The History of Tarot
Traversing the history of tarot is like playing the long game of “Chicken or the Egg.” There are many cultures which claim to be the birthplace of tarot, but history time and time again proves to be a mesh of simultaneous, similar events that bleed into one another. So, before considering the origin of tarot, one must first recognize the history of playing cards.
9th Century China, particularly during the Tang Dynasty, lies the earliest known reference to playing cards. Writer Su E, in the Collection of Miscellanea at Duyang, describes a “leaf game” called Yezi Gexi which was supposedly played by Princess Tongchang, daughter of Emperor Yizong of Tang. The scholar Ouyang Xiu, who thrived during the Song dynasty, insisted that this so called "leaf" game had been in existence mid-Tang dynasty with the association of the development of printed sheets. While the rules and particular playing pieces of this game had been lost, it’s speculated that these first cards may actually have been paper money to be used as both a game piece and the stakes in which the game was played for. The act of using real money as gaming pieces wasn’t unheard of, however risky, and eventually they were replaced with play money—similar to the popular game Monopoly. The play money was referred to as "money cards.” Madiao, a trick-taking game, is one of these early games from the Ming Dynasty which used money cards.
Following the rise of paper and through the means of merchants and travelers, cards trickled from China into Persia, Arabia, India and then to Egypt by the 11th century. While the cards certainly received different interpretations as well as variations as they traversed culture to culture, they mostly retained four different suits: sticks, coins, swords and cups. The idea of four suits was retained throughout the course of the cards’ history, although suits we recognize today— Spades, Hearts, Diamonds, and Clubs — had originated in France in approximately 1480. The cards during this time had been used to play trick-taking games just minus any trump cards, although the precise rules have been lost. By the time the 14th century rolled around, playing cards had reached Europe.
The cards and the games that had been invented around them became a reflection of society.
Because the first playing cards were hand-painted and often commissioned, they were a privilege of the wealthy. They spread along inland trade routes as a means of a pastime that had become favored by the upper class. These cards were just another show of wealth and mostly used as conversational décor rather than a means for play. The images on the playing cards evolved as society evolved, being derived from fables, romances and other forms of commentary including political. This especially came apparent during the Gothic Age when there were severe economic and religious changes. Merchants and craftsmen now played more important roles in the economic growth of towns depending on the buying and exchanging of goods. Card imagery and luxury reflected this aspect.
It would be a while before the common man was included in the rise of card games, but when they were it was in the form of a bonding practice as well as a test of skill. The cards filled the gap between intellectual games like chess and games of pure luck like dice. Gambling was included thus inspiring the stigma around card games. While the wealthy got away with their luxurious card pieces, the lower class were condemned for their card games as it became an association with greed, immortality, and idleness. Cards were banned by particularly religious authorities for a time especially when people began to draw analogies from their games.
The search for the greater meaning within the games led to what is now known as cartomancy.
Cartomancy is divination using cards—specifically playing cards which had been used first. To put it simply, tarot cards are used for cartomancy, but not all cartomancy uses tarot cards. The form of cartomancy using playing cards was the first and most popular form of fortune-telling. The goal was similar to the games in which the cards were first founded: to see and make one’s own destiny either by luck or skill. Sometimes, a game would be played and the fortune-teller would explain the outcome of destiny using their winning hand.
Through imagery, numbers, and particular spreads, the card reader could interpret the story and answer the proposed question. Romance readings using this method were especially done by women of the lower class using a 13-card spread during the time of the Spanish inquisition. Another way cartomancy was read was by choosing a signifying card, cutting the deck, and laying it out in rows. The goal was to find the signifier and interpret the cards around it.
The cards were given associations and classifications using the elements, cardinal points, lunar cycles etc. For example, each suit of 13 cards could represent the 13 months of the lunar year while the entirety of the deck (52 cards) could represent the 52 weeks of the year. Cards such as the Ace was symbolically “Alpha and Omega” or “the Beginning and End”. The court cards were straight forward being inspired by the local social structure. Different decks had varying designs and thus were interpreted accordingly. These designs would be influenced by literature, current politics, animals, herbs—all suggesting symbolism which echoed the popular beliefs and local folklore. This was prevalent during the Renaissance in Italy as new thematic content reflected the enlightened views. The Mamluk period cards were shown to have a reversed interpretation as well as upright.
Jean-Baptiste Alliette is said to be the “Father of Cartomancy,” meaning he was just the first to popularize it with a wide spread audience in the middle of the 18th century. He preferred the name “Etteilla” which was just the reverse of his last name. Etteilla was the first to have printed a method of cartomancy using his own independent pack of cards to which he assigned a particular meaning to each one. A keyword was associated with the individual cards and there were particular spreads he would use for interpretation. He was inclined to the esoteric interpretation of tarot which he made the center of his philosophy incorporating astrology and his redesigned tarot. It’s because of the efforts of him and Antoine Court de Gébelin’s essays on the esoteric meaning of tarot that made the idea of cartomancy popular.
However, one can’t talk about cartomancy without discussing Marie Anne Lenormand who also had a strong hand in the legacy of cartomancy. She was only 14-years-old when she ran away from the convent school where she was raised and relocated to Paris. There she learned the art of cartomancy rode the wave during the late 18th century where she rose as a famous, professional fortune teller. She is considered the greatest cartomancer of all time and is credited to given advice to many famous names such as leaders from the French Revolution, Joséphine de Beauharnais (Napoleon’s wife), Empress Josephine and Tsar Alexander I. She was active for more than 40 years, and after her death, her name was used on several cartomancy decks including a deck of 36 illustrated cards known as the Petit Lenormand, or simply "Lenormand cards.” These cards are still used today especially France, the Low Countries, Central Europe, the Balkans, and Russia.
With this background set, we can now discuss tarot proper.
Tarot was first known as trionfi and later as tarocchi or tarock, and they were a pack of playing cards similar to the ones discussed before. This deck was used from at least the mid-15th century in various parts of Europe to play games such as Italian tarocchini. Like the other games, tarot was a trick taking game. “Trick Taking” is a play of a “hand” led by rotation and centered on a series of finite rounds or “tricks.” Tarocchini is similar to the French tarot trick-taking game (which uses a 78-card deck), and Austrian Königrufen (also called the “Game of Kings”). It can be assumed that these games of equal luck and skill led a similar fate in being used to interpret destiny. The earliest evidence of a tarot deck in cartomancy context comes from a manuscript dating back to 1750 which had documented Tarocco Bolognese cards used for rudimentary divination.
Referring back to Etteilla and his work, he was the first to issue a tarot deck specifically for divination purposes. He and other esotericists believed that tarot as a whole was derived from the Book of Thoth—an important piece of literature in Egyptian mythology said to be written by Thoth, the Egyptian god of writing, knowledge and magic. This 78-card deck had two parts: the Major Arcana and Minor Arcana. This terminology was first used by Jean-Baptiste Pitois who also went by the name Paul Christian. The most recognizable decks in this category are Tarot of Marseilles (French tarot), the Rider–Waite–Smith tarot deck, and the Thoth tarot deck.
Arthur Edward Waite, an American-born British poet and scholarly mystic, was the co-creator of the Rider–Waite tarot deck (also called the Rider–Waite–Smith or Waite–Smith deck) along with Pamela Colman Smith who illustrated the deck. Through the efforts of Waite and the publishing of The Mysteries of Magic, by 1886 the occult tarot was taken seriously; however, it was not an officially established tool in the English-speaking part of the world until 1888 when the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was formed. The Rider–Waite–Smith deck was released in 1909, and, aside from Etteilla’s tarot, was the first complete cartomantic tarot deck. It also was the first tarot deck to feature complete scenes for each of the 36 suit cards between 2 and 10 since the Sola Busca tarot of the 15th century. While the court cards remained traditionally assigned, the deck swapped trumps of Justice and Strength, renamed the suits of Batons and Coins to Wands and Pentacles, swapped the order of the King and the Knight (renaming them the Prince and the King), changed the Page to become the Princess, assigned each of the court cards to the letters of the Tetragrammaton (which associated both the court cards and suits to the four elements), and associated each of the cards tanked 2 to 10 with one of the 36 astrological decans. Waite released The Key to the Tarot in 1910.
Aleister Crowley released the Thoth deck, a partner to his The Book of Thoth, in 1944 which offered an evolution to the original designs presented in tarot. Crowley’s claim was that tarot was symbolic imagery of the Universe, based on the data of the Holy Qabalah. Originally, the deck was a series of paintings done by Lady Frieda Harris between 1938 and 1942. This deck followed the Golden Dawn group teaching of zodiacal associations of the major arcana and the associations of the astrological decans of the minor arcana. However, it differed by reverting to the traditional Marseille tarot numbering of Justice and Strength (thought retaining the swapped associations to the Hebrew alphabet), as well as swapping the Hebrew alphabet associations of the fourth and seventeenth arcana (The Emperor and The Star) in accordance with Crowley's Liber Legis of 1913. Some other changes including a renaming of several major arcana cards, the renaming of Batons and Coins to Wands and Disks, and the Golden Dawn's version of court cards minus the Knight’s renaming.
Aside from the works of names such as Crowley and Waite, the Romani people have also had a long and complicated history with cartomancy and tarot.
It’s speculated that the Romani were the previously mentioned travelers which aided in the introduction of playing cards and cartomancy alike to the rest of the continent. The now recognized slur, g*psie, came from the assumption that the Romani were descended from ancient Egyptians. The idea was romanticized heavily, still influencing stereotypes today. Esoteric enthusiasts like Court de Gébelin, who believed the origins of the tarot as the Book of Thoth in ancient Egypt, made the associations of tarot with cartomancy to the Romani people because of this fact. However, with the Romani being an oppressed ethnic minority, that association wasn’t taken seriously until the 1850s when French authors like Boiteau d'Ambly and Jean-Alexandre Vaillant began insisting that the Romani people spreading tarot was both a logical and viable theory. Vaillant in particular published a book in 1857 book about the Romani people as he was both a student and tarot enthusiast. In spite of this, the theory remained criticized as the arrival of the Romani historically misaligned with the popularization of the 78-card deck which had included trumps and suits previously. The romanticization of the Romani, however, was so prevalent in society that occultists clung to the idea of Romani and tarot so much so that in 1889 Tarot of the Bohemians (“Bohemians” referring to the Romani) was published further fortifying the notion.
Aside from the fantasy and harmful stereotypes, Romani people certainly have their own culture embedded in their own sacred cartomancy practices. Fortune-telling was a means of income and livelihood, although the majority of clients were of non-Roma descent. The practice, however, was naturally shunned from the church demonizing the profession as much as the people. Despite this, the famed accuracy of Romani divination was widely coveted. Thanks to their nomadic ways, their fame grew like wildfire and there were claims of acute clairvoyance within the culture. Just as the original card games divined through what was claimed as skill and luck, the Romani people used words like dukkering (roughly translating to something spiritual or ghostly) and bocht (roughly meaning fate). Traditionally, it was speculated that the art of cartomancy was passed from mother to daughter as the women led in the fortune-telling world. And cartomancy wasn’t the only form of divination the Romani are credited with but they also used forms such as palmistry, tea-leaf reading, and methods using a crystal ball. Either way, fortune-telling remains an acute and respected aspect of Romani culture today.
Other such involvement that must be noted would be from Kabbalah. Kabbalah is Jewish mysticism using esoteric methods to explain the relationship between the eternal God or “Infinite”, and the finite universe which is considered to be God’s creation. To put it simply, it’s a bridge of understanding between the Creator and the Creation. A lot of interpretations and imagery of tarot was inspired by Kabbalah practice. For example, there are 22 cards in the major arcana which correspond to the letters in the Hebrew alphabet the number of pathways on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. In Western esotericism, Hermetic Qabalah became the central underground tradition starting in 1856 with Alphonse Louis Constant (also known as Eliphas Levi). Levi was credited to publishing the association of the 22 cards with the Hebrew alphabet as well as linking the four suits of the minor arcana to Tetragrammaton (the four-letter name of God). The previously mentioned book The Tarot of the Bohemians was written using Levi’s teachings. In the major arcana, the High Priestess is holding a Torah as she sits between King Solomon's pillars. Other examples of Kabbalah associations were when Crowley swapped the Star and the Emperor so that the Emperor maybe correspond to the Hebrew letter tzaddi, and the Star to heh. There is also an association the ten sefirot, or vessels, with the ten numbered cards, and the four olams, or realms, with the suits of the Minor Arcana. The four suits themselves refer to the different journeys and aspects of the human condition: swords are knowledge, wands associate sexuality and passion, cups are emotions, and pentacles associate with the material such as money and career. All of these together give humanity the fulfillment as referred to in Kabbalah.
In summary, the history of tarot is a long and convoluted one. With the efforts of many people of various cultures, tarot cards have evolved into what we most recognize today.