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History of the Medieval Atouts

DaanaMindon — Sun, 17 Dec 2006 23:22:26 CST

Contact: Diane O'Donovan ....... d_Mindon@yahoo.com
This site contained a series of essays extracted from original academic research by the author. The subject of that research was the reason for use of non-classical stellar characters to provide the older Atout images, teh reason for the pack's structures and usual emblems, and the nature of the earliest forms of card-use in western Christendom.

The conclusions of that research were first summarised, briefly, on a web-page published by the author in 1998-2000 on a Geocities.aol site.

The conclusions of that research were (and are):

1. That while the matter included in the cards came into Europe from regions then governed by Islam, the pack itself (whatever its original fabric) was not of Arab origin, but entered Muslim society from older communities that had been brought under Muslim rule from the 7th century onwards.

2. That the majority of current studies of the western card-pack conflate four separate historical issues, viz. (i) the origins of the 'card-pack' as such (ii) the purpose of the cards first introduced into mainland Europe (ii) the origins of the imagery employed for the earliest known western packs (iiii) the origins of those numerical games which actually survived into the twentieth century, and which are now commonly referred to for that reason as "ordinary" card-games.

3. That the imagery of the earliest remaining Atouts derives directly from earlier use of the non-classical heavens to add point to religious and political arguments, and that the subject of those images was initially understood in Europe.

4. That the particular stars depicted in the earliest sets of Atouts form a pattern, and that pattern reflects the compass of navigational stars used to indicate both time and direction. The Atouts did not depict the circuit of the zodiac.

5. That use of these stars to inform the Atouts makes of the pack a comprehensive model for the mundus. From the 6th century onwards, Europe's definition of the 'mundus' included the earth below, the intermediary region of sun, moon and ecliptic stars, and then the higher heavens. This definition was enunciated by Isidore of Seville, whose Etymologiae served as the single encyclopaedia of the whole medieval period. Its influence cannot be overstated.

6. That when John of Rheinfelden - a Domincan - spoke (in 1377) of a new form for the 'ludus cartarum', saying that it enabled one to survey all the stages and states of the world to the present time, while speaking of a 52-token pack as the form of the activity "as we first received it", the likelihood is that he was referring to the advent of the tarot-style pack.

7. That the reason for an initially enthusiastic reception for the card-pack lay in its use as a means to aid memory and learning.

8. That while the Cistercian monks, among others, played a part in the way the western pack was first formed and used in Europe, it was the Dominican order which disseimated the pack widely through Europe late in the fourteenth century.

9. That the divisions of the larger pack show a deliberate attempt to provide a generic model of the world according to the structures by which the world was described by the long-distance mariners. That is to say, while the level of the basic 40 cards continues to represent the lower, penitential world, the next level is divided into 16 parts rather than 12, and the highest level [originally] depicts stars of the mariner's compass. For historical, ideological and pedagogical reasons, the model of the archetypal world-ship, the Arca noe, was considered most suitable for training in memory and oratory, bot only for monks but for scholars in general.

10. That Europe gained its first contact with the idea of the card-pack from practices followed in Norman Sicily, and soon after taken into North Africa where they aided a radically new educational curriculum under the auspices of al Idrisi, the geographer, traveller, physician and astronomer, and probably a decendant of the Sufi still revered in the region today.

11. That from the first, the form of card-game brought into Europe was meant to assist memory and description of the internal world of memory and the external world in all its states and periods.

12. That the emblems used for the tarot and 'Spanish-suited' deck were practical emblems for the four cardinal points of direction. They have their form by reference to conventional literary epithets for those stars. These four stars, and their usual attributes were already known to the Biblical writers, and were not unfamiliar to Christian Europe even in the medieval period.

12. That the depiction of the Atout stars on early painted cards show the influence of longstanding eastern traditions, by which the pattern of the heavens was made the model for formal oratory, andused to ornament literature both religious and secular. This custom, and the set characters, pre-date the advent of Islam but were maintained in popular and literary traditions of the Islamic world.

13. That the subject of the Atouts cards and the habit of using the astronomical 'types' to inform religious moralia had come to Europe long before the idea of the card-pack. Examples of the star-road imagery occur in western monastic works as early as the seventh century, and are very common during the Norman period.

14. The origin of these star-characters does not lie with the classical Mediterranean, but with the older pre-classical view of the heavens; that which the Mediterranean Greeks and Romans termed the "sphaera barbarica".

15. Popular knowledge of this so-called "sphaera barbarica" can be traced in the near eastern sources to at least the third millennium b.c.

16. That the pattern of the tarot pack's schematic world, and its Atouts' earliest astronomical subjects, together with allusions from medieval Europe and medieval Islam, strongly suggest that the card-pack first developed from a custom of using 'pages' of an almanac-like text to aid teaching.

17. The precursor of the card-pack may thus have been formed from palm-branches, sheets of papyrus, scraps of sail-cloth or any other material habitually used for writing.

18. Since the figures of the 'sphaera barbarica' are as old as human civilization, and the mariners' star-circuit appears to be equally ancient, it is impossible to determine when this conceptual world-model was first enunciated.

19. There is a good deal of evidence to suggest that Egypt or Phoenician North Africa first formulated the idea of the portable 'game of leaves' as an aid to memory, calculation and education.

20. The division of the tarot's lower levels are ideally suited to calendrical calculations, astronomical calculations, and to the known custom in Islam of linking the series of lunar mansions (manzil) to the whole corpus of spiritual and practical study.

21. The Sufi Ibn 'Arabi in Muslim Spain produced works putting this habit to good use, and Burckhardt's discussion of ibn Arabi's works includes a clear illustration of this.

22. In the same way, we find verbal games in Europe which consist of a conceptual tour, in its stages, through the intellectual or the physical world. The games may use tokens, but need not. The same theme informs the work produced by Idrisi for the Norman kings. Again, John of Rheinfelden speaks of the ludus cartarum as a means by which all the world may be described and figuratively represented.

23. A great worldmap was included in a pictorial version of the Alamanc produced for the king of France in c.1375. It offers all the usual matter included in an Islamic-style Alamac of that period: calendar, description of the world, depiction of the human body and its zodiacal rulers; the wheel of the lunar mansions, the correlation of moon and tide-rise about the coast - and so forth. On that worldmap, this so-called Atlas Catala (made in Majorca by a Jewish refugee, a master of bussola and compass named Abraham Cresques), shows the quarters of North Africa indicated by emblems for the same four cardinal stars that were known in Islam, by the older Biblical writer Job, and already present in objects dating from the time of the Indus valley civilization.

24.These are the four stars whose habitural emblems are depicted on the Atlas Catala, three of the same emblems (and all four of the same stars) being then used to mark the lower quarters of the tarot. They are plainly meant to refer to the quarters of the mundus' lower two levels, by alluding to the four cardinal stars which are present again among the Atouts.

25. The idea of the Almanac is older than Islam. The stellar characters of the Atouts are older than Islam. The particular type of almanac on which the pack is based is much older than Islam and is likely, (to judge from internal and external evidence), to be that which originated with a sea-going people. There is some reason for thinking the same traditions were known to the Phoenicians, and that the Coptic monks of Canopus had maintained and Christanised the 'papyrus-section' contest before it was taken up by the wider community of the Christian churches of the near east.

26. A form of page-segment or "papyrus-section" game is then mentioned in twelfth-century Sicily. Thereafter a map-section game is introduced into north Africa as part of a radically new educational curriculum, brought by an Islamic scholar who had just returned from 15 years in the Norman Sicilian court.

27. Also in the 12th century, a number of traditional Egyptian market-place tales were given form as a collection called 'The Thousand and One Nights", whose literary context is made the court of Bahgdad under Harun al Rashid, some centuries before.

28. In that collection is the retold story of the quintessential sophist (debater), always a brilliant but subjected woman. It is an Egyptian tale of great antiquity. Its Christian version is the story of St. Catherine of Alexandria, whose toothed wheel became a symbol of the Dominican order of Preachers, and which is also to be seen on some early painted cards. The Islamic version of the tale is the story of Tawaddud, who claims to have her perfect memory, and universal learning from practice with what she calls "certain signs and tokens which the almanac makers have." The same story contains an anomalous and probably interpolated allusion to a Persian card-game called Kanjifah. The system of the lunar mansions, the calendar and all the usual Almanac matters are expounded by Tawaddud, and these of course include the usual rote preductions.

29.Predictions of exactly the same form are found in European monastic manuscripts in England as early as the eighth century. We find them again in a Christian Almanac of Damascus, whose pages are very close in size and proportion to those of our earliest Atout cards. Islam probably first learned of card-use from the practices of older Christain communities.

In sum: The pattern of the tarot offers a full 'survey' or model of the world. Its suit-sign emblems are conventional indicators for the cardinal points of direction, and are so used within Europe in the late fourteenth century. [This was a conclusion reached by the present author, made by consideration of the archaeological, pictorial, archaeological and historical sources. It owes nothing to other correlations offered between elements or directions and those 4 emblems.]

The European tarot's levels reflect the ordinary person's perception of the world as formed in three levels: the quartered 40 stand for the world as a place of trial and penitence.
The series of star-characters used for the Atouts was originally the series of stars forming the long-distance mariner's compass, and also used to describe the spiritual road.

Between these two levels we have a number of cards commensurate with the usual divisions of the windrose. (The mariners of the Mediterranean had used a 12 wind rose, while the 'Barbery' men and the eastern Moors referred to 16 winds). Cresques knew both systems, which is why he speaks of himself as master of both bussola and qumbas.
This is another conclusion first reached by the present author. It has been more widely adopted only since 1998, and is habitually repeated without attribution. The author wishes to state that no such suggestion had been offered by any other source prior to the publication of her research in summary on the geocities website.

The model offered is equally suited to teaching the criticial sciences as to the pragmatic: that is, of literature, politics, philosophy, religion etc. as of counting and medicine. The pack's form has the great added advantage of permitting practical calculation.

The essays included here, together with all conclusions reached are derived from the body of original research, completed by 1997 and summarised on a geocities website in August 1998, and again in 2000. The essays are edited extracts from the original manuscript, chosen to explain certain issues or points in more detail, and to demonstrate the author's right to intellectual copyright, but not to present the whole of the manuscript it is original sequence of chapters.

We are solely concerned here to explain how the western pack first gained it form, emblems and earliest imagery, and what its earliest uses were, and to explain the exact nature of that "Saracenic" connection mentioned in some early European allusions to card-use. Our omitting discussion of later European card-packs, or of cards from other regions (except incidentally) does not indicate a failure to take such things into consideration in the original work.

Readers able to feel some interest in a deeper discussion of the pack's origins, early imagery and given structures are welcome to correspond with the author.

d_Mindon@yahoo.com.au

Ibn Arabi's Wheels

DaanaMindon — Sun, 17 Dec 2006 21:24:32 CST