Affirmative Action

1
So, it's Friday. A good day to laugh in a bad world to be (in many places).

I made reference to Cynthia Giles' account of Jess Karlin a few weeks ago. Her version of history is, let us say, a little biased. And incomplete certainly. My point of discussing this in this essay, "Bullies", is in part to raise an issue being now much discussed in our cultures. What constitutes bullying? Many people claim it is simply being made fun of. Or even having someone just ask you a question for clarification of what seems to be a dubious claim on your part.

Let's face it, almost everybody feels bullied by anyone who does not embrace as pure genius them and every booger their brain has ever produced. That's just how people are.

But a more relevant issue (for Tarot history) has to do with the title of this article, something Giles said to Jess Karlin long ago, something that informed Karlin about where ideologically the "cartofeminists" were coming from. Basically, a point of grievance, and an assumption concerning that grievance which colored the way cartofeminists interpreted events and how much (or how little) they felt an accurate reporting of them was necessitated.

The interest for myself anyway in trying to figure out what was going on was rooted in that first interaction Karlin had with Mary K. Greer back in 1995 on alt.tarot. But also in a review jk did on the Haindl Tarot in that year. He had gone into detail on the concept of the Goddess promoted by Rachel Pollack (who did the English language Haindl books), and the weird effort of Haindl to make up for the bad things the Germans had done (back in that war probably most of you no longer recall), by Haindl's trying to marry runes and Hebrew letters in his Tarot.

There were just lots of weird, politically-tinged, choices and explanations going on and it seemed to be coordinated. And, referring to Greer's comments, the effort to cut Aleister Crowley (particularly) out of the action and cast him aside so Frieda Harris was anointed the true creator of the Thoth Tarot really seemed like a dishonest carny trick.

But then Giles explained it to Karlin during a trip she made to Austin in 1996. The cartofeminists lying about the facts was, she said, just an act of "affirmative action" to get even for what Crowley and Waite primarily, had allegedly done to push the women artists aside. Again, grievance and vengeance. Or "ressentment".

And that clarified for jk what he was really dealing with.

You have to be careful out there when you are doing history. And you cannot or your should not care whether or not you will be loved for doing history correctly.

Re: Affirmative Action

2
.... :-) .... the momentary state of the history of Tarot History in matters of Cartofeminism is comparable to the state of women soccer in 1955 or so. ... the women are missing. At least in the Tarothistory forum. Maybe that's the revenge for having too boring topics. This is different to the good old days in alt.tarot ....
well, the number of male writers also has gone down.
Huck
http://trionfi.com

Re: Affirmative Action

3
I'm not sure what you mean about the soccer comparison.

You mean "the women" are missing here? In this forum?

They certainly are not missing elsewhere.

And cartofeminist books and ideas still shape a lot of what people do in Tarot. And I would say the religion of grievance shapes a lot of the larger sphere of our social and political dynamics, not always unjustifiably. The topics in this forum are like the topics on alt.tarot—they are made up of the things people here (whomever they may be) on any particular day want to talk about. Most people who count themselves as interested in Tarot will not want to talk about Tarot history just in general. It will be boring to them—unless of course it involves the obligatory accounts of Goddess cults unjustly exterminated by the Kurgans or exciting exploits of Plan 9 outer-space aliens or reveals secrets never before revealed about fortunetelling.

Just looking over the topics list in this "room" they only seem to cover a very small amount of the over 500 years. I don't know if that is a recent development.

So, again, what exactly are you saying? That women do not like Tarot history—at least the brand of it that you all do here? Or what exactly?

Re: Affirmative Action

4
Yes, women are missing here.
The last woman, who had some relevant contribution, was Lorredan (667 posts here) alias Rosanne at tarotforum.net, and she left us possibly in about 2016.
Mary Greer was also here and had 55 posts.
Topics after 1800 are very rare in this forum. Most topics are pre-1500. We started as an emai-list LTarot 2003-2005 and topics were more or less limited to 15th century. The moderators at TarotL had made too much unnecessary trouble. Since 2003 we also had communicated at tarotforum.net. Then the moderator activities at tarotforum.net caused, that this forum was founded in 2008.

It seems, that Cynthia Giles has left the Tarot scene long ago .... https://www.cynthiagiles.com/biography
Her book: The Tarot: History, Mystery and Lore, Cynthia Giles, Simon and Schuster, 1994 - 256 pages
https://books.google.de/books?id=BomDnb ... navlinks_s
Generally a lot of people has left the Tarot theme, it simply was more popular in earlier times.
Huck
http://trionfi.com

Re: Affirmative Action

5
glennfwright wrote: 08 Jul 2022, 19:19 Most people who count themselves as interested in Tarot will not want to talk about Tarot history just in general. It will be boring to them—unless of course it involves the obligatory accounts of Goddess cults unjustly exterminated by the Kurgans or exciting exploits of Plan 9 outer-space aliens or reveals secrets never before revealed about fortunetelling.
Versus that New Age dreck and wide-ranging places like Aclectic tarot, is the reason I've always understood why this Researcher's Study existed - so we didn't have to deal with the crackpots. And I don't say that with any gender connotations. Some of the best academic articles (e.g.,Eva Frojmovič) and books I've read are by women - I'm currently reading Marilyn Yalom's Birth of the Chess Queen, which necessarily has a 'women's studies' aspect about it. But as Huck pointed out - they simply aren't here for whatever reason (I think there was a Kate here for a while as well). They are certainly welcome.

Re: Affirmative Action

6
Phaeded wrote: 09 Jul 2022, 18:07They are certainly welcome.
Not a criticism. Just an observation. What the host or welcomer counts as welcome may differ from what the prospective or desired guest may count as that. And when the absent constitute a large class of human beings, like women, that may signify something the hosts have not recognized or which they have rejected as irrelevant, but which still operates as an obstacle to many people of that class actually feeling welcome. It is a feeling after all.

I have both criticized Tarot history and historians (a lot), and played one online for many years. We should understand there are different brands of historians and Tarot historians. Dummett was and his followers are a brand of Tarot historian. I used to enjoy irritating that crew quite a bit, because they behaved pretty much as piously about things as many occultists or cartofeminists.

Then there are actual historians (like they studied and got degrees to be one of those), and the problem with them is often that they do not have the time and basic OCD qualities necessary to root out the facts about Tarot cards. As we have seen recently, finding those can be a bit like hunting for buried treasure and so attracts people who have those qualities maybe more than those of a scholar.

Lastly, "dreck" is most of life. And it is certainly a big part of Tarot history. I will take the dreck and the dreckers over the fascists who would, for example, run the "gypsies" out of Tarot so the Dr. Ritters of Tarot can feel more pride in their ethnically cleansed version of the dreck.

There really are no solutions to these issues. And ones most offer—pristine forums protected from all contrarian content—are nothing but marketing forums or cathedrals of the dim.

Re: Affirmative Action

7
Well, some days you think you will never hear a name again... then Twitter points you right to them.

I was in the thick of this back in the day. As a former moderation, brief owner by accident of Tarot-L, and someone who muted both Greer and JK, I can you tell that Cynthia's account is spot on. JK was a famous troll and could be very cruel. You can read a lot of it for yourself on the tarot-l archives:

https://groups.io/g/TarotL

Behind the scenes, JK often harassed moderators, other posters, and sent some pretty nasty messages in private. Banning didn't work. He would get a new email address, and come back on again. Whenever he was banned, his cadre of followers would attack whoever was doing it.. .I think Hurst compared moderators to psychopaths at one point.

JK wasn't reviled because he was doing history correctly. He was reviled because he acted horribly and did horrible things.

Frankly, the term "cartofeminist" is a misogynist in itself. And has been used frequently to apply to any woman in the tarot space. And you wonder why we don't play on those terms?
Huck wrote: Generally a lot of people has left the Tarot theme, it simply was more popular in earlier times.
I think the advent of social media has made it harder to gather like minds. However, I think you are very wrong, that tarot is not as popular, nor tarot history. It's just harder to find it all in one place.
Phaeded wrote: I've always understood why this Researcher's Study existed - so we didn't have to deal with the crackpots
What is your definition of a non-crackpot? Waite? Mathers? Etteilla? Gébelin? Or are we only sitting at the Visconti-Sforza and calling it a day?

Honestly, I didn't know about this forum until today. So I guess now I'm here :D.

Re: Affirmative Action

8
Tirjasdyn wrote: 19 Aug 2022, 22:22 Honestly, I didn't know about this forum until today. So I guess now I'm here :D.
Welcome ...
I think the advent of social media has made it harder to gather like minds. However, I think you are very wrong, that tarot is not as popular, nor tarot history. It's just harder to find it all in one place.
Following the name "Tirjasdyn" I don't find much about "Tarot History" as we have defined it. Well, we are selective in our definition, not objective. We have a lot of 15th century, we have some things older than 15th century. We have also themes connected to later times than 1500, but somehow it stops around 1800 and with the beginning of divination with Tarot. After 1800 is rare here.
Naturally the time after 1800 is also "History". But it didn't take place here.

In 2003 an email-list L-Tarot was founded and this followed the theme "early years of the Trionfi deck" and this meant 15th century. Most members came from Tarot-L and were not lucky wth the moderator activities there.
Around the same time tarotforum.net started and offered various specialized history themes. The forum technology had advantages against the email lists, and L-Tarot closed (about 2005).
But the moderator ideas repeated at tarotforum.net and this forum was founded as an alternative discussion forum (2008). Tarotforum.net didn't like that. Finally tarotforum.net died (2017, I think). Well, this wasn't a real good idea, but it happened.
Huck
http://trionfi.com

Re: Affirmative Action

9
Tirjasdyn wrote: 19 Aug 2022, 22:22
Phaeded wrote: I've always understood why this Researcher's Study existed - so we didn't have to deal with the crackpots
What is your definition of a non-crackpot? Waite? Mathers? Etteilla? Gébelin? Or are we only sitting at the Visconti-Sforza and calling it a day?

Honestly, I didn't know about this forum until today. So I guess now I'm here :D.
Welcome! I started at TarotL in 2002, and moderated at Aeclectic for a year or so as well. What name did you use at TarotL?

My definition of a non-crackpot is someone who accepts that Tarot was invented as a card game shortly before 1440 in a city in Italy, probably Florence, that it did not encode any secrets or riddles, and that the association of the game with esoteric thinking of any kind began only in the mid-to-late 18th century. Divination is a different issue.

Among those you list, I don't think any of them would make the non-crackpot cut nowadays, if they held on to the beliefs they expressed in their lifetimes. Of course none of them knew very much of what we know now, so it is unfair to judge them by this measure.

Playing-card historians generally consider Antoine Court de Gébelin to the be the father of the crackpots, although I am more indulgent, since crackpot ideas (i.e. baselessly speculative, or simply made up, ad hoc) about Tarot were expressed long before Gébelin, even if they weren't occult or esoteric, and were not as thoroughly developed as his thesis. Gébelin's (and his guest-author the Comte de Mellet) were the ones that started esoteric and divinatory Tarot, with Etteilla playing the role of Apostle of the new creed.

We don't sit on the Visconti-Sforza and call it a day at all! Visconti di Modrone (aka Cary-Yale), Brambilla, and Viscont-Sforza (aka Pierpont-Morgan Bergamo) are among the earliest surviving Tarots, but there are others of the same age which have been recognized now (the last 15 years) as Florentine productions. My own focus has long been on a "proto-Tarot," designed by Marziano Rampini di Sant'Alosio for Filippo Maria Visconti. Printed cards and sheets, like the Rosenwald sheets at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Cary Sheet at the Beinecke library at Yale University, and the "Budapest" sheets (because so many examples are there), and Minchiate, also get plenty of attention here. This is only for the iconographical aspect of early Tarot study. Tarot as a card game gets less attention, although every regular participant here knows the sources. Finally, the literary evidence is crucial, so this is discussed a lot.

As Huck pointed out, we tend to stop at the occult and divinatory stage, since none of us is a card-reader or practicing occultist. I myself am very familiar with this side of the continuing history of Tarot, though, and it is by far the primary area of interest at my Tarot History Facebook group.

In terms of general interest in Tarot history, I have to disagree with Huck as well. My experience on the FB group convinces me that historical knowledge of Tarot (and playing cards more generally) is at the highest I've ever seen it. Besides more source texts becoming available, not only in the form of online books but also raw archival sources, we are in a golden age of historical reproductions and recreations, by people like Sullivan Hismans, Marco Cesare Benedetti, and Yves Reynaud, not to mention the older stalwarts of historical reproductions Giordano Berti and the late Osvaldo Menegazzi (carried on by Cristina Dorsini at Il Meneghello).

Re: Affirmative Action

10
Hello Ross,

I thinking usually signed off with my name, Michelle. Though may have started back then with Tirjasdyn/Jasdyn.

Mostly I was trying to parse if crackpot meant any modern woman writer, but I'm glad that's not case. I am interested in history, and despite a few eyebrow-raising members, I've been pleasantly surprised with what I've found here.
cron