If the Tarot was not intended as a way to secretly transmit esoteric wisdom under the noses of the Church, how can it also be true that there was symbolic content indicative of deeper meaning in it from the very beginning?
To understand this seeming paradox, you must understand the world in which the Tarot was born, a world quite different from our own. It is hard for those of us living in a culture so aggressively anti-intellectual that the most powerful man in the world has deliberately cultivated a reputation for malapropisms and mispronunciations (and if you believe young George W. grew up saying "nook-you-ler" at the dinner table of George H.W. and Barbara, you're terribly naive), but in Renaissance Italy nearly every rich and powerful man fancied himself a poet, a philosopher, and a connoisseur of fine art. And every member of the small but growing middle class aspired to the same status.
Even in their pastimes and amusements, these men -- and women, because as we will see, the growing status of women in the late medieval period was an important component in the creation of the Tarot as a game and in the symbolism of Tarot as a device for meditation or divination -- reveled in intellectual challenge and delighted in displaying their erudition and subtlety. To some extent, this attitude extended down into the populous, and to some extent it was not even a new thing but a remnant of the glory of Rome, and the remembered glory of having once been part of the greatest civilization the western world had yet known (even though many of the inhabitants of these great cities were in fact descended from the barbarian hordes who had destroyed Roman civilization rather than its citizens).
In ancient Rome a great festival was celebrated every year called the Saturnalia. There were remnants of that celebration in the annual carnivals with which medieval Europe welcomed the beginning of Lent, familiar today to Americans as Mardi Gras. Part of the celebration in Milan (and other Italian cities) included a parade called Trionfi, the plural form of the Italian word for "Triumph." These triumphs were depicted in a series of "carts" -- similar to our modern-day floats, wheeled carts pulled by horses that carried figures in costume depicting allegorical figures, each of which was seen to triumph over the one before (just as captives were led before the conqueror in the triumphal parades of ancient Rome).
(more later)
