History of the Tarot - Part 2

We have some idea of what these allegorical processions were like from a poem by Petrarch called "I Trionphi" (an alternate spelling), in which we are presented first with the figure of Love in the form of a beautiful woman. But the poet's Love for this woman is no match for her Chastity, which triumphs in this life. But even the best men and women must fall prey to Death. Ah, but her Fame may last beyond her Death, thanks to Petrarch's own words! But Time will, alas, eventually erase even such fleeting immortality, and the only way to truly triumph over death is through the church and its offer of Eternity, which is the final chapter of Petrarch's poem. So the sequence goes Love, Chastity, Death, Fame, Time, Eternity, each new image triumphing over the one before.

We can easily see how the familiarity of such series of images could have led to the idea of a series of emblematic cards that do the same thing. The fact that the game in its early years was universally called "trionfi" (or "triomphi" or some similar spelling -- medieval Europeans were not prone to consistency in these matters), and the fact that many of the cards are practically identical to illustrations of carts from such triumphal processions, make it all but certain that these parades were indeed the inspiration for the Trumps or so-called "Major Arcana" of the modern Tarot.

So from the very beginning, this new game of Trumps involved symbolism and allegory and deeper meaning within the confines of a game. To help us understand how a game can have serious symbolic content, Tom Tadfor Little has proposed an analogy to the modern game of Monopoly, which is, as he points out, "a simulation of capitalistic real estate that draws its essential scheme from Atlantic City real estate trading in the 1930s."

When he was young, says Little, he was vaguely aware that the components of the game symbolized something in the outside world, but he wasn't that interested in it, nor was it necessary for him to learn the minutiae of real estate trading in order to appreciate the game -- "What mattered is that I knew that Marvin Gardens was more expensive than St. Charles Place."

The analogy, like most, falls apart if examined too closely -- as originally played, an understanding of the underlaying meaning of the symbols involved was, in fact, essential, because the earliest cards we know of had neither numbers nor labels on the cards. You had to understand the concept, understand that the Pope "trumped" the Emperor, for instance, in order to play the game. And, as mentioned, the elite of 15th Century Italy was more intellectually oriented, and the concepts and symbolism involved was of a much higher level than found in Monopoly. Still, one can see that something can be a game and also contain symbolic content with real intellectual and philosophical underpinnings.

(more later)