Volume 28, Number 2 · February 19, 1981
In the Cards
By Frances A. Yates
The Game of Tarot from Ferrara to Salt Lake City
by Michael Dummett
Duckworth (Biblio Distribution Center, Totowa, New Jersey), 600 pp., $47.50
Twelve Tarot Games
by Michael Dummett
Duckworth, London, 242 pp., £5.95
This very large book is an elaborate history of the game of Tarot, a card game not unrelated to our modern cards, with suits and trumps, but much more complex, using packs of picture cards with strange images. From the fifteenth century this game spread over Europe with variations in different countries. Professor Dummett, a very well-known philosopher and interpreter of Frege, has taken time off from his labors to write a detailed account of this game and its local variations: a much shorter companion volume is a guide to the playing of twelve games. In the larger volume he publishes many illustrations of Tarot cards; even a reader uninterested in card games must surely be puzzled and fascinated by the pictures. The same images, in varying forms, recur constantly: 'the Female Pope,' 'the Hanged Man,' 'the Emperor,' and so on, just as we constantly see kings, queens, and knaves in our packs. It seems to be the basic aim behind Professor Dummett's fanatical pursuit of the Tarot game, in all its forms, to prove that throughout its history it was only a game, and nothing else. His book will not be welcome to contemporary occultists, who attach immense significance to 'the Tarot,' to the initiations into mysteries, or revelations of the future, supposed to reside in these cards.
Review, 2421 words
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