The Greater and Lesser Trumps: Introduction

The story is told that in Ancient Egypt of fond and mysterious memory, the bureaucrats of Imhotep (whom men called the son of Ptah, God of Engineers and Ways) were wont to classify and pontificate about their classifications. And in the fullness of time, these bureaucrats who were also priests and arbiters and officers of the court, these servants of the Pharaoh - they had assembled a hundred thumbnail profiles of human character which could be used to classify the many kinds of men.

The total number of profiles was 42000, with variants thereof, but the core of the system was a series of a hundred images - thirty greater archetypes and seventy lesser archetypes, each descriptive of a particular kind of human character.

These wise and complex servants of the Son of Ra made themselves particularly adept in the use of these images to quickly and appropriately assign new recruits to different areas of the bureaucracy of the Twin Crown. A man whose character was one of the Great Thirty would be placed on a career path which might go unto the threshold of the Crown, as a close advisor or implementor of the Sun-God's earthly viceroy. A man of the Lesser Seventy might yet be a foreman among the builders of the pyramids.

Eventually, because this ancient instance of personality profiling seemed like sorcery or theurgy or divination to the untutored masses, the set of images became used (illegally at first) as a tool of divination. The children used it for games. The Great Thirty became 22, and then dwindled, as people realised they weren't useful in simple games. The modern set has only 2 or 3, and we call them Jokers. These are sometimes called the Greater Trumps.

What of the Lesser Seventy? They were divided into five sub-sets: Builders, Designers, Priests, Traders, and Nobility. Each sub-set had 14 images in it. Over the years, the common people did away with nobility, and the ideas were conflated. The five sets became four suits: Staves, Swords, Cups and Coins - we call them Clubs, Spades, Hearts and Diamonds now. And each suit has only 13 cards, for a total of 52, instead of 70. These are sometimes called the Lesser Trumps. Many card games use only these, and omit the Greater Trumps altogether.

People still abuse these greatly diminished decks to tell fortunes, completely having forgotten their origin as a tool of the bureaucracy for personality profiling. Or so the story goes.

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Note: This account of the development of modern playing cards (and their ancestor, the Tarot deck) comes from a wide range of sources. I would however like to specifically acknowledge the author Piers Anthony, who first hypothesized what the missing cards should have been and gave his own ideas literary flesh. Subsequent posts owe much to Anthony and the imagery of the last four millennia.