A military commander in the French army, who was in combat along with Joan of Arc was also an artisan who designed and crafted cards. His name was Etienne de Vignolles, AKA La Hire. Saint Joan so impressed him with her courage and heroic deeds that he removed the knight in the deck in favor of a dame. Decorating cards with religious motifs, or those depicting human forms were not a problem to the Catholic Church. King David was symbolized in the deck with the king of spades with sword in hand and quiver at his feet. Charles the Great was represented by the king of clubs, Julius Caesar became the king of diamonds, and Alexander the Great, the king of hearts. The four sources of western civilization were thus represented by the four kings.
Today’s Queens and Jacks did not evolve as consistently. Athena represented the queen of spades, undoubtedly also drawn to be reminiscent of the soldier, Joan of Arc. Rachel, for whom Jacob hung around for 14 years to marry was the queen of diamonds. Oddly, the queen of hearts was depicted by Judith, the lovely maiden who lopped off the head of Holofernes. Now it gets complicated: the queen of clubs was an amalgamation of an abstract favorite of kings, termed Argine, which may have been named for an anagram of regina (queen). But again, it could have been used to suggest Joan of Arc as the king of clubs was depicted by Charles the Great, a very distinguished French Catholic honcho.
The jack of spades was the symbol for one of Charlemagne’s knights of the court. Hector stood in for diamonds; La Hire himself for hearts, while clubs were represented by Judas Maccabeus. For the sake of variety, the four jacks depicted four famous knights: Lancelot, Ogier, Roland and Valery. Each knight’s name appeared below their picture on the cards. They were long-haired, clean-shaven youths, warriors wielding battle axes. All of them buy Valery had at their feet a dog similar to a bloodhound. This may have occurred because Valery was also the lead craftsman of the deck.
Still lower on the scale came the cards from 10 to 2, marked by the appropriate number of suit symbols, greatest value accorded to the greater number. The English word “Ace” first meant “unit,” and had French, Spanish, German and other equivalents: as, aas, ass, etc. The Ace stood lower on the scale than 2. However, the medieval Catholic Church viciously opposed such a classification. God was “one,” and hence any game or numeric system which defined His number as the lowest was blaspheme and Satan’s work. Anyone who would not agree had to be convinced by an array of means which were difficult to argue with down at the basement.
Today, the Ace symbolized a kind of quintessence – associated freely with anything from the exposed essence of woman to what the physicists call the “naked singularity” – which is greater in value than any single influential personage. But can a single and the simplest of the cards in the deck stand for anything at once and should one privilege its scientific baseness or metaphysical elevation?
The question remains as arguable today as it was during the middle ages. In many countries there is no clear cut distinction between spiritual and earthly values, both being essential to present-day self definition. Today perhaps more than ever, any good citizen reveres the national, the mystical, the quantum-physical, and the downright pornographic of Esquire decks. The Ace is all or nothing, depending on how you see the contemporary concoction of concepts, and symbolizes best, perhaps, a kind of postmodern rhetorical indeterminacy which can take you anywhere or nowhere.
Otherwise, the cards serve us pretty much as they served any specific class or a mixture of class during the middle ages or the Renaissance. The basic hierarchy of the deck from King to lowest number, and the 2.598.960 possible combinations of varying value, the value of combinations decided by their rarity, allow ample possibility to project anybody’s social and spiritual aspirations.
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