A Tarot History

The following amplifies topics in the introduction, which also supplies references.

The tarot (also known as tarocchi, tarock and similar) is typically a set of seventy-eight cards. There are twenty-two trump cards, including the Fool, and four suits of fourteen cards each. Non-occult Italian-suited Tarot decks were the earliest form of Tarot deck to be invented, being first devised in or near the 1430s in northern Italy. The trump cards have pictures representing various forces, characters, virtues, and vices. The standard modern tarot deck is based on the Venetian or the Piedmontese tarot. It consists of 78 cards divided into two groups: the 22 trumps and the 54 others.

Tarot cards are used throughout much of Europe to play Tarot card games. Variations of the game are still played in France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Denmark, and especially in the countries on the area of the former Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. Tarot was also used as early as the 1500s to compose poems, called "tarocchi appropriati", describing ladies of the court or famous personages.

Playing cards first entered Europe in the late 1300s with the Mamelukes of Persia, and as far as history takes us, the first tarot decks were created between 1410 and 1430 in either Milan, Ferrara, or Bologna, in northern Italy, when additional trump cards with allegorical illustrations were added to the more common four suit decks.

Manuscripts from 1735 (The Square of Sevens) and 1750 (Pratesi Cartomancer) document rudimentary divinatory meanings for the cards of the tarot.

The earliest tarot cards were hand painted, and for a long time tarot cards remained a privilege for the upper classes. But after the invention of the printing press, mass production of cards started. Decks survive from this era from various cities in France. the best known deck from this phase is a deck from Marseille and thus named the tarot de Marseille.

The trump cards were added to regular playing cards in order to show underlying philosophical, social, poetical, astronomical, and heraldic ideas. The essential meanings of the cards are derived mostly from the Kabbalah of Jewish mysticism and from Medieval Alchemy.

The first esoteric Tarot deck was designed by a French occultist named Alliette. He worked as a seer and card diviner shortly before the French Revolution. Etteilla added astrological attributions and "Egyptian" motifs to various cards, altering many of them from the Marseille designs, and adding divinatory meanings.

In 1781 Antoine Court de Gébelin, a Swiss clergyman and Freemason, published a speculative tarot study, asserting that symbolism of the tarot de Marseille represented the mysteries of Isis and Thoth. De Gébelin wrote this treatise before Jean-François Champollion had deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs, even before the Rosetta Stone had been discovered. What is more, later Egyptologists found nothing in the Egyptian language to support de Gébelin's fanciful etymologies.

Some decks exist primarily as artwork; and such art decks sometimes contain only the twenty-two trump cards. Artists have been free to represent the various elements in a card in any way they choose, and they usually try to draw the picture in such a way as to reveal a new truth. As a result, a variety of styles of tarot decks and designs exist. Many popular decks have modified the traditional symbolism to reflect the esoteric beliefs of their creators.

Historically, one of the most important designs is the one usually known as the tarot de Marseille (below).

System Connections

Older decks, including the tarot of Marseille, are less detailed than more modern decks. Tarot reading revolves around the belief that the cards can be used to gain insight into the current and possible future situations of the subject (or querent), i.e. cartomancy.

Carl G. Jung went into tarot symbolism. It seems he regarded many of the cards as representing archetypes: fundamental types of persons or situations embedded in the subconscious of all human beings. His view does not account for the many picture changes in the tarot deck from when it started as playing-cards in medieval Italy. "Changing archetypes" is a major weakness in Jung's thought, then, for he does not seem to account for it - not well enough. What essentially matters, is not to put too much into playing-cards. The question: How much is too much? It violates the basic findings one way or another, or in several ways.

It is also possible that 22 of the tarot's cards (the so-called major arcana) somehow represent human development from infancy through adulthood to old age. Thus, the Fool symbolizing the new born infant, the Magician symbolizing the stage at which an infant starts to play with artifacts, and so on.

Numerology may also be brought into tarot thinking. There is a link between tarot and astrology, as the tarot derives at least in part from Jewish Kabbalah, as stated above, and Kabbalah is soaked in astrology. Hence, some find it interesting to incorporate ideas and parts of tarot into their own astrological practice. One such way is shown by a spiral figure that relates to findings in a study by Sigurd Agrell.

For fortune-telling, each tarot card is given a set of several meanings, but all of them do not seem to have anything to do with what early tarot trumps were intended to signify by rather standardised, allegorical means used by early deck makers.

Further Thought

An image says more than a thousand words [American].

Elegant sayings and many kinds of images attempt to sum up experiences or teachings harvested over a time.

It is largely fit to focus on the essentials first of all.

Lovely arts counts the world over.