Still more on Tarot origins

In addition to the far-too-many Tarotists who blithely pass on completely discredited misinformation about the history of the Tarot, either from ignorance or chicanery, there is a slightly smaller group that does at least recognize the value of historical scholarship, but is so heavily invested in the belief that the Tarot represents "ancient wisdom" that they endeavor to keep as much as possible of the traditional mythology of Tarotic origins without violating known facts. Their tortured theories, however, regularly violate Occam's dictum that the simplest explanation is usually the best.

Personally, I have no problem realizing that the Tarot is a relatively modern invention, and that to the extent that it contains traditions and symbols that have been around for centuries before the cards were first invented, for the most part those things have been put into the cards gradually over time. They were not invented as a means of passing that knowledge and those symbols on surreptitiously under cover of a card game. They were invented as a card game and developed into something much more. To me, this does not make the Tarot any less useful, any less important, or any less real.

On the other hand, some Historians tend to discount the very real importance of the symbolic content of the Trumps, at least, among the players of the game in 15th Century Italy. And while the cards and those meanings were never "secret" or "occult" in the usual sense of those terms, it's also true that many ideas that were abroad at the time, including some related directly to the game of trumps and the symbols it used, were what we would today label "esoteric" or "occult" (although the original meanings of those terms is pretty ludicrous when applied to things available to anyone on the Internet!).

Both sides in this debate would do well to remember that the late Middle Ages, segueing into the early Renaissance -- the period that produced the first trionfi cards that eventually became the Tarot -- was a period of intellectual ferment, philosophical debate, heretical religious exploration and deep superstition. Many things now identified with the "occult" were ordinary knowledge then, and not hidden at all.

The most obvious example here is Astrology. As late as the 16th Century -- long after the Tarot cards were in existence -- a newly elected Pope put off his formal investiture by three weeks to make sure that it took place on an astrologically auspicious day. It's true that the Church formally frowned on astrology, as well as most other forms of divination, but belief in them was widespread, among educated and intelligent folks as well as the masses, and the Church did little to fight it. It wasn't hidden. It wasn't secret knowledge known only to a few -- although obviously some knew more than others, and to some extent the ability to cast horoscopes and plot the movements of the stars and planets could be said to be "esoteric."

Much more than just the obvious symbolic content of having a skeleton with a scythe represent the concept of death was at work from the earliest beginnings of the game of trumps, and that the oracle we have today is in many ways a natural, perhaps even an inevitable, extension of that.