Jeanne d'Arc and La Hire to the Naked Singularity of Spades

During the second half of the 14th century, Christian Crusaders and Venetian merchants brought what were called "Saracen cards" back to Medieval Europe. Once the poverty and superstition of the Dark Ages had lifted, markets and guilds and universities began to tentatively sprout in the more fertile cultural soil, and the budding concepts of science and leisure and play began to blossom in the sunlight. After the ravages of the bubonic plague, many survivors migrated from the forests and farms into cities. Working as merchants and craftsmen, they gradually formed a new urban mercantile class. Life was getting better for most people: They lived longer, they knew more, and their standard of living was higher. They also had more time to play.

In the earliest years of the Renaissance, books, cards, and pictures were all produced by artists, not printing presses. The burgeoning arts and university communities of Siena, Bologna, and Venice all became hotbeds of card playing. By 1379, numerous drawings of and written references to cards had appeared in Basle, Barcelona, Brussels, Paris, and Viterbo, a center of learning 60 miles north of Rome. As itinerant scholars and artists moved from school to school, the popularity of card games began to grow exponentially. In 1414 a single Briefmaler (card painter) was enough to supply the entire demand of Nuremberg, but within two generations, playing cards had become so fashionable that the city employed at least 37 full-time specialists.

But not everyone was persuaded of either the appeal or the morality of card games. During the Protestant Reformation, cards were scorned as "the Devil's picture book" because of the infernal wagering they facilitated. Then as now, it was considered a sin by many people to waste time, risk losing money, or have an excessive interest in the outcome of a pleasurable contest.

Even so, Carlos Mortensen's less pious ancestors in Spain were playing with 40-card decks, while Germans made do with 36. The cards used in Northern Italy were based on 52-card Persian decks divided into four suits: coins, cups, scimitars, and polo sticks, emblematic of the officers providing a sultan's court with money, food and drink, military protection, and sporting entertainment. In Italy, the polo sticks became scepters or cudgels - clubs used for fighting, that is, not yet the three-leafed clovers farmers fed to their livestock. A small number of artisans even experimented with the unheard of idea of replacing the viceroy with a - gulp - queen.

While card games continued to be the province mainly of male aristocrats, women, farmers, guild members, and tradesmen gradually figured out ways to get in on the action. Where each group ranked socially was reflected in the decks they used to play. Ever since Korean silk packs placed generals atop their hierarchy, cards had represented the strata into which various cultures had arranged themselves. A report from 1377 has many Swiss decks with the sun at the top, followed in descending order by the king, queen, knight, lady, valet, and maid. In another popular deck, the order was snarling lions, haughty kings and their ravishing ladies, soldiers in breast plates and helmets, then bare-breasted dancing girls. On Florentine decks, the ladies and dancers were naked.

Card playing became wildly popular among the French nobility in the late 16th century, and in England by 1650. Mary Queen of Scots loved to gamble for high stakes, shocking her husband by violating the Sabbath for a card game. In London in 1674, Charles Cotton published The Compleat Gamester, which laid out the rules and basic strategy for more than a dozen card games.

In the wealthy Catholic city-state of Venice, aristocrats kept separate apartments, called casini, just to play cards and consort with cortigiani onesti, those well-educated "honest" courtesans feted as symbols of Venetian splendor and liberal values. Venice is not only the birthplace of lotteries and casinos (its first opened in 1638), but was an early breeding ground for primero, the vying game that took Renaissance Europe by storm and eventually evolved into poker.

In the meantime, what did European playing cards look like? For well over a century, every hamlet and city had produced its own idiosyncratic designs, featuring suits such as monkeys, flowers, acorns, and parrots. But it was the decks produced in Northern France that were adopted most widely. By the middle of the 15th century, these economical decks made from cheaply stenciled patterns were being shipped in large quantities to Scandinavia, England, and what were called the Low Countries.

As early as 1470, card makers in Rouen had settled on the four suits in the two colors we're familiar with today. Coeurs (hearts) represented the church, carreaux (diamond-shaped floor tiles) the merchant class, both in the form of simple red icons. In black were the stylized piques (pikes or spearheads) signifying the state and trefles (three-leafed clovers) the farmers. A more general way to understand the four suits were as spirituality, money, war, and agriculture.

One of the French designers was Etienne de Vignoles, called La Hire (The Hero) because of his bravery during the Hundred Years War against England. Not that he saw duty every minute of it, but in the critical Seige of Orleans (1428-29), he fought under the numinous 17-year-old warrior Jeanne d'Arc, who was wounded in the breast but remained on the battlefield encouraging her pikemen and archers until the siege had been lifted. Legend has it that when, two years later in Rouen, the English burned Jeanne at the stake, her valor inspired Etienne to replace the soldier in French decks with la dame.

Unlike their Muslim counterparts, Catholic theologians didn't object to depictions of humans; indeed, their churches positively bristled with paintings, sculptures, mosaics, and stained-glass images of apostles, saints, archangels, Mary, and Jesus himself. So the Rouennais designers were free to adorn their court cards with historical figures and embellish them with Judeo-Christian iconography. The king of spades was drawn to resemble David, King of the Hebrews; his sword was modeled on the weapon he took from Goliath upon slaying the giant with a leather slingshot, which was shown lower down on his card. The club king depicted a stylized Charlemagne, the king of diamonds Julius Caesar, the heart king Alexander the Great. The four kings thus represented the Jewish world, the Holy Roman Empire, and pre-Christian Rome and Greece, the four main wellsprings of Western civilization.

The queens and jacks aligned much less neatly. The queen of spades was based on Pallas Athena, the goddess whose warlike spirit called to mind Jeanne's. The queen of diamonds was modeled on Rachel, the beauty who Jacob had to wait 14 years to marry. The queen of hearts was inspired by the Judith, the Jewish heroine who got the Assyrian general Holofernes drunk on false pretences then cut off his head, saving Israel in the process and rating the valiant widow her own book in the Old Testament. The club queen paid homage to "Argine," apparently an anagram of regina, the Latin word for "queen," though the designer probably had Jeanne in mind, too, since the king of clubs was Charlemagne, the other great French Catholic leader.

The jack of spades was based on Ogier, a knight in Charlemagne's court; diamonds on Hector of Troy; hearts on the proto-feminist Etienne de Vignolles; and clubs on Judas Maccabeus, who led Israel's revolt against the Syrians. Four other jacks featured full-length depictions of famous knights, whose names were printed next to their pictures: Lancelot, Ogier, Roland, and Valery. Each of these long-haired, beardless young warriors brandished a battle axe, and all but Valery (the knight who designed them) were attended by a hound.

Ranked below the jacks were the cards 10 through 2, whose values corresponded simply to the counting scheme and were indicated by the number of "pips" stenciled in the shape of their suit. (Interestingly, the total number of pips in a standard pack came to 365.) Just below the deuce, however, the math became fuzzier and more metaphysical. The English word ace means "one," "unit," or "particle," more or less exactly what it means in the French and Spanish as, the Italian asso, the Dutch aas, the German ass, and so on. Yet, the medieval Catholic Church argued strenuously that, since God was "the One," any game or scheme that assigned his number the lowest value was ipso facto the work of the Devil. Those who disagreed faced eons of pitchforks and brimstone.

These days, the ace stands for whichever entity - such as alpha, Allah, God, 1, A, the sun, a minaret, a steeple, a cathedral, the hinge of a woman's legs, or what physicists call a naked singularity - outranks the most dominant human. Yet, how can a single card, the plainest one in the deck, for that matter, represent so many things? And which must take precedence, the physical or metaphysical world?

Neither, says Edward O. Wilson. The eminent biologist has shown that in complex societies, religious and earthly values have always combined to determine status. "Power belonged to kings by divine right," he reminds us, "but high priests often ruled over kings by virtue of the higher ranks of the gods." In the general absence of kings nowadays, the theocratic presidents of Iran and the United States both serve as prominent examples of this principle.

Totemic ladders organize every society, though we're never quite sure how to read all the faces and colors and symbols. Does our ace of spades represent Saddam Hussein, an unfathomable concept in physics, the Vietnamese goddess of death, or "the Bitch"? All of the above? None? Since finding the ratio of the chord height to the phase-couple point of a naked singularity tends to make even Barry Greenstein and Jesus Ferguson dizzy, that sublime correlation is probably not the most prevalent. But do we really prefer the Esquire deck on what might be called the Naked Bitch level of culture, where the ace of spades is a bottomless Britney Spears posing pre-K-Fed in white high heels and a fluffy white sweater? If so, then God help us.

American idiom also declares that this innocent scrap of cellulose acetate is as black or as bad as things get - or as good, in the sense that Rhett Butler or Catwoman, Adam Cartwright or John Shaft are good. The ace of spades also is real, the most real, in that our willingness to "call a spade a spade" shows us to be forthright, clear-eyed, realistic.

However we interpret such images, poker's hierarchy of aces, kings, queens, and jacks, followed by the nine lower numbers, permutate and combine into 2,598,960 possible five-card hands, each with a clear value relative to the others - clear, that is, until an expert starts betting and raising. At the showdown, assuming there is one, the more mathematically rare a hand is, the greater its value.

But what does the back-and-forth play of a hold'em hand mean? Wilson, for one, suggests that rituals such as poker "celebrate the creation myths, propitiate the gods, and resanctify the tribal moral codes." In other words, when we read the community cards and abide by the rules, surrendering a mountainous pot to a fragile great-grandmother showing down jacks to our tens, we participate in and "resanctify" antediluvian pecking orders. All poker players must accept that, weirdly enough, a deuce is the smallest a thing can get, smaller than even a one - unless the one completes the bottom end of a straight or forms part of a low hand; that in tandem, however, deuces over match any ace, any face card, but that even three deuces must lose to a straight or a flush - unless, of course, another pair materializes, in which case we have a full house.

Straight flushes at the top, then quads, fulls, flushes, straights, sets, two pairs, pairs, highest card, highest kicker - poker's recombinant totem pole is based on mathematical scarcity, the Arabic counting scheme and our status-hungry social order. As a measure of our collective values, it makes just about perfect sense. And who would deny that showing down bottom set against aces up, especially in one of the cathedrals of Eros and chance that host the biggest cash games and tournaments, feels deeply sweet in our marrow?