When I first got into tarot history, and realized that the cards were probably used as a game from the outset, and that nevertheless some people thought they embodied a serious system of ideas, I felt disoriented. If this were the situation, what would a typical 15th-century tarot player be thinking as she or he draws a hand of tarot cards? Is it just "this one means I can probably win the hand"? Or is it "Death triumphs over Love, just like when my brother-in-law's fiancee died last summer"? A lot of discussions of tarot origins get some fair mileage out of what card players might have been thinking about as they used the cards. But I just couldn't find a way to get a handle on that.
My favorite mode of reasoning is analogy, so I looked around for something from my own 20th-century experience that might be parallel--a game modeled on a system of concepts. Hmm. Monopoly!
Monopoly is a simulation of capitalistic real estate that draws its essential scheme from Atlantic City real estate trading in the 1930s. (I hope I got it right!). I learned the game as a small child, knowing nothing about Atlantic City and even less about mortgages, property auctions, and utility bills. I was vaguely aware that the game was simulating something in the adult world, but I never worried about it or tried to learn more. What mattered is that I knew that Marvin Gardens was more expensive than St. Charles Place.
As I grew older, the basic analogy behind the game became more obvious. Buying, building, charging rent. Made sense. But I still didn't really give much thought to why the most expensive properties were called "Boardwalk" and "Park Place". They were just names.
I spent a few years in England when I was in college, and got hit with serious culture shock: a Monopoly board with all the names "Briticized". I was first outraged, then enlightened. Seeing the names of familiar London streets and neighborhoods on the board, the organizing principle behind the game snapped into focus! How clever of the British game designers to translate the basic scheme into locally meaningful terms. (Never mind that Atlantic City names have never been "locally meaningful" to this California brat.)
The point is that players may have all different levels of awareness of the scheme the game designer used to put the game together in the first place (from utter ignorance to detailed knowledge that would even allow critique of the designer's choices), and it doesn't necessarily matter too much. You can learn the game from whoever teaches it to you. If you know the underlying scheme, it may make learning the game initially a bit easier, or it may bring about an appreciation of the designer's cleverness, but it's not a prerequisite for play, and it's not too likely to come up during talk about the game.
Now imagine a future a few centuries hence. American real estate capitalism is a thing of the past. Only a few obsessive anachronistic types even have words like "mortgage" in their vocabulary. But people still play Monopoly. A 23rd-century Court de Gebelin, an enthusiastic but ignorant devotee of some romanticized memory of capitalism, encounters the game and recognizes so many things that fascinate him: luxury tax! railroads! bidding! He's in hog heaven, and happily goes off to tell his friends that the forbidden secrets of real estate trading were concealed in a board game to protect them from centuries of socialist oppression. Maybe he guesses wrong about a lot of stuff: the properties must have been in New York (the capital of capitalism), the game must date from the time of Adam Smith, the founder of capitalism...you get the picture.
A couple centuries later, some historians have a look. What an idiot this guy was! It's easy to uncover the truth: the game comes from early 20th-century America, the properties are in Atlantic City, not New York, and--most humiliating of all--it was never anything but a game! People have played it for centuries without giving a hoot about economic philosophies or Atlantic City geography.
If we imagine that the 24th-century historians don't have many records of 20th-century popular culture to use to reconstruct what the designer of Monopoly had in mind, how could they get a clear picture of the ideas behind Monopoly? The few surviving accounts of the game confirm the names of the properties and some coarse picture of the rules. But why did the designer call one property "Mediterranean Avenue" and place it at the low end of the board, and call another "Board Walk" and place it at the high end? What a perplexing mystery! Why didn't the game players who wrote about how to play and how popular it was address these basic questions? Didn't they know? A great boost in the project might come from someone uncovering the British and German versions of the Monopoly Game. Aha! There's "Mayfair". We happen to know what that is! There are more documents surviving about London than about Atlantic City. Well, that's one way to start to unravel things. Players may not have needed to talk about the underlying structure of the game, but designers putting together local "translations" needed to understand that structure--it's part of their job.
I think we have something to learn from the ancient designers who adapted the Tarot for use in Ferrara, Milan, Florence...they probably paid attention to the concepts more than players did.
I hope this little thought exercise is helpful in conceiving how a game and a system of ideas can coexist in a single artifact, and how historical documents may fail to yield up the underlying system of ideas, despite its not being in any sense secret or obscure at the time when it's put into the game.
A final remark. I ran a very short, preliminary version of this analogy past Brain Williams yesterday. I'd been talking about Monopoly and "New York city real estate". He politely clued me in to the fact that I was a few miles too far north! I couldn't have asked for a more eloquent demonstration of how a player can have a crude conception of the ideas behind the game, but still be ignorant of some basic anchor points! I thought I understood what Monopoly was about. Did I?