Dummett's Game of Tarot

This post is a small tribute to Michael Dummett’s 1980 The Game of Tarot. His first Tarot book contains 600 densely informative pages, and attempting to describe it can exhaust one’s supply of superlatives. At the time it was published, much of the information was not merely new but revelatory. Over three decades old, it remains the most comprehensive and generally reliable work on the subject of Tarot history(1). Dummett’s findings, analyses, and conclusions constitute prerequisite material even for iconographic studies of early Tarot, and his fundamental contributions in that area were the subject of my previous overlong post.

The facts that were first presented in Dummett’s book have shaped much of my online discretionary time for the last thirteen years, directly or indirectly. That was true even before I had seen a copy. Most people interested in Tarot are attracted to the New Age aura, superstitious practices, and pseudo-historical bullshit that surround it. In my case it was the opposite: the fact-based history of Tarot which The Game of Tarot established is the primary reason for the existence of this blog. With the author’s passing it seems appropriate to express appreciation for his contribution to a field of study that, in its pop-culture expression, almost uniformly ignores, rejects, marginalizes, distorts, and denigrates his contributions, those damned facts.

The intended audience for this post is someone who has heard of the book, (probably from a Tarot enthusiast warning them how limited and misleading Dummett’s studies were, or how Dummett has been superseded by online Tarot “historians”), and who searches the Web to learn a bit more about it. Dummett’s outline of “principle topics” for the book will be reproduced, along with the table of contents for the companion volume, Twelve Tarot Games. There will be quotes and comments about a few subjects Dummett addressed in his Preface which seem revealing of his purpose and methods. Finally, a bibliography will list those later Tarot books which include him as author or co-author. This is not any sort of book review, but each section should provide a bit of context for better understanding The Game of Tarot.

Facts About Tarot

What’s the big deal? Mainly, it's about the facts. More than anything else, the publication of The Game of Tarot was the birth of a fact-based Tarot history. He was not content to assemble a few facts, review conventional wisdom, and write up a seemingly plausible story. He believed that every supposed fact cited by previous authors should be tracked down and verified, and as much additional information as could be discovered should be added. Folklore carried no weight, regardless how many people might have credulously accepted it. Crucially, he embraced and developed the taxonomic study of playing cards, methods pioneered by Detlef Hoffmann and Sylvia Mann, to structure the previously inchoate factoids into a coherent history. In this rigorous manner, most of what is known about Tarot history was discovered, collected, collated, analyzed, and explained by Michael Dummett, and the majority of it was laid out in 1980. In the world of Tarot, Dummett remains the King of Facts. (In the same sense, “Etteilla”, Antoine Court “de Gébelin” and “Eliphas Lévi” are Barons of Bullshit, poseurs who wouldn’t even give you a straight answer about their own names.) In honor of the treasure chest of historical evidence marshaled in The Game of Tarot, a short list of quotes from the world of fact fanciers.

Data! Data! Data! I cannot make bricks without clay. Sherlock Holmes

It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts. Sherlock Holmes

Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts. Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Where facts are few, experts are many. Donald R. Gannon

Facts are facts and will not disappear on account of your likes. Jawaharlal Nehru

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. Aldous Huxley

Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence. John Adams

We can have facts without thinking but we cannot have thinking without facts. John Dewey

I am turned into a sort of machine for observing facts and grinding out conclusions. Charles Darwin

There are in fact two things, science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the later ignorance Hippocrates quotes

It's not what a man don't know that makes him a fool; it's what he do know that ain't so. Josh Billings

Facts have a cruel way of substituting themselves for fancies. There is nothing more remorseless, just as there is nothing more helpful, than truth. William C. Red Field

A fact never went into partnership with a miracle. Truth scorns the assistance of wonders. A fact will fit every other fact in the universe, and that is how you can tell whether it is or is not a fact. A lie will not fit anything except another lie. Robert Green Ingersoll

Let us take things as we find them: let us not attempt to distort them into what they are not. We cannot make facts. All our wishing cannot change them. We must use them. Cardinal Newman

It is easier to accept time-honored lore than newly revealed facts. People are more comfortable with an oft-repeated falsehood, especially one otherwise congenial to their values, attitudes, and predispositions, than they are with being disabused of their error. The greatest affront occurs when part of one’s psychological identity or emotional support is “debunked”. Tarot folklore today presupposes an entire world of long-standing falsehoods and newly fashioned pseudo-history, a universe of paranormal powers, ancient mysteries, and secret societies and traditions which people have made central to their world view. Facts, if accepted, automatically and inevitably debunk such cherished figments. That is why Dummett, with his damnable evidence and logic, is rejected, misrepresented, despised, and mainly ignored.

A Table of Principle Topics

No one needs to guess what The Game of Tarot was about, or read every one of the 600 pages to discern the main themes. Dummett, ever the Oxford logician, was nothing if not analytically clear and explicit. Because of that, even dim-witted or deeply biased readers have little excuse for the assorted bizarre claims they make about his work.

This book is concerned with three major subjects: the history of playing cards, the history of card games, and fortune-telling and the occult. It is implicit in the approach that a study of playing cards and that of card games cannot be separated from one another without detriment to both: each supplies vital clues to the other. But different readers will have particular interests in one or another of these topics: for so long a book, it may therefore be helpful to indicate, a little more precisely than is done by the chapter headings, which portions deal with each.

Below is a graphical interpretation of Dummett’s table. Dummett naturally used page numbers, making it an indexed table of contents. While that is helpful for someone using the book, for the present summary purposes the display below, with dashes and x’s, seems more revealing.

The Game of Tarot
	History of Playing Cards	History of Games Played	Fortune-telling and the Occult
Preface	—	— x —	— x —
Annotated List of Illustrations	— x —	—	—
Part 1: History and Mystery
1. The Tarot Pack in Playing-Card History	— X —	— x —	—
2. The Beginnings in Europe	— X —	— x —	—
3. Europe and Asia	— X —	— x —	—
4. When and Where the Tarot Pack was Invented	— X —	— x —	—
5. Cartomancy	—	— x —	— X —
6. The Occult	—	—	— X —
7. The Game of Tarot	— x —	— X —	—
Part II: Games with 78 Cards
8. General Features of the Game	— x —	— X —	—
9. The Early Stages of the Game in France	— X —	— X —	—
10. Swiss Tarot, Tarock or Troccas	— X —	— X —	—
11. Classic 18th-century Tarot Outside Italy	— x —	— X —	—
12. Grosstarock	— x —	— X —	—
13. Tarocco in Piedmont and Lombardy	— x —	— X —	—
14. Tarock-l'Hombre	—	— X —	—
15. Tarot in France in the 19th and 20th Centuries	— X —	— X —	—
Part III: Italian Games and Italian Cards
16. Tarocchino or Tarocchi Bolognesi	— X —	— X —	—
17. Minchiate	— X —	— X —	—
18. Trappola	— X —	— X —	—
19. Sicilian Tarocchi	— X —	— X —	—
20 The Order of the Tarot Trumps	— X —	—	—
21. The Early Italian Game	—	— X —	—
22. Tapp-Tarock	— x —	— X —	—
23. The Variants of Tapp-Tarock	— x —	— X —	—
24. Cego	—	— X —	—
25. Konigsrufen	—	— X —	—
26. XIXer-Rufen, XXer-Rufen and Czech Taroky	—	— X —	—
27. Paskiewitsch and Hungarian Tarokk	— x —	— X —	—
28. Bavarian Tarock and its Relatives	— x —	— X —	—
(Based on the “Index of Principle Topics”, page 586.)

Perhaps the most striking fact to leap out from the table is how little of the book is concerned with the preoccupations of most Tarot enthusiasts: fortune-telling and the occult are a minor part of the book. That reflects the fact that The Game of Tarot is a history book. Fortune-telling and the occult were not significantly associated with the deck until after about 340 years of Tarot being an enormously popular game. Even then, when a tiny handful of French Freemasons and fortune-tellers were creating occult Tarot, the game was enjoying its greatest popularity as an international phenomenon, due in part to the reinvention of the deck with more modern features. Even now, on any given day, there are probably more people playing cards with Tarot decks than reading their fortune.

Despite that, the chapters on cartomancy and occult Tarot are long and thorough, and at the time the book was published they constituted by far the most detailed and documented history ever written about their respective subjects. They have since been superseded by two more books, both co-authored by Dummett. Clearly it was no part of Dummett’s project to ignore these aspects of Tarot or to argue that “throughout its history it was only a game.” This “just a game” accusation was leveled against Dummett by his first and most famous reviewer, Frances Yates in the New York Review of Books, and it is repeated without justification to this day.

Dummett’s goal, clearly stated and impressively realized in The Game of Tarot, was to discover and present the facts about both aspects of Tarot history, what might be called Tarot’s double contribution to popular culture. One big revelation, where facts refuted folklore, was in the timing. The unanticipated but inescapable evidence told a very different story than had been accepted by cultists: the fact is that Tarot was invented as a card game around 1440, and was extremely popular for centuries, across much of Europe. It was not popularly adopted for fortune-telling until the late 18th century, and more esoteric views of the old game did not become popular until a century after that, about 150 years ago. Cultists who pretend to an interest in factual history work tirelessly to distort that chronology, but...

A final point about the subjects covered concerns the companion book, Twelve Tarot Games. While Dummett was first researching Tarot he was also becoming an aficionado of the game. And when he published his encyclopedic history of Tarot, he simultaneously published a much smaller book on how to play the game. It is an essential element of the context of The Game of Tarot.

This description is from Ross Caldwell(3):

Although all the material is in The Game of Tarot, it is entirely rewritten with a view to precision, clarity, and playability, since GoT is hardly convenient to consult when playing or looking for tips on strategy. There is not a single footnote, nor an index. He says in the introduction that he would have included Minchiate, but that packs were no longer available (1980). This is no longer true, as reproductions of historical packs can be easily found.

Twelve Tarot Games has a matching cover photo and reversed color scheme, from the same publisher in the same year as The Game of Tarot. It is, in effect, Part IV (in volume II) of the same book.

Part IV: Twelve Tarot Games

0. Introduction
1. Scarto
2. Mitigati
3. French Tarot
4. Grosstarock
5. Ottocento
6. Sicilian Tarocchi
7. Tapp-Tarock
8. Point-Tarock
9. Königsrufen
10. Cego
11. Hungarian Tarokk
12. Bavarian Tarock

This quote is from the back cover:

Michael Dummett, author of The Game of Tarot, a comprehensive history of games played with the Tarot pack and of the pack itself, here explains how to play twelve different Tarot games, all of them currently played in Italy, France, Germany, Denmark, Austria, or Hungary. This selection from the great variety of such games that are now played or have been played in the past will introduce card players to a whole range of new experience.

Many of these games require just as much strategic skill as Bridge, but present quite new problems to the serious player, to which his experience at Bridge will give him very little guidance. Some of the games are for three players, some for four. In some of the three-handed games, each plays against each, in others one, according to the bidding, plays against the other two. In the Bolognese game of Ottocento, there are fixed partners, as in Bridge; but in most of the four-handed games, one player plays against the other three, or, in some cases, plays with a partner who is the player holding a card that he has called, whose identity is therefore not at first known except to himself. In none of the games does winning depend simply on making more tricks than the other side, but on the particular cards won in tricks, and in Ottocento on the particular combinations of such cards; but in most of the games there are bonuses for additional feats in the course of play, presenting the player with a choice of objectives lacking in most games.

Dummett’s Hobby

The majority of the Preface discusses the sources of information found and used, with many acknowledgements, and emphasizing “a great debt to Mr John McLeod”, who has since co-authored the expanded and revised 2004 work, A History of Games Played with the Tarot Pack. In addition there is an interesting discussion of how Dummett came to be absorbed in his “hobby” of Tarot and Tarot scholarship, in the 1960s.

I first became interested in the game of Tarot in the summer of 1967. It had been a potential interest of mine since childhood when, looking at a compendium on the occult, I had read the chapter on fortune-telling with playing-cards. This, besides explaining how to tell fortunes with regular playing-cards, had also a section on the Tarot pack, from which I first learned of the existence of that pack, and which, in its introductory paragraphs, stated that Tarot cards were still used in central Europe for a complicated game of skill.... And then, in the summer of 1967, when I was on holiday with my family in Normandy, I came across a Tarot pack ‘avec règles du jeu’ in a shop in Honfleur, and eagerly bought it.

That purchase proved something of a disappointment, being a modern style deck with rules that were not entirely clear, but Dummett and his son Andrew learned to play the game nonetheless. He began to discover that the game was played differently in different countries, and that players employed different decks as well. Encyclopedia entries and playing-card authorities were of little help in understanding this diversity. The most important exception was Sylvia Mann, whose “great knowledge, unrivaled in its breadth, of the history of playing cards”, made possible a collaboration eventually resulting in The Game of Tarot. Her assistance is credited on the title page, for reasons partly discussed below. A few pages later he arrives discusses another motivating factor.

I do not think that I should ever have become so gripped by this investigation as I was had it not been for political events. When I first became interested in it, I was deeply involved in work to combat that racism which has, over the past fifteen years, disfigured our national life and dishonoured our country.

As older readers may recall first-hand, the years 1967 and 1968 were notably disturbing and discouraging for those in the Civil Rights movement... and others.

1968 was the most terrible year that I hope I ever have to live through. In the United States it was the year in which Richard Nixon was elected President for the first time: I spent three months there, arriving about three weeks before the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King, and leaving one week after the assassination of Robert Kennedy, who I believe might really have saved that country. In Britain it was the year in which the Labour Party, then in power, finally declared itself willing to go to any lengths to promote racism in this country for the sake of supposed electoral advantage.

Dummett was one of the more influential philosophers of the late twentieth century, as well as a prominent activist in areas of immigration and race relations. The trivial yet challenging area of playing-card research was a recreational diversion for him.

I found it almost impossible to do any more work on philosophy or logic than my teaching duties made essential: apart from the difficulty of finding the extended periods of time necessary for such work, both subjects present themselves as wholly serious; and in a time of such crisis, it seemed impossible to devote any energy available for serious work to anything so remote from the concerns of most people when there were so much more urgent calls upon it. But when one is engaged in what produces constant emotional anxiety, there is a need for some kind of refuge, and my new hobby became for me such a refuge. It presented sufficiently difficult and sufficiently intriguing problems to exercise the mind, but provoked no anxiety and seemed too far removed from serious concerns to compete with either my academic or my political work; it became a necessary recreation for me, almost a drug that could alone confer for an hour or two a piece of mind that was otherwise absent. I have, indeed, continued to pursue it long after I ceased to need any such refuge, and have transformed it from a recreation into a piece of research which, although only a hobby, was still undertaken as conscientiously as impossible; but I doubt if I should ever have become so absorbed with it as to carry it so far had it not in the first place been for a time an emotional necessity for me.

And the rest is (Tarot) history.

Sylvia Mann

Sylvia Mann had an informal collaboration with Dummett, mentioned above, which he discussed in the Preface of The Game of Tarot. In turn, she presented an account of Dummett’s Tarot researches in the 1987 anthology, Michael Dummett: Contributions to Philosophy. We will begin with a passage from that chapter of hers, titled “Playing Cards”.

The very fact that his attention had been held by this particular aspect of playing-cards dragged the whole attitude towards playing-card research kicking and screaming into the field of reality. A lot has been published about Tarot and other playing-cards during the past twenty years, about eighty per cent of which has been rubbish. Much of the best of the remainder has been catalogues of exhibitions held in Austria, France, Germany, Holland, Italy, Switzerland and at last, in 1982, in the U.K. These have been carefully and lovingly compiled, but mainly by art historians, who are interested chiefly in visual images. So here we had beautifully mounted displays, comparable to a collection of rare, dead butterflies, however attractively presented. Michael Dummett is the person who, above all others, had breathed life into these dead images. He has brought alive the purpose and use of the cards; at last one understands the why of certain packs, as well as the when. Gradually, I am sure mainly because of his efforts, museum curators interested in playing-cards are beginning to associate their possessions with their original use and are paying increasing attention to the history of particular games, especially national ones.

The point she made in this 1987 piece remains true: “In my opinion, The Game of Tarot is the most important book on cards ever written. It is a huge work and obviously balanced in favour of Tarot cards, but his attempt to relate the earliest known European cards to ancestors and relations elsewhere is most impressive.” Further along, she makes this comment:

Obviously he is listened to with attention, but it is really his written work (including papers originally read at meetings) which must emphasise what a milestone he is along the road taken by historians of playing-cards. There are still Philistines among us who cannot be bothered to follow his most carefully and closely reasoned deductions, ("Dummett? I can't understand a goddamn word he writes!") but anyone who really cares about cards and the truth about cards will always treat his words with the greatest respect. There are several individuals who also write with scholarly accuracy about cards but, with the exception of the aforementioned Professor [Detlef] Hoffmann(2), most of these are specialist writers dealing with extremely limited subjects, and none has Michael’s breadth of knowledge, particularly when concerned with cards intended for play and not for those thousands of decorative packs published more or less as artistic exercises or mere gimmicks, which few card players would favour.

Sylvia Mann

Sylvia Elizabeth Mann was a Londoner, born June 8, 1924, died November 6, 1994. She was a playing-card collector and historian. She authored Collecting Playing Cards in 1966, The Dragons of Portugal (with Virginia Wayland) in 1973, Collecting English Playing Cards in 1978, and the catalog Alle Karten auf den Tisch for a 1990 exhibition in Schaffhausen, Germany. She was a founding member and the first president of the IPCS, and editor of their journal, The Playing-Card. On her death, George Beal (Playing-Cards and Their Story, 1975) wrote a notice for the London Independent:

“Sylvia Mann was an authority on the history and study of playing-cards. It was she who formulated much of the present classification of playing-cards of the world: the various national patterns and suit systems of Europe and also of Oriental cards. She was a founder, member, and past president of the International Playing-Card Society which, after nearly 25 years' existence, has members in more than 30 countries. It was Sylvia Mann who led the way in refuting the ridiculous claims that tarot cards were somehow occult and of mysterious ancient Egyptian...”

Years earlier, Dummett had lauded Mann, her knowledge and understanding of playing-cards and her contributions to his own work in general and that book specifically. In particular, he singled out her distinction between standard pattern decks and novelty decks. This distinction is crucial to understanding the history of playing-cards, and this passage is worth quoting for that reason as well as for the acknowledgement.

No articulated framework was provided for [the systematic study of playing-cards] until the publication in 1966 of Sylvia Mann’s unpretentious volume [“her masterly and lucidly written book, Collecting Playing Cards”]. She was the first to draw a clear distinction, absent from the catalogues of any of the great collections of playing-cards, between the standard and non-standard cards: that is, between those of a kind normally used for playing, on the one hand, and on the other, all other cards. The distinction may at first sight look to be an obvious one: but, obvious or not, it had not been drawn until Miss Mann drew it, and, once drawn, it introduced a great clarity into the subject.

In fact, however, the distinction is not so obvious as it first appears, because standard cards may be differentiated from non-standard ones in either of two ways. The obvious distinction—even though this is not clearly drawn in the earlier books—is between cards whose design is largely or partly determined by some purpose extraneous to the use of cards to play card games, for instance that of advertising, political propaganda or educational instruction, and those whose design subserves no such further, albeit secondary, end. Not all those belonging to the latter category constitute standard cards, however. Among them we must again distinguish between those which card players would regard as normal playing-cards and those which they would see as special or as fancy, as cartes de fantaisie. And this, being a psychological distinction, is not always apparent from the cards themselves: to draw it, it is necessary to have historical knowledge. One must know what, at that time at which the cards were made, and in that place where, or, rather, for which, they were made, were regarded as the acceptable limits of variation in the design of normal playing-cards: within those limits, we have standard cards, outside them non-standard ones—although occasionally what is a new non-standard design when first produced may become a standard one if it gains sufficient popularity.

Playing-cards are very ephemeral objects, and so only a tiny proportion survive from former centuries; and, as a result, our knowledge is very patchy. Perhaps, of some design of which tens of thousands of examples were produced, only a handful of cards from a single pack may have come down to us. It is therefore not surprising that earlier writers had simply failed to draw the crucial distinction introduced by Sylvia Mann between standard and non-standard cards; not, indeed, that, having been introduced, it is always easy in practice to draw. But it is a crucial distinction. Isolated experiments in playing-card design occur again and again, and are often of great beauty and therefore of interest to those for whom the study of playing-cards is an adjunct of art history; but they have no significance for the history of playing-cards as such. That acknowledged, how can we apply the distinction to early periods from which we have so few examples that we cannot readily tell what is customary and what is exceptional? Hard as this is to do, it has been made a great deal easier by the realization that, at all places and times, standard playing-cards conform to one or another standard pattern, another concept introduced, in its generality, by Miss Mann.… What earlier researchers had failed to grasp, or, at least, clearly to enunciate, is that the stereotyping of playing-card design into standard patters that then evolve only so gradually that the changes pass unnoticed by card players is a universal law, whether those patterns are consciously distinguished from others used elsewhere or are merely unconsciously accepted as the norm. Only by the introduction of the general concept of standard patterns could there have been a basis for a systematic taxonomy of standard playing-cards, a work now being undertaken by the Playing-Card Society of which Miss Mann was the first President. When we go back to the earliest times in the history of playing-cards, there is little hope of identifying for certain the cards that exhibit standard patterns, and distinguishing them from occasional variants or sports; but at least we are now clear about the content of our speculations when we conjecture that some early pack was or was not standard.

Dummett credits Mann with far more than that, however, as noted on the title page: “with the assistance of Sylvia Mann” appears below his name. Since her contribution is commonly overlooked by those discussing The Game of Tarot, it is worth quoting Dummett a bit on the subject.

Indeed, this book—the present Preface excepted—is to be regarded as a work of collaboration. I have done the actual writing, which Miss Mann has checked, making numerous helpful suggestions and corrections.… The work on documentary sources and on the rules of games has been mine; but the sections on the history of playing-cards are the outcome of a co-operative endeavour, extending over a decade. I have been able to make some discoveries in this area, such as those set out in Chapters 9 and 19, and have propounded some theories, to be found in Chapters 2, 3, and 20. But at every step I have been able to rely on the stream of information which she has provided me; and I have been stimulated by the equally constant flow of suggestions and ideas she has put forward, informed by an extremely sound judgment based on an almost unequaled knowledge of the subject. A great deal of what is said in this book about the history of playing-cards is therefore due to her, and hence also a great part of the credit.

Stuart R. Kaplan’s Encyclopedia of Tarot

Stuart R. Kaplan, president of U.S. Games Systems, Inc., had published The Encyclopedia of Tarot only two years earlier. In his Preface, Dummett takes Kaplan to task for his misleading presentation. Because Kaplan’s book is still important to anyone studying Tarot history today, these observations are worth repeating as a caveat.

[The Encyclopedia of Tarot’s] object, as stated on p. xiii, is to bridge the gap between the occultist and the art historian. The result has inevitably been equivocation. In non-sensitive areas, that is, where presentation of the historical facts will not disturb the preconceptions of the occultist... there is indeed serious historical discussion.... But the book as a whole is organized in such a way as to conceal from all but the most alert of those readers previously unaware of the fact that, before 1781, Tarot cards were not used for any purpose other than to play card games, at least until such readers arrive at the very last chapter, which occupies a single page. This is effected by a historically inaccurate differentiation between the French word tarot and its German equivalent Tarock: Latin-suited packs are referred to as ‘tarot decks’, without any distinction between cartomantic ones and those intended for play, while French-suited ones are designated ‘tarock packs’, irrespective of country of origin, and the game is almost always referred to as ‘tarock’ and never as ‘tarot’. Moreover, in the entire book no clue is given as to the date of invention of the French-suited form of the pack, which in fact originated in the eighteenth century. Chapter XIV, which deals with ‘tarock packs’, i.e. French-suited ones, begins thus: ‘The game of tarock probably dates from the sixteenth century, possibly even the fifteenth century, and it continues in popularity today in certain sections of southwestern Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. early trumps were often highly artistic and depicted animals ... or full-length figures and scenes including operas, dancers, costumes ... Many of these early cards were hand stenciled.’ The effect on the previously uninformed reader must be to make him suppose that the French-suited pack dates back to at least the sixteenth century, and that it alone was used for the game of tarock, the Italian-suited cards, including the fifteenth-century ones discussed at length in previous chapters, having been intended for some other purpose; from the context, he could not guess that the ‘early trumps’ referred to dated from after 1750.

This cleverness appears to be a conscious trick on Kaplan’s part. As another example of it, in his Preface where he introduces the subject matter of various chapters of his book, Kaplan has this to say about Chapter XIV. “This encyclopedia would not be complete without detailed information about the game of tarot, known in Europe as tarock. Chapter XIV contains photographs and descriptions of some thirty decks used for playing the game of tarock rather than fortune telling.” There is no question that Kaplan is leading the reader to false conclusions by this false distinction. Reading the paragraph of Dummett, and then reading Kaplan’s comments in the Preface to his own book, is enlightening in regard to the misleading occult apologetics presented by the Encyclopedia. Dummett concludes:

The gap between the occultist and the serious historian is unbridgeable, because occultist theories rest upon a whole spurious pseudo-history of the Tarot pack. To give its true history is, necessarily, to puncture those theories; any attempt to avoid puncturing them obliges one, at best, to fudge the fact.

Tarot Bibliography

The Game of Tarot was just the first Tarot book from Dummett and, later, his co-authors. Its context today necessarily includes the entire shelf of Tarot books with his name on the cover. This short list is limited to books, but there are also many articles in different periodicals, notably including The Playing-Card, the journal of the International Playing-Card Society.

One periodical, however, seems particularly noteworthy because of its iconographic observations. The feature “Tarot Triumphant”, with three Tarot articles, appeared in issue № 8 (January/February 1985) of FMR. (Copies can be found online via eBay and used book sellers.) Dummett’s article, “Tracing the Tarot”, provided an overview of early Tarot history and his clearest analysis of the design of the standard trump cycle. An article by William Voelkle discusses the Visconti-Sforza deck, and the 35 cards of the Pierpont Morgan Library collection are reproduced. The third article is a 19th-century short story involving Tarot. The following year Dummett published his own volume on the Visconti-Sforza deck, with full-size reproductions of all 74 surviving cards.

The Game of Tarot: From Ferrara to Salt Lake City
Dummett, Michael
Duckworth (©1980)
600 pages
ISBN-10: 0715610147, ISBN-13: 9780715610145

Twelve Tarot Games
Dummett, Michael
Duckworth (©1980)
242 pages
ISBN-10: 0715614851, ISBN-13: 9780715614853

Tarot Triumphant
Dummett, Michael, and William M. Voelkle
FMR/AMERICA (Franco Maria Ricci, ©1980)
20 pages
ISSN: 0747-6388

The Visconti-Sforza Tarot Cards
Dummett, Michael
Paperback, George Braziller (©1986)
141 pages
ISBN-10: 0807611417, ISBN-13: 9780807611418

Il Mondo e L'angelo: I Tarocchi e La Loro Storia
Dummett, Michael
Bibliopolis (©1993)
489 pages
ISBN-10: 8870882721, ISBN-13: 9788870882728

I Tarocchi Siciliani
Dummett, Michael
La Zisa (©1995)
176 pages
ISBN-10: 8881280108, ISBN-13: 9788881280100

A Wicked Pack Of Cards:
The Origins of the Occult Tarot
Decker, Ronald, Thierry Depaulis, and Michael Dummett
St. Martin's Press (©1996)
308 pages
ISBN-10: 0312162944, ISBN-13: 9780312162948

A History of the Occult Tarot: 1870-1970
Decker, Ronald and Michael Dummett
Duckworth Publishing (©2002)
320 pages
ISBN-10: 0715631225, ISBN-13: 9780715631225

A History of Games Played With the Tarot Pack:
The Game of Triumphs, Vol. 1
Dummett, Michael and John McLeod
Edwin Mellen Press (©2004)
402 pages
ISBN-10: 0773464476, ISBN-13: 9780773464476

A History of Games Played With the Tarot Pack:
The Game of Triumphs, Vol. 2
Dummett, Michael and John McLeod
Edwin Mellen Press (©2004)
508 pages
ISBN-10: 0773464492, ISBN-13: 9780773464490

A History of Games Played With the Tarot Pack:
The Game of Triumphs, Supplement
Dummett, Michael and John McLeod
Maproom Publications, (©2009)
80 pages
ISBN-10: 0956237002, ISBN-13: 9780956237002

______________________

Notes:
1. As an example of how sound Dummett's research and analyses were, there have been some wonderful facts discovered recently regarding the first decade or so of Tarot history. The most striking was announced just this week: Thierry Depaulis discovered the earliest known documentation of Tarot, with some fascinating and suggestive details. Before these new discoveries, based on Dummett's research as of 1980, the likelihood was that Tarot was invented in either Ferrara, Milan, Bologna, or possibly Florence, probably in the late 1430s. After these great new findings of 2011 and 2012 have been taken into account, the best guess is that Tarot was invented in either Ferrara, Milan, Bologna, or Florence, probably in the late 1430s.
2. On Hoffmann and Mann, from A Catalog of the Cary Collection: “Detlef Hoffmann and Sylvia Mann established the broader relevance of playing-cards. As a serious pursuit, the study of these materials extends beyond the concerns of the antiquarian. Hoffmann, with E. Kroppenstedt, affirmed the value of cards as cultural documents in a succession of catalogues of the holdings of the Deutsches Spielkarten Museum. Commencing in 1966.... [...] While these catalogues differ in thematic content and plan, their cataloguing method is uniform and consistently applied. The descriptions themselves are divided into two sections: the first part presents the pack's basic information such as title, manufacturer, date of manufacture, place, composition, dimensions, and process. [...] The entry then provides commentary on particular characteristics of the pack or points out relationships with other packs illustrated or discussed in the playing card literature. Most, if not all, entries are illustrated. [...] Sylvia Mann's Collecting Playing Cards was published in 1966 and appeared concurrently with the first work of the German series. It made collectors and scholars realize that playing-cards, even considering their great variety and number, could be studied in logical groups. For example, packs of cards used within a particular geographical region might share qualities of design, such as the attributes of the king or queen. In many cases these groups of cards may be given names and their traits listed in orderly fashion. For the first time in the playing card literature, Mann provides both names and extensive commentary for these card types. Because Collecting Playing Cards gave encouragement to collectors and opened new areas of inquiry, researchers perceived a need to exchange information on their findings. Collectors' newsletters had been in existence for many years; however, they could not accommodate the new historical approach to the subject proposed by Hoffmann and Mann. Discussion among British collectors resulted in the formation of the Playing Card Society, and Sylvia Mann was elected president. The inaugural meeting was held on September 9, 1972, at the University of East Anglia in Norwich.” It is worth noting that Hoffmann and Mann were beginning to establish the taxonomy of playing-cards at the same time when Dummett was taking up the study of playing-cards in general and Tarot history in particular.
3. My thanks to Ross, not just for the short description of Twelve Tarot Games but also for scans of that and the two Italian book covers illustrated in the Bibliography section.

La Crédulité Sans Réflexion

A couple years ago I presented some of the earliest illustrations of cartomancy, dating from the 1770s, though not directly related to Tarot. Here we have two of the earliest printed instructions for cartomancy, 18th-century “Little White Books” from a decade or two later. They are neither pre-Gébelin nor directly related to Tarot and, as such, they are of little of interest to me. However, being from the same general time and place as the earlier prints, they are good companion prints to those in the earlier post. They supplement the narrative presented in that post concerning the first flowering of cartomancy, after two centuries of development. This is the same general era and locale in which occult Tarot was invented.

Michael Dummett and Tarot Iconography

The passing of Michael Dummett, especially at the turn of a new year, is a reminder to those interested in Tarot history of what has been accomplished and what remains to be done. I want to emphasize one of his less well known areas of contribution, post some passages and comments, and recommend his findings as a starting point for further study.
But first....

We are entering the 3rd year of the 4th decade since the publication of Dummett's monumental study, The Game of Tarot: From Ferrara to Salt Lake City. Dummett collected, collated, and analyzed a great body of evidence and drew the most plausible and defensible conclusions. This, rather than playful speculation incorporating esoteric folklore, reflects legitimate historical methods and produces conclusions that endure the tests of time. Many additional facts have been discovered since that publication, (including more than his share by Dummett himself), but The Game of Tarot remains the best source of information on the history of Tarot, and the early history of playing cards in Europe.

Because of Dummett's thorough and sober scholarship, all earlier works are superseded while subsequent works are essentially footnotes to this comprehensive study. The book is out of print and used copies typically sell online for about $300. According to Thierry Depaulis, Dummett’s 1993 book, Il mondo e l’angelo: I tarocchi e la loro storia, (The World and the Angel: Tarot Cards and Their History) presents “a more linear history of the Tarot, focusing on the evolution of the game in Italy, which is so fundamental.” That book, however, is even more difficult to find in libraries and is written in Italian, which limits its direct influence. (I've never seen a copy.) A subsequent book on Sicilian Tarot was published in 1995, I Tarocchi Siciliani.

Matto e Bagatto

Most people who know of Dummett from his writings on Tarot are inclined to ignore, dismiss, or marginalize his work. They may ritualistically genuflect to the name, but the man and his work are held in contempt. The fools and charlatans who inhabit the world of pop-culture Tarot have little fondness for the actual history of Tarot.

The vast majority of Dummett's research on Tarot history was focused on The Game of Tarot and the History of Games Played with the Tarot Pack. As such, it is of no interest to typical Tarotists. They may cherry-pick and distort some of the secondary uses of Tarot for their own fanciful fictions, but history per se holds no appeal.

Dissembling concessions aside, they have never quite come to grips with the fact that Tarot was a card game for centuries before it was turned to esoteric ends. Their fascinations are fortune-telling and romantic pseudo-history. Alchemy and Albigensians, numerology and Neoplatonic mysticism have nothing to do with the origin of Tarot or most of its history. That history must therefore be shoved aside to make room for these sexier subjects.

Other later works are more accessible. Chapter Six of The Game of Tarot, examining the early history of occult Tarot, was revised and greatly expanded into two subsequent books: A Wicked Pack of Cards: The Origins of the Occult Tarot (Ronald Decker, Thierry Depaulis, and Michael Dummett, 1996), covering the origin and first century of the subject, and A History of the Occult Tarot: 1870 - 1970 (Ronald Decker and Michael Dummett, 2002), covering the second century of occult Tarot. The massive A History of Games Played with the Tarot Pack: The Game of Triumphs (Michael Dummett and John McLeod, 2004) updates and expands the main thrust of The Game of Tarot in two imposing volumes. Those titles do not exhaust Dummett's Tarot bibliography. Nonetheless, the early history of playing cards and Tarot has not yet had a better English-language treatment than The Game of Tarot.

The Riddle of Tarot

The comments above are merely to point out that Michael Dummett was by far the greatest scholar of Tarot history. There will not be a second like him, for the same reason that there will not be a second Neil Armstrong: only one person can be the first to do something. Dummett was the first to produce a comprehensive study of Tarot history. Among other achievements in that work, Dummett proved that the study of Tarot history need not make any strong assumptions about the meaning of the trump hierarchy. As disappointing as that fact is to Tarot enthusiasts, with their conviction that the trumps are some sort of esoteric manifesto written in pictorial code, Dummett proved that no such assumption is required to study the factual history of Tarot. His research and writings, greatly surpassing anything before or since, made no such assumptions—Q.E.D.

Given that demonstration, it seems paradoxical that Dummett also did some of the most important analysis of Tarot iconography. He began, however, by suggesting that Tarot iconography was probably a dead end. (His view has been mis-stated as being a "theory of no meaning", which quotes below should demonstrate it was not.)

We can derive some entertainment from asking why that particular selection was made, and whether there is any symbolic meaning to the order in which they were placed; and we may or may not come up with a plausible or illuminating answer. (If we do not, that may not indicate that we have failed to solve the riddle; there may be no riddle to solve.) But our answer, though it may throw light on what the original designer of the pack, or the Duke or other noble who ordered it made, had in mind, is unlikely to throw any on the way in which the average fifteenth-century player of the game would have viewed the cards. For him, they were simply a set of picture cards arranged in a particular sequence and having a particular role in the game.
(The Game of Tarot, p.165.)

This gets us into it. He has defined the "riddle" of Tarot: why those subjects were selected and placed in a particular hierarchical order. Did the trump cycle originally have a coherent intended meaning? While it is certainly the case, a priori, that there may be no riddle to solve, it still seems likely that there might be, and that the iconography and sequence might therefore repay study. We know that many medieval and Renaissance series of images do show cyclic design, an overall composition, even though they may be puzzling today. In A Wicked Pack of Cards, the authors put it this way: “The test of whether a coded text has been correctly deciphered is that it allows a coherent message to be read.” (Page 250.) This is a crucial point. Virtually all of the blather in the online fora is incoherent, making no sense of the trump cycle. Rosamond Tuve, in a chapter titled “Imposed Allegory” (Allegorical Imagery, 1966), offers the following two guidelines to avoid imposing unintended allegorical content on a work.

This then is the first safeguarding principle: if large portions of a work have to be covered with blotting paper while we read our meaning in what is left, we are abusing rather than using the images.
(Page 234.)

We arrive at a second principle: the principal drift governs the meanings attributable to the incidents born upon the stream; the latter cannot take their own moral direction as they choose. If we ignore the stream’s main direction of flow, and embark on incidents which travel counter to or unrelated to it, arriving at special separable meanings for such incidents, we shall presently drown farcically, amid the laughter of the characters, who sit on the bank well protected by the natures the author gave them, only waiting for the chance to push us in.
(Page 235.)

Note that both of Tuve's safeguards involve interpreting elements of a work in terms of the entirety. Context counts. The entire work must be considered, and the parts must fit the whole. As Dummett put it, the selection and arrangement of the subjects must be meaningful, hence the essential significance of the order of the cards. A corollary of Tuve's second rule is that obscure or ambiguous elements must be conformed to mesh with the obvious ones. In other words, we should begin with the known and work toward understanding the unknown, those subjects more subtle, obscure, or ambiguous, in terms of that "principal drift". A favorite ploy of the bullshit artists who write most Tarot books and dominate online Tarot discussions is to begin with one of the most ambiguous subjects, particularly the Fool, the Popess, the Chariot, or the Hermit. They select a preferred interpretation for that subject and then bludgeon well-known, historically conventional meanings for the rest of the deck. As James Revak put it, torturing the cards until they confess the desired meaning. Whether this is dim-witted blundering or cynical fraud, it is certainly bullshit.

A pictorial work such as the trump cycle is inevitably going to be schematic at best. The surrounding composition should provide enough context to determine the significance of each piece, just as the shape and colors of each jigsaw puzzle piece connect it to the surrounding pieces. Also, because the pictorial work is schematic, each element should be essential in some manner. If a source work is being compared to the trump cycle, each supposed element of the comparison should be highly significant to both works—essential elements should have been abstracted from the source, so as to convey the essential meaning.

Conversely, if one must scour the alleged source for incidental elements to mindlessly match with the trump cycle, then it is clear that the meaning is different and the supposed “source” is probably not even an influence or parallel. Dante's Divine Comedy, for example, is a large and sprawling work from which various writers, including Joseph Campbell, have collected supposed parallels with the Tarot trumph cards. This sort of cherry-picking is precisely the selective elimination of context, the opposite of rational iconography. This is the sort of thing that Dummett's emphasis on the arrangement of the cards tends to correct.

Dummett's Null Hypothesis

In formulating the riddle in more detail, Dummett offered an historically persuasive alternative. Here is Dummett's argument about Tarot iconography, from the beginning of the essential Chapter 20 of The Game of Tarot, "The Order of the Tarot Trumps". (Emphasis added.)

Not all those who have sought to decode the symbolism of the Tarot pack have been occultists; some have been serious scholars, well versed in the iconography of later mediaeval and early Renaissance art. One W.M. Seabury wrote a book to prove that the symbolism of the pack was based upon Dante; Miss Gertrude Moakley, in her fine book about the Visconti-Sforza pack, advanced an interpretation of the pack, supported by much evidence from Italian art and literature; Mr. Ronald Decker has engaged in complicated speculations, linking the pack to the astrology of the time. I am not going to advance another such theory. I do not even want to take a stand about the theories that have been advanced. The question is whether a theory is needed at all.

I do not mean to deny that some of the subjects, or some of the details of their conventional representation, may have had a symbolic significance obvious to fifteenth-century Italians, or, at least, to educated ones, that escapes us and may be revealed by patient research; that is very likely to be the case. But the question is whether the sequence as a sequence has any special symbolic meaning. I am inclined to think that it did not: to think, that is, that those who originally designed the Tarot pack were doing the equivalent, for their day, of those who later selected a sequence of animal pictures to adorn the trump cards of the new French-suited pack. They wanted to design a new kind of pack with an additional set of twenty-one picture cards that would play a special, indeed a quite new, role in the game; so they selected for those cards a number of subjects, most of them entirely familiar, that would naturally come to the mind of someone at a fifteenth-century Italian court.

It is rather a random selection: we might have expected all seven principal virtues, rather than just the three we find—and, of course, we do find all seven in the Minchiate pack, and they were probably present also in the Visconti di Modrone pack. With the Sun and Moon we might have expected the other five planets, instead of just a star; with the Pope and the Emperor, we might have expected other ranks and degrees. But of course, in a pack of cards what is essential is that each card may be instantly identified; so one does not want a large number of rather similar figures, especially before it occurred to anyone to put numerals on the trump cards for ease of identification. Certainly most of the subjects on the Tarot trumps are completely standard ones in mediaeval and Renaissance art; there seems no need of any special hypothesis to explain them. Whatever may be the truth about those who first designed the Tarot pack, the inventors of the Minchiate pack surely approached their task in the spirit I have suggested: they wanted twenty additional subjects, and they choose ones which it was natural for men of the sixteenth century to think of—the four elements, the remaining virtues, the signs of the Zodiac—and inserted them en bloc in a convenient place. I do not think that anyone has suggested that there is any hidden significance in the sequence of Minchiate Trumps.

That is my opinion; but I do not want to insist on it. It may be that those who first devised the Tarot pack had a special purpose in mind in selecting those particular subjects and in arranging them in the order that they did: perhaps they then spelled out, to those capable of reading them, some satirical or symbolic message. If so, it is apparent that, at least by the sixteenth century, the capacity to read this message had been lost. There are many references to tarocchi in sixteenth-century Italian literature, in which their symbolic potentialities were exploited, but always in an obvious way: no hint survives that any more arcane meaning was associated with them.[...]
(The Game of Tarot, pp.387-388.)

First, note that this passage refutes those who claim his view to be a "theory of no meaning". He explicitly acknowledges the meaning of the subjects on the cards, and elsewhere he discusses most of them in detail. His actual position, that there is no detailed and coherent design to any known deck, is both parsimonious and historically documented in other games. Dummett gives the example of Minchiate, a variant Tarot deck, which is as close a parallel as possible—it is Tarot! Other examples can be provided from other games of the same period. This makes Dummett's alternative the presumptive explanation, however unsatisfying it may seem. It is the default explanation of the trumps, and will remain so unless and until someone can propose a detailed, coherent alternative hypothesis. (Lawyers would call it a rebuttable presumption based on prima facie evidence.) Gertrude Moakley remains the best alternative yet published, and her explanation, although more agreeable than Dummett's null hypothesis in many ways, is less persuasive.

The Ur Tarot Dilemma

The passage above continues with this rather dismal conclusion:

The search for a hidden meaning may be a unicorn hunt; but if there is a meaning to be found, only a correct basis of fact will lead us to it. The hidden meaning, if any, lies in the sequential arrangement of the trump cards; and therefore, if it is to be uncovered, we must know what, originally, that arrangement was.

Here Dummett introduces another important element, arguing that we need to know which deck was the Ur Tarot before we can begin our interpretation. This is an historian's view, a perspective in which iconography is secondary to documented history. For example, Ross has built a good, (albeit speculative), case for Bologna being the original home of Tarot. From that historical conclusion he then looks at Bolognese trumps, their iconography and ordering, as the best surviving evidence of the Ur design. Drawing a conclusion about the Ur Tarot, based on documentary evidence outside the cards themselves, precedes the iconographic analysis. Dummett assumed this approach and simply pointed out that we do not know, with any degree of confidence, which surviving deck best exemplifies the earliest decks.

Disputing Dummett's argument here provides a context in which to present some of his other contributions to Tarot iconography in the next section. Dummett says that we need to know, a priori, which deck was original. Only then can we attempt to analyze the meaning of Tarot. Practically, however, the converse seems to be the case. We do not need to know what the original order was to pursue such studies, and there are at least two approaches to reversing the process. One alternative is to look at all of the early decks and orderings and ask what the various early orders have in common. From that we can attempt a generic iconographic interpretation consistent with all or most of them, employing additional explanations of the specific differences. Such a study might suggest to us a meaning that was commonly recognized in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, perhaps even by the people who were simply playing the game, but certainly by the individuals who created the various orderings. This is the generic or synoptic meaning of Tarot. Dummett himself pointed to the existence of such a meaning, (cf. below), and attempting to discern it in surviving decks does not require any assumption about the Ur Tarot.

A second possibility is to study all of the variations and attempt to decipher each separately. A best-possible reading of each deck is produced, and then these are compared. The assumption is that the original deck was well designed, and subsequent variations were probably less coherent. Thus, we are looking for the deck and ordering which displays the best evidence of integrated design. Rather than knowledge of the original order being a prerequisite for such a unicorn hunt, it may be the unicorn itself. Such a study might find that one particular sequence, and its corresponding iconography, appears exceptionally well designed. The others would be most easily explained as derivatives which, while making intelligible changes, nonetheless failed to maintain all of the overall meaning and, most critically, coherence. (Such an approach is analogous to that of textual criticism, by which biblical scholars attempt to reconstruct the evolution of texts.) If such an approach proved successful, then we might actually learn something with important implications for the origin of Tarot, we might indeed gain some enlightenment by studying the iconography.

Three Families of Tarot

Despite his claim to eschew iconography, Dummett's findings are essential as a basis for any subsequent study. He documented a dozen different orderings, establishing the Ur Tarot problem. Each locale in Italy had it's own style of Tarot deck, with both its own order of the cards and its own iconographic variations. This is what I have called the "civic pride" aspect of Tarot. Each city-state wanted it's own Tarot, but they still wanted it recognizable as Tarot. Non nova sed nove is the fundamental principle of the changes from one locale to another. Dummett also emphasized the importance of those orderings to any iconographic study, and he is in good company with writers like Tuve, above. Different arrangements of subject matter within the trump hierarchy imply different meanings, so the ordering matters.

Another crucial insight was that these variations in ordering tended to fall into three families, which he gave the uninspired names of A, B, and C. These families were more-or-less geographically distinct, (labeled Southern, Eastern, and Western, respectively, by Tom Tadfor Little), which suggests an historical diaspora: large initial variations were followed by lesser ones. Here is his 1980 description of those three families of decks.

If now, in the light of this analysis, we look at the actual orders, we see that they divide into three sharply distinct types, which I shall arbitrarily label type A, type B, and type C. These types are to be distinguished according to two principles: where the Virtues come; and whether the Angel or the World is the highest card. In type A, the Angel is the highest trump, the World coming immediately below it. The three Virtues, Temperance, Fortitude, and Justice, occur consecutively, usually interposed just above the lowest card of the middle segment, which, in orders of this type, as least whenever we can tell, is invariably Love.

In orders of type B, something completely different happens. In these, the World is the highest trump, and Justice is promoted to the second highest position in the sequence, coming immediately below the World and above the Angel, the third highest card. There is clearly an association of ideas here: the Angel proclaims the last Judgment, at which justice will be dispensed. In orders of type B, Temperance always comes immediately above the Pope, and is separated from Fortitude, which comes three cards later, after Love and the Chariot.

In an order of type C, the World is again the highest card in the sequence, but, this time, the Angel comes immediately below it. Of the Virtues, it is Temperance that is promoted to a relatively high position, namely to just above Death and just below the Devil; any symbolic appropriateness in this escapes me. The remaining two Virtues are again separated and scattered within the middle segment, Justice in all cases coming lower.
(The Game of Tarot, p.399.)

These family similarities may allow other conclusions to be drawn, and they may even allow an entire family of patterns to be dismissed as iconographically derivative. For example, the use of the virtue Justice to symbolize the Archangel Michael, between the Angel and World, is obviously a kluge, a sloppy variant. It is a perfect example of rearranging the standard subjects to tell a new story, and it indicates that the Eastern family of Tarot patterns does not represent the Ur Tarot very well.

Three Types of Subject Matter

Another fundamental iconographic insight was that the trump cycle, in each of the numerous orderings, had the same generic/synoptic design. Pop-culture Tarot enthusiasts routinely assume that everything means the same thing, whatever imposition they are personally fond of. (This is simply a variation of the Romantic view of Frazer, Jung, Campbell, et al. that all stories are the same story.) Dummett's conclusion that the different Tarot patterns had a similar generic meaning was based on his analysis and comparison of the different orderings of the trump subjects.

When we look closely at the various orders, we find that there was far from being total chaos. A first impression is of a good deal of regularity which, however, is hard to specify. Now the cards which wander most unrestrainedly within the sequence, from one ordering to another, are the three Virtues. If we remove these three cards, and consider the sequence formed by the remaining eighteen trump cards, it becomes very easy to state those features of their arrangement which remain constant in all the orderings. Ignoring the Virtues, we can say that the sequence of the remaining trumps falls into three distinct segments, an initial one, a middle one, and a final one, all variation occurring only within these different segments.

Restoring Tarot's Virtues

Note that the virtues are only set aside momentarily. They are the most fugitive of the trumps, having been moved repeatedly as Tarot traveled from city to city, having been revisioned for different purposes/meanings in the trump cycle. By ignoring them for a moment, as a heuristic technique, Dummett reveals an overall design to the trump cycle which the roaming virtues tend to disguise.

Tuve's first rule, however, demands that the virtues be restored to their rightful place in any particular deck before attempting to read the meaning of that cycle. (If our pattern recognition skills are sufficiently well honed, they need not be set aside at all.)

Tuve's second rule requires that these varied, vagrant, and ambiguous subjects be interpreted in light of the specific representation and placement in each deck. Thus, in some decks Temperance triumphing over Death appears to have been revisioned as Fame, and even labeled to make that meaning clear. This revision echoes Petrarch's Trionfi. In other decks Justice was revisioned as Judgment, placed between the Resurrection and the New World.

This is a brilliant observation, one that has been almost entirely ignored by Tarot enthusiasts for more than three decades.

Building on that insight, Dummett went on to explain the significance of those three sections, the genre of each section, if you will. In 1985, Dummett wrote “Tracing the Tarot”, an article in the periodical FMR, which correctly identified the three groups. (In his earlier analysis presented in The Game of Tarot, he included Death in the third group.) This provided the necessary foundation for any serious subsequent analysis, and the fact that hundreds of pop-culture Tarot interpreters have ignored this finding is revealing.

The first group consists of the Bagatto (the “trifle”, aka Mountebank, Juggler, or Magician) and the four “papal and imperial cards”. The Fool is not included in some early lists of the trumps, it is generally not numbered, and it has a unique role in the game. Therefore Dummett left it out of his analysis. However, as part of the allegorical design of the series, its place as the lowest of the low is obvious, paralleled in many other works of art and literature, and essential to the design. Considered as an allegorical figure, the Fool belongs in this group and these six cards form a social hierarchy, a “ranks of man” design. Not surprisingly, it shows two representatives from each of the “three estates” of medieval society. In every ordering of the Tarot sequence, the Mountebank is the lowest of the trumps (not counting the Fool) and the Pope is the highest. This lowest group clearly suggests that a very intelligible and coherent design is present, and this ranks of man genre is the "principal drift" which "governs the meanings attributable to the incidents born upon the stream". That is, it is the context in which the individual card subjects must be interpreted.

“The next group of cards could be described as representing conditions of human life: love; the cardinal virtues of Temperance, Fortitude..., and Justice; the triumphal car; the wheel of fortune; the card now known as the hermit; the hanged man; and death.” These images are allegory properly so-called, rather than the representatives of social rank in the first section. They reflect a “conditions of man” design which, like social ranking, formed a well-known organizing principle in didactic art. The Moral Virtues, Love, Death, and the Wheel of Fortune are among the most common allegories of the era, and the ordering -- successes, reversals, downfall and death -- suggests a coherent meaning. Again, this is the genre of the middle trumps, the context in which the individual cards must be interpreted.

“The final sequence represents spiritual and celestial powers; the devil, the tower, the star, the moon, the sun, the world, and the angel. The angel is the angel of the Last Judgment.” These images are related to Christian eschatology, and although they are not the most conventional representations, they derive from chapters 20 and 21 of Revelation, and tell the central story of Christ’s triumphs over the Devil (the lowest card of the section) and Death (via an image of resurrection.) Again, this is the genre of the highest trumps, the context in which the individual cards must be interpreted.

In other words, Dummett's iconographic analysis results in the same three groups as his analysis of historical sequences. The iconographic analysis of the groupings adds meaning to the structure, identifying the three types of subject matter and making sense of the design: it allows a coherent message to be read. Dummett himself couldn’t resist characterizing the groups by their subject matter in this fashion, even though his analysis was primarily based on sequence rather than iconography.

These three categories of subject matter are common to many works of art, literature, and drama. Representatives of Mankind, routinely including an emperor and pope along with assorted other characters, were the protagonists of such works. Allegorical personifications were varied, but usually ended with Death. These were the conditions of life to which the protagonists were subject. Eschatological subjects most commonly included some indication of the Final Judgment, but Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell were themselves a common motif.

Building on Dummett's Work

In memory of the iconographic prophet who has gotten so little respect in his own land, the Tarot community, let's take things a step further. Dummett noted that the virtues were revised, moved around, more than any other trumps. As illustrated above in the discussion of the Eastern ordering being an awkward and derivative design, the virtues are therefore the most obvious place to look for signs of revisioning. The virtues in Tarot are Justice, Fortitude, and Temperance, the three "Moral Virtues", those virtues associated with the appetites. (As an aside, there is no "missing virtue" except in the minds of people who don't know that the three Moral Virtues are a complete set. Writers like Thomas Aquinas make this perfectly clear.) So let's think about the three virtues -- what would a coherent design entail in terms of ording the virtues?

The reasoning is that the most coherent/intelligible surviving deck will be the one that has the fewest changes from the Ur Tarot. There are really only two possibilities for systematic placement of the virtues: adjacent or equally spaced. Anything else is clearly a rearrangement, more or less arbitrary. This means that we can rule out the Eastern family, as discussed above. Notice that we are not selecting the Ur Tarot per se, but rather ruling out decks that do not seem well-designed.

The Southern orderings have the virtues adjacent, although some of them have other structural problems. We can rule out some of the Western designs, including well-known orderings such as that described by Susio and the ordering illustrated by the Vieville deck. The Western ordering known as TdM, historically the most common Tarot deck in the world, has the three virtues equally spaced. Each virtue is also, arguably, meaningfully placed above two related cards. Either TdM or one of the Southern designs would seem to be the best candidate for meaningful analysis and interpretation.

If any surviving design is a well-preserved fossil of the Ur Tarot, it probably a deck with either the Bolognese or Milanese (TdM) ordering. This speculation is based on an important assumption, that the earliest deck was very systematically designed. However, it is not an arbitrary assumption. Consider the alternative: If the earliest deck did not have a recognizably coherent design, then Tarot iconography is not very interesting. The Ur Tarot would be as much a sloppy hodge-podge as any other and, most importantly, Dummett's null hypothesis—that there is no systematic design—would be correct. Dummett must be refuted or accepted; he cannot be ignored.

We are either dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants, or we are just dwarfs.
Michael Dummett remains the singular giant in Tarot history and iconography.

______________________

Notes:

This post restates part of the background information presented in The Riddle of Tarot (2004), and the 2007 post, Iconography and the Order of the Cards.

Regarding the three Moral Virtues, this brief summary is from the Catholic Encyclopedia entry on Virtue: "As the proper function of the moral virtues is to rectify the appetitive powers, i.e. to dispose them to act in accordance with right reason, there are principally three moral virtues: justice, which perfects the rational appetite or will; fortitude and temperance, which moderate the lower or sensuous appetite [the irascible and concupiscible appetites, respectively]. Prudence, as we have observed, is called a moral virtue, not indeed essentially, but by reason of its subject matter, inasmuch as it is directive of the acts of the moral virtues."

NYT: Remembering Michael Dummett