A to Z Blogging Challenge word of the day - Minchiate deck

Since today’s letter is the hallway point of the alphabet, I thought I’d go a bit untraditional. Oh, there’s were plenty of words that we’ve each heard of, even if not related to occult, like: Magic, Moon, Mars, Mercury, mediation, and of course the famous Merlin. Yet, I chose a topic I’d never heard of.

Minchiate deck

It’s a deck of 97 cards. 41 of those are trumps and 56 are small cards closely related to the tarot. The Minchiate deck was devised in Florence in the 16^th century, and actualy used in card games. In fact Minchiate means game. According to the resource I’m using there were as many forms of the Minchiate deck.

The trumps of the deck include most of the tarot trumps, but additional virtues, like the four elements and 12 signs of the zodiac. Last six cards were traditionally painted wihtout the name or number. Little attention was paid to this deck of cards, except by the odder corners of tarot lore, still there was a modern version of the deck published in 1999.

I looked for a example of the cards to post, but couldn’t find one. I did find a webstie that has a video of what looks like to be examples of the cards. Not sure how accurate it is, like I said earlier, I didn’t even know the Minchiate deck existed until today. If you’d like to check out the website here’s the link: http://www.lepalaisdutarot.com/ancient-minchiate-etruria.htm

Hope all enjoyed todays post and learned something new or interesting. Remember all this information came from:

 The New Encyclopedia of the Occult by John Michael Greer.

This particular word can be found on pages 309-310

Have a great day and come back tomorrow to find out what word I chose that begins with the letter “N”.

Have a great day and remember:

 Let Imagination Soar

Write and Read With Creativity

Julia Matthews