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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 follow such a consistent path. The queen of spades represented the goddess Athena, which could also have been a representation of that kindred warrior, Joan of Arc. Rachel depicted the queen of diamonds whose husband, Jacob, waited around for 14 years to marry her. Somewhat disturbingly, the queen of hearts represented Judith, who quite unromantically cut off the head of Holofernes. The queen of clubs did not follow this same pattern. She represented a collection of images that formed Argine, an abstract favorite of kings, whose name appears to be an anagram of “regina” (queen). This also could be a possible reference again to Joan of Arc, as Charles the Great, the French Catholic major domo, was the king of clubs.

The jack of spades was from a knight in Charlemagne’s court; diamonds were for Hector; for hearts we have La Hire himself and Judas Maccabeus represented clubs. A variation on the theme had the four jacks being represented by four well-known knights: Lancelot, Ogier, Roland, and Valery. These four were youthful, clean-shaven and longhaired warriors, all with battle axes. All had a bloodhound-like dog at their feet except for Valery, possibly because Valery was the chief craftsman who created the deck.

For the lower numbers, cards two to ten, their value was on the same scale, i.e. two to ten. The Ace, an English word first defined as “unit”, did not fit into the two through ten range and had French, German, Spanish and other equivalents: as, ass, ace, etc. The Ace was actually valued below the two. The medieval Catholic Church took great exception to this as God was “one,” so to represent the almighty’s number as the lowest on the scale was clearly the work of the devil. Anyone deigning to disagree with this was shown the door to the torture chamber.

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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