Playing Cards

 

     The deck of playing cards has an elaborate structure, capable of communicating a symbolic code, just as a language does.  The suit and rank of each card define a specific position in the grid, resembling in this way the coordinates of a mapping system.  Games and techniques of divination are both based on the random selection of certain cards or groups of cards with which value or other specific significance is associated. 

     Some structural characteristics are undeniable, chief among them the four suits and thirteen ranks [1].  An initial division produces the colors, red and black.  Each of these then splits again, producing the four suits which show only a small deviation through the centuries and the countries of Europe, where, doubtless due to increased trade with Egypt and the East, they had first appeared shortly before the Renaissance.

     Considered diachronically, a session with playing cards, whether recreational or fortune-telling,  presents a sort of table model of fate, in which each player receives a certain destiny in the deal.  In a worthwhile game, the player’s outcome will depend in  part on skill just as in cartomancy the subtlety of the practitioner is often decisive.  Receiving a strong or weak hand parallels being born into affluence or poverty, health or disability, though a vulnerable position can sometimes come out ahead through bluffing or other strategy.  Fortune-telling differs only in that the implications are made explicit with the occult practitioners  defining the specifics they find implied by a particular array of cards.  Like a life, the game or the session with a “reader/advisor” has a beginning and an end with victories and defeats between.  The cards allow players to experience a variety of such brief imaginary lives recreationally or, if the players are gambling, with some real consequences reflecting the symbolic ones. 

     Synchronically, the array of possibilities in a deck of cards is designed as a universal symbolic system, like the catalogue of possibilities available in the divination tools offered by astrology, I Ching, the Ifa oracle, and the like.  The more elaborate mahjong set of tiles evolved from playing cards, with possibilities far beyond a simple set of dominos.  [2]  Many have noted the numerological correspondence of playing cards with the passage of a year: fifty-two cards and fifty-two weeks, four suits and four seasons, thirteen of each suit and the thirteen lunar months, two colors corresponding to night and day, yet these associations are in general an indication of their encyclopedic comprehensiveness rather than a specific and determined signification.   To some the suits possess differing inherent worth.  For instance, in bridge the lowest is clubs, followed by diamonds, hearts, and spades.

     The face values playing cards are fixed, representing an increasing series from two to ten, then ascending further through the face cards.  The ranks prima facie indicate a differentiation in worth, and the face cards clearly refer to the stratification of feudal society, with the numbered cards representing the lower tiers of society.  The deck then forms an image of “the great chain of being” or scala naturae, as it was more commonly called in Latin. [3]  The deck arrived in Europe from the Mamluk Sultanate where the face cards were all  male, with an “under-deputy” (thānī nā'ib) in the place now occupied by the queen, a pattern reflected in the German decks with an “Obermann” and a lower status Untermann)..  In some Italian decks the place is held by a knight (cavallo).

     In some games, of course, and in particular when using the cards to tell fortunes, every rank must have associated meanings.  Any number of modern occultists have specified such adventitious significance.  For instance, one popular book, written seventy-five years ago yet currently available at Wal-Mart and Target, says that the three indicates happiness, the seven spirituality, and the nine humanitarianism. [4]  All codes, however, of this sort are arbitrarily assigned.  This very susceptibility to a variety of interpretations indicates the cards’ underdetermination, allowing the same deck to be used in  an endless variety of ways.  Specific cards share with Symbolist images a fruitful imprecision conducive to a broad range of interpretations.

     The four suits have varied surprisingly little since they came to Europe from the Mamluk Sultanate in the fourteenth century.  Originally the suits of the Mamluk cards were cups, coins, swords, and polo-sticks.  Virtually all suits since have been minor variations of these four.  The swords, in Spanish espadas, became spades, the cups turned to hearts, the coins to diamonds, and, since polo was not a significant game in Europe, the last suit was changed to lances or clubs.  The familiar English set corresponds closely with the suits used in early fifteenth century France, while the Tarot suits are closer to the Muslim model.  Arriving in Britain through Belgium In the passage from Belgium to England the French suits piques (pikes), as coeurs (hearts), carreaux (tiles, “lozenges”), and trefles (clovers)  became the modern hearts, spades, diamonds, and clubs.  In Spain and parts of Italy and France the naibi  deck [5] came into use using cups (copas), coins (oros), swords (espadas), and clubs (bastos), the only difference being that in Italy the clubs are ceremonial batons, whereas in Spain they are crude cudgels like Hercules carried.  In Germany and other parts of central Europe the suits are leaves (Grün, Blatt, Laub, Pik or Gras), hearts (Herz or Rot), bells (Schelle, Schell or Bolle) and acorns (Eichel or Kreuz),

     The most profound explanation of the origin of the playing card suits was suggested over a hundred years ago by Jessie Weston. [5]  She argues that the suits correspond as a group to both the treasures of the Tuatha de Danaan and the objects displayed in the Grail castle.  Links between the magic objects of ancient Celtic lore [6] (the Sword of Nuada, the Lia Fáil or Stone of Destiny, the Spear of Lugh, and the Cauldron of the Dagda) and the numinous objects seen in the Grail castle (the Grail itself -- either Cup or Dish, the Sword, the Stone, and the Lance) certainly have remarkable similarity to the naibi suits (cups, swords, coins, and clubs), but Weston felt that both were themselves developments of a more archaic significance.  To her behind the set are elemental sexual symbols through which people sought to encourage abundance and fertility through a ἱερός γάμος, a sacred marriage, that ensures the continuity of life. 

     For her the suits evolved from a pair of sexual symbols, doubled then to make four; lance and sword are clearly the male components, dish and cup the female.  While Weston and others of the Cambridge group doubtless over-emphasized the centrality of re-energizing the “spirit if the year,” the religio-magical motive of  promoting the fruitfulness of the earth and the prosperity of the human community is evident world-wide.

     The origin of the images and their later resonance and reception need not be consistent.  In fact, the durability of a symbol may well benefit from its underdetermination.  A great many interpretive schemes have been applied to them, but all of these are secondary, afterthoughts in a way to the original promotion of life for which they were first intended.  Sometimes the red cards were associated with beneficence and the black with threats.  To some the suits suggested the four elements, to others the cardinal directions.  They have been associated as well with the social classes: hearts (once cups or chalices) suggesting the clergy, spades (once swords) indicating the nobility, diamonds (once coins) for those engaged in commerce, and clubs (once crude wooden ones like Hercules’) for the peasantry. 

     Specific figures from history and legend were sometimes identified with individual cards: the king of spades being pictured as the Biblical David, that of hearts as Charlemagne, diamonds as Julius Caesar, and clubs as Alexander, thus encompassing the known world with the lands of Jews, Franks, Romans, and Greeks.  The queens were identified with Athena (spades), Judith (hearts), Jacob's wife Rachel (diamonds), and Argine, an anagram for regina (clubs), while the jacks were Charlemagne’s knight Ogier (spades); La Hire, a general in the Hundred Years’ War (hearts), the Trojan Hector (diamonds); and Lancelot or Judas Maccabeus (clubs). 

     The significance of the cards is determined strictly by the rules of the game.  Thus queen of spades in the game of hearts is undesirable, trumps in bridge make a good hand, and any two pair will beat a couple of aces in poker.  The flow of the arrival of such cards, meaningful only within the compass of a game, constructs an experience resembling the recognition of motifs in a musical composition, a fugue or  symphony, but there is an important difference.  Every note of The Well-Tempered Klavier is intentional, chosen by Bach, whereas the cards should appear without any conscious design. [8]  The loss in “beauty” due to chance composition is compensated by the fact that the card table more nearly replicates the unpredictability of life itself.   Apart from dependence on chance, the play of the game brings good or ill or middling fortune just as in life.  The value of speculating on the cards of one’s fellow-players likewise resembles the prudent conduct of worldly affairs in which the estimation of the power of rivals may be relevant.  

    The card game is wholly ludic, just for the fun of it, like the delights and disappointments vicariously undergone by the film viewer.  Yet a hand in cards is marvelously abstract, given meaning only by the specific terms of a given game.  Adeptness at the manipulation of symbols is the most distinctive human characteristic, doubtless the source of our species’ success, if success it be, and playing cards allow people to develop, but more importantly, to relish this skill in concert with others.  Dog owners cannot doubt that a dog in play, exercising canine athletic and perceptual abilities, is having a grand time.  A table of suburban bridge players may be doing very much the same in human terms.

 

 

 

1.  I say nothing about the Tarot since, in spite of enthusiasts fond of claiming ancient and exotic origins for the deck, these have been shown to be a variation of the older deck.  In spite of its portentous images, the Tarot deck was developed in fifteenth century Italy for the game trionfi and exclusively used for games until several hundred years later when its use in divination began.

2.  The first references to Chinese card-like game pieces called pái (牌) (a term that could apply to either tiles or cards) date from the ninth century C. E. describing the use of inscribed paper “leaves” and dice in a board game.  Playing cards are known there from circa 1200 C. E.

3.  See Arthur O. Lovejoy’s classic study The Great Chain of Being.  For an early exposition of the scala naturae, ranking animals by their apparent complexity, see Aristotle’s Historia Animalia.

4.  Edith Randall and Florence Evylinn Campbell, Sacred Symbols of the Ancients: The Mystical Significance of the Fifty-two Cards (1947).  Randall and Campbell mention as their source Olney Richmond who claimed to revive a 20,000-year-old tradition in Chicago in 1888. 

5.  The word naibi, of Arabic origin, was used in the original statute mentioning cards in fifteenth century Florence and it is used yet today of the Spanish deck, the baraja Española.

6.  In Ch. 6 of Ritual to Romance (1920).  While it is true that Weston ‘s readership is the result of T. S. Eliot featuring her in the footnotes to The Waste Land and that the Cambridge School as a whole has lost authority, her work, like that of Jane Harrison and Frazer himself, is replete with fruitful observations.  The fact that Weston was susceptible to the occultists of her day whom she liked to think the latest in a lineage descending from ancient esoteric masters does not invalidate her every conclusion.  Even the connections she traces between the treasures of the Tuatha de Danaan, the Grail objects, and the suits is also unnecessary to accept her fundamental idea that spade, hearts, diamonds, and clubs have sexual connotations.  

7.  The treasures appear in an interpolated recension of the legendary Lebor Gabála Érenn (The Book of the Taking of Ireland), the same passage introduction, interpolated in the introduction of Cath Maige Tuired (The Second Battle of Mag Tuired), and in "The Four Jewels", a later, short text in the Yellow Book of Lecan.

8.  Some works of Cage, Stockhausen, and other aleatory composers constitute at least in part an exception.