Minchiate
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Minchiate is an early 16th-century card game, originating in Florence, Italy. It is no longer widely played. Minchiate can also refer to the special deck of 97 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 but more complex than tarocchi. The minchiate represents a Florentine variant on the original game
The word minchiate comes from a dialect word meaning "nonsense" or "trifle", derived from mencla, the vulgar form of mentula, a Latin word for "phallus".[2] 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. In tarocchini, sminchiate is a signal used to communicate to a teammate.
The game spread from Florence to the rest of Italy and France during the 1600s. In Sicily, it was called gallerini. In Liguria it was known as ganellini. The rules used in these regions are lost, except for cryptic references that they were quite different from the Florentine game. All surviving rules are derived from the type played in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany and the Papal States.
By the 18th century, minchiate had overtaken the original game of tarot in popularity in Italy. Paolo Minucci published a commentary on the game in 1676. The game is described in detail by Romain Merlin in Origine des cartes à jouer, published in Paris in 1869. It was also known in Germany during the late 18th century. The game was still played in Genoa in the 1930s, but its popularity declined in the late 19th and early 20th century.
The minchiate deck differs from other tarot decks in several features. The first and most obvious difference is that the trumps have almost doubled in number; there are 40 trumps in the minchiate, in addition to the unnumbered card the Madman, The Fool or the excuse. Minchiate uses Roman numerals for its trumps. Due to the large number of trumps, players generally called them by their number with the exception of the arie.
Minchiate decks come in two standard patterns, earlier and later, which coexisted for almost two centuries. Earlier Minchiate dates from the early 16th century or even the late 15th century.[6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13] As seen in the table below, there are the four standard Latin suits of swords, clubs, coins, and cups. These contain pip cards from ace to ten, and four face cards: a jack, a knight, a queen, and a king.
In the minchiate deck, 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. The suits follow the Portuguese pattern, with the exception of the clubs which are depicted as batons which follows from the northern Italian suit-system. This pattern died out around 1900.
By comparing the Rosenwald sheet with 16th century trump lists, the Popess (II) was likely dropped in the late 15th century which shifted every trump above the first down one rank.[4][25] The Empress, Emperor, and Pope became the new II, III, and IIII respectively, the latter now wearing a secular crown as opposed to a papal tiara.
Since the five lowest trumps were collectively known as the papi (popes), Love was added to this group after its demotion. The identification of middle papi was largely forgotten for centuries as players generally called cards by their number (pope 2, pope 3, etc.) French writer Romain Merlin (1869) is the only source that called trumps II, III, and IIII the Grand Duke, Western Emperor, and Eastern Emperor.
Justice, Fortitude, and Temperance were three classical "cardinal virtues" depicted in the more familiar tarot trumps. The minchiate supplies the remaining cardinal virtue — Prudence — and inserts them with the three theological virtues, Faith, Hope and Charity. The only other deck to have the theological virtues was the Cary-Yale deck. This is the only deck to include all seven virtues.
Minchiate is a southern tarot pattern so it shares many qualities with the Bolognese and Sicilian tarots as opposed to the western patterns like the tarot of Marseilles. While the Tower is called The House of God in the Marseilles tarot, it is called the House of the Devil or Hellmouth in the minchiate deck and it depicts a nude woman fleeing a burning building. The Moon depicts an astrologer studying the moon instead of the tarot of Marseilles howling dogs and lobster.
The card corresponding to the Hermit is often called Time, or the Hunchback. It depicts an elderly man on crutches with an hourglass in the background. Like other southern decks, the final card in the series is not the World, but Judgement. The minchiate completes the series by adding all the zodiac signs, in random order, and the four classical elements.
The eight highest ranking trumps have a red background while the top five (the arie) are unnumbered. A 98th card was made for some decks.[22] It is a trump with a red background and is also unnumbered like the arie. It depicts a nude woman running in a wheel, probably representing Fortuna. While 98-card decks were mentioned as being played in Sicily during the early 18th century, only a few examples from Genoa survive. It is uncertain how this card ranked and how it affected the versicole sequences in the game. Also unknown is how it relates to the 98-card version of de Poilly's Minchiate described below.
Although no divination system using this pack of cards ever existed in previous centuries, and because of this allegorical and cosmological content, in recent years tarot occultists have proposed systems of divination and cartomancy that use the minchiate deck. In Charles Godfrey Leland's 1890 book Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches, an incantation is given that mentions the use of "40 cards", which are renamed in the spell as 40 gods who are being invoked to compel the goddess Laverna to do the caster's bidding.[34]
Paul Huson has speculated that these 40 cards are the 40 trumps of the minchiate deck.[35] 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,[36][37] to invoke Janus.
JANUS. [associated with Doors etc]
above sections selected with grateful thanks -from WIKIPEDIA- 'MINCHIATE'
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