Responses by Dummett, O'Neill, and Hurst

While Moakley's scholarship is admired, and she is recognized as a trail-blazer in the field of tarot history, her overall perspective has received mixed reviews. First, here is Michael Dummett in Game of Tarot, p. 88:

Why, then, were these cards called 'triumphs'? Many have tried to explain the word from the use of the twenty-one triumph cards in play, namely as 'triumphing' over the other cards; and we cannot say for sure that this explanation is incorrect. A brilliant suggestion of Miss Moakley's is, however, more attractive. This is that the name has nothing to do with the use of the cards, but only with what is shown on them, the series of triumph cards representing a sort of triumphal procession. As documented by Burckhardt and Miss Moakley, a favourite entertainment in the courts of Renaissance Italy was the staging of just such triumphal processions, with floats bearing figures either derived from classical mythology or representing abstractions such as Love, Death, etc.: a transformation of the utterly serious triumph of a Roman general or Emperor into an elegant allegorical entertainment. A frequent ingredient in such Renaissance triumphs was the idea underlying Petrarch's poem I Trionfi, in which each successive personified abstraction triumphs over, that is, vanquishes, the last; thus, in the poem, love triumphs over gods and men, chastity over love, death over chastity, fame over death, time over fame and eternity over time. The case would be clinched if it were possible to explain the subjects of the triumph cards of the Tarot pack as forming a triumphal procession of this sort; but in spite of Miss Moakley's determined efforts, supplemented subsequently by those of Mr Ronald Decker, such an explanation, while plausible in principle, is difficult to make convincing in detail. Nevertheless, in default of a better explanation, we may accept it as likely, though by no means certain, that it was this association of ideas which prompted the use of the name 'triumphs' for the additional cards of the Tarot pack.

Although the conclusion is favorable to her, Dummett is also critical, in a way that unfortunately misrepresent Moakley's thesis. For her the explanation for the word "triumphs" applied to the card game and deck does have to do with the association with Petrarch's poem, but not, except indirectly through Petrarch, with an association to triumphal processions of the Roman sort, that of a general or emperor She was aware of them, of course, and also of the Renaissance triumphal processions in celebration of military victories. Her main analogy, for their spirit, is to the type of processions seen on the last night of Carnival. As far as the origin of particular cards, she sees only two as arising from actual figures in that procession, the "Bagatino" and the Fool, with the latter as a character on the sidelines until the end. She is justly criticized, I think for comparing the Bateleur to the Carnval King. He is lowlier than that. But it is not just Carnival processions she draws attention to, but also sacred ones, such as at Epiphany in Milan.  It is the generic idea of the public procession that she is comparing to the tarot sequence, that from seeing the one people would naturally see the other in similar terms..

In such a comparison, she did not maintain thatt each card represents a personage that "triumphs over"the one before it. It was groups of cards, together on floats. Also, the idea of a procession frees one from thinking of floats later as "triumphing over" the ones before. So Petrarchan triumph-groups can even be out of sequence, if need be, although in fact hers aren't; it's just that some are simultaneous, e.e. Love and Chastity, or Death and Time. It must be remembered, too, that she was trying to do two things at once: have a succession of groups defined by the cardinal virtues which are also defined by Petrarch's sequence. It is not easy to do!

O'Neill and Hurst

Robert V. O'Neill was a more severe critic. In his case the basic points have been highlighted by Hurst, so I may as well discuss Hurst's comments on these points together with those of O'Neill.

First, here is O'Neill himself, from the pages of Tarot Symbolism, 1986:

Pages 78-79: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiek5IWFG2XAJNJUFLVwHwinty9SiQelDbP1s9UEX6WRT9lmRIXOeWfi1Kh-tcfBzLTTEkLJr_icGz3ki5cZWuSRFMptJ8G3EF6FAiFc3D4HWeFo23ZQaYR2K8n88W3iPt0OjqTvTnaYzI/s1600/ONeillonMoakley-1good.jpg

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And Hurst on Moakley: https://wikivisually.com/wiki/User:Michael_Hurst/Moakley 

Where Hurst first agrees with O'Neill is with regard to the "mismatches" between Petrarch and the tarot seqeunce.

Death follows eventually, but Fame appears to be completely absent. The triumph of Eternity (the Angel and World) over Time (the Moon and Sun) would complete Petrarch’s triumphs, in something close to their proper order. Among other problems with this analysis, however, in the Visconti-Sforza deck the Hermit card is clearly intended to represent Time, and therefore ruins another part of the sequence. 

He says that her answer to this problem is that in the merry spirit of Carnival, anything can happen. This has been criticized by O'Neill, whom Hurst quotes:

The explanation is that the Tarot is not only a simplification of Petrarch’s scheme, but also a spoof, a ribald take-off on the solemnity of the original story in the spirit of the Carnival parade. This explanation is not acceptable simply because it allows too much freedom. Any lack of correspondence can be passed off as part of the joke. Therefore, if the cards match it is taken as positive evidence for the theory, while any discrepancy is dismissed offhand. This is too simplistic

 It seems to me that any spoof is going to have aspects that match the original and aspects that do not match, but rather exaggerate for the sake of satire. Moreover, it is not just a question of satire or joke. Many, if not most, creative works of art presents something new while drawing on something admired from the past. Shakespeare does not reproduce on stage the content of the chronicles from which he drew inspiration for his play. O'Neill's idea seems to be that the cards, if they are inspired by Petrarch, should stick to the story and not change things, because any change can be explained away as an improvement. For example there is the questio of Time being put in the middle and Fame not being there at all. Petrarch was writing about his life. The cards are for people other than famous poets whose reputation will only gradually diminish with time. Time for ordinary humans is not cosmic time, but the time of their lifetime, and their confrontation with time is that it is running out, like sand in an hourglass. And since most people aren't famous, it makes no sense to speak of fame in that sense. There is a different kind of "fama", for which a better translation is "glory", namely the attainment of heaven. And this is not defeated by Time, so there is no sense in putting Fame before Time. There are numerous adaptations of Petrarch like that. Yes, it allows much freedom. But that is in the nature of invention. It does not invalidate what she is saying.

Hurst goes so far as to apply Dummett's observation, in Game of Tarot (but not repeated since), that

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... 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.,

 Unfortunately there is an ellipsis, so we don't know what else Dummett said, and Hurst doesn't say what page he is quoting. But there are several good reasons why the selection might not be random. For one thing, educational games were very popular. Another is that the Church was hostile to card games because they were particularly susceptible to gambling, where a person could lose money he needs to support his family. And more than likely, the person he loses to is adept at cheating. People who liked card-playing needed a justification the church could accept. An educational purpose, such as teaching virtue or teaching the road to heaven, would help diffuse objections. That the numbers were not on the cards supports this thesis. A person had to remember the sequence. For that, he needed little clues in what was being portrayed would help, such as groups of cards around a shorter sequence than the cards, and one that made more sense, such as an adaptation of Petrarch's view of life's issues. This is not to say that the cards make sense within the groups. Moakley did not attempt to make such sense either. Even Dummett said the cards were organized into groups: "the Imperial and Papal powers". "The spiritual and celestial powers". And something in the middle.No wonder he did not repeat his somewhat exaggerated statement on other occasions.

Finally, there ways of making associations to cards so that Petrarch fits. The Star card could be fame, if it shows the Three Wisemen looking at the Star of Bethlehem. What could be more glorious? Also, Petrarch introduces his Triumph of Time by speaking about the Sun's daily round. The sun is a perfectly good image of cosmic time, as opposed to human time, the man with the hourglass.

There are also criticisms of Moakley that Hurst doesn't talk about, and additional criticisms Hurst has.On the suits as allegorical marchers between floats, Hurst says:

However, the idea that the suit cards represented allegorical companies in a pageant intended to accompany the trump cards is simply false: The suit cards were standard for many decades prior to the invention of Tarot's trump cards, and were directly adopted from 14th-century Arabic playing cards.

Moakley never claimed that the suit cards were invented to accompany the trumps.If I say I intend a marching band in a parade to precede, say, a float with, say, elected representatives of the constituency on it, I have not said or presupposed or implied that the marching band was created for that function.

Other of Hurst's criticisms of Moakley are justified. He correctly says that Moakley's chapter 2, on the "Cigiognara mix-up" is flawed. Also, when he says that while some cards or juxtapositions of cards may have a ribald spirit, others do not, such as the Last Judgment. Also the cards do not show the Devil in a ribald way, or the Emperor, Empress, Popess, and Pope. Her Carnival aspect seems overstated.

Other criticisms by O'Neill Most are based on misunderstanding.  He jumps to the unwarranted conclusion that she thinks the sequence is fully explainable in those terms. plus those of the poem. It is obvious from the numerous footnotes that Moakley does not hold that. Also, by picking and choosing appropriately, he finds that Moakley only commits herself to three of Petrarch's six triumphs: Love, Death, and Eternity. Actually, they are Love/Chastity, Death/Time, and Eternity. In minchiate she finds both Fame and Eternity.


My own criticisms:

Moakley's main errors, as far as I can see, are in the nature of assumptions she makes, based on the material available to her. (That should be a lesson: never make assumptions based on what happens to be known, without good reason.) One is that the PMB cards represent well enough the original designs on the cards. Given that she knew about the Cary-Yale, she assumed from the cards shown in Hargrave's book (p. 226) that the designs were similar, as they are for all but one. That was an important exception as it is the one with the trumpet-lady on top, although the trumpet could not have been made oy in the small, poor quality reproduction. She could have investigated further. Second, she assumed that the lists of the titles of the cards and their order that were available to her were representative of the cards' original order. Since she knew that the lists were 50-100 years after the PMB, and that minchiate of around the same time reflected a very different order, that was not a good assumption.

Another part of her thesis was that we have to take into account the ribald nature of Carnival in intepreting the cards and their order. Here one problem is that we don't know what the floats were like in Carnival processions. Moakley tries to make up for that lack of knowledge by looking at the commedia dell'arte. But that will only take us so far. Also, any ribaldry built into the cards may not have come from any actual procession; players getting together to play cards is enough of an occasion for ribaldry in itself, as the extant documents (Lollio, Aretino, and others) make evident. That ribaldry entered into the formation of some of the cards was accepted by Dummett in relation to the Bagat, whom he called "the Mountebank", and the Popess. Others, such as Ross Caldwell and Girolomo Zorli, have referred to ribaldry in relation to the apparent chaos of the cards. Other researchers reject the idea that there is any chaos at all, and that different orders merely reflect different ways of telling the story. It  seems clear to me that ribaldry did affect the design of some of the cards in the PMB and other decks, such as the d'Este and the Metropolitan. Whether that was present at the beginning is hard to say, in part because we don't know how many cards there were in the beginning or in which of the different milieus (Milan, Florence, Bologna, Ferrara) it was.

Over the 50 years since Moakley's book, subsequent discoveries have shown what some of the other factors are that should be taken into account.While researchers have not found out more about Carnival processions, they have found out a great deal about religious processions and wedding processions, in the latter case including especially the cassoni, or wedding chests, that were carried. These other types of procession may be more important than Carnival.

Religious processions are particularly relevant to one of O'Neill's objections. He says that the last night of Carnival besides being an occasion for ribaldry would be expected also to be preparation for Lent. Where int he cards is that different, more serious mood reflected?  The answer is that these cards, many of them, were already conventional symbols in a religious setting: the virtues, the Wheel of Fortune, Death, the Devil, Hell, the Star, the Sun and Moon, the Pope, and ladies resembling the Popess. These associations remain.

Also since Moakley wrote, the idea has come to the fore that the tarot developed in stages, an idea that even Dummett, after opposing it for decades, finally came to accept on a limited basis. Moreover, the stages might have involved different cities.. Dummett in 2004 allowed that the tarot might have begun in Milan, for example, been augmented in Ferrara by adding the 3 virtues, and the order of the virtues changed when they were added elsewhere. Dummett says (see viewtopic.php?f=11&t=1073&p=16421&hilit=berry+john#p16421):

Players in other places heard of this addition, and copied it; but they did not know where in the rankng these three cards were supposed to go. They made up their own minds on the question, with divergent results.

Other researchers, before and after Dummett's 2004 article, have used the same principles in regard to other cards. Thus what may have started out as all-serious as Petrarch himself might have had ribald cards, among others, added and serious cards subtracted, going from one city to another, and at least minor changes in the order and depictions (serious vs. ribald) as well.

So while Moakley may have made mistakes, questionable interpretations, or ambiguities in detail, her overall theory remains totally defensible, in my opinion at least, as long as we go by what she actually wrote  as opposed to the summaries that others have made of her, and take into account what has been learned since her time.