Playing Cards - Popular Scripture

From the fifteenth century on, people have found meaning in the combination of symbolism and numerical values represented in the humble playing card deck.


.queen.of.the.eternity. by =noah-kh on deviantART

The Queen of Hearts, the Ace of Spades, the Trumps and Jokers. I recently found an interesting site, trionfi.com, with several good articles on the cards, their history, and iconography.

It's interesting to me as a former card game player and tarot deck user, to think of the hold some of the ideas present in the deck still have on our imaginations, the trump suit, in particular, absent from modern playing card decks apart from the joker/fool.

Anyway, there are a number of ways of parsing the meaning of these games/divination practices. They might be expressions of Jungian archetypes, records of aesthetic transmutation, testimonials on the human love of chance and order or maybe rituals of inclusion.

For some reason they remind me of two other medieval practices:

Stain Glass Windows, like this 13th century one from Speyer displaying the temptation of Adam and Eve:


















And the images from the spiritual exercises of Ignatius of Loyola:



It's more than just the style or composition that reminds me of trump cards... There's something about the theory behind the imagery. I think it has to do with a personal experience of the sacred, some unmediated access in a time when the record of revelation was still withheld from the lay people of Christian Europe. There is something different about art that has to stand in for a withheld document, a mnemonic link in the form of an experience of art.