Minchiate

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, 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.

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 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.

Deck

The Minchiate deck differs from the standard tarot deck in several particulars. The first and most obvious difference is that the trumps (which occultists call the major arcana) have almost doubled in number; there are forty trumps in the Minchiate, in addition to the unnumbered card the Madman, The Fool or the "Excuse".

The trumps of the Minchiate deck, and their corresponding Rider-Waite tarot cards are:

Card number	Italian name[1]	depicted on the Minchiate card	corresponding divination tarot card
(0)	Il matto	The Madman	0 - The Fool
I	Papa uno; l'Uno; il Papino; Ganellino[2]		1 - The Magician
II	Papa due	The Empress; the Grand Duke	3 - The Empress
III	Papa tre	The Western Emperor	4 - The Emperor
IV	Papa quattro	The Eastern Emperor	5 - The Hierophant
V	Papa cinque	Love	6 - The Lovers
VI		Temperance	14 - Temperance
VII		Fortitude	8 - Strength
VIII		Justice	11 - Justice
IX		Wheel of Fortune	10 - Wheel of Fortune
X		Chariot	7 - The Chariot
XI	Il gobbo; il tempo	Hunchback; time	9 - The Hermit
XII	L'impiccato	The hanged man	12 - The Hanged Man
XIII		Death	13 - Death
XIV	Il Diavolo; il Demonio	The Devil	15 - The Devil
XV	Il casa del Diavolo	The house of the Devil	16 - The Tower
XVI		Hope	-
XVII		Prudence	-
XVIII		Faith	2 - The High Priestess
XIX		Charity	-
XX		Fire	-
XXI		Water	-
XXII		Earth	-
XXIII		Air	-
XXIV		Libra	-
XXV		Virgo	-
XXVI		Scorpio	-
XXVII		Aries	-
XXVIII		Capricorn	-
XXIX		Sagittarius	-
XXX		Cancer	-
XXXI		Pisces	-
XXXII		Aquarius	-
XXXIII		Leo	-
XXXIV		Taurus	-
XXXV		Gemini	-
XXXVI	La stella	The star	17 - The Star
XXXVII	La luna	The moon	18 - The Moon
XXXVIII	Il sole	The sun	19 - The Sun
XXXIX	il Mondo	the World	21 - The World
XL	Le trombe	The trumpets	20 - Judgment

The ace to ten and the court cards (which occultists call the minor arcana) resemble their standard counterparts more closely. There are the four standard Spanish and Italian playing card suits of swords, batons, coins, and cups; these contain pip cards from ace to ten, and four court cards: a jack, a knight, a queen, and a king. In the Minchiate deck, 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 Minchiate decks.

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 deck; instead, it contains a Grand Duke and two different Emperors. The card subjects depict a western and an eastern emperor.

The standard tarot card The Tower, or House of God, becomes the House of the Devil in the Minchiate deck; 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 decks 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.

Game

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 19th and early 20th century.

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

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 tarot occultists 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.^[3] Paul Huson has speculated that these forty cards are the forty trumps of the Minchiate deck^[4]. He has also pointed out that Leland's book Etruscan-Roman Remains in Popular Tradition (1892) contains a spell that is cast with tarocco cards^[5],^[6] to invoke Janus.

References

Notes

1. ^ A History of Games Played with the Tarot Pack, Dummet & McLeod, 2004. Edwin Mellen Press, Lampeter. Vol.1, page 319.
2. ^ [1]. Regole delle Minchiate di Niccolo Oneste (1716). Retrieved on 2011-11-01.
3. ^ Aradia, ch. 17
4. ^ Huson, Paul, The Devil's Picturebook, p.67, New York: G.P. Putnams Sons, 1971
5. ^ Huson, Paul, The Devil's Picturebook, p.189
6. ^ Etruscan-Roman Remains, ch. 10

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 [2].

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 [3]:

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

Books

• Dummett, Michael: The Game of Tarot (U. S. Games, 1980) ISBN 0-7156-1014-7
• Huson, Paul: The Devil's Picturebook (G. P. Putnams Sons, 1971, BackInPrint, 2003) ISBN 0-595-27333-5
• Huson, Paul: Mystical Origins of the Tarot (Destiny Books, 2004) ISBN 0-89281-190-0
• Williams, Brian: The Minchiate Tarot (Destiny Books, 1999) ISBN 0-89281-651-1

Web sites of interest

• Tarot and Minchiate of Florence by Tom Tadfor Little
• The Minchiate at Andy's Playing Cards
• Early notes about the Minchiate
• Regeln des Minchiatta-Spiels Rules for the Minchiate game (in German)
• Rules in English for Minchiate and other tarot games
• Images from Fiorentine Minchiate deck
• Images from Etrurian Minchiate deck
• Titles of and images from French Minchiate deck

See also

• Tarot card games