarocco Siciliano – Modiano – contemporary gaming cards, pips 5-10, 4 court cards, trumps numbered differently, some non-standard images. Small: 2 x 3.3 inches.
  • Zanoni Tarot – Runinga USA, Ojai, CA, 1993 – 22 trumps, bright colors, hippyish but TdM based, 3 x 5.3 inches, no box

BOOK/DECK SETS   $10

  • The Chalice Tarot – Lynda Stevens – self-published 1995. Purchased from Stevens @2002. Cards are heavily laminated, gold foil backs. Slight curve near the top of the deck. Booklet 6 x 8 inches, spiral bound, 106 pages.
  • Cosmic Tarot – book/deck set by US Games. Deck by Norbert Losche. Book by Jean Huets.
    Additional Book: The Cosmic Tarot: Signposts Along the Path, Laura Clarson, 1995. b/w illustrations of each card. 144 pages.
  • Dance of Life Cards – Audrey Savage and Paula Scott Frantz, 2000. Large laminated cards, bright colors, 3.6 x 5.1 inches. Book: 302 pages, b/w illustrations of all cards. Small red splotch like nail polish on the cover. Deck designed for psychological/therapeutic work.
  • Da Vinci Tarot – Lo Scarabeo
  • The Fifth Tarot – Martien and Teressena Bakens, Blue Dolphin Publishing
  • Gilded Tarot – Ciro Marchetti
  • Shining Tribe – Rachel Pollack
  • What’s Your Spirit Animal – Kelly Eckert – Self-published. 88 animal cards, large paperback – 330 pages

BOOKS  $5.00

All paperback unless noted

Noted on the left if TdM, Occult or another language

  • (Bilingual ITALIAN and English). Alla Corte dei Trionfi: Volume I The Trumps. Produced by the Tarot Museum in Riola, Italy. History. @30 pages of color illustrations of decks from the museum’s collection in the back.
  • Amberstone, Ruth Ann and Wald. Tarot Tips. Llewellyn 2003. (Special Topics in Tarot Series)
  • (TdM-Occult) Anonymous. Meditations on the Tarot. Tarcher 1985. Very large paperback. Christian Hermeticism.
  • Auerbach, Kimberlee. The Devil, the Lovers, & Me. Dutton 2007. Memoir of her rather chaotic life with tarot readings interspersed. Hardback.
  • Bennett, Sidney. Tarot for the Millions. Sherbourne 1967. One of a series introducing fringe topics to Middle America.
  • Boyer, Janet. The Back in Time Tarot Book. Hampton Roads 2008.
  • (TdM FRENCH) Brzesc-Colonges, Regine. Le Tarot Science de l’Etre. Trajectoir 2004. Divinatory meanings and discussion of the trumps focused on spiritual and personal development.
  • (Occult) Case, Paul Foster. Tarot: A Key to the Wisdom of the Ages. Macoy Publishing, 1947. Hardback. Summary of his tarot teachings, founder of BOTA.
  • (TdM FRENCH) Charles, Judith. Tarot de Marseille: Developer L’Intuition par L’Obersrvation. Dangles2008. She tells you what details in the cards inspired each card meaning. Uses the Grimaud TdM.
  • (TdM SPANISH) Couste, A. El Tarot: o la maquina de imaginar.
  • (TdM FRENCH) Darche, Claude. Tarot: Outil de Developpement Interior. Dangles 2008. Practical Trump meanings broken down by category, reading tips, spreads
  • (TdM FRENCH) Darche, Claude. Tirages et Interpretations du Tarot de Marseille. Dangles 1997. 40 spreads with sample reading.
  • Daniels, Kooch and Victor. Tarot at a Crossroads: The Unexpected Meeting of Tarot and Psychology. Schiffer 2016. Hardback.
  • Denning, Melita and Osborne Phillips. The Magick of the Tarot. Llewellyn 1986
  • (Occult) Gad, Irene. Tarot and Individuation: Correspondences with Cabala and Alchemy. Nicolas-Hayes 1994.
  • Gaudet, Christiana. Fortune Stellar: What Every Professional Tarot Reader Needs to Know. 2nd Self-Published 2017. Signed.
  • Gearhart, Sally and Susan Rennie. A Feminist Tarot. Alyson Publications 1981
  • Gerulskis-Estes, Susan. The Book of Tarot. Morgan & Morgan 1981. Based on Morgan Greer deck.
  • Gillentine, Julie. Tarot and Dream Interpretation. Llewellyn 2003. (Special Topics in Tarot Series)
  • Greer, Mary. Tarot Reversals. Llewellyn 2002. (Special Topics in Tarot Series)
  • Greer, Mary and Rachel Pollack, editors. New Thoughts on Tarot. Newcastle 1989. Transcripts of lectures from a tarot symposium. Several well-known names.
  • Greer, Mary. Women of the Golden Dawn. Park Street Press 1995. Large Hardback.
  • Greer, Mary. The Essence of Magic: Tarot, Ritual, and Aromatherapy. Newcastle, 1993.
  • Gwain, Rose. Discovering your Self Through Tarot. Destiny 1994.
  • Jette, Christine. Tarot Shadow Work. Llewellyn 2001.
  • Jette, Christine. Professional Tarot: The Business of Reading, Counseling and Teaching. Llewellyn 2003.
  • Jette, Christine. Tarot for the Healing Heart. Llewellyn 2001.
  • Jette, Christine. Tarot for All Seasons. Llewellyn 2001. Celebrating the wheel of the year.
  • Katz, Marcus and Tali Goodwin. Tarot Time Traveller. Llewellyn 2017.
  • Japiske, Carl. Exploring the Tarot. Ariel Press, 1989. Based on Palladini’s Aquarian Tarot.
  • Johnson, Kate and Maura Shaw. Tarot Games. Harper 1994.
  • Kenner, Corrine. Tall Dark Stranger: Tarot for Love and Romance. Llewellyn 2005.
  • (GD flavor) Kraig, Donald Michael. Tarot & Magic. Llewellyn 2002. (Special Topics in Tarot Series)
  • Letzkus, Margaret. Sacred Places in the Tarot. Self-published 2011. Discusses sacred space and earth energies illustrated with numerous tarot cards.
  • Lionnet, Annie. The Tarot Directory. New Millenium 2002. Hardback, spiral bound, heavy slick paper. Color illustrations with numerous deck.
  • Llewellyn’s Tarot Reader 2005. @40 short essays – practical tips for working with the cards.
  • Llewellyn’s Tarot Reader 2006. @40 short essays – practical tips for working with the cards.
  • Llewellyn’s Tarot Reader 2007. @40 short essays – practical tips for working with the cards.
  • Llewellyn’s Tarot Reader 2008. @40 short essays – practical tips for working with the cards.
  • (TdM ITALIAN). Mattiuzzi, Antonia. I Tarocchi: Come Leggerli, Come Interpretarli, Come Meditarli. 1998. Solid discussion of card meaning. Section discussing cards in sets of 2 and 3. Spreads with sample readings.
  • Maxwell, Joseph. The Tarot. Spearman 1975. Early 20th century occultist.
  • McCoy, Edain. Past-Life and Karmic Tarot. Llewellyn 2004. (Special Topics in Tarot Series)
  • McElroy, Mark. Taking the Tarot to Heart. Llewellyn 2005. Reading tarot for love and romance. Signed.
  • McElroy, Mark. Putting the Tarot to Work. Llewellyn 2004. Using tarot for career and project planning.
  • Mead, Alyson. Searching for Sassy: An L.A. Phone Psychics Tales of Life, Lust and Love. Balboa 2012. Edgy and hilarious.
  • Michelson, Teresa. Tarot Spreads. Llewellyn 2003. (Special Topics in Tarot Series)
  • (TdM) Miller, Karenna and T. Magus. Tarot by the Slice. Working with the TdM.
  • (TdM-Occult ITALIAN) Piantanida, Donato. Magia dei Tarocchi. Mediterranee1996. Extensive discussion of the trumps with occult correspondences
  • Pollack, Rachel. Complete Illustrated Guide to Tarot. Color illustrations of many decks.
  • Pollack, Rachel. Soul Forest. Tarot Media 2011. 24 essays illustrated with Shining Tribe deck.
  • Renee, Janina. Tarot Spells. Llewellyn 2012.
  • Ricklef, James. Tarot: Get the Whole Story. Llewellyn 2004. Spreads and readings.
  • Ricklef, James. KnightHawk’s Tarot Readings. Writer’s Club, 2001. Readings for fictional and historical people.
  • Roberts, Richard. The Original Tarot and You. Vernal Equinox Press, 1987. Signed.
  • Rosengarten, Arthur. Tarot and Psychology. Paragon 2000.
  • Sim, Valerie. Tarot Outside the Box. Llewellyn 2004. (Special Topics in Tarot Series)
  • Tyson, Donald. 1-2-3 Tarot: Answers in an Instant. Llewellyn 2007. Distilling 3-card spreads to one sentence.
  • Vega, Phyllis. Romancing the Tarot. Fireside 2001. Practical card meanings separated into categories: material, spiritual, educational, sexual, etc.
  • (TdM-Occult-FRENCH) Wirth, Oswald. Le Tarot des Imagiers du Moyen Age. Tchou 1966. Large hardback. Wirth’s 22 trump cards included in an envelope attached to inside back cover.
  • Wanless, James. Tarot for Business: Strategic Intuition for the 21st Merrill-West 1996.
  • Woudhuysen, Jan. Tarot Therapy. Tarcher 1979.

Thanks so much for your interest.

Happy shopping and Tarot On!

Tarotforum RIP

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Waves of shock and grief are rolling through a large segment of the tarot community in reaction to the announcement that www.tarotforum.net will be shut down as of July 14, 2017.  Since 2002, Tarotforum has been one of the largest and best-moderated communities on the internet. When Tarot_L on Yahoo shut down over a decade ago, Tarotforum became my go-to place for tarot history. I’m greatly relieved to learn that the forum will still exist in read-only form, so we won’t be losing its huge storehouse of information.Two subgroups of the forum were my home base: Tarot History and Development, and Marseille and Other Early Decks. These are a wonderful resource for people interested in the fine points of tarot history, collecting historical decks, comparing details on different decks, and learning to interpret and read with the TdM and other historic decks.

On its hundreds of pages of discussion, you’ll find contributions by many luminaries of the tarot community: Jean-Michel David, Ross G. Caldwell, Mary Greer (Teheuti), Adam McLean, Enrique Enriquez, and Yves Le Marseillais (Yves Reynaud). I always stopped to read the thoughtful contributions by three people who chose not to reveal their names: Kwaw, Huck and Le Pendu. You can find many posts by two who left us in the past year: Yoav Ben-Dov and Michael J. Hurst.

Where to now? Many members who consider the forum their extended family are talking about either moving en masse to an existing forum, or setting up a new one of their own. Who knows how long the forum will be available, so check it out while you can.

What’s out there for the amateur tarot historian and those learning to read with the TdM and similar decks?  I was amused that many people on Tarotforum said they would never, ever join “fartbook”. Actually, I backed away from tarotforum a few years ago and shifted my focus to facebook after having my hand soundly slapped and being threatened with banishment a few times because I put a link to my web pages when I thought it would contribute important information to a discussion. Self-promotion was totally forbidden on the forum, yet certain deck creators were allowed to blatantly advertise. I could never figure out their arbitrary criteria, so I took myself to a platform where I could link to this blog at will.

Here are some facebook groups I belong to:

  • Tarot History
  • Tarosophy de Marseille – for people who read with the TdM

Two Facebook groups for collectors of playing cards of all types, including tarot and historic decks:

  • Cartagiocofilia – a multi-lingual, global community
  • Playing Card Collectors Club – it’s owner, Gejus van Diggele, is the chairman of the International Playing-Card Society

Separate forums where you can find serious, in-depth discussions:

http://www.forum.tarothistory.com/ – I believe Ross G. Caldwell and the late Michael J. Hurst are the guiding spirits behind this one. I haven’t spent enough time with this wonderful resource – it’s going to be my summer reading.

http://www.traditiontarot.com/ – entirely in French. Notable contributors include several people mentioned above, plus Alain Bougearel and Bertrand Saint-Guillain.

I haven’t found an actual Italian forum yet. But Andrea Vitali’s site  http://www.letarot.it/ is a goldmine of in-depth articles, and has a news section with the kind of intriguing updates you would find on a forum.

I’ll see you somewhere in cyberspace.

Il Meneghello’s Little White Sheet

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Has anyone read the folded sheet of paper that comes with every Il Meneghello deck? Recently I became curious enough to dust off my Italian dictionary and read it carefully. Osvaldo Menegazzi, the owner and artistic force behind Il Meneghello, is a native of Milan who’s been immersed in tarot most of his long life. I was hoping for special insights from a Milanese perspective. Instead I got a dose of Oswald Wirth.

Here’s a summary of the sheet. Where material seems to be lifted directly from Wirth’s book, I cite the chapter. (Information on Wirth and his book at the bottom.)

History: This section of the sheet reads like the 1960s. We’re told that the oldest deck in existence resides in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris and was commissioned by King Charles VI of France in 1392. Historians have known for decades that this deck was actually created in Italy in the late 15th century. He goes on to tell us that in the 15th century there were luxury hand-painted decks for the upper classes and woodblock decks colored with stencils for the masses. Tarot was invented by combining two decks: a card game called Naibe and a 22-card deck with symbolic figures designed for fortunetelling. While these 22 images are obviously Christian, they may be European adaptations of abstract designs used for divination in the orient, like Geomancy or the I Ching. (Wirth, Chapter 14).

Menegazzi speaks approvingly of Antoine Court de Gebelin who discovered that tarot is the sacred Book of Thoth; and of Etteilla who designed an Egyptian-style deck and became a rich and famous cartomancer. Menegazzi can’t resist joining his fellow occultists in sneering at Etteilla, calling him a self-promoting wig maker. Etteilla was a successful professional card reader and astrologer, so he must have known a few things about self-promotion. But he was never a wig maker. (See my article here for a rant about why and how Etteilla was dissed so badly by his fellow occultists.)

Divination: Menegazzi says up front that he’s using Wirth’s method because it only uses 22 cards and is fairly simple. He refers readers to the Alfred Douglas book The Tarot. Here’s a compilation of his advice for readers:

  • Don’t let other people touch your cards unless you allow the querent to shuffle the deck before a reading.
  • The more you study the cards and memorize their meanings, the more they will be imprinted on your subconscious and take on your personal vibrations.
  • Store your cards in a wooden box placed near the east wall of your house.
  • Before consulting the cards, light incense and put yourself in a meditative state.
  • If you have an either/or question like, “should I go out with Frankie or with Johnnie?” do two readings asking how it will work out with each option.

The method for selecting cards, and the spread, are taken directly from Wirth, Chapter 15.

Picking Cards: the reader shuffles the 22 cards and asks the querent to give him a random number between 1 and 22. The reader counts down that number of cards from the top of the deck, makes a note of the card, and leaves the card in the deck. The reader shuffles again and asks for another number. You repeat this as many times as there are spread positions. (When reading for yourself you can roll dice to get a number). Pull the selected cards out of the deck and lay them out in a spread. With this method it’s possible to get the same card in more than one spread position.

The Spread: Menegazzi uses Wirth’s 5-card cross spread minus one card. He seems to combine Wirth’s spread Wirth's four-card spreadpositions 4 and 5. (Here’s an article explaining the Cross Spread in detail.) Three cards are pulled from the deck, while the fourth card is derived from adding up the sum of the other three. Menegazzi does not mention laying the cards out in any particular configuration, but they seem to fall naturally into a square with 1 and 2 on the left and right, 3 above and between the first two, and 4 beneath 3. Here are the spread positions:

(1) What is favorable in this situation, or the attitude or action that would be favorable to take.

(2) What is unfavorable in this situation, or the attitude or action that would not be good to take.

(3) The Mediator that bridges the first two cards, points to a middle way, and facilitates getting what you asked for.

(4) The Solution or Outcome: this card is derived by adding up the sum of the previous three cards. If the sum is more than 22, add up the digits in the sum until the number is reduced to 22 or less.

Divinatory meanings for the 22 trump cards comprise a large part of the sheet. They’re a condensation of Wirth’s DMs, and are in line with what you see in most books on how to read the TdM.

Oswald Wirth (1860-1943) was a Rosicrucian and prominent member of French occult circles. In 1887 he designed a deck with Egyptian and kabalistic details inspired by Eliphas Levi’s writings. This was the first deck to have Hebrew letters on the cards. It’s published by US Games Inc.

In 1927, Wirth wrote Le Tarot des Imagiers du Moyen-Ȃge (Tarot of the Medieval Image-Makers). The chapter citations in this article refer to this book.

The most recent and accessible edition of this book was published in 2012 by Red Wheel/Weiser as Tarot of the Magicians. The introduction by Mary Greer gives a gives a biography of Wirth that puts him in the context of his times and of other French occultists. Wirth’s cards as he designed them (not the later, rather ugly, versions) are reprinted on heavy paper in the back of the book so you can cut them out and have an original Wirth deck.

Deck used to illustrate the spread: Tarocco Milanese 1850. Milan: Il Meneghello, 1986.

Tarot Picture Books

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Once there was a time when lovers of tarot seeking to look at beautiful cards had to (gasp!!) purchase a book! In that long-ago time (say, 1976) there was no Google, no wikis, no surfing nor clicking. To indulge your tarot obsession, you hopped in your Ford Pinto and drove to a local bookstore where these beautifully illustrated volumes nestled on a shelf.

The three books described here are all over-sized, hardbound, beautifully illustrated, focused on the Tarot de Marseille, and published between 1973 and 1986. They’re easy to obtain for about $5.00 at online used booksellers. Yes, you can see many more decks online, but there’s something magical about holding a large book in your hands and looking at a curated selection of cards.

Out of the three, The Book of Tarot by Fred Gettings is the most compatible with my approach to tarot. Gettings says, “the cards are intended to be springboards for intuitive judgments rather than happy hunting grounds for scholars of esotericism.” Then he gives 18th– and 19th-century esotericists a hilarious, over-the-top tongue lashing, saying that historical research on tarot is actually “…..  an extended commentary on human credulity, duplicity, inventiveness, ignorance and superstition.” He was ahead of his time in asserting that tarot is a product of late-medieval Italian culture, not of ancient Egypt, nor of Neo-platonic renaissance thinkers.

Page from book by Fred GettingsHis disdain for putting an esoteric overlay on the cards falls apart when he discusses the geometric structure of each trump. He sees the Hebrew letter Aleph in the Juggler’s arm positions, and the horns of Isis behind the Papesse. You can try his method yourself by laying paper over a card and tracing the main outlines in black pen.  Try to see the underlying geometric structure, and ask yourself if the lines remind you of an astrological or alchemical symbol.

Throughout the book he gives examples of reading the cards intuitively in the context of the question and adjacent cards. He advises not using the suit cards for divination since the card meanings vary arbitrarily from one reader to another. Then he contradicts himself once again by giving Papus’ esoteric numerical system based on Hebrew letters.

Most of the cards shown in the book are Tarot de Marseille and nearly every page has art from the Middle Ages to the 19th century. This book gives you a good introduction to tarot history, the study of comparative imagery, and reading intuitively with the TdM.

Sylvie Simon’s book can serve as a beginner’s guide to occult tarot. Her interpretation of each trump card is based onpage from Sylvie Simon book the Hebrew alphabet, the Tree of Life, and astrological associations. Since she’s a French esotericist, she uses the continental system where Aleph is assigned to the Juggler rather than the Fool, as in the Golden Dawn system, giving a different set of correspondences from what most Americans are used to.

Unlike most French authors who turn up their noses at reading with the suit cards, her discussion is surprisingly detailed.  Her card meanings are based on a combination of Pythagorean numerology and the numbers associated with the sephiroth on the Tree of Life.  She gives each card a couple of paragraphs of useful divinatory meanings, and her descriptions of the court cards bring them vividly to life.

The book contains many reproductions of art depicting card players, card readers and card printing workshops, as well as several historic decks. This book is a good introduction to European esoteric tarot. Her card meanings are very useful, even if you don’t use esoteric systems.

Page from Brian Inness bookColor reproductions of historic decks are the main event in The Tarot by Brian Inness. Each trump card gets a full page spread of illustrations from nine historic decks and related alchemical emblems. There’s also a double-page spread of cards from several decks ranging from the 18th-century Vandenborre to the 20th-century Sheridan Douglas deck.

His tarot history is refreshingly accurate. He points out that attributions from other symbol systems are usually an awkward fit. But then he gives his own system which has as many problems as the others.

This book goes into divination methods more than the other two. We get several classic spreads like the Celtic Cross, and spreads by Papus and Mathers, with sample readings. New to me is a flexible spread with cards radiating out from a central significator which can be modified depending on the question and the circumstances.

These books are a delight to look at while introducing us to tarot scholars of a previous generation.

Gettings, Fred. The Book of Tarot. London: Triune Books, 1973.

Simon, Sylvie. The Tarot: Art, Mysticism and Divination. Vermont: Inner Traditions, 1988.

Translated from the French edition published by Editions Fernand Nathan, 1986.

Innes, Brian. The Tarot: How to Use and Interpret the Cards. London: Macdonald & Co, 1976 and 1987.

Tarocchi Lando produced by Giordano Berti

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Another historically important Piedmontese deck produced by Giordano Berti just arrived in my mailbox. Like Berti’s other productions, this deck is housed in a sturdy handmade box lined with felt and covered with marbled paper. The cards are protected by a sparkling gold bag and are accompanied by a booklet with detailed historical background.

Two sets of sheets from the same wood blocks were registered in Turin: in 1829 by Lando and in 1832 by Lando’s widow. This deck is a facsimile of the latter set of sheets. Like most printers, Lando produced a variety of card styles: Tarot de Marseille, Piedmontese, and decks with French suit symbols.

This deck is a Tarot de Marseille Type I with two exceptions: The World card is a standard TdM Type II, and the Pope isLando Star card a hybrid of Types I and II. Four trump cards have details derived from Piedmont-style decks, like the lion raising his paw on the Strength card, and the Hanged Man’s shoes. (Links below will take you to explanations of the Type I and Piedmont style.) The Star card is unique with only four stars in the sky and water jars of different sizes and colors. “Lando” is printed at the top of every trump and court card, and card titles are in French.

This was not a luxury deck. The block carving is only competent, and in many places the stenciled colors (orange, yellow and two shades of blue) were applied hastily. To judge whether a deck is readable, I look at the eyes. I think it’s important for the eyes to be well-defined so you can see the direction of their gaze. This deck gets high marks in that department. A few figures just have black smudges for eyes, but they are a rare exception.

The 24-page booklet gives a short history of tarot in Savoy and Piedmont along with an overview of Lando’s output. Most card printers are just names on a box. Thanks to diligent genealogical research by Phillipe Noyes we meet Lando and his family in their social setting. Giuseppe Lando was born @1784 into a family of shoemakers. After serving in the army during the Napoleonic wars, he returned home to Turin and somehow transformed himself into a card printer. After he died of pleurisy in 1831, his widow continued the family business until their son could take over.

Lando King of cups cardThe Lando family produced playing cards in Turin from the 1820s to the 1860s. This spans the golden age of tarot in Piedmont when large numbers of card makers were printing decks in several styles. They often borrowed or stole each other’s designs, resulting in hybrid decks such as this one with imagery from several types of decks.

An unexpected bonus is a little booklet on cartomancy by Giulia Orsini. She gives keywords for all 78 cards plus two spreads. Unfortunately, the text is in dire need of an English-speaking editor. Whenever you see the word “seed” read it as “suit.” The keywords for the 7 and 8 of Coins are identical because a line was repeated. This happens again where two spread positions have identical descriptions.

Berti has published three other 19th-century Piedmontese decks (all reviewed here): the luxurious Oriental Foudraz, the refined Perrin, and the elegant Vergnano that won a design award when it was first published. I’m very happy to round out my collection with a deck from Piedmont printed for the average working person.

See more images and purchase the deck at Berti’s website RinascimentoItalianArtEnglish.wordpress

For the characteristics of the Tarot de Marseille Type I deck click here

For the characteristics of Piedmont type decks click here

Lando Two batons card

Two Sixteenth Century Essays on the Meaning of Tarot Cards

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Around the year 1565, two men on opposite sides of northern Italy wrote down their thoughts about the moral lessons in the tarocchi deck. In the 1980s, both essays were discovered by playing card researcher Franco Pratesi, and were recently published in Italian and English as Con gli occhi et con l’intelletto: Explaining the Tarot in Sixteenth Century Italy. Generous footnotes and introductory material by Ross Sinclair Caldwell, Thierry Depaulis and Marco Ponzi put the essays in their historical context. This extremely important book shows us how a typical, well-educated Christian of the time would have seen the cards, without the distractions of occultism and Egyptomania that came a few centuries later.

Let’s look at each essay separately.

Francesco Piscina wrote Discorso in his early twenties while a law student in Piedmont. The material was presented as a public recitation then published by a local press. Only two copies exist, in a library in Piedmont and in a private collection. Piscina tells us his ideas came to him suddenly while watching a lady play the game of tarot — much like De Gebelin two hundred years later saying he was suddenly struck with the idea that the tarot trumps are Egyptian hieroglyphics while watching ladies play the game in a Parisian drawing room.

Piscina wanted to discover the moral lessons conveyed by the inventor of the game of tarocchi. To know this, the proper order of the cards is paramount, because the story in the trump sequence depends on knowing which cards are trumped by other cards. Piscina uses the trump order that was common in Lombardy and Piedmont and evolved into the Tarot de Marseille, with several exceptions that show the deck was still in flux in the sixteenth century.

World and Bagatto cards from soprafino deckWhile discussing the World card, he mentions the symbols of the four Evangelists in the corners as proof that the trumps are teaching us to be good, conventional Catholics. But we don’t know of any World cards from that time that contained the four Evangelists. They don’t appear until the Tarot de Marseille pattern emerged one hundred years later. Did he know of a TdM-like deck that’s lost to us? He discusses the Bagatto is an innkeeper, not a juggler or craftsman. I wonder if this is an old, possibly local, tradition that’s lost to us but emerged into the light of day with the soprafino Bagatto raising his wine glass. (Or is he just a cobbler who drinks on the job?)

[Note: Better historians than I have just informed me that there were cards with the four evangelists in the 16th century – see the comment below. Now I’m more curious than ever to know what decks these two essayists had in front of them.]

Piscina admits the essay was written on a whim, and it reads as if he were speaking off the cuff, giving us a range of interpretations along with his own. This is a bonanza for historians, as we can get a sense of how the cards were interpreted by others, rather than being stuck with just one person’s idiosyncratic ideas.

Piscina devotes only two long paragraphs to the suit cards. He divides the suits into two categories, a common practice that survives in our red and black suits. He interprets the suits as two types of war and two advantages of peace.

At the end of his essay he does some wordplay on Taroccho, showing us the word means a fool or an idiot. It makes sense that the game may have been named after the most powerful and active card in the game.

The second essay is called the Anonymous Discorso. Presumably, it was never published, but five handwritten manuscripts are distributed among various libraries. From textual analysis, it seems the author was from central Italy and he used the Ferrarese card order, with a few variations.

The author’s aim was to fill a gap in the literature of moral interpretation of games by giving cards their due. Nearly half the essay is devoted to the suit cards, where the anonymous author follows a long tradition of finding moral allegories in the four suits.

He starts by telling us that games were originally idle pleasures, but they evolved into vices that fuel our greed when we play for material gain. The designer of the game wanted to teach us that all is vanity; that worldly possessions and pleasures evaporate, and we would be better off contemplating God.

The four suits depict lust for money, glory and gluttonous pleasures, with greed for riches underlying it all. He divides the trump suit into two sections with the Devil as the pivot. Trumps below the Devil show the usual human situation, inflamed with passions and heading for hell. Cards higher than the Devil show us the way out of entanglement in worldly vanity by contemplating God and rising to heaven.

These two essays are unfiltered voices from tarot’s distant past. They bring to light what certain thoughtful people of the sixteenth century read into the cards. We owe a huge debt of gratitude to Franco Pratesi for discovering these rare manuscripts, and to Ross Sinclair Caldwell, Thierry Depaulis and Marco Ponzi for their dedication to tarot history, making it possible for all of us to read these essays.

I strongly recommend reading the review of an earlier edition of this book by the late Michael J. Hurst. He puts these essays in their context of the long history of finding allegory in the four playing card suits, as well as in dice, chess and other games. He also provides a translation of the first discourse we know of, from 1377, on the moral meaning of playing cards.

https://pre-gebelin.blogspot.com/2010/06/renaissance-tarot-two-xvi-italian.html

Get the book at Lulu

Il Bagattello and Il Mondo cards from Tarocco Soprafino di F. Gumppenberg, Milano 1835. Il Meneghello, Milano, 1992.


Marshmallow Marseille

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This deck is an 18th-century Tarot de Marseille redrawn with a contemporary folk art flavor. The lacy vegetation on the pips and the bright pastel colors like aqua, violet and peach give the deck a fresh, airy feel without being cloying or cute.

If you’re familiar with the standard Marseille deck, you’ll notice a few minor differences in the pips. The straight swords on the Seven and Nine of Swords enter at a slant. The Nine and Ten of Coins lose their static symmetry and tumble energetically among the cascading vines. French card names are hand-lettered alongside the image, with words broken at odd places, adding a touch of quirkiness.

Marshmallow Marseille Page of CoinsMarshmallow Marseille 10 of CoinsThe deck is a bit smaller than usual, about 2.5 x 3.5 inches. I’ve been wanting a small, compact TdM to carry in my purse or backpack; this may be the one. The second edition has just come out (July 2018) with an improved box and iridescent backs that retain the same kaleidoscope image with a little marshmallow in the center. The cards, printed on 320 gsm card stock, are smooth, pleasant and very easy to shuffle.

This deck is not a fanciful invention. It’s faithful to a deck by Angelo Valla of Trieste published about 1790. See the original deck here:

http://www.albideuter.de/html/lombardisch-trieste.html

I shuffled the deck while asking how it will read. The Seven and Two of Swords came up, with their sum, the Hermit, as a Marshmallow Marseille spreadclarifying card. The deck says, “I may be pretty but I know how to cut to the core. I will uncover the source of your pain and shed light on what has been denied or buried.” A powerful message from a pint-sized deck.

See more cards and get the deck for $40 at www.WanderingOracle.com

The Cartomancer Magazine – Summer 2018

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Another beautiful edition of The Cartomancer just arrived in my mailbox. With a new owner, Arwen Lynch, the magazine has become even more eclectic. This issue contains thoughts on shadow work with tarot, plus articles on divination with tea leaves, Lenormand decks and playing cards. I was very happy to see several pages of tarot art in rich colors on a black background — a tradition in each issue.

If you’ve ever thought of producing your own deck, there’s a lengthy article giving all the technical details you need to consider. A book review introduced me to Madame Pamita, a prominent tarot personality in Los Angeles, just south of where I live. It sounds like her book has some refreshing new takes on the cards. As someone who adores Arp, Malevich and other early-modern abstractionists, I’m definitely going to look for the abstract Minimalist Oracle Deck.

Cartomancer magazine inside pageLast but not least, I want to announce the launching of a history series written by me and co-author Joep van Loon. We’ll be going through the trump cards, one per issue, describing how the imagery and divinatory meanings evolved from the 15th to 20th centuries.

(No, you aren’t imagining things—arcana is misspelled in the title. So is my first name. Oh well, there’s 21 more chances for them to get it right before we finish the series at the end of 2023).

Buy a single issue or subscribe to either the print or digital version at www.TheCartomancer.com

The Vandenborre Deck Restored by Pablo Robledo

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I am very excited about this fresh new version of the 1762 Vandenborre deck published this month by the Argentinian tarot maker Pablo Robledo.

This Brussels-Rouen pattern deck is first cousin to the Tarot de Marseille. Some of its unique imagery may stem from a lost tradition that migrated from Ferrara to France and Belgium. Its most notable feature is the substitution of the Spanish Captain and Bacchus for the Papesse and Pope. Read a lot more information about this deck and the Captain in another blog article here.

Until now, the only available version was printed by Carta Mundi in 1983 and distributed by US Games. I’ve always been very happy to have a copy of this historically unique deck to refer to. But Robledo’s deck is so beautiful and so pleasant to handle that I may actually start reading with it!

Vandenborre BateleurShown here is a side-by-side comparison of Le Bateleur in the two decks. Robledo’s deck is a bit smaller (2.5 by a little less than 4.5 inches). The background is slightly off-white so there’s no harsh glare. The lines are faithfully reproduced from the original, but the colors are subtly updated, making the cards much easier to read.

I love the pips in this deck.  They are large, sturdy, and have a strong presence. It’s going to be interesting to find out how they speak when I start reading with this deck.Vandenborre four pip cards

The medium weight card stock is smooth, silky and pleasant to touch. Instead of a box, the deck comes wrapped in a sturdy envelope with a unique block printed design created by Robledo in the 18th-century tradition. A card is included with publication information that’s dated and initialed by Robledo.

As far as I know the only way you can get this very limited edition deck, aside from contacting Robledo himself, is to e-mail info@collectarot.com (located in the US).

Vandenborre envelope

Divinatory Meanings for the Tarot de Marseille

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At the bottom of an old carton, I recently found a file folder stuffed with divinatory meanings (DMs) for the Tarot de Marseille (TdM) pip cards. When I began reading with historic decks about 20 years ago, I bought European TdM books, snapped up English language books when they became available, and downloaded lists of card meanings online. Then I took copious notes and made charts comparing various authors’ meanings.

I pulled the 4 of Swords out of a deck at random and listed the DMs for that card given by the eleven authors in my folder:

Etteilla 1785: upright: solitude, retreat, hermitage, banishment, remote, the tomb

Reversed: economy, good management, foresight, discretion, precautions

Arthur Edward Waite 1911: upright: retreat, solitude, the tomb

Reversed: circumspection, economy, wise administration

Paul Marteau 1949: Mysticism, a growing understanding of the ideal, slow flowering of realization, beginning of a plan

Antonia Matiuzzi 1987: closed off, excessive defensiveness, isolation, the tomb

Colette Silvestre-Haeberle 1998: perseverance, overcoming difficulties, perfect balance

Alejandro Jodorowsky 2004: upright: rationality, practical mind, scientific intelligence

Reversed: excessive rationality that excludes intuition and poetry, rigid mind

Diego Meldi 2007: solitude, a period of waiting, feeling oppressed or alone and wanting to escape

Judith Charles 2008: with positive cards: triumph over problems, stabilizing relationships

With negative cards: solitude, misunderstood, mental troubles

Claude Darche 2008: rigid, dogmatic, stuck in a problem you can’t overcome. You must extricate yourself

Yoav Ben Dov 2013: upright: A situation that is stable but limited, pushing against boundaries, constraints

Reversed: limited, confined, giving up trying to break out of your oppressive situation

Centroisa.com accessed 2016: upright: solitude which is creative and productive

Reversed: unfortunate events in work or professional life

Some random thoughts on this list of card meanings:

  • In more ways than one, Etteilla is the founding father of modern tarot reading. His divinatory meanings have had a huge influence on subsequent tarotists.
  • Etteilla is the reason A. E. Waite, occultist and creator of the Waite Smith tarot, is included in an article about the Tarot de Marseille. Several years ago, James Revak calculated that 49% of Waite’s divinatory meanings were derived from Etteilla. Many of the illustrations on the WS pip cards illustrate Etteilla. As you can see, Etteilla’s DMs have been taken up by many authors.
  • Etteilla’s upright and reversed meanings often have no relationship to each other. He started his career reading with French-suited cards, and claimed to have been trained by Italian cartomancers. So his card meanings may come from an old oral tradition.
  • People ask if there’s a “tradition” for TdM reading. Etteilla’s DMs infuse modern interpretations of the cards. If you read enough books, you get the feeling there’s a loose consensus among card readers, and you can easily spot the authors who are outside the mainstream, or who base their card meanings on occult correspondences. The best mainstream book in English is Tarot: The Open Reading by Yoav Ben-Dov.
  • Paul Marteau may have popularized the term Tarot de Marseille and made it the standard European tarot deck, but otherwise he seems to be off on his own metaphysical cloud.
  • I did a happy dance whenever an author connected card meanings to the actual image. They mentioned how the flower in the Four of Swords seems constricted behind a thick a wall, and how the card’s symmetry feels static.
  • Which leads me to my number one rule for card meanings: if you can’t support your meanings with the imagery, then they’re just abstract concepts you have to memorize.
    Cards are a visual language!

When I give a reading, do I remember any of these DMs? Not consciously.

Did I waste my time reading all those books and taking such extensive notes? I hope not!

I like to imagine all that book learning sifting down to my subconscious, like autumn leaves settling on a forest floor and turning to mulch.

Ask if you want the names of any of the books I used. It would be tedious to list them all here, and few of them are in English.

Cards illustrated at top, clockwise from top left:

Marshmallow Marseille by Wandering Oracle (Based on a 1790 deck)
Rosenwald deck (@1500) restored by Tarot Sheet Revival (Sullivan Hismans)
Tarocco Milanese 1850 by Il Meneghello
Tarocco Soprafino 1835 by Il Meneghello

Three Vandenborre Decks

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My 1983 Vandenborre deck by Carta Mundi has been sitting unused on a shelf for a few decades. After falling in love with Pablo Robledo’s recent production of the deck, and discovering a third version on the market at the GameofHope website, I went on a buying spree then sat down to compare the decks. All three decks faithfully recreate the lines on the original cards, but none is a photo facsimile. The stains and tax stamps have been eliminated, making each deck pristine. (There’s a link at the bottom where you can see the original cards in the British Museum.) Here’s a run-down of how the decks compare.

Colors

Robledo’s colors follow the originals in the British Museum exactly (bottom card in the set of three shown above). Carta Mundi’s colors are washed out and they made some arbitrary changes that remove even more color from the cards. For instance, in the Star card shown at top left, the stars have lost their red centers and there are changes to the colors at the bottom of the tower. The GameOfHope cards (top right) follow the Carta Mundi colors but are much deeper. The greens in the Carta Mundi deck appear light olive, so the GameofHope cards have dark olive; while the original and Robledo’s deck are grass green. Robledo’s cards have a white background, unlike the tan originals, making the colors pop.

Nothing in the three decks stands out as arbitrary or wrong. If we didn’t have an original deck for comparison we wouldn’t know the color had been altered. So the deck you prefer really comes down to a matter of taste.

Six of Swords from Vandenborre deckSize

The Carta Mundi and GameOfHope cards are the same overall size, 2.75 x 4.75 inches. The actual images in the GameofHope deck are one-quarter inch shorter and narrower, but the border is larger to make up the difference. This is the only deck with rounded corners. The images in Robledo’s deck are nearly the same size as the GameofHope, but the borders are very narrow, making this the smallest deck. (The image at left gives the Robledo card an extra wide top border that doesn’t exist. The borders on all sides are about one-tenth of an inch.

Card Stock

All three decks have pleasantly smooth card stock. The front of the Carta Mundi cards is more matte and untreated than the back. This deck is by far the heaviest and stands a half-inch taller than the other decks when stacked side-by-side. The GameofHope’s playing card stock is a bit lighter than Robledo’s.

Vandenborre deck backsBacks

Robledo’s deck  reproduces the original sun faces in ruffled rings. Carta Mundi’s rather crude version is larger and blue. GameofHope does something different, but is still in line with historic card backs.

Packaging

The Carta Mundi box is rather flimsy. Mine is showing wear even though I rarely take the deck out. The GameofHope deck comes in a sturdy tuck box and the box and title card display an old engraving of the Spanish Captain. Robledo’s deck does not have a box. It comes in a handmade, block-printed envelope, in keeping with how decks were packaged in previous centuries. See it in my review of the deck (link below). The enclosed card gives the deck’s number and date.

The Booklet

The Carta Mundi deck comes with a stellar 30-page booklet. Its brief discussion of history is very accurate, except for calling Etteilla a hairdresser (a pet peeve of mine). The author of the booklet believes the original order of the tarot trumps appears in the Sermones de Ludo cum Aliis. This isn’t necessarily so since tarot had been around for at least a half-century before the 22 trumps were listed in the margin of the Sermones. Even though the deck is numbered in the standard Tarot de Marseille order, the booklet discusses them in the Sermones order and arranges them in three groups: those subject to Love, Death, and Eternity.

The divinatory meanings for all 78 cards stick closely to the image with no occult correspondences or metaphysical abstractions. The booklet supplies three spreads with sample readings: Oswald Wirth’s Cross Spread, and two spreads that use the 22 trumps plus the 14 cards of the suit that pertains to the question.

Recommendations

If you want historical accuracy, you want Robledo’s deck. On the other hand, although the brilliant colors on the white background are very lively they don’t have the mellow feel of the original. (Or were the cards originally white and aging turned them tan?) I’m a bit squeamish about shuffling and using a deck when there are only 29 copies in existence. Since this deck has received such high praise, surely Robledo will print more copies which will solve that problem.

I like the deep, rich colors of the GameOfHope deck and find it very pleasant to look at. But the rounded corners and the extra wide border are a big drawback. This deck really needs a borderectomy, which would pare it down to the size of Robledo’s deck.

The Carta Mundi cards are probably difficult to shuffle, although I’ve never tried. Next to the other two decks the colors look pale and lifeless; but others might see the colors as soft and delicate.

The Carta Mundi deck is long out of print, and I don’t know if it’s worth chasing down now there are more accessible decks. The deck produced by GameofHope is a good serviceable deck that will keep you going until Robledo prints more of his historically correct masterpiece.

ADDENDUM

As soon as I published this article, a reader told me about a mini Vandenborre available at www.Pyroskin.com. Unfortunately, the shipping cost to North America nearly doubled the cost of the deck. It appears to have Carta Mundi colors.

LINKS

See an original deck on the British Museum website:

http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details/collection_image_gallery.aspx?assetId=1153098001&objectId=3268572&partId=1#more-views

These folks do reprints of several historic decks:  http://gameofhopelenormand.bigcartel.com/

Collectarot carried the first edition of Robledo’s deck. If there’s a second printing it will probably be available here.

My review of Robledo’s Vandenborre deck.

My article on the Spanish Captain and some background on this type of deck.

Vandenborre Moon card

I Tarocchi di Valentina Visconti per il Palio d’Asti

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Acquiring this hard-to-find deck inspired me to get acquainted with Valentina Visconti and learn about the chapter of her life depicted in these cards.

In 1389, Valentina set out in a magnificent procession from Milan to France to meet her husband Louis, Duke of Orléans, brother of the mad king of France, Charles VI. They had been married in a proxy ceremony two years before, but meeting in person was delayed while Valentina’s father, the Duke of Milan, scraped together her extremely expensive dowry. The procession stopped in the town of Asti to spend five days enjoying the Palio (horse races).

First, a description of the deck before getting back to Valentina’s life.

VV acciuga

The deck has the traditional 78-card structure, with ten additional cards. Five cards represent the prizes given to the winners of the Palio: Speroni/Spurs, Monete/Money, Gallo/Rooster, Palio/Banner and Acciuga/Sardines. The other five cards represent personal qualities one needs to win: Courage, Intrigue, Freedom, Knowledge and Shrewdness. The artists suggest using these cards to predict who will win the Palio this year. (It’s still happening on the third Sunday of every September.)

The Emperor and Empress cards depict the artists themselves, while Valentina’s portrait appears on all the coins. The batons are rendered as leafy branches, and where the batons usually interlace, this deck has concentric circles with flames.

The court cards are Re, Domina, Cavaliere and Valletto. Except for the King of Swords, who has a beard, the other kings appear very feminine. Instead of Regina, the usual word for Queen, this rank is called Domina, which accentuates her independent rulership..

VV Re dominaThe cards are 2.25 by 4.25 inches, printed on uncoated, light cream card stock, with square corners. The images are graceful, romantic line drawings rendered in dark brown ink.

The deck, created by artists Maria Teresa Perosino and Sergio Panza, was published in 1982 in an edition of 1,000 numbered copies by Edizioni Del Solleone, owned by Vito Arienti of Milano, Italy.

The Fable of the Visconti Tarocchi

The artists and publisher seem to have sincerely believed that every mention of playing cards in the 14th century actually refers to Tarocchi. They also state that there is so much contradictory data about the deck’s origins that one story is as good as another. With this in mind, here’s a charming fable that’s included with the deck, spoken by the spirit of Valentina herself.

VV VallettoShe tells us that when she left Italy in 1389 to take up married life with the French king’s brother, her luggage contained her favorite books, her harp and a Tarocchi deck, along with a fabulous trousseau of gowns and jewels. The procession stopped in the town of Asti for several days to enjoy the horse racing. It was there that a young French page, with the bluest eyes she had ever seen, caught her attention. The two exchanged love-sick gazes from a distance, and managed once to brush hands briefly. When the procession arrived at its destination outside Paris, the Page disappeared, his duties having been discharged.

When Valentina was conducted to the palace to meet her husband for the first time, she advanced toward Duke Louis slowly, her eyes lowered. When Louis held out his hand to her, it held the only token of affection she had been able to give the Page—a card from her Tarocchi deck. When she looked up at the Duke and saw his piercing blue eyes, she realized that he was the Page she had fallen in love with. He had disguised himself as a servant in order to get a sneak preview of his wife.

The marriage was truly a love match. Louis was eager to learn about the secrets of Tarocchi, so they spent many evenings discussing the cards. Louis shared his enthusiasm for the cards with his brother, King Charles VI, who, in 1392, ordered three luxury decks to be painted by the artist Jacquemin Gringonneur. Louis’ own painted deck was listed in the inventory of his belongings at his death in 1407.

VV LoversThe hatred of the queen and the intrigues at court prematurely ended the lives of both Valentina and Louis. Valentina’s spirit wandered between the worlds, remembering a prediction made by one of her grandmother’s servants, that the Visconti Tarocchi would be passed down through time to keep alive of the story of Valentina and Louis. After many generations had passed, Valentina’s spirit heard voices calling to her, the voices of Maria Teresa Perosino and Sergio Panza, residents of Asti and partners in art and in life. Inspired by Valentina’s spirit, they revived her life and times through the medium of a new Tarocchi.

The Truth About the Decks

It’s true that in 1392 King Charles VI paid a substantial amount of money to the artist Jacquemin Gringonneur for three decks of painted and gilt playing cards. For many years people assumed that one of these decks was the partial tarot deck in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. On stylistic grounds it’s obvious that this deck was created in the mid fifteenth century, most likely in Ferrara. This deck has been filled out with replacement cards and published by Lo Scarabeo as the Golden Tarot of the Renaissance.

When Louis d’Orléans was murdered in 1407, the inventory of his possessions listed un jeu de quartes serrasine – Unes Quartes de Lombardie showing that cards were still associated with the Arab world, and that one deck may have come from Valentina’s home territory.

Why can’t these be referring to tarot decks? Because we know from other listings in account books that tarocchi or trionfi was specified for that type of deck. If the document just said “a deck of cards”, that assumed a regular deck with four suits. In addition, there is no documentary evidence for the game of tarocchi/trionfi before 1440. It’s very unlikely there were trionfi decks in the 14th century but no documentary evidence for over forty years.

Who was the real Valentina? Her story encompasses murder, madness, incest, exile, and accusations of witchcraft.  (Someone really should make a miniseries.)

Click here to get the real story of her dramatic life and times.

VV Ace coins

Untold Tarot by Caitlín Matthews – Book Review

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This book is destined to become a classic, along with books on the same topic by the likes of Jodorowsky and Ben Dov (to whom the book is dedicated). Three kinds of people need this book:

  • People who are curious about reading with the Tarot de Marseille (TdM) or other historic decks, but are put off by the thought of reading cards that don’t have fully illustrated scenes.
  • People who dove into intuitive reading feet-first and now feel the need for grounding in systematic study.
  • People like me who have been immersed in historic decks for years and think they know just about everything. The book gives lots of new techniques to try as well as fresh insights into the cards.

Two features of this book put it head and shoulders above other books in its category. Every how-to-read book I can think of is illustrated with just one Tarot de Marseille deck and doesn’t acknowledge other types like the Visconti-Sforza or Vieville. This book is illustrated with ten historic decks ranging from the Budapest sheet of 1500 to Ben Dov’s 21st-century recreation of the TdM. When discussing the trump cards, Matthews tells us when certain cards, like the Star, have radically different imagery in various decks.

Untold Tarot Book PageEach trump card gets a two-page spread with a color photo, divinatory meanings, and a short discussion of the card in the context of European art and culture.

The forty number cards (pips) can be the scariest part of a historic deck for novice readers. But I’ve always loved these cards the most, perhaps because they’re treated like the ugly stepchildren of the deck. I’m thrilled to see Matthews dedicate so much of her book to understanding the pips and to working with them as an integral part of a reading. Before being pushed off the diving board into doing readings, Matthews walks us through the structure of historic tarot decks. We’re introduced to the pip symbols, told how to read Roman numerals, and how to translate foreign card titles like deniers and cavalier that can be alienating.

Matthews’ goal is to reclaim the reading skills that were lost one hundred years ago when the English-speaking world turned to the Waite Smith deck and its avalanche of spin-offs with fully-illustrated scenes on all cards. There’s a strata of centuries-old cartomantic folklore which Lenormand and playing card readers have kept alive, like laying the cards in a tableau, using significators, and seeing the spades as pain and difficulties. Incorporating this old wisdom into our tarot practice keeps us rooted in folk cartomantic practices that were lost to taromancy when occultists hijacked tarot in the late 18th century.

Matthews doesn’t spoon feed us her preferred method for dealing with the pips. We’re given extensive instructions on several methods for discovering their meanings: free-associating on the image, combining number with keywords for the suit; or interpreting them in light of the trump card with the same number. The court cards receive the same thorough treatment, giving the novice reader a complete grounding in the cards before beginning to read with them.

Vergnano Tarocchi 3 SwordsPlease, read her keywords and card interpretations with your deck in front of you; and read critically. Ask yourself if her interpretation is illustrated in the corresponding card in your deck. If a card interpretation isn’t rooted in the visual image, then toss it out. Keywords aren’t eternal truths that can be applied to any deck.

We’re walked through several spreads ranging from three to ten cards, including some new twists on old favorites. Then the last sixty pages of the book contains more reading tips and spreads accompanied by sample readings. The spreads are rooted in old-time cartomancy, which means lots of tableaux with 20+ cards.

The crown jewel of the book is Matthews’ own Mapping the Landscape spread comprised of 22 cards in 5 interlocking crosses of 5 cards each. She suggests we put our personal questions in a larger, more global context. In that spirit, she illustrates her spread with an analysis of how Brexit will affect the U.K.

This sturdy 224-page paperback features color photos of historic decks on nearly every page. Heavy, glossy paper brings out the rich colors and details. Kudos to Schiffer for this high-quality production.Empress and 3 Coins Madenie Tarot

Bottom line: If you have any interest in reading with the TdM or other historic decks you need this book. Read it twice. Read it three times if you’re a novice TdM reader. After reading with historic decks for nearly two decades, I’ve fallen into a comfortable rut. This book has fired me up with enthusiasm and I’m looking forward to experimenting with all the tantalizing techniques and spreads in this marvelous book.

Matthews, Caitlín. Untold Tarot: The Lost Art of Reading Ancient Tarots. Schiffer Publishing Ltd., Pennsylvania, 2018.

Illustrations

  • Lovers – Playing Marseille, Ryan Edward. Inset.cards.com
  • Three of Swords – Tarocchi Vergnano, Torino @1830. Restored by Giordano Berti, RinascimentoItalianArtAnglish.wordpress.com
  • Empress and Three of Coins – Tarot de Marseille Pierre Madenié 1709, restored by Yves Reynaud, Tarot-de-Marseille-Heritage.com
  • Ace of Coins – Tarocchi Fine Dalla Torre in Bologna, 17th Century. Museo Internazionale dei Tarocchi, 2016

Ace of Coins Fine dall Torre Tarocchi


Golden Decks of the Fifteenth Century: The Visconti di Modrone and Brera-Brambilla Tarocchi

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Nearly two decades ago, Il Meneghello of Milan gave us the best facsimile available of the 1450 Visconti-Sforza deck. Now they’ve outdone themselves by producing facsimiles of the two earliest trionfi/tarocchi decks we know of — luxurious gold-covered cards created for the Duke of Milan in the early 1440s. Il Meneghello printed the Visconti di Modrone deck in 2015 and 2017, and released a book in 2018. The Brera-Brambilla deck was published in the summer of 2018 with its accompanying book available in September.

The names of these decks can be a bit confusing. Italians refer to the decks by their last Italian owner, while Americans name them after the museum or collection where they are housed. For consistency, I’m going to refer to these decks by their Italian names with the American designation in parentheses.

Dating the decks

Both decks were created during the reign of Duke Filippo Maria Visconti (1412 to 1447) probably about 1442 or 1443. No documentary evidence such as account books exist because the Visconti records were destroyed in a fire during the political turmoil of the late 1440s. But the heraldic devices and the coins depicted on the decks tell us who was in power when they were commissioned.

Visconti di Modrone (Visconti Cary Yale) Deck

This deck was formerly in the Visconti di Modrone collection. In 1947, an American collector, Melbert B. Cary, acquired the deck and brought it to the US. He subsequently donated his collection to the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library at Yale University.

The Deck

This deck has several features that distinguish it from the other two decks commissioned for the Visconti and Sforza dukes. Eleven trump cards still exist, including the three theological virtues of Faith, Hope, and Charity. We can’t say if the three virtues were added on, as in the Minchiate deck, or if they were substituting for traditional Trionfi playing cards.

All the royal characters in this deck are accompanied by one to four attendants. The Emperor and Empress have four attendants each, while a servant manages the chariot driver’s horses. All the Kings and Queens in the four suits have attendants.

There are six court cards in each suit, with the addition of female knights and pages. Putting all the ranks in male-female pairs is a romantic touch that suggests this deck was a wedding present. At left is the female Knight of Swords with the Sforza quince flower device on her gown. None of the suits retains a complete set of court cards but only one pip card is missing – the Three of Coins.

Female Knight of Swords Visconti di Modrone deckAll the pip cards have an embossed silver background which has tarnished to dark gray. Gold and blue are the only pigments used on the pip symbols. The baton pips are the same arrows held by the court figures in the Brambilla deck; while the court figures in the Modrone deck hold long ceremonial staffs with elaborately carved finials.

All cards have pink borders with little blue flowers, rather than the plain borders of the other two decks made for the Visconti and Sforza families.

When was the Modrone deck created?

The betrothal or marriage scene on the Lovers card contains the best clues. On the canopy, the Visconti viper alternates with a white cross on red, which is the insignia of Pavia, the Visconti’s main residence. But it’s also a symbol of Savoy, which has led researchers to speculate that the scene is either the marriage of Filippo to his second wife Maria of Savoy in 1428, or of Francesco and Bianca Sforza’s son Galeazzo Maria to Bona of Savoy in 1468. On stylistic grounds, we can be certain the deck was created in the 1440s before Galeazzo was born. The marriage of Filippo and Bona was loveless and unconsummated, so it’s doubtful anyone commissioned a deck to commemorate it twenty years after the fact.

Lovers card Visconti di Modrone deckIt’s more likely the deck was commissioned for the marriage of Filippo’s daughter Bianca to Francesco Sforza in October 1441. The man on the Lover’s card wears the Sforza heraldic fountain on his clothes. The Batons and Swords court cards wear Sforza emblems of quince flowers and fountains, while the Cups and Coins court figures wear the Visconti devices of a dove and sunrays and the ducal crown with fronds. This suggests the joining of the two families.

Who created the deck?

Three prominent Italian International Gothic artists have their champions as the creators of one or more of the decks made for the Visconti and the Sforza. The current consensus is that all three decks were created by Bonifacio Bembo and his workshop. In 1928, Roberto Longhi, one of the foremost art historians of the 20th century, wrote an article which revived Bembo’s reputation and attributed all three decks to him. Art historians have fallen in line with this ever since. Before then, the Zavattari family were the favorites. There are compelling reasons to believe that at least one of the decks could have been created by Michelino da Besozzo. All three artists worked for the Visconti; and there are obvious connections between the cards and details in their frescoes.

The Book

Cristina Dorsini introduces us to Filippo Maria’s life and character, then dates the deck from the evidence of heraldry and coins depicted on the cards. Michelino da Besozzo is put forward as the artist, and ten examples of his work are reproduced. All the existing trump cards and four court cards are given full-page color illustrations with a discussion of the card on the facing page.

Like all recent publications coming from the Il Meneghello workshop, the English translation is very poorly done and there are numerous typos. The results range from humorous to clumsy to incomprehensible. If you can read Italian, you may want to get that version and spare yourself some agony.

Deck Details

Tarocchi Visconti di Modrone XV Secolo was published by Il Meneghello in two editions: 400 copies in 2015 and 1,000 copies in 2017. The cards in the two printings are identical: 3.5 x 7 inches, rounded corners and printed on sturdy matte card stock with speckled brown backs. The boxes for the two editions have different paper coverings and lids. Both editions are housed in boxes with marbled paper and a card pasted on the cover with a red wax seal. The 2015 deck comes with a booklet containing an abbreviated version of the material in the 2018 book. A numbered title card is included with both decks.

The Brera-Brambilla Deck

Giovanni Brambilla of Venice owned this deck in the early 20th century; but it has been in the Pinacoteca di Brera since 1971.

Art historians argue about which deck came first, the Brambilla or Modrone. The current consensus says this is the earlier deck, which could make it one of the first commissions from the Bembo workshop after Bonifacio took over from his father around 1440.

Queens of Batons, Visconti di Modrone and Brera-Brambilla decksThe deck has the fairy tale quality of International Gothic art. The six remaining court figures are suspended in a golden glow and seem barely anchored in this world. They all have the curly blond hair, pale skin and vacant, childlike face that was the ideal for both men and women at the time. Compare this to the more detailed costumes, animated horses, and lively faces and figures in the Modrone deck. The gold is embossed like the Modrone with a diamond and sunburst pattern above a green bottom section.

The two Queens of Batons shown here illustrate the artistic styles of the two decks. The Brambilla Queen holds an arrow upright and wears a blue gown decorated with a flower motif. Her elegant posture and porcelain skin are typical of the International Gothic, as is her tightly curled blond hair and fashionably high forehead created by shaving or plucking the hairline. In contrast, the Modrone Queen seems more natural and lively as she leans to hear what the maid in pink is saying. Her gown is decorated with the Sforza fountain, and she holds a long ceremonial baton instead of an arrow.

Like the Modrone deck, the pips have an embossed silver background with symbols in gold and blue. Only one pip is missing, the Four of Coins. The coins in both decks are rendered as Filippo Maria Visconti’s gold florin.

Three of Swords and Three of Batons, Brera-Brambilla deckIn the suit of batons, a shortened odd baton lies horizontally behind the crossed batons. There are no straight swords, except for the ace. The odd-numbered cards are asymmetrical with an extra curved sword on one side (see the Three of Batons and Swords at left).

Only two trump cards remain, the Emperor and the Wheel of Fortune, which is nearly identical to the later Colleoni-Baglioni (Visconti-Sforza) card.

The Book

The book begins with a short introduction to International Gothic culture, then devotes a large section to ten castles in northern Italy that house frescoes of card players. They are referred to as tarocchi players throughout the discussion, but every card that can be identified is a pip. Since no trump cards are shown, it’s impossible to say what game is being illustrated on the castle walls.

The Zavattari dynasty, four generations of artists working in Lombardy throughout the 15th century, receive a few pages of text and several pages of color photos. Several details in their frescoes resemble figures in the Brambilla deck, so Dorsini proposes the Zavattari as the creators of this deck.

This book cries out for a native English-speaking editor. The English translation is awkward but fairly easy to understand until you get to the technical details of the deck. This section evidently exceeded the translator’s abilities so some phrases are incomprehensible.

Deck Details

Emperor and Wheel of Fortune, Brera-Brambilla deckTarocchi Visconti Brambilla XV Secolo. Edition of 200 printed in 2018. The deck is housed in a sturdy box covered in dark brown marbled paper. The cards are the same size as the Modrone deck, 3.5 x 7 inches with a dark reddish-brown back that’s streaked and distressed to look aged. A Wheel of Fortune card is pasted on the box with a red wax seal, and a numbered title card is included.

Both books and both decks, as well as a newly released Colleoni-Baglioni (Visconti-Sforza) deck by Il Meneghello, are available in North America from www.collectarot.com.

References:

Dorsini, Cristina. Visconti di Modrone Tarot: Art in Milan in 1400. Il Meneghello Edizioni, March 2018.

Dorsini, Cristina. Visconti Brambilla Tarot: The Zavattari at the Visconti Court. Il Meneghello Edizioni, September 2018.

Bandera, Sandrina. Brera: I tarocchi il caso e la fortuna – Bonifacio Bembo e la cultura cortese tardogotica. Milano, 1999. Large color reproductions of all three of Bembo’s decks.

Kaplan, Stuart. Encyclopedia of Tarot, Volume I, pp 87-98 and Volume II pp. 26-35 and 48-52. US Games Inc.

Cards used in illustrations

Visconti di Modrone: Ace of Cups, Female Knight of Swords, Lovers, Queen of Batons

Brera-Brambilla: Queen of Batons, Three of Batons, Three of Swords, Emperor, Wheel of Fortune

 

The Budapest Tarot Recreated by Sullivan Hismans

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In the 1440s, you could go to the store and buy a pack of cards for playing the popular new game of Trionfi. What did those cards look like? Did they resemble our familiar tarot cards? We can’t be sure because not a single printed tarot deck survives from the 15th century. All we have are a handful of gold-covered cards commissioned by wealthy aristocrats. Luxury decks like the Visconti-Sforza prove that by the mid-1400s tarot decks had 78 cards including our familiar twenty-two trump cards. But we don’t know how closely these luxury decks resembled cards printed for the masses.

Back then, playing cards were printed using wooden blocks resembling large rubber stamps. Cards were printed in sheets of about twenty. Paint was stenciled on, then the sheets were cut up into individual cards and stacked into a deck. If there was a flaw somewhere, the entire sheet was recycled and often used in book binding. Occasionally, when a restorer disassembles an antique book, a sheet of tarot cards will be found padding the inside the covers. Several of these sheets have made their way into museums and private collections and are known by the name of the collection where they reside.

The Budapest Sheet

Sheet of unprinted Budapest cards from1500The tarot sheets held by the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest are comprised of all the trump and court cards and the suits of swords and batons. Duplicate sheets printed from the same woodblock were sold to the Metropolitan Museum in New York City in 1922. A private collection in New York owns a small section of one sheet, and the Cary Collection of Playing Cards at Yale University owns another duplicate sheet plus a stencil used to color one of the sheets in the Budapest collection.

Out of the tens of thousands, if not millions, of decks printed in Italy in the 15th century, only a handful of uncut sheets survive. It’s either an extraordinary coincidence that so many cards printed from the same wood blocks were preserved, or this particular deck was very popular.

These sheets are very important for understanding the early history of tarot. They could only be seen online until recently, when Belgian graphic designer Sullivan Hismans faithfully reproduced the images of both the Budapest and Rosenwald sheets, then printed them as decks. Hismans’ decks are so accurate that it’s impossible to find a discrepancy when comparing his cards with online images of the originals. Now we can hold a valuable piece of tarot history in our hands.

The Cards

Budapest tarot four trump cardsAll the traditional twenty-two trumps are present, but some cards have slightly different designs. A crowd of onlookers watches the Bagatto. The Lovers are a courting couple with Cupid helping things along. The Fool strides through the countryside holding a tree branch decorated with bells. This deck has one of the most cheerful and life-affirming Sun cards.

After examining the clothing on the court cards, I believe the deck was designed in the 1470s, but some of the styles go back to the very early days of tarot in the 1440s. Playing card designs were very conservative. When one set of wood blocks wore out, designs were often copied onto new blocks. It’s quite possible that this deck transmits a remnant of the earliest days of tarot.

Hismans reproduced the lines of the original woodcuts with pen and paper and digital drawing. Eight trump and court cards are partly missing from the original sheets and had to be hand drawn with pen on paper to complete them. The cups and coins suits no longer exist and were recreated using other sheets in the Budapest collection.

The areas of stenciled color on the original sheets are faithfully reproduced. Hismans applied paint to paper, photographed it then applied it digitally to the cards. The original yellow has faded to tan, and the red paint shifted toward orange, so Hismans gives us the original bright, cheerful colors. The two highest trumps, Justice and World, have blue areas that may have been hand-colored. These have been duplicated exactly.

The card backs are a black and tan diamond pattern. Only 250 copies were digitally printed on 350 gram card stock with a light glossy finish. They are sturdy yet flexible and not too thick. At 2.25 x 4 inches, the cards are slightly smaller than most decks, but shuffle easily and are very usable.

The Envelope

Envelope for Budapest deckIn previous centuries, cards were packaged for sale in heavy paper envelopes printed with ornate designs and the card maker’s name and address. Hismans learned block carving in order to understand how the lines on the cards were made. He used this skill to carve a unique envelope design, paying tribute to the original printer by incorporating the Fool’s tree branch. The deck is signed and numbered on the inside of the envelope.

Reading with the Budapest Deck

If you’re an experienced TdM reader, the suit of swords will take some mental adjustment. The swords are curved outward and are bound together by a gold crown. The straight sword in the odd numbered cards is uncolored. A curved band behind the sword hilts seems to be holding them in place.

The crown brings to mind worldly power and prestige. Two of the swords court cards are warlike: the Knight is a warrior in armor and the Page is Hercules wearing his lion skin. One could read the sequence from two to ten as a struggle for power and glory. But crowns are worn on the head. Perhaps these crowns are gathering up and focusing thoughts.

If you’re comfortable reading with the Tarot de Marseille, the Budapest deck makes a fun and intriguing alternative.Swords cards from Budapest tarot

Get this deck and the Rosenwald deck at Sullivan Hismans’ web page www.TarotSheetRevival.com

Tarot Hes 1750

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When we think of historic tarot decks, the French Tarot de Marseille and early Italian decks quickly come to mind. But I’m ashamed to say that in my nearly twenty years of deck collecting it never occurred to me to think about German tarot decks.

Giordano Berti has corrected this imbalance with his latest production, the Tarot Hes published about 1750 in Augsburg, Germany. The 35-page booklet that accompanies the deck gives a quick survey of German tarot. As a bonus, the booklet quotes several of Mozart’s diary entries where he mentions playing tarot. Tarot de Marseille and Besançon (Jupiter and Juno) type decks were originally imported to Germany from France. By the mid-1700s the game was very popular and decks were being manufactured in Germany.

This deck is a hybrid of the Type I and Type II Tarot de Marseille. On this page I list ten Hes0002characteristics of a TdM I deck. This deck has five out of the ten. Eight trump cards, the aces of swords and batons and the Chevalier de Bastons are a mirror image of the traditional TdM.

I was immediately struck by the smiling faces. Everyone in this deck looks like they’re really enjoying life, while Death just heard a good joke. The court cards have details you don’t find in the traditional Conver/Chosson TdM pattern: Details on the clothing, nicely turned rails on the chairs, flowers and grass under the horses’ feet.

The cards are 2.5 by almost 5 inches. The card stock is medium-light, rather bendable and has a very silky feel that’s pleasant to handle. The backs have a very pleasant, subtle brown and tan diamond pattern. This is a facsimile of the only copy in existence housed in the British Museum, so signs of aging are present. What looks like mildew is obvious on several cards. It appears in batches of adjacent cards and must have happened after the cards were put in order and stored.

The box designed by Letizia Rivetti opens like a book with a red felt interior. The marbled paper covering the outside is bolder than Berti’s other decks, with large areas of teal green and deep blue. A card is pasted on the front and a numbered card with identifying information is included. The packaging of all of Berti’s decks is a work of art in itself.

This deck is charming, friendly and attractive. I can see myself reading with it.

Published November 2018 in a limited edition of 900.

Stay tuned! Berti will soon release another German deck, the Tarot Miller 1780.

See more card and box images and order it here:

https://rinascimentoitalianartenglish.wordpress.com/marseille-tarot-of-hes-1750/

Tarot des Aux Arcs

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The deck’s name had me puzzled for a while. It looks French but makes no sense in that language. Then I checked out the creator’s website — Aux Arcs in French is pronounced Ozark, the mountains where the artist lives.

The deck creator, Lori LaPage, says this deck is not a Tarot de Marseille and it doesn’t read like one. But I respectfully disagree. The imagery is solid TdM rendered in acrylic washes and lively black lines that perfectly capture the energy of each card. The higher-numbered swords cards look heavy and sinister, while the cups are in a party mood with their flowers and ribbons. The batons burst with vitality. Every card sings with energy, making it easy to interpret. The backs radiate the same high energy with gold starbursts on deep red.

page of Coins and papesse from Tarot des Aux ArcsOne of the more whimsical cards, the Page of Coins, looks like he’s puckering up and getting ready to kiss the coin in his hand. Or is it a bagel? The black Papesse, one of my favorites, is colored by the deep mysteries she transmits.

Card titles are in French, and the names on the court cards can be difficult to read, so it helps to have some background with the TdM. The pips are not labelled with the suit name and the trumps have names only, no numbers. Some cards have features that echo earlier historic decks:

  • The trump cards do not have numbers, except Death, which is labeled XIII. In older Italian decks it’s often called “The Thirteen” (Il Tredici) to avoid using the “D” word.
  • The Tower has one falling figure and is called La Maison Dieu.
  • Some Batons look like the straight swords in the Visconti-Sforza deck, and some of their tips look like pens.

The deck is playing card size, 4.75 x 2.75 inches, smooth and easy to shuffle. It comes shrink-wrapped and does not have a card with identifying information, so I made up an index card to keep with the deck before I forgot its vital statistics.

Purchase the deck from PrinterStudio.com for $28 at https://www.printerstudio.com/sell/designs/tarot-de-aux-arcs.html

LaPage’s website https://theluminarian.wordpress.com/ has excellent articles on reading intuitively without spread positions, profiles of court card personalities, and combining suit symbols with numbers.

Three of Batons from Tarot des Aux Arcs

Tarocchi di Besançon Miller 1780

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When we think of the Tarot de Marseille (TdM), France usually comes to mind. But the game of tarot was played throughout Europe, with locally printed decks that had their own unique touches. Giordano Berti has recently produced facsimiles of two German Tarot de Marseille decks. The Tarocchi Miller is a Besançon-style deck where the Pope and Papesse are replaced with Jupiter and Juno.

Tarot arrived in Germany in the mid-1600s, just as the Tarot de Marseille pattern was becoming the dominant style in France. By the 18th century, Germans were playing the popular game of tarot with decks imported from neighboring regions of France where the Besançon style was very popular. German printers copied this style for their own decks. There are two theories about why the Pope and Papesse were eliminated, and they might both be true depending on the region. It’s surmised that Protestants, who were numerous in eastern France, didn’t want to see Catholic religious figures on their cards. On the other hand, Catholics thought the Pope on a playing card was sacrilegious, and a female pope even worse.

In 1780, the printer Josef Rauch Miller of Salzburg printed a Besançon-style deck with many quirky features that set it apart from a traditional TdM.

Devil and Lovers from Tarocchi di Besancon MillerThe first thing I noticed were the brackets at the top corners of the trump cards with two sets of roman numerals. Perhaps it’s an indication of the political atmosphere of the time, but neither Emperor nor Empress displays the imperial eagle. The Empress has the coat of arms of the town of Salzburg on her shield, while the Emperor has the obligatory tax stamp.

I’m not sure what’s going on in the Lovers card. An old woman wearing a large lace cap (at least that’s what it looks like to me) watches while the lovers clasp hands over a little table. Is she a marriage broker or chaperone? Are they sealing an engagement? Cupid aims his arrow directly at the old woman while she holds a yellow object that I can’t make out in her upper hand.

The Devil is dressed like a clown with the Fool’s feathers in his hair. His Two court cards from Tarorcchi di Besancon Millercompanions seem to be hybrid human animal. The one on the left reminds me of a dancing bear.

The bright red lobster on the Moon card floats on his back toward the bridge on the left while waving his claws as if signaling for help. Nearly every trump card has a unique feature that gives this deck a distinct personality – Death’s red skullcap, The Hermit’s short pants and Fu Manchu mustache, and the Hanged Man’s crown and little ruffled skirt.

The Batons and Swords pips appear bold and energetic with their large leaves and flowers rendered in strong colors. The numbers are placed wherever they fit best—for the swords it’s inside the center oval. All the court cards seem well-fed and pleased with themselves. The rather portly Knight of Cups with his pencil mustache looks to me like an ageing 2 pip cards from Tarocchi di Besancon MillerLothario.

The Deck and Book

The cards have a lovely silky feel and rounded corners making them very pleasant to handle. The colors are deep and mellow. Like all of Berti’s decks, the cards come in a gold bag and are housed in a sturdy hand-made box covered in dark blue and maroon marbled paper. The 35-page booklet gives a history of tarot in Germany, and fascinating diary entries by Salzburg citizen Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart mentioning social events where he played tarot.

If you collect historic tarot decks, Berti’s German decks are a nice way to extend the range of your collection.

Berti’s website where you can learn more about the deck and purchase it.

Here’s an article on Besançon type decks. .

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