From: "J. Karlin" Newsgroups: alt.magick,alt.tarot Subject: Re: Evidence the Tarot is of Hermetic origin Date: Tue, 24 Oct 2000 19:44:34 GMT Prophet 718 wrote: > To counter your rather vauge and misunderstood claims of links between > the Tarot and the Tree of Life, I counter with an excellent article on > the Mantegna prints which indicates the Tarot was likely developed > within the Greek school of thought--- Early Tarot developed within the playing-card school of thought. Its symbolism is largely ornamental, and NOT mystical in any way. While the designers of Trionfi decks borrowed from many traditions, especially Christian traditions, to decorate the cards, the bulk of the combined deck, referred to by occultists as the "Minor Arcana", had nothing whatsoever to do with the "Greek school of thought", nor the Jewish one, since it was a derivation of card suits introduced from Mamluk Egypt. These suit signs were Mamluk heraldic devices and were changed only superficially when introduced into Europe in the 14th century. "Tarot" was added to these cards in the 15th century, purely for the purpose of creating a specialized deck of playing cards. The "Mantegna deck" is NOT a Tarot or Trionfi deck. While comparisons can be made between these, one shouldn't overstate the case for their similarities. There were many card games and many decks developed in Renaissance Italy. Trionfi (or Tarocchi, the Italian names for Tarot) is one class of these. As for the Kabbalistic content of Tarot, this is an 18th-century invention, born of the imagination of Antoine Court de Gébelin, the first person to publish "serious" symbolic speculations concerning the meaning of Tarot symbolism. Eliphas Lévi developed these ideas further, and they were adopted into the absurdly complex Tarotic-Kabbalistic symbolism of the Golden Dawn, by which time Tarot HAD become a Kabbalistic "book" (well, coloring book), in addition to its continuing existence as a more mundane type of game. (jk) ********************************************** Read the alt.tarot FAQ: http://lonestar.texas.net/~r3winter/tarotfaq.html More tarot resources available at: http://lonestar.texas.net/~r3winter/alttarotqa.html **********************************************