Tarot de Marseille

Le Bateleur. The Magician.

I just finished Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus. It was a beautiful book, putting me constantly into a black, white, and grey, yet vibrant dreamworld. As I wondered in and out of different tents, one to which I always returned was the Fortune Teller. She used cards for her readings, specifically the Tarot de Marseille. This little episodes as she read provide a little foreshadowing for those that know meanings, or spent time looking them up. As a card player and enthusiast, and the owner of three decks of tarot, I wondered how (if at all) the Tarot de Marseille differed from my own.

The earliest inventors of paper and printing with wood blocks, the Chinese, "played cards" as early as the 9th century (first recorded references of playing cards, although it has been speculated that since there was paper, there were paper card games). Cards were widespread in Asia by the 11th century. In the 14th century, Mamluk Egypt introduced Europe to their playing cards, a deck consisting of 4 suits (swords, staves, cups, and coins) of either 13 or 14 cards (numbered 1 through 10 [pips], with either 3 or 4 "court" cards [a king, first and second duties, and an assistant--all designed and faceless keeping an Islamic tradition]). The Spanish were most likely the first European card players owing to connections in the Islamic world, but card playing by the elite of European was widespread by early 15th century. Card playing exploded with the invention of the printing press, in conjunction with and challenging the myriad religious prints.

Types of design also mushroomed in the different cultures and regions of Europe. Germany played with suits of hearts, bells, leaves, and acorns, and these suits probably influenced the French suits of hearts, diamonds, spades (from leaves), and clubs (from acorns). The Tarot de Marseille continues to use the swords, staves, cups, and coins, but changes the court cards to king, queen, knight, and knave (or "page" and "jack" as well).

With news games being made and played in the 14th century, Northern Italians created a supplement to the traditional four-suited set. These cards, often numbered 1 though 21 (and a no numbered or zero car), depicted allegorical persons and situations, called carte de trionfi (shortened to trionfi) or triumph cards. The French called these stouts (roughly translated as "assets") and the English shortened "triumph" to "trump" (side ramble: This makes me wonder if the meaning of "trump" is taken from the cards--I may need a trip to the OED!!).

The Tarot de Marseille includes the trump cards, as well as the 4 suits, 14 cards of swords, staves, cups, and coins. The swords are curved and crossed and the staves crossed as lattice work, echoing the origins in the Mamluk cards with the curved scimitar and the long, straight polo mallets. The Tarot de Marseille is certainly the fore bearer of the most common divinatory tarot decks. The 22 trump cards and the four sets of four court cards influence the titles and pictorials in the modern Rider deck, created in 1909. However this modern deck differs from the Tarot de Marseille, in that the pip cards (1 through 10) also include an allegorical pictorial.

Other things of interest:

Abbreviation of Knave to Kn too much like the K for King. Went low class with Jack.
Euchre. Joker relationship and sound. The best bower. Relation to the "zero" card--the Fool.
Timing. 13 cards in each suite -- 13 lunar month calendar and 364 days or 52 card deck to 52 week year. Four suits four seasons.
Papess. Female Pope controversy. Sometimes called the Priestess. Pope also become Priest or Hierophant.
13 not numbered or named. Death.
Corner and edge idices -- so one doesn't have to spread hand -- 17th to 18th century
Redesign of court cards so reversible. Less telling to opponents what's in one's hand. 18th century
French Revolution. "Ace high" because of the rise of the Third Estate. Or three court cards became Liberté, Egalité, and Fraternité.

"Digital Dualism"

Unreality:

Voltaire famously said, "History is a pack of lies we play on the dead." While that certainly rolls off the tongue, it also points at a fundamental truth about history. It is constructed. Histories are a construction (or a reconstruction, if you consider that what is "real" is a construction of the person and perception).

Discussion of the real versus the un-real on the interwebs follows a similar set of arguments. There exists ongoing arguments about the reality of the web, and the differences between a virtual life and IRL (In Real Life). Writer Nathan Jurgenson has written a thoughtful piece on these distinctions.

He argues that what is online is real, because it depends on the real people with their real histories and actions, creating it. I agree, but just tend to see the opposite. Jurgenson say both the digital and IRL are real, and I would argue that both the digital and IRL are somewhat unreal. I'm not arguing a Platonic theory of forms or anything. I believe there is a physical world, but human perception creates/constructs what is real.

Let's look at Professor Charlie Evan's 1897 "Plan de Saint-Pétersbourg," a map of the often renamed St. Petersburg, Russia (not Florida. Not that I've been to the Russian city, but I can assure you, those cities are very different. Maybe that's my first discovery looking at this map!). Professor Evan's difficult scanning in a large format map begins to open discussion of the problematic digital  reconstruction.

Problems:

1. digitizing tools

There are many different ways that one can begin to digitize material for the web, and depending on what you are digitizing and for what purpose, different tools should be used.

2. file type

Again, how you are using the information will begin to determine the type of digitization file. Evan's map, to be clearly viewed and utilized by students, would need to have a good resolution--keeping most of the information from the original. Obviously things like text, images, audio, or video require different file types.

3. accessability

Do you want to share that information? Or only to present it to folks?

3. costs

There are a lot of costs associated with a digitization project--person doing the digitization, time spent, tools for digitization, and as always the bandwidth costs. Just for this map reproduction, Evans had to scan multiple sections of the map, and then using Photoshop, stitch together the pieces to create a coherent whole.

Other Uses:

If combined with Google maps, this map from 1897 could really begin to highlight the changes of St. Petersburg over time. One can see the creation and destruction of streets, bridges, buildings, parks. As Google map shows historical spots and museums, the user could see buildings from 1897 re-appropriated for national museums. Also, in conjunction with Google maps, one is able to access 3D street views--a unique experience for someone who has never visited the city. GIS opens an almost infinite realm of possibilities, layering different historical data on top of the maps. One could see how epidemics or revolts spread through the city. It does get a bit complicated if the user has great the shift data files GIS maps.

1897 "Plan de Saint-Pétersbourg" Observations:

Like most major European cities, St. Petersburg lies on a major river, the Neva River. It is split into some major islands, as the Neva splits its route to Neva Bay.

The French letterings and words on the Russian map, show the influence on Russsian culture and highlights the connections between eastern and western Europe.

The map itself represents the division of St. Petersburg 1897 into twelve police districts. I don't know enough about Russian in 1897 to know why that's important, but I'm sure there is a reason.

The fewer, grid-like streets in the outer police districts, show new growth on the outskirts of the historical city, probably brought on by population booms in the mid-1800s, as well as the industrial revolution. Possibly, those fewer, grid-like streets are more industrial areas.

St. Petersburg in 1897 had three major railroad stations (one on the north side of the Neva, and two on the south connecting Moscow to the industrial, port city).

There are a number of parks located throughout the city.

There is a fortress, which seems to be right in the center of the oldest part of the city.

The "Cimètiere de Wolkow" (a cemetery is located in the southeastern portion of the map, far on the outskirts of the city--a good location for a cemetery). There is another on the Ile de Vassiliovstrov and a Catholic Cemetery in the north-eastern corner--leading me to suspect that Catholics were a minority in St. Petersburg at the turn of the century. Cimetiere de St. Mitrophane is located south of the Varsov train station.

The slaughterhouses (abattoirs) are just east of the Varsov station.

I suspect the Ile de Vassiliostrov, contains the ports and harbors.

Four bridges cross the Grande Neva, and a fifth looks like it's being built.

Two bridges cross the Petite Neva, a smaller branch of the main river.

Two bridges cross the Grande Nevka, the northern, large branch of the Neva River.

Two bridges cross the Moyenne Nevka.

Three bridges cross the Petite Nevka.

And one bridge crosses the isthmus between the Petite and Moyenne Nevka.

"Who Kindled Courage"

"Shameless slatterns, half-naked women, who kindled course and breathed life into arson…" 

     --unknown, on the 

       "women incendiaries"

While the working class revolutions of 1848 across Europe were largely unsuccessful, they led to a series of consequences that were dramatically important. They increased the insistence in both German lands and Italian lands for unification. The new working class continued to grow in their political education and awareness, making them a group no longer to be ignored in the resolution of conflicts or the creation or recreation of governments. In France the revolution of 1848 was an indication that the Revolutionary ideals of 1789 had not been forgotten. Enlightenment ideals of liberté, egalité, and fraternité grew ever stronger in the minds of this new working class. But fifty years, two unsuccessful revolts, and the Industrial Revolution had changed those ideas.

Internal divisions led to weaknesses of the new political theories. These divisions had become more defined--often running along class divisions. Socialists and communists claimed that liberal theories didn't adequately represent the working class, whose labor was used and abused by a bourgeoise or capitalist system…

This is not the post that I want to write, but felt like it was important to give background to the Paris Commune, a short-lived (two months!) worker or proletariate controlled government during the spring of 1871…

It's not even the Paris Commune that I want to write about. It's the women of this revolution. The pétroleuses. The fire-starters of the the Paris Commune. The largely imaginary women, who used what would later become the Molotov Cocktail, to burn down "much of Paris" during the extremely violent retaking of Paris by the regular army.

They represent something an important tension that had been steadily growing since early Enlightenment (oh, and we could argue further back… but I'm not going to here…) about women's roles in an educated, republican society, and in the nineteenth-century women's role in the new working class, the highly-politicized socialist and communists movements.

There have been a few times throughout history when women have asked for and philosophy has conceded an equal existence for both men and women. Some early Greek philosophers (Plato and Epicurus, not mind you, Aristotle) contended women's mental acuity and ability in society to be on par with their male counterparts. Jesus' acceptance and the role of women in early Christian congregations was another. Women were often leaders in this early movement, while at the same time male bishops met and decided the "women's question." Women working during the so-called Scientific Revolution (like, Cavendish, Bassi, Winkelmann and others), if not literally, contextually argued in favor of women's equality in the intellectual or in a public sphere. By the Enlightenment, Mary Wollstonecraft and Olympe de Gouges are writing Enlightenment-styled, revolutionary-supporting treatises on the inclusion of women in a new world centered centered on the Enlightenment, Liberté, and Egalité.

"Fraternité", here, takes us back to the problem. The society was (is) one deeply entrenched in patriarchy, and our favorite male philosophers while beautifully breaking the boundaries of tradition, often excruciatingly chose a continued tradition of patriarchy when it came to their revolutionary sisters. It was not liberté, egalité, and HUMANITÉ, it was a brotherhood.

Socialists and communists had a similar choice throughout the nineteenth century. In fact many of these radical thinkers believed that a socialist society could only be fully formed with the help of and inclusion of women (like Saint-Simon).

Stories of women and children protesting in front of cannons, as the regular army came to take the munitions from the National Guarde, bought time for the Paris Commune and forced the regular army back out of the city. Women helped to defend their districts as Paris and their Commune help to the regulars. These were working women, mothers, unable to feed their children from the salary they earned. These were women born during the Enlightenment.

The Pétroleuses were the women, about whom fathers warned their sons. Breaking out of their domestic and private spheres (if at all these women ever existed in a domestic or private sphere), these women were "unnatural" and "barbaric". The implication was that when women are unnatural and wild, society itself will be destroyed by their barbaric ways.

While the pétroleuse didn't exist, the ideals of the pétroleuse lives on in women across time, as they ask to be treated with the respect and equality that ALL people of ALL kinds deserve in an enlightened and democratic society.