Course Post Week 3: Manteíā over the Millennia

In episode one of “In Our Time: The Written World,” Melvyn Bragg speaks with the British Library’s lead curator of Chinese, Francis Wood. She tells of the library’s collection of about 500 Chinese oracle bones, which were used for royal divination practices in China from about 1700 to 2700 BCE, one of which is pictured here. Holes were pressed into the bone to create cracks on the opposite side, and the meaning of these cracks could range from weather and pregnancy predictions to political and military advice. The inscriptions on these bones are still readable today and feature some of the oldest Chinese characters on record, which have undoubtedly influenced the modern Chinese language.

In reading about ancient divination practices, I was reminded of a storied divination method that is in common practice today—tarot reading. The tarot cards themselves date back to mid-15th century Italy; one of the oldest surviving tarot decks, “The Visconti Tarot,” dates back to this period. In terms of mystic usage, however, it took until the 19th century for tarot to be solidified as a popular divination method, and this is also when other divination decks began being published, like the (still popular!) oracle deck. One important tarot deck, the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, was published in the early 20th century, and took inspiration from past popular decks. The Rider-Waite-Smith (or RWS) deck would go on to inspire most popular tarot decks of the modern day with its 78-card lineup and list of major arcana, plus four suits of minor arcana.

What stood out to me in relation to the readings was that these decks share mostly the same card lineup. You can directly see this influence by comparing the art on the Visconti deck and some modern decks, such as the Queen of Swords cards pictured here

—the left one from the Visconti deck, and the right one from a modern RWS-inspired deck that I myself own, the Cosmic Slumber tarot. Notice how the queens’ posing, expressions, and hand positioning are similar, despite the cards overall not sharing a common aesthetic. The lasting influence of both the characters inscribed on the Chinese oracle bone and the imagery present in the Visconti tarot deck show how visual language (both written and pictorial) can be passed down over millennia because of the important practices (like divination) associated with them. With the help of museum preservation, the lineage of languages can be a valuable resource in researching the history of written communication!

Resources:
  Bragg, Melvyn, “In Our Time: The Written World: Episode One,” BBC Radio 4, Jan 2, 2012, https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b018wfsc.
  Husband, Tim, “Before Fortune-Telling: The History and Structure of Tarot Cards,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Apr 8, 2016, https://www.metmuseum.org/blogs/in-season/2016/tarot.
  Indie Deck Review, “The Cosmic Slumber Tarot by Tillie Walden,” Facebook, Nov 7, 2020, https://m.facebook.com/Indiedeckreview/posts/1016659275490701.
  Place, Robert M., “A History of Oracle Cards in Relation to The Burning Serpent Oracle and a New Revelation About the Origin of the Lenormand,” Tarot & Divination Decks with Robert M. Place, Oct 25, 2015, https://robertmplacetarot.com/2015/10/25/a-history-of-oracle-cards.