Thoughts on the Ordering of the Trumps

Despite all the variations in the early ordering of the trumps, there are many consistencies. Of the five lowest cards, the Bagatto is always lowest and the Pope always highest. The sequence Devil - Fire - Star - Moon - Sun is the same in every attested order. That sequence is always preceded by Traitor - Death, but with Temperance inserted in the western tradition. After the Sun, there are only three possibilities: Angel - World, Angel - Justice - World, and World - Angel. Death, when numbered, is invariably 13. There are a variety of ways to place the virtues (Temperance, Justice, and Fortitude), but at least two always fall between the Pope and the Traitor. Readers are advised to take an actual set of cards and place them in each of the variant orders. It will become apparent that the variations are not random rearrangements, but respect a number of constraints.

There was clearly persistent hesitation over the proper placement of the Papess. It was taken for granted that the Pope must outrank the Emperor, Empress, and the Papess. It was also clear that the Emperor must outrank the Empress. The two most "logical" possibilities are to pair off the four figures, either with both women coming first (and Papess outranking Empress), or with both imperial cards coming first. What is noteworthy is the presence of a third, less obvious arrangement: Papess - Empress - Emperor - Pope, as in the Marseilles ordering. It is instructive to tabulate the use of these three different arrangements:

Papess - Empress - Emperor - Pope: Rosenwald (A), Geoffroy (C), Marseilles (C)

Empress - Emperor - Papess - Pope: Steele sermon (B), Bertoni (B), Garzoni (B)

Empress - Papess - Emperor - Pope: Metropolitan Museum (B), Susio (C)

The Gringonneur and Rouen cards have the Emperor directly below the Pope, but the relative order of Papess and Empress is not known. The Minchiate and Bologna orderings are ambiguous. Notice that none of the broad ordering categories is associated unambiguously with a particular Papess position, although Empress - Emperor - Papess - Pope is very common in the eastern (B) tradition, and Papess - Empress - Emperor - Pope is common in the western tradition.

If the variations in the placement of the Papess are ignored, the Metropolitan Museum order then agrees exactly with the Bertoni and Garzoni order, and with the Rouen order. The Steele sermon order differs from them only in exchanging Love and the Chariot.

Putting aside the matter of the placement of the Papess, how can we understand the remaining variations in ordering? Dummett very perceptively recognized that the variations are closely connected with the assignment of number 13 to Death, apparently an inviolable demand of tradition. If all three virtues are ranked below Death (as they are in the southern tradition), a difficult numbering problem arises--Death would be 14 if the trumps were simply numbered in sequence! In the Tarocco Bolognese, the problem is avoided by leaving the Bagatto and the four "popes" unnumbered, beginning the numbering with Love as 5, even though it ought to be 6! In the Minchiate of Florence, the problem was solved by simply eliminating the Papess. The maker of the Rosenwald cards apparently had no idea what to do!

In the eastern tradition, the problem was solved by placing Justice above Death, next to the Angel of Judgement. This is symbolically appropriate, Justice now representing archangel Michael dispensing Justice on Judgement Day.

In the western tradition, we see an apparently peculiar solution: Temperance is placed immediately above Death, in position 14. This solves the numbering problem, but is perplexing in symbolic terms. In the Marseilles ordering, though, there is another pattern which supports this placement of Temperance: the Christian virtues are placed three apart (8 Justice, 11 Fortitude, 14 Temperance). If the pattern of threes is extended backwards, it picks up other Christian icons (5 Pope and 2 Papess). If it is extended forward, it finds the Star and the Angel. If this triadic pattern is not accidental, it explains two peculiarities of the Marseilles order: the placement of Temperance and the placement of the Papess.

The order given by Susio is an intriguing one. Although Temperance is placed at 14, the order of the lower trumps more closely matches the eastern tradition. For clarity, here is a comparison of the Marseilles order, the Susio order, and the Steele sermon order:

Tarot de Marseille	Susio	Steele sermon
the Bagatto	the Bagatto	the Bagatto
the Papess	the Empress	the Empress
the Empress	the Papess	the Emperor
the Emperor	the Emperor	the Papess
the Pope	the Pope	the Pope
		Temperance
Love	Love	Love
the Chariot	Justice
Justice	the Chariot	the Chariot
the Old Man	Fortitude	Fortitude
the Wheel	the Wheel	the Wheel
Fortitude	the Old Man	the Old Man
the Traitor	the Traitor	the Traitor
Death	Death	Death
Temperance	Temperance
the Devil	the Devil	the Devil
Fire	Fire	Fire
the Star	the Star	the Star
the Moon	the Moon	the Moon
the Sun	the Sun	the Sun
the Angel	the Angel	the Angel
		Justice
the World	the World	the World

Except for the usual "musical chairs" routine in placing the Papess, the Steele sermon and Susio orders differ only in whether the "Death problem" is solved by promoting Temperance to 14 or by promoting Justice to 20. The Marseilles order, on the other hand, differs considerably from both of them in the ordering of the cards between the Pope and the Traitor. If we make a composite of the Steele sermon and Susio orders, putting both virtues back below Death, we get the interesting series of pairs Temperance - Love; Justice - the Chariot, Fortitude - the Wheel. There may be some clever cyncicism here, as each Christian virtue falls to an appropriate adversary. Could it be that such a sequence was the ancestor of both the Susio and Steele sermon orders?

The difficulty for this hypothesis is, once again, the problem of the numbering of Death. It is difficult to believe that such a consistent feature as Death=13 was not present from the beginning, and it is unlikely that any of the other lower cards might have been omitted or promoted in the early versions of the game. A second difficulty is that the position of Temperance at 14 is much easier to explain if it originated with the invention of the triadic placement of the virtues, rather than appearing spontaneously, as it would have to if the Susio is not derived from the Marseilles order.

The other possibility, if we do not attribute the similarity between the Susio and Steele sermon orders to chance, is that the Susio order is a hybrid or compromise between the western and eastern traditions, as exemplified in the Marseilles and Steele sermon orderings. Players used to the western order might have adopted the eastern ranking of the cards between Pope and Traitor, as being somewhat more obvious and easy to remember, but not taking on the changed placement of Temperance and Justice, which would make a radical change in the relative rankings of the cards.

What is the best candidate for the original order of the trumps? I think it is unlikely to be a southern (type A) order, for two reasons. First, the earliest references to the game of tarot are from Milan and Ferrara, not from Bologna, Florence, or Rome. It is historically likely that the game was invented in one of the northern cities and then spread south. Furthermore, the solutions used in the southern tradition to ensure that Death is numbered 13 seem quite ad hoc. Either one of the standard tarot trumps is omitted, or else the cards are deliberately misnumbered. The Rosenwald sheet, as the earliest artifact of the southern tradition, is quite revealing. There are thirteen trumps below Death, and the artisan's attempt to assign numbers to them falters and fails. This predicament is more likely to be the result of a thoughtless change in ordering than an original design feature!

If the Susio order, as argued above, is a later hybrid of the eastern and western traditions, we are down to only two possibilities: the Marseilles order or the Steele sermon order (or some close variant of it). The Marseilles order is associated with Milan, and the Steele sermon order is to be associated with Ferrara. Both are strong candidates.

I will make a tentative argument in favor of the Marseilles order. Although many portions of the tarot sequence would have been easy to learn, such as the Pope defeating the Emperor, Death taking the Traitor, and the series of increasing brightness in Star - Moon - Sun, there are clearly some other parts of the sequence where intuition needs some guidance. In particular, the placement of the virtues amongst Love, the Chariot, and the Wheel is not altogether obvious. Many arrangements might make equal sense to players. In the Marseilles order, the triadic pattern serves as a guide. All the religious figures--Papess, Pope, Justice, Fortitude, Temperance, and even finally the Angel, are placed at regular intervals. The virtues, although not placed together, are still ordered quite systematically. The system, however, is more intellectual than intuitive. The beginning player is not helped much by a guide that requires recollecting the global structure of the deck. The Ferrara order appeals more to intuition, pairing off virtues against their natural adversaries (Temperance with Love, Fortitude with Fortune), and placing Justice alongside the Angel of Judgement. The strangeness of having the sequence Traitor - Death - Devil - Fire interrupted by Temperance is avoided. The Old Man is closer to Death than in the Marseilles order, which is also more intuitive. The Papess is moved to a more intuitive position, either above the Empress (as the Pope is above the Emperor), or immediately below the Pope (as the Empress is immediately below the Emperor).

So of the two candidates, one uses a more abstract ordering principle, and the other uses a more practical one. In which direction is evolution more likely to run? I think the Marseilles order, with its global triadic pattern, is something that "looks good on paper", as they say, and would appeal to an enthusiastic game designer more than a novice player. If it were the original order, there might have been pressure from players to make it more intuitive. It is also conceivable that the intuitive Ferrara order came first, and that the Marseilles order was an attempt to intellectualize the game a bit (perhaps a precursor to the mentality seen in the Tarot of Mantegna). If this were so, though, it is hard to understand why such a change should achieve any popularity, as it seems an unnecessary complication to a game that is already quite playable.

Certainly we can see that the southern order further compromises abstract pattern to practical intuition. The virtues are grouped all together, which makes them very easy to remember. But the result is that the "cleverness" of the original design, which manages to land Death at 13, is greatly compromised.

I think it is sensible to expect that an abstract design would become more practical and intuitive over time. Under this assumption, we can briefly sketch the history of the tarot ordering:

The game is invented in Milan, and embodies a rather abstract ordering principle based on the number three. Although the game becomes quite popular, the ordering has several features that make it difficult to learn: the Papess ranks below the Empress (whereas the Pope ranks above the Emperor), the virtues are spaced at intervals instead of close together, and Temperance, in particular, outranks Death, which is difficult because the other virtues do not.

When the game spreads to Ferrara, these "problems" are addressed by promoting Justice to accompany the Angel, leaving Temperance and Fortitude behind in lower positions, paired with Love and the Chariot. The Papess is also put in a more natural place.

As the game spreads to Bologna, an even more extreme simplification of the order occurs. All three virtues are collected together, although there is some uncertainty as to precisely where to insert them amongst Love, the Chariot, and the Wheel. The Angel is promoted above the World, perhaps because it is forgotten that the World (no longer showing the tetramorph) is a symbol of God. This version is passed on to Florence and ultimately Sicily.

At first glance it may seem odd that the Marseilles order, which we associate more with 18th-century France than with 15th-century Italy, should be the original order. And in truth there are no decisive arguments one way of the order. But the picture becomes more plausible when one considers that the French and Swiss acquired the game of tarot directly from Milan around the end of the 15th century, and Milan was one of the two early major centers of tarot in Italy. Tarot historians Robert O'Neill and Ronald Decker both endorse the priority of the Marseilles order. Dummett, with typical caution, takes no stand on which type of order (A, B, or C) is earlier, but in The Visconti-Sforza Cards, he takes the Susio order to be earlier than the Marseilles order. I think the analysis of the Susio order given above casts some doubt on this position. A Milanese origin for the tarot also accounts for the great many lavish cards that were created and preserved at the Milanese court, many more hand-painted decks than have come down to us from Ferrara or anywhere else.