Re: jk poor fellow is in Tarot history now

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Oh yes, still exist. Unlike so many of us.

John Berry was trying to be nice, and failing.

See, that was the problem with that book. Nobody could ever figure out why Bob had written it.

It really isn't possible to immerse yourself in the annals (much less the lore) of playing cards, and especially Tarot cards, and maintain any reasonable hope of staying respectable. It is the realm of Caravaggio, Eliphas Levi, Jodorowsky, and now Guillermo del Toro.

Bob really needed to be respectable. Otherwise his science buddies at Oak Ridge (and eventually the CIA) might be suspicious.

Very Hitchcockian dilemma.

Thus...vertigo.

Re: jk poor fellow is in Tarot history now

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John Berry had a preference for the topic "general playing cards" and in his evaluation of the book of Bob (1989) he was near to that, what was my own preference in the Tarot material, especially my own 5x14 theory (also made 1989 without any knowledge about John Berry and his opinions). So I for my own part think not, that Berry failed.
Actually I lost my interest in 19th/20th century Tarot with the detection, that the similarity of Kabbala and Tarot was created by Levy and Golden Dawn with a reflection on the letter order of the Sepher Yetzirah. The arguments, why John Berry had his opinion, I don`t see clearly, it's just my impression, that he was marching on similar ways. John Berry again wrote about the topic in 2004 and it is said, that it was last work, published posthum in the
Playing Card journal of the IPCS.
In the same year Dummett suddenly wrote about a theory with 18 Tarot cards. This happened short before the death of John Berry. Suddenly Dummett knew about the document of Ferrara 1457, in which 2 Ferrarese Trionfi card decks are described as having 70 cards. Dummett speaks of an anonymous "another theory" and he didn't give references. The note of Ferrara 1457 was published by Trionfi.com 2003 with a reference to the Ortalli text (The prince and the playing cards, published Ludica 1996). Franco Pratesi had pointed to the publication before (1998). As it seems, it didn`t got much attention in the IPCS, and we were the first in the internet with it.

1987 and 1989 are now 32/34 years ago and it was before the time of common internet and the world of authors was quite different from today.
Huck
http://trionfi.com

Re: jk poor fellow is in Tarot history now

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it is not that [playing card historians] do not share his feeling that these enigmatic images have or had meaning individually
In truth, the playing card historians rue the day somebody back in the day thought it a good plan to employ what were not very enigmatic images on their playing cards. This led to such terrible outcomes!—like gamblers and their descendants the occultists going on flights of fancy—not to mention the cartofems and the marketers crafting their own zany schemes for profits and cardboard power. Can't we all just get along and gamble with our cards in peace?

No, we can't.
rather we are frustrated by the lack of a satisfying explanation of why these images are found together.
It can be very frustrating to be frustrated.

I have no idea what a "satisfying" explanation would look like to the IPCS denizens. But the explanation that seems to be systematically parading itself (so to speak) on early Tarots is DOA for the historians because it sounds a little too much like an open window for those dreadful thieving occultists, and nobody wants to let them in. Well, the IPCS doesn't anyway.

And so, acknowledging Bob tried to be different by offering an actual "mindset" for consideration, when we get to this conclusion by Berry in the very first paragraph:
I find this account no more attractive or convincing than the usual cloudy stuff that appears in booklets accompanying modern occult Tarot
packs.
This is what I meant by Berry failing to be "nice" to Bob. Because that is about as damning a thing as any playing card historian could say about anyone, especially "a member of our Society." Basically Berry Dummetted Bob, suggesting he wasn't any different than some fellow like A. E. Waite, posturing about rising about the occult stuff and then just doing his own version of it after claiming a morally superior position to do it mo-bettuh than the other mysterians.

I can promise you, from my own quite long correspondences and debates with Bob over many years, the very last thing in the world he would want is to be professionally diminished by being compared with occultists. Problem was, and this is true of IPCS types in general, when Bob came into the pop-Tarot communities, he came across like some Victorian colonizer, invading to educate the poor savages about how dumb their beliefs were. And he quite rightly ended up in a pot.

One of the real problems in the basic assumptions of many playing card historians is that they really want to tell us the story of playing cards, their structures and rules, as if those were a people or an ethnicity, entirely separate from the human beings and cultures which created them. Bob was not wrong to go looking backwards to try and obtain some forward-looking notions about what the answers are to Tarot origins and representational systems.

I would say his main failing was that he didn't have much of a sense of humor. And the people who made Tarot definitely did.

Re: jk poor fellow is in Tarot history now

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This thread started with some disparaging remarks, or at least a quotation and a link, about Jess Karlin. Then, for reasons I don't understand, it shifted to John Berry and Robert O'Neill. What is the connection?

Well, back to Jess Karlin, whoever he really is (perhaps there is some understanding I don't know). I don't know anything about his online presence, except that he is said (on Aeclectic, I think) to have brought to the English-speaking readers the French etymological dictionary writers' view of the word tarot, that it derived from the Arabic tarak. This same information is found in Depaulis's Le Tarot Revele, and I don't find it mentioned in print before then.

Otherwise, I only know Karlin's book Rhapsodies of the Bizarre: The Tarot Essays of Antoine Court de Gebelin & M. le Comte de Mellet (Lulu: 2002), which is a very competent translation of the two essays, along with copious and as far as I can tell accurate notes, both situating the essays in the context of their time and attempting to show how much later occultists, such as Waite and Crowley, owed to these two essays, not to their credit. Karlin also goes to some pains to reconstruct the game of tarot as the two Frenchmen presented it. His introduction is mostly devoted to how Wicked Pack's emphasis on debunking de Gebelin and de Mellet gets in the way of understanding them more fully in the context of their time and of what came before and after - hence the need for his own book. It is a criticism he seems to extend to other chapters of Wicked Pack.

In general I found his book helpful and even refreshing. As someone who buys into neither the occultists' own views of their history nor the debunking contempt of a Dummett (not that debunking isn't also needed sometimes), I can see why he would ruffle some feathers. He seems to be wanting to treat the history of the occultist tarot in the same way as a historian of ideas would treat any other current of thought.

Re: jk poor fellow is in Tarot history now

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mikeh wrote: 27 Dec 2021, 01:49 This thread started with some disparaging remarks, or at least a quotation and a link, about Jess Karlin. Then, for reasons I don't understand, it shifted to John Berry and Robert O'Neill. What is the connection?
It`s related to some discussions before 2003, maybe 1995-97. Robert O'Neill was already very active in the web, I was already active a littrle bit and Jess Karlin was very active. I remember also a single post of Michael Dummett. I remember also George Leake and I don't know what happened to him. I don't know, where the archive of alt.tarot has gone to.
Huck
http://trionfi.com

Re: jk poor fellow is in Tarot history now

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mikeh wrote: 27 Dec 2021, 01:49 ...some disparaging remarks, or at least a quotation and a link, about Jess Karlin...
Yes, but those things were written by alleged experts, so they must have been 100% bona fide.

But that doesn't necessarily mean those experts were telling the truth, nor that they even knew or cared about what they were writing.

Few people do these days.

Re: your confusion.

Well, Huck was just riffing off a comment I made (in another thread it is true) about the cover of Bob's book. That is why he posted the cover and the movie poster.

And, then you raised the issue a bit yourself, referring to ROTB, which in fairness does begin by kind of snarking at Bob O'Neill, and for that matter Stuart Kaplan too. So, the connections to Karlin?

Well, Bob's big mission online was to win the hearts (I'm not sure he thought they had minds) of the turn-of-the-century online Tarot community. And in so doing, he early on encountered Mary K. Greer and her acolytes, who seemed to Bob to have some sort of dominant role in that society. Greer as you may recall was passionately defenestrating men in general and the occultist men Waite and Crowley in particular as part of the Cartofeminist marketing scheme. Since jk was not a fan of Greer or of her schemes, and often poked fun at her on alt.tarot (the old Usenet group), Bob briefly declared war on jk and publicly denounced him and encouraged everyone to "shun" him, like we were all Amish or something. When people pointed out to Bob he was being ridiculous, he then apologized to jk, but you know a certain pattern of stanses and standards had been established.

Oh, and then of course jk helped Bob peddle the vast stores of his unbought books. The alt.tarot FAQ even included a link for the book and jk did this for the most part as a friendly gesture, since in fact he did not think much of the book, but he resisted saying so initially because all the alleged experts kept speaking so highly of it he figured it must have some value. And you know Bob needed some help. Anyway, the books started to move. Eventually Bob sold them all. Success. Naturally Bob never said thanks.

As for Berry, well, a link was posted so I replied to what it said. I noted Berry also did not think much of Bob's book. But he also tried to sound nice and failed.
mikeh wrote: 27 Dec 2021, 01:49Well, back to Jess Karlin, whoever he really is (perhaps there is some understanding I don't know).
My understanding is he died a while back, though that is based only upon an absurd thread I read about that being so on tarotforum.net, not a terribly reliable source for much. But the thread is amusing at least.
mikeh wrote: 27 Dec 2021, 01:49I don't know anything about his online presence
Well, he was one of the pioneers of online Tarot culture, along with the Cartofems, the playing-card historians, the playing-card peddlers, the occultists, and all the other tribes and groups and individuals drawn to talk about Tarot and many other matters.

Much Tarot history was debated and even made in those early days.
mikeh wrote: 27 Dec 2021, 01:49Otherwise, I only know Karlin's book Rhapsodies of the Bizarre: The Tarot Essays of Antoine Court de Gebelin & M. le Comte de Mellet (Lulu: 2002), which is a very competent translation of the two essays, along with copious and as far as I can tell accurate notes...
I guess if you're into that sort of thing, it would be an OK book.

I know he spent five years of his life researching and writing the thing, and when it came out it was widely denounced by large numbers of the faux-players in the community as just a "rehash" of existing material. Most of the playing-card historians acknowledged it was a valid contribution. Exactly of what is debatable. But yes I think the concern jk had was to honor the ideas of the occultists and trace their development and not take cheap shots just because so many playing-card historians have been encouraged to do this by easily offended and highly biased characters like Michael Dummett.

Bob O'Neill just to be clear said ROTB was a failure of scholarship because it resorted to personal attacks (like on himself) and nobody ever does that in a valid work of history. Really, that is what he said.

See, it is so much easier if you just lived through it all. Same problem with all history. Lots of work.

Re: jk poor fellow is in Tarot history now

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Huck wrote: 27 Dec 2021, 03:26 I remember also a single post of Michael Dummett. I remember also George Leake...
If you are referring to the Dummett remarks I am familiar with, it was Leake who posted them, all mostly rejecting the criticisms jk had not actually presented formally to provoke his response. Leake just passed along jk's remarks in email (regarding Wicked Pack) to Dummett who then replied complaining that jk fellow was "obstreperous". jk did challenge Dummett to a public debate on his Wicked Pack claims about the occultists, but Dummett declined. At least Dummett's bad scholarship and bad faith provided a jumping off point for ROTB.

Re: jk poor fellow is in Tarot history now

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asterix_a ... oman_Agent
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At a meeting with his associates, it is suggested to Caesar that causing internal conflict between the Gauls will lead to their breakdown. He is then told by another Official about Tortuous Convolvulus, a natural troublemaker whose mere presence causes arguments, quarrels and fights. This had him sentenced to the lions in the circus, but his ability had the lions eat each other and he is still in prison. Impressed by his abilities, Caesar sends him to the Gauls. On the way, Convolvulus has the whole ship arguing, from the captain to the galley slaves; and when the pirates attack the ship, Convolvulus represents one of them as having been bribed earlier by himself, and thus provokes them to sink their own ship. The pirate chief realises their mistake, and comments that they don't even need the Gauls to make fools of themselves.
In the German version he is called Tullius Destructivus and it is called "Streit um Asterix". In the French original he is called Tullius Détritus and the title is "La Zizanie" (Discord).
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glennfwright wrote: 24 Dec 2021, 14:59
Bob was not wrong to go looking backwards to try and obtain some forward-looking notions about what the answers are to Tarot origins and representational systems.

I would say his main failing was that he didn't have much of a sense of humor. And the people who made Tarot definitely did.
Huck
http://trionfi.com
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