Roger Caillois: Preface to Le Tarot des Imagiers du Moyen-Âge by Oswald Wirth

[TheLoracular]

@_R_

For the general forum reader:  _R_ published the translated to English essay that Roger Caillois wrote as a preface to Wirth's Tarot of The Magicians last November.    Below are my notes and comments about that preface.  Reading it first or having it open in another browser window will provide the right context.   

 

I feel like I should have been more familiar with Roger Caillos than I was before reading your article, from my years of studying game theory if nothing else.  I am sure he was cited and quoted in things I read,  but that is the problem of being an eclectic who knows a little about a lot of different topics, master of none.  Based on what I read of his other interests (game studies/ludology, leftist political commitment particularly against fascism, his flavor of sociology, being a founder of Diogenes) I felt a kinship for him before I even began to read.   

Being an avid game-player with some experience also as a game designer including games using tarot cards as mechanics, the start of Caillos' preface immediately drew me in.  At this point in my life, I don't use tarot for traditional divination that much though I'm happy to mentor others who are learning to do it.  
 

I love the poetry of Caillos' words on the topic as he compares gaming to divination:
"Conversely, all divination bears on an unlimited domain, since it includes all possible events, which are infinite in number, and which fork at every opportunity in an unpredictable manner (or predictable perhaps, which is practically the same since certainty remains excluded). To this infinity must normally correspond another infinity, which is that from whence the soothsayer draws his oracle"

 

I smile as he goes on to "It but remains to the prophet to interpret it according to a code that is so well-established that the mage hurries to explain the reasons for his disagreement should he diverge from it."   Ah, Mr. Caillos if you had known in 1966 what was about to happen to the world of tarot in the mid 1970s and then explode in the early 1980s....   

 

"To slide from one system to another, it is then only necessary to know, I wish to say to invent, the necessary correlations."  I find this all a topic near and dear to my heart.  Anyone who has listened to all four episodes of my babble on my Tarot Esoterica podcast will appreciate just how much but that isn't relevant to the actual topic on hand. 

 

You were right.  Caillois' preface is a stand-alone encompassing essay all of its own and I see why you said it was so perfect.  Of course, now I'm inspired to re-read Wirth just to familiarize myself with it since its been 30 years,  I'm eager to read it with the knowledge base (and research tools) I have now, that I didn't have in the late 80s. 

 

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In China, an unfortunately late text without authority relates that 32 ivory tablets were presented to the Emperor by an officer of the court towards the year 1120.
 
Is he referring to Pai Gow in specific and Chinese dominoes (bone tiles) NOT Majong in general perhaps?  He has to be. The dating would be correct to at least one of the accounts of were presented to Song Emperor Huizong.  To my limited knowledge, Chinese game scholars didn't ascribe any mysticism to them at all.  They, like playing cards, came into existing for gaming and gambling without any occultism associated with them back then, beyond the Chinese philosophies shaped practically all Chinese culture.  I never heard the phrase "One Thousand times Ten Thousand" used in relation to Pai Gow but I am an ignorant American.  

 

Now of course, because I'm shamelessly one of those sliders from one system to another who loves to find the different ways the same general esoteric philosophy is expressed in different esoteric traditions, I'm going to have to put Pai Gow tiles on a "To Do" list to look for deeper connections between the 32 tiles and Eastern esotericism.  They're cheap on Amazon.    

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Cailos' description of Dashavatar is fascinating.   But some quick research dates them to 16th century and Bir Hambir who from what I quickly read, was very devout to the Vaishnavism denomination of Hinduism and might easily have wanted to have religiously iconic cards to play with his court, starting the tradition there.  But this dates them way after Naibi cards cards appeared in the 14th century.

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I did a quick search to see if you had written any articles on Naibi cards but this was the only search result.  My budget-killing copy of Dummett’s The Game of Tarot has arrived and between that and Wicked Pack of Cards, I'm sure I can follow a bit more of their history.  I know there are some articles as well on http://trionfi.com/ but I really don't enjoy navigating through that website.  It is very outdated web design. 
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@_R_

Was the methodology that Cailos describes for divination- a 12 card spread based on the astrological houses- what this in vogue at the time he wrote this preface?  Is it still very popular in France? 

 

 And is "the swords symbolize moreover willpower and power; the staffs, work and the duties of one’s condition, material energy and fertility; the cups, love and mysticism, the intimate elaboration of the spiritual riches; the coins, finally, the knowledge and art of combinations, every creative industry which arranges the external world."  still a conventional way to look at the suits in Continental Europe?

 

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I like very much what he has to say about the pre-Gébelin decks being composites of the "repertoire of the allegories of the time" which feels right to me.   I have not taken a Wirth/de Guaita tarot and compared it card by card to my Marseilles deck to see the alterations, but I feel like that would be a place, not the Marseilles deck itself, to start looking for actual western occult symbolism beyond what that group (de Gébelin, Lévi, Papus, de Guaïta, Oswald Wirth) wove into the new "Western occultism" from Christian thought itself.  I don't think decks older than their own intentionally had any, especially not the Marseilles.  

 

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H. Bosch (1450-1516) spent most of his life in the town of  's-Hertogenbosch which was a VERY progressive/religiously tolerant place at that time, I have read.  My brain is associating Ersasmus having lived/taught there too around the same time period but I'm not sure.  Very little is known about Bosch himself, but 's-Hertogenbosch during his lifetime would have been a haven for the kind of Christianity that gave rise to the societies and lodges of de Gébelin's generation, so any parallels between Bosch's paintings and the writings of Erasmus. etc., might simply be because of that.  I don't think tarot was in the mix.    

 

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What was the 35 card Florentine deck he was referring to?  

 

Minchiate originated there and has more trumps than tarot but it has a lot more than 35 cards.  Now, any deck of any era that has cards depicting the three virtues, the four elements, the twelve signs of the zodiac is going to give any western occultist plenty to wax esoteric about but that certainly didn't mean pre-de Gébelin themselves were designed by intent by their printer to be esoterical.   Florence was Florence and the Renaissance was the Renaissance.   Classical themes like the four elements and the zodiac were hot ticket items in more than playing cards. 

 

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I have a personal answer for Callios' self-question of what "accurate imagination" might be and why Wirth was dismissive of divination as play.  But that doesn't belong in a historical tarot thread 🙂  

 

However, I very much like the phrasing of "Accurate imagination is to reunite, insofar as possible, the conditions of a felicitous conjecture."  That feels like it belongs as quote on a picture and sent out to the social media sphere. 🙂

 

I really enjoyed reading this article,  _R_  Probably even more than the first but I think that completely comes from the fact that my other major hobby besides tarot are games and so much of this one was dedicated to that.  
 

 

Edited January 18, 2021 by TheLoracular

[_R_]

8 hours ago, TheLoracular said:

In China, an unfortunately late text without authority relates that 32 ivory tablets were presented to the Emperor by an officer of the court towards the year 1120.
 
Is he referring to Pai Gow in specific and Chinese dominoes (bone tiles) NOT Majong in general perhaps?

To the best of my knowledge, yes.

 

8 hours ago, TheLoracular said:

I did a quick search to see if you had written any articles on Naibi cards but this was the only search result.  

No, not yet. I may get round to it eventually. I have one article in mind.

8 hours ago, TheLoracular said:

Was the methodology that Cailos describes for divination- a 12 card spread based on the astrological houses- what this in vogue at the time he wrote this preface?  Is it still very popular in France? 

Yes, but it is not so popular now as it involves too many cards, and assumes too much astrological knowledge. Typically, one or more clarifying cards (usually minor arcana) are placed over the first twelve cards, using up to the full deck depending on the author, so, 24, 36 or even 78 cards could be in piles on the table. But it is something of a staple spread regardless.

8 hours ago, TheLoracular said:

And is "the swords symbolize moreover willpower and power; the staffs, work and the duties of one’s condition, material energy and fertility; the cups, love and mysticism, the intimate elaboration of the spiritual riches; the coins, finally, the knowledge and art of combinations, every creative industry which arranges the external world."  still a conventional way to look at the suits in Continental Europe?

Looking beneath the academic prose, I would say yes, more or less.

8 hours ago, TheLoracular said:

I have not taken a Wirth/de Guaita tarot and compared it card by card to my Marseilles deck to see the alterations, but I feel like that would be a place, not the Marseilles deck itself, to start looking for actual western occult symbolism beyond what that group (de Gébelin, Lévi, Papus, de Guaïta, Oswald Wirth) wove into the new "Western occultism" from Christian thought itself.  I don't think decks older than their own intentionally had any, especially not the Marseilles.  

This is precisely where Paul Marteau's singular contribution begins to make itself felt, a subject I will return to shortly.

8 hours ago, TheLoracular said:

Very little is known about Bosch himself, but 's-Hertogenbosch during his lifetime would have been a haven for the kind of Christianity that gave rise to the societies and lodges of de Gébelin's generation, so any parallels between Bosch's paintings and the writings of Erasmus. etc., might simply be because of that.  I don't think tarot was in the mix.    

I don't think he is suggesting a connection with the tarot, but rather is pointing a certain iconographic commonality. The paintings by Bosch are this one and this one (the names vary slightly).

8 hours ago, TheLoracular said:

What was the 35 card Florentine deck he was referring to?  

 

Minchiate originated there and has more trumps than tarot but it has a lot more than 35 cards.

I think he must be referring to the Florentine Minchiate: 35 + 6 cards = 41 trumps, + 56 pip cards = 97.

 

8 hours ago, TheLoracular said:

why Wirth was dismissive of divination as play.

This attitude was fairly standard: the 19th century occultists by and large considered divination as being low-class (hence the contempt for Etteilla), low-level (as opposed to lofty metaphysical speculation), and feminine (as opposed to their own brand of virile intellectualising). And yet there is a certain irony here if one looks at their works, for they all contain at least one chapter on how to use the tarot for divinatory purposes (and Papus even wrote an entire book to that effect - aimed squarely at "the ladies"), thus showing they were in fact responding to a commercial imperative themselves.

8 hours ago, TheLoracular said:

I really enjoyed reading this article,  _R_  Probably even more than the first but I think that completely comes from the fact that my other major hobby besides tarot are games and so much of this one was dedicated to that.  

Thank you. It certainly is a very interesting piece, and the "cosmological" overlap or parallels between divinatory systems and gaming systems are very much worth exploring.

[TheLoracular]

I am excited to keep going with this and will tackle another in a week.

 

12 hours ago, _R_ said:

No, not yet. I may get round to it eventually. I have one article in mind.

It will be exciting to read if it makes its way onto paper.  Naibi cards are interesting to me in their own right.  

 

 

12 hours ago, _R_ said:

This is precisely where Paul Marteau's singular contribution begins to make itself felt, a subject I will return to shortly.

I am very much looking forward to that.  

 

12 hours ago, _R_ said:

This attitude was fairly standard: the 19th century occultists by and large considered divination as being low-class (hence the contempt for Etteilla), low-level (as opposed to lofty metaphysical speculation), and feminine (as opposed to their own brand of virile intellectualising). And yet there is a certain irony here if one looks at their works, for they all contain at least one chapter on how to use the tarot for divinatory purposes (and Papus even wrote an entire book to that effect - aimed squarely at "the ladies"), thus showing they were in fact responding to a commercial imperative themselves.

Indeed 🙂    

 

[_R_]

On 1/19/2021 at 10:29 PM, TheLoracular said:

Naibi cards are interesting to me in their own right.  

It occurs to me that there is a book on the subject in English, The Playing-Cards Of Spain: A Guide for Historians and Collectors, by Trevor Denning. I haven’t read it, but it looks quite comprehensive.

[TheLoracular]

6 hours ago, _R_ said:

It occurs to me that there is a book on the subject in English, The Playing-Cards Of Spain: A Guide for Historians and Collectors, by Trevor Denning. I haven’t read it, but it looks quite comprehensive.

There was an incredibly cheap copy for sale, missing dust jacket but promised to be otherwise pristine  for sale in the online used book marketplace I like so I grabbed it this morning.  Thank you!  

[_R_]

10 hours ago, TheLoracular said:

There was an incredibly cheap copy for sale, missing dust jacket but promised to be otherwise pristine  for sale in the online used book marketplace I like so I grabbed it this morning.  Thank you!  

That's nice to hear, it looks like a great book; I was looking for a reference on something and the Google Book snippet was generous enough to read the entire entry. I will have to get a copy myself eventually.

 

In other news, I will soon rewrite and add to the introduction to the Caillois piece since I have just found another short essay he wrote on a closely-connected topic, 'The Image.'

[TheLoracular]

13 hours ago, _R_ said:

That's nice to hear, it looks like a great book; I was looking for a reference on something and the Google Book snippet was generous enough to read the entire entry. I will have to get a copy myself eventually.

 

In other news, I will soon rewrite and add to the introduction to the Caillois piece since I have just found another short essay he wrote on a closely-connected topic, 'The Image.'

That is exciting news!