Minchiate

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Minchiate is a late-medieval card game, probably originating in 15th century Florence, Italy; it is no longer widely played. Minchiate can also refer to the special deck of playing cards used in the game. The deck is closely related to the tarot cards, but contains an expanded suit of trumps. The game was similar to tarocchi and the game of tarot. In the view of some people, the larger number of trump cards may shed light on what the original intentions of the creators of the Tarot deck meant by the images they included.

VII, Strength, from the Minchiate deck, depicts a woman breaking a pillar.
VII, Strength, from the Minchiate deck, depicts a woman breaking a pillar.

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[edit] History

Scholars generally believe that the Tarot cards were invented in Lombardy and the Piedmont regions of northern Italy; they spread elsewhere in Italy early on. The Minchiate represents a Florentine variant on the original game. The name first appears in Italian sources dated to 1466 in a "lost letter", 1471 in a case of prohibition and 1477, in which it is listed in a list of games permitted by law; literary references may date to around 1440 (documents). The game was later also known as Gallerini or Germini.

The name Giuoco delle Minchiate means only "Game of Minchiate"; the name minchiate has no other certain meaning, but it has been suggested that it derives from the Latin mentula, originally meaning "penis". The word minchiate comes from a dialect word meaning "nonsense" or "trifle." The word minchione is attested in Italian as meaning "fool," and minchionare means "to laugh at" someone. The intended meaning may be "The Game of the Fool," considering that the card "The Fool," also called "The Excuse," features prominently in the game play of all tarot games.

[edit] The deck itself

Minchiate differs from the standard tarot deck in several particulars. The first and most obvious difference from the tarot deck is that the trumps, which occultists and modern-day tarotists call the "major arcana", has almost doubled in size; there are forty trumps in the Minchiate, in addition to the unnumbered card The Fool or the "Excuse".

The trumps of the Minchiate deck, and their corresponding Tarot cards (if any) are:

I the Juggler (The Mountebank)

XI the Hunchback (or Time) (The Hermit)

XXI Water (none)

XXXI Pisces (none)

II the Grand Duke (none)

XII the Traitor (The Hanged Man)

XXII Air (none)

XXXII Aquarius (none)

III the Western Emperor (The Emperor)

XIII Death (Death)

XXIII Earth (none)

XXXIII Leo (none)

IV the Eastern Emperor (none)

XIV the Devil (The Devil)

XXIV Libra (none)

XXXIV Taurus (none)

V Love (The Lover)

XV the Devil's House (The House of God)

XXV Virgo (none)

XXXV Gemini (none)

VI Temperance (Temperance)

XVI Hope (none)

XXVI Scorpio (none)

XXXVI the Star (The Star)

VII Fortitude (Strength)

XVII Prudence (none)

XXVII Aries (none)

XXXVII the Moon (The Moon)

VIII Justice (Justice)

XVIII Faith (none)

XXVIII Capricorn (none)

XXXVIII the Sun (The Sun)

IX Wheel of Fortune (Wheel of Fortune)

XIX Charity (none)

XXIX Sagittarius (none)

XXXIX the World (The World)

X the Chariot (The Chariot)

XX Fire (none)

XXX Cancer (none)

XL the Trumpets (or, Fame)(Judgment)

The Ace to Ten and court cards, which occultists and modern-day tarotists call the minor arcana, resemble their tarot counterparts more closely. There are the four standard tarot and playing card suits of swords, batons, coins, and cups; these contain pip cards from ace to ten, and four court cards: a page, a knight, a queen, and a king. In the Minchiate, however, in the suits of cups and coins, the "knaves" or "pages" (Italian fanti) have been replaced by "maids" (fantine). The knights, mounted figures in the Tarot of Marseilles and similar designs, are centaurs or sphinxes in many versions of the Minchiate.

Significant differences exist also among the trumps between the Minchiate subjects and their Tarot de Marseille counterparts. As discussed below, the Pope and Papess or High Priestess are absent from the Minchiate; instead, the Minchiate contains a Grand Duke and two different Emperors. The card subjects, depicting a western and an eastern emperor, likely predate the fall of Constantinople.

The Tarot card The Tower, or House of God, becomes the House of the Devil in the Minchiate; it depicts a nude figure fleeing a burning building. The Moon lacks the Tarot de Marseille lobster and dogs; it instead depicts an astrologer studying the moon. The card corresponding to the Hermit is often called Time, or the Hunchback; it depicts an elderly man on crutches. All four cardinal virtues and the three theological virtues appear only in the very early tarot called the Cary-Yale Visconti tarot; the full series appears in no later deck, perhaps suggesting that the Minchiate series dates to early in the history of the game. The Minchiate version of the Hanged Man is called the Traitor; he carries bags in his hands as he hangs upside down, a symbol which may relate him to the medieval world's most notorious betrayer, Judas Iscariot, and his thirty pieces of silver. The final card in the series is not the World, but an angel blowing trumpets; this figure is sometimes called Fame.

[edit] The game of Minchiate

The game spread from Florence to the rest of Italy and to other areas of Europe including France. By the eighteenth century, Minchiate had overtaken the original game of Tarot in popularity in Italy. Paolo Minucci published a commentary on the game in 1676, and the game is described in detail by Romain Merlin in Origine des cartes à jouer, published in Paris in 1869. The game was still played in Genoa in the 1930s, but its popularity declined in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

The game, like Tarot games, was a trick taking game in which points were scored by capturing certain cards. The first five cards (Juggler, Grand Duke, Western Emperor, Eastern Emperor, Lover) were called papi, "popes", even though The Pope, one of the Tarot de Marseille trumps, does not appear among the Minchiate trumps. The last five trumps (Star, Moon, Sun, World, Trumpets) are called arie ("airs") and also have a special high scoring value in the game.

[edit] The Minchiate and the meaning of the tarot

While the game of Minchiate died out during the early twentieth century, in more recent years the Minchiate has become the subject of further speculative interest. It is arguably a sister deck to the early Tarot, and the expanded set of trumps added to the Minchiate may, in the view of some, shed light on what the Tarot deck was originally intended to signify.

In fifteenth century Florence, at least, the Tarot was thought to contain religious, allegorical, and cosmographical symbols. Justice, Strength, and Temperance were three classical "cardinal virtues" depicted in the more familiar Tarot trumps. The Minchiate supplies the remaining cardinal virtue — Prudence — and also includes the three theological virtues, Faith, Hope, and Charity. The sun, moon, star, and world figure in the Tarot de Marseille trumps; the Minchiate completes the series by adding all the zodiac signs and the four classical elements.

Because of this allegorical and cosmological content, in recent years occultists and tarotists have proposed systems of divination and cartomancy that use the Minchiate deck as well as regular tarot cards. In Charles Godfrey Leland's book 1890 book Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches, an incantation is given that mentions the use of "forty cards," which are renamed in the spell as forty gods who are being invoked to compel the goddess Laverna to do the caster's bidding.[1] It has been speculated that these forty cards are the forty trumps of the Minchiate deck. Leland's book Etruscan-Roman Remains in Popular Tradition (1892) contains a spell that is cast with tarocco cards[2] to invoke Janus.

[edit] References

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Aradia, ch. 17
  2. ^ Etruscan-Roman Remains, ch. 10

[edit] Minchiate decks

The Italian publisher Lo Scarabeo offers a reproduction of the "Ancient Minchiate Etruria", an engraved Minchiate deck that originally appeared in 1725.

The Italian publisher Il Meneghello offers a reproduction, in regular and mini sizes, of the "Minchiate Fiorentine", a woodcut Minchiate deck that originally appeared circa 1820 [1].

The Tarot artist Brian Williams has published a modern edition of the Minchiate deck, which accompanies his book referenced below.

Artist Constante Constantini has, though Italian publisher Solleone, published two different modern Minchiate decks[2]:

  • Minchiate Fiorentine: modern redrawing of a woodcut design
  • Nuove Minchiate Fiorentine: modern redrawing

[edit] Books

[edit] Web sites of interest

[edit] See also

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