The Servant’s Almanac, Soldier’s Deck of Cards, or Cards Spiritualized
In Part 1, I gave examples from 1377, 1525 and 1529 of how playing cards were used for moral allegories. Sometime in the late 17th to early 18th century this trend gave birth to a popular storyline that has continued, little changed to this day. The story goes that, in order to justify carrying a pack of cards, a soldier (or a servant) explains that the deck reminds him of the calendar and of God. Some variation on this story quickly appeared throughout Europe and has continued to metamorphize in interesting ways. That the character usually mentioned is either a Richard Middleton or Richard Lee of Glasgow, suggests its origin was probably the British Isles.
The oldest example of each number card being spiritualized is found in 1666 in Belgium, in a book illustrated by cards, called Het Geestelijck Kaertspel, “The Spiritual Card Game with Hearts Trumps, or the Game of Love,” by Joseph a Sancta Barbara in which each of the Hearts cards is equated with a Christian subject. The King references God the Father, the Queen is the Virgin Mary, the Knave shows the rich and mighty [made humble?] before the Crucified Christ, the ten shows the ten commandments. Then there are the nine choirs of angels [see at right], eight Christian virtues; seven works of mercy; six goals in life; five wounds of Christ; four last ends, the three members of the Holy Family; the worship of God the Father and Mary the Mother; and the one Truth that must reside in a Christian heart. (Hargraves, A History of Playing Cards, p. 161.)
If this sounds a little like “The Twelve Days of Christmas” you aren’t far off, since a similar catechism-type song, with religious imagery called “The Twelve Days” or “A New Dial” appeared in 1625.
The next example, known as “The Servant’s Almanac” is found in Brett’s Miscellany by Peter Brett, 1748, which I’ll quote in full as it contains the main elements found in the later versions:
A Certain Gentleman having two Servants, one Servant complained to his Master of his fellow-servant, that he was a great Player of Cards, which the Master would not allow in his family; he called for the Servant complained of, and tax’d him.
He knew not what Cards meant.
At which the Master was angry with the Complainer, and called him to hear what he could farther say; Who desired, he might be immediately searched, so he believed, he at that Time had a Pack in his Pocket. And accordingly he was searched and a Pack found in his Pocket; which he would not own to be Cards, but said: That it was his Almanack.
His Master asked him, How he made it appear to be his Almanack? His Answer was,
“There are in these Things you call Cards, as many Sorts as there are Quarters in the Year; that is four, Spades, Clubs, Hearts and Diamonds: There are as many Court Cards as there are Months in the Year, and as
many Cards as there are weeks in the Year; and there are as many Pips as there are Days in the Year.”
At which his Master wondered; asking him, Did he make no other Use of them ? He answered thus :
“When I see the King, it puts me in Mind of the Loyalty I owe to my Sovereign Lord the King; when I see the Queen, it puts me in mind of the same; when I see the Ten, it puts me in mind of the Ten Commandments; the Nine, of the Nine Muses; the Eight, of the Eight Beatitudes; the Seven, of the Seven liberal Sciences; the Six, of the Six Days we mould labour in; the Five, of the Five Senses; the Four, of the Four Evangelists; the Tray, of the Trinity; the Deuce, of the Two Sacraments; and the Ace, that we ought to worship but one God.”
Says the Master, “this is an excellent Use you make of them; but why did you not make mention of the Knave?”
“Sir, I thought I had no occasion to mention him, because he is here present,” clapping his Hand on his fellow-Servant’s shoulder.
By 1762, the version known as The Soldier’s Prayerbook is recorded in an account/common-place book belonging to Mary Bacon, a farmer’s wife. (Mary Bacon’s World. A farmer’s wife in eighteenth-century Hampshire, published by Threshhold Press (2010).) This seems to be the first mention of what became the best-known version.
The most famous example is from 1776 in London Magazine: or, Gentleman’s monthly intelligencer (Vol. 45), which tells the story of Richard Middleton. It begins:
“One Richard Middleton, a soldier, attending divine service with the rest of the regiment in a church in Glasgow, instead of pulling out a bible, like his brother soldiers, to find the parson’s text, spread a pack of cards before him . . .” [He is taken before the Mayor and asked,] “What excuse have you to offer for this strange, scandalous behaviour?” (Follow the link above for the full story.)
Histoire du Jeu de Cartes du Grenadier Richard appeared in France in 1811, but is most often found bound with an even more interesting Explication morale du jeu de cartes from 1776 (see comments for more information & thanks for the correction, Ross). Marie-Anne-Adélaïde Lenormand published it as Almanach du bonhomme Richard in 1809, and later, in 1857, the Chevalier de Châtelain included it in his translation, Fables de [John] Gay & Beautés de la Poésie Anglaise. The English poet and playwright, John Gay (1685-1732), best known for the play, “The Beggar’s Opera,” did not include it in his two volumes of Fables (although a couple of his fables feature card-players), but it could be a lost work, printed originally in broadside.
By 1926 the story had metamorphized (considerably and without the moralizing) into a magician’s card trick called The Adventures of Diamond Jack, as advertised by Herman L. Weber (Namreh) in The Sphinx. It and The Perpetual Almanac or Gentleman Soldier’s Prayer Book appear near each other in Jean Hugard’s Encyclopedia of Card Tricks (1937), showing that they are considered to be of a similar type. Another irreverent version, called Sam the Bellhop has become popular through performances by Bill Malone and James Galea, as seen in the following youtube videos.
The next (and truer) metamorphosis was as a country song, “The Deck of Cards,” first made famous by T. Texas Tyler in 1948, written about the WWII North African Campaign in the little town called Casino. It’s been recorded by at least a dozen musicians including Phil Harris, Tex Ritter, Wink Martindale (on Ed Sullivan), Max Bygraves, Hank Williams, Prince Far I, John McNicholl, and many others that can be found on youtube, including the parody, “A Hillbilly’s Deck of Cards” by Simon Crum.
This song was updated with a twist for the Korean war as “The Red Deck of Cards” by Red River Dave McEnery in 1953 (which I first heard from labor organizer and folklorist U. Utah Phillips).
“It was during the last days of the prisoner exchange in Korea, I was there as they came through Freedom Gate. Shattered, sick and lame. There in a red cross tent as the weary group rested, a soldier broke out a deck of cards. A look of hate crossed the tired face of one boy as he sprang up—knocking the cards to the ground. As the cards lay around, many of them face up, he picked up the Ace and began.
“Fellows,” he said, “I’m sorry, but I hate cards. The commies tried to use them to teach us their false doctrine. They told us the “ACE”, meant that there’s one God, the state. We knew that to be untrue for we were religious boys.” “And the “DEUCE” meant there were two great leaders. Only two. Lenin and Stalin. And we couldn’t swallow that either . . . ”
There is, of course, a Vietnam version (by Red Sovine), the Gulf war (by Bill Anderson), the 2nd Iraq war (1-with photos & 2-Al Traynor), and an e-mail variation currently circulates featuring a soldier serving in Afghanistan:
“A young soldier was in his bunkhouse all alone one Sunday morning over in Afghanistan. It was quiet that day, the guns and the mortars, and land mines for some reason hadn’t made a noise. The young soldier knew it was Sunday, the holiest day of the week. As he was sitting there, he got out an old deck of cards and laid them out across his bunk . . .”
“What does this all have to do with tarot?” you may ask.
All the above variations center on storytelling (or “destiny narration” as Cynthia Giles called it) and advice giving, plus number symbolism. Number symbolism is one of the key techniques used in interpreting the cards, and tarot authors, in writing about the meaning of numbers, often point to the same religious motifs as sources of ideas used to interpret the cards. Like the illustrated “prayer cards” above—whether simply evoked in the mind or made into a deck—they suggest a book of signs that are meant to guide us in making the best decisions. They also serve as memonic aids (for instance, the song goes, “The ten reminds me of . . . “), and the tarot was originally thought to have served as part of the Ars Memoria. And, of course, the magicians doing magic tricks perfectly emulate the patter of the Bagatto, Montebank or Magician of the Major Arcana.
The sample cards above come from a deck illustrated to match The Soldier’s Prayerbook, and are available here.
[I’ve been wondering if this story might first be found in a book I haven’t been able to access from 1613: The Carde and Compasse of Life Containing Many Passages, Fit for These Times. and Directing All Men in a True, Christian, Godly and Ciuill Course, to Arrive at the Blessed and Glorious Harbour of Heaven, a manual of advice to the prince. By Richard Middleton. It’s a long shot, but if anyone has access to the libraries holding it, I’d love them to check it out.]
Check out Part 1 on the early moral allegories, and read Steve Winick’s discoveries that he has so generously contributed to the comments on this post.
Continue on to Part 3 on Social Reformation.
Mary K. Greer has made tarot her life work. Check here for reports of goings-on in the world of tarot and cartomancy, articles on the history and practice of tarot, and materials on other cartomancy decks. Sorry, I no longer write reviews. Contact me
18 comments
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January 21, 2011 at 12:23 pm
Shaheen Miro
Wow this is wonderful. I think that Anna Cortez would really enjoy this since it goes right along with her deck and writing The Playing Card Oracles. I have been reading her book and she claims that the playing cards came before the tarot and that they are two completely different systems. I have always read and believed that the playing cards were created after the Tarot. What is your take?
January 21, 2011 at 2:37 pm
mkg
Shaheen –
So glad you found this of interest. There is little doubt that playing cards came to Europe, probably from North Africa, before tarot was invented, by as much as 75 years or more. Part 1 talks about how the German game of Karnöffel might have influenced the creation of the tarot deck. Many Italian and French readers use the two parts of the tarot deck separately. The Major Arcana is only for spiritual matters, and the Minor Arcana or a regular playing card deck is used for mundane events.
January 21, 2011 at 10:44 pm
Helen
Mary this was so interesting, thanks!
January 22, 2011 at 12:16 pm
Susa
Brilliant article! Thanks for posting.
January 31, 2011 at 9:52 am
Steve Winick
Mary, as a folklorist I was immediately reminded of a traditional song and the scholarship on it. It’s a Christmas carol collected throughout England and North America, which goes by several titles including “The Carol of the Numbers,” “Green Grow the Rushes-O” and “Come and I will Sing You.” It’s a cumulative song, like “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” so by giving the last verse I give essentially the whole song. One version, collected from Children in upstate New York who themselves had learned it from Cornish miners employed in the region, ends like this:
Twelve are the twelve apostles,
Eleven of them have gone to heaven,
Ten are the ten commandments,
Nine is the moonshine, bright and clear,
Eight is the Great Archangel.
Seven are seven stars in the sky,
Six are the cheerful waiters,
Five is the ferryman in the boat
Four are the gospel preachers,
Three of them are strangers,
Two of them are lily-white babes, all clothed in green, O !
One of them is God alone, and He ever shall remain so.
Now, as you can imagine, no-one is sure what all the descriptions refer to. (The Ferryman being the strangest one in this context; if it were six, it would be the Six of Swords! In some esoteric traditions Christ harries Hell, but I don’t know if he encounters a version of Charon in those texts.) Anyway, many of them are pretty obvious in the Christmas context: twelve apostles, eleven of whom went to heaven; ten commandments; four “Gospel preachers” (i.e. evangelists); three “strangers” (i.e. foreigners, the wise men from the east); one God. In some traditions, there are eight Archangels, although the Catholic norm is seven. Still, that line was probably originally “eight are the eight Archangels.”
In his 1891 essay on this strange and mystical carol (the essay appeared in the Journal of American Folklore), William Wells Newell compared it to another song. The following is from Newell:
J. Sylvester, “A Garland of Christmas Carols, Ancient and Modern,”
Lond. 1861, p. 136, gives a piece called “A New Dial,” which,
according to his statement, appears to bear date of 1625, being taken
from a leaf of an old almanac, preserved in the British Museum.
This quaint Puritan alteration of the older number-song is worth
attention:
One God, one Baptism, and one Faith,
One Truth there is, the Scripture saith.
Two Testaments (the Old and New)
We do acknowledge to be true.
Three persons are in Trinity,
Which make one God in Unity.
Four sweet Evangelists there are,
Christ’s birth, life, death, which do declare.
Five senses (like Five Kings) maintain
In every man a several reign.
Six days to labor, is not wrong,
For God himself did work so long.
Seven Liberal Arts hath God sent down,
With Divine skill man’s soul to crown.
Eight in Noah’s Ark alive were found,
When (in a word) the World lay drowned.
Nine Muses (like the heaven’s nine spheres)
With sacred Tunes entice our ears.
Ten Statutes God to Moses gave,
Which, kept or broke, do spill or save.
Eleven with Christ in heaven do dwell,
The Twelfth forever burns in hell.
Twelve are attending on God’s Son,
Twelve make our Creed. The Dial’s done.
Count one, the first hour of thy Birth,
The hours that follow, lead to Earth;
Count Twelve, thy doleful striking knell,
And then thy Dial shall go well.
As you can see, many of the individual items in this list are exactly the ones given by the fictional Middleton to explain the cards: of the ten numbers the lists have in common, six are given the same meanings: 1, 3, 4, 6, 8, and 10.
This establishes that the numerological game of using a number sequence to recall these individual meanings goes back in English to 1625. In that sense, I think it isn’t farfetched that the Middleton book you refer to from 1613 may have been an influence on the later story featuring a soldier called “Richard Middleton.” The original Middleton was Chaplain to Prince Charles (later King Charles I of England), and the book was a primer for the Prince, exactly the place you’d expect to find such mnemonic devices. Middleton also wrote other books with intriguing titles such as “The Key of David.” I’ll see if I can find anything on him at the Library of Congress.
January 31, 2011 at 1:23 pm
mkg
Steve –
Wow! Thank you so much for all this information. It’s this kind of sharing that makes the internet such an exciting world. My daughter’s husband is from an old Cornish mining family. I’m going to see if his grandfather knows “The Carol of Numbers”.
January 31, 2011 at 2:24 pm
Steve Winick
It’s well documented in Cornwall, but also elsewhere. It’s particularly popular in Newfoundland. Here is a version sung by an old friend of mine, Bob Hallett from the Newfoundland band Great Big Sea:
By the way, what is the song from 1625 that you mention. Do you have a reference? I’d love to look that up!
January 31, 2011 at 4:16 pm
mkg
Steve –
The song is known as “In Those Twelve Days” and also “A New Dial”.
Here’s a couple of mentions of the 1625 date:
http://www.littlethingscount.com/wackletter.htm
http://www.musicanet.org/robokopp/english/anewdial.htm
http://books.google.com/books?id=tfgVAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA136&lpg=PA136&dq=1625+%22A+New+Dial%22&source=bl&ots=ruAjx6EK6e&sig=hBXSsu1UeK1Eq38qmpy16FvAaTM&hl=en&ei=_E9HTZeEMo_msQPjpJjKAg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=7&ved=0CEUQ6AEwBg#v=onepage&q=1625%20%22A%20New%20Dial%22&f=false
January 31, 2011 at 4:34 pm
Steve Winick
Okay, then it’s a version of the same song I posted. (The “dial” refers to a clock, so the version I posted refers not to twelve days (of Christmas) but twelve hours (on the dial). I’ll look into your references and see if there’s a version with days!
Thanks!
January 31, 2011 at 8:05 pm
Steve Winick
Hi again Mary,
This doesn’t change the accuracy of your fantastic post, but might add a bit more detail. The 1625 text I posted in my first reply is the same 1625 text you mentioned in passing in the original post–and have now linked to. In its original 1625 form, it associates the 12 items being counted with the dial of a clock. (I’m glad I posted the text because it is actually closer to the later playing-card story of Richard Middleton than any of the earlier playing-card stories, sharing six out of ten possible number correspondences.)
Sadly, we should be cautious in ascribing the 1625 date definitively to “A New Dial,” because every reference I can find to the date is based on this observation:
“Copied from a leaf of an old Almanack preserved in the Bagford collection in the British Museum. The corresponding leaf is in the Black Letter and bears the date 1625.”
The “Copied from a leaf…” “…corresponding leaf…” language sounds like a hedge to me. It sounds to me like the song is handwritten onto a partially empty leaf of a printed almanac from 1625…otherwise why not just say the song was printed in Black Letter and dated 1625? Antiquarians in those days had a vested interest in claiming every item was as old as possible, and often resorted to this kind of hedge language. As paleographers know, such handwritten additions sometimes turn out to be much later than the books they’re written on.
The version of the song called “In These Twelve Days,” which makes it a Christmas Carol, is much later–I can’t find any “Twelve Days” version earlier than 1822. It was the Oxford Book of Carols (1928) that muddied the waters by giving the 1822 text and ascribing it the date 1625, on the grounds that they considered the two songs “versions of the same song.”
Still, all in all, the best data available to us to suggest that the mnemonic device that became part of the playing-card story may have existed in England as long ago as 1625.
Interestingly, the snopes.com site, while debunking the idea that “The Twelve Days of Christmas” is a catechism song, quotes the text of “A New Dial” and also mentions the Texas Tyler “Deck of Cards” song, but they miss how close the correspondence is between these two traditions.
Thanks again for a great post!
January 31, 2011 at 8:19 pm
mkg
Steve –
I love that you are looking into all the pieces of this old song and hope you will find some new evidence that you can write up into an article. Please keep us posted on any new findings you come across or ways in which you see the themes developing. Thanks for clarifying the difference between the 12 days and the 12 hours as two separate, though related, strands. The ‘hedging’ is an important point regarding the date.
January 31, 2011 at 9:54 pm
Steve Winick
Forgive me for continuing to comment, but I’ve just had a look at the “Explication morale du jeu de cartes,” and its fascinating. First of all, it’s got an extremely expanded version of the Richard Middleton story, which goes to 62 pages of text plus over 150 pages of explanatory notes! Each feature of the deck gets many more possible meanings ascribed to it, from Classical and Egyptian mythology to some notes from the Kabbalah and other Jewish sources, as well as the standard Bible.
More importantly, the French begins with the essay “Explication morale du jeu de cartes” (from which the book takes its name). This essay is the story of Louis Bras-de-Fer, who like Richard Middleton is a soldier called upon to explain why he carries a wicked pack of cards. This story adds another feature not in the English texts: it adds suits to the explanations. The suits were hearts (corresponding to hearts or cups), pikes (corresponding to spades or swords), paving-stones (corresponding to diamonds or coins), and trefoils (clovers or three-leaved plants, corresponding to clubs or batons). For the twos, the text translates to:
“Then I cast my eyes on the two of trefoils, which reminds me of Jesus Christ, the second person of the Holy Trinity. The two of pikes reminds me of his two natures, the Divine Nature and the Human Nature, which allow Jesus Christ to be God and Man together. The two of paving-stones reminds me of his birth in a creche and his profound abasement during his entire life, and his passion and his bloody death on the cross. The two of hearts reminds me that he left his spirit and his heart on earth, at the same time that he intercedes for us in heaven, in order to present our spirits and hearts to God his father.”
The significance of this approach for tarot is clear: the combination of a number symbol with a suit symbol is exactly the way you read with a Tarot de Marseilles, or indeed any Tarot deck that came before Waite’s. So the moral/biblical interpretations in this book follow the same process as cartomancy, but apply it to tell a different story. The suits themselves also appear to be read in much the same way as we read tarot suits, with the paving-stones being “earthy” matters, pikes being both intellectual matters and also violence, hearts being emotional matters and also joy, trefoils being the trinity and stern judgment.
This text is fascinating in that it came out during the time Court de Gebelin was publishing Le Monde Primitif, but three years before the essay on Tarot cards in Volume 8. Likewise, it came out after Ettellia’s first book on cartomancy (with a 33-card deck), but before his book on Tarot. I wonder whether this book influenced either of them. I even wonder if one of them might have written it, given that it was published anonymously.
February 1, 2011 at 12:33 pm
mkg
Steve –
Thank you so much! You’ve made this post richer by far! The material on the suits is fabulous. I’m hungry for more.
February 12, 2011 at 6:36 am
Ross Caldwell
Mary, Steve –
Thanks for this interesting discussion. I’m always collecting information on moralizations of games, and their use as metaphor in literature and language. I really like the “Histoire”‘s extensive encyclopedism. It must be a record.
Note that the book “Histoire du jeu de cartes du Grenadier Richard” was published in 1811 (see the title page to this second). It was bound together with the “Explication morale du jeu de cartes” (1788) in this edition. Thus some 30 years after Court de Gébelin.
Notes 180 and 181 (page 158) refer to the “planets” (now asteroids) Ceres and Pallas, discovered in 1801 and 1803 respectively (and duly noted). Herschel – now Uranus – was discovered in 1781.
February 12, 2011 at 11:06 am
mkg
Thanks for the correction, Ross. I think I added it correctly now.
I hope you have seen Part 3—which has some very interesting stuff.
April 23, 2011 at 10:51 am
jean paul galibert
beaucoup appris
je fais du mot “jeu”
un usage plus large
April 23, 2011 at 6:29 pm
mkg
Jean Paul – I’m so glad you like it.
October 13, 2011 at 1:59 am
Steve Winick
Hi Mary–just following up on our conversation of months ago. I’ve been looking into Mlle. Lenormand’s publication of the Middleton story. The story is included in the “Notes” section of her book Les souvenirs prophétiques d’une sibylle. The entire story is placed as a footnote to a soldier or policeman (“gardien”) asking her the question “vous faites les cartes?” The gardien goes on to explain that “we” (the government?) are thinking of making “faire les cartes” illegal. So maybe she sees the story as an interesting sidenote about the military trying to make cards illegal–its placement there is otherwise somewhat random. The entire book is available on Google Books, here:
http://books.google.com/books?id=0dsOAAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
The Middleton (or “Midaleton”) story begins on page 340
A few small corrections: I think you’ve got the date a few years early; the editions I’ve seen are 1814. Also, she did not use the title “Almanach du Bonhomme Richard” as far as i can tell–that was well-known at the time as the French title of Ben Franklin’s “Poor Richard’s Almanac.” Since the whole thing is a footnote, it’s given no title in the book.
All the best, and thanks again!