The History of Tarot Cards

Some time in the first half of the fifteenth century, somewhere in northern Italy, someone created the first set of tarot cards. Similar to playing cards of the day, the tarot deck included number cards (1 through 10) in four suits, and court cards page, knight, and king. But the tarot deck had more: a queen was added to each of the courts, and 22 special cards, not belonging to any suit, were added. These special cards bore symbolic pictures, with such subjects as the Emperor, the Pope, The Wheel of Fortune, Death, the Devil, and the Moon.

Tarot cards were used to play a new type of card game, similar to bridge, but with 21 special cards serving as permanent trumps, which could be played regardless of what suit was led, and out-ranked the ordinary cards. This Game of Triumphs, became extraordinarily popular, particularly among the rich, and spread through northern Italy and eastern France. As the game spread to new locations, changes were often made in the pictures, and also in the ranking of the trumps, which usually bore no numbers. In time, tarot spread to Sicily and north to Austria, Germany.

Ensuing Centuries, faithful of the occult arts in France and England encountered the tarot and saw mystical and magical meaning in the enigmatic symbolism of the cards. Their fascination with the cards led to the celebrity tarot presently has as a spiritual tool and occult artefact.

One pursuit of tarot history is to trace the many changes the cards have undergone through the centuries, as they were taken to different locations and redesigned by different artists and card makers. Many distinctive designs are beautiful, intriguing, or excite, giving us a porthole on the notable culture of different times and places.

A second objective is to find clues pertaining to the audacious mystery of the origin of the tarot cards: What was on the mind of the original designer? Did the symbolic pictures have a deeper meaning and purpose, or were they merely game pieces? The question is surprisingly difficult to answer. We can gather some evidence from the art, literature, and popular culture of the time. We can also look at the cards themselves, and the occasional written references to them that have survived. From such evidence, it is possible to build up a picture of what the tarot symbols might have meant when the cards were first created. Different people, though, come up with very different pictures! The evidence is ambiguous.

On these pages, I display some of the pertinent evidence and present the conclusions I draw from it. I hope that others who share my fascination with the tarot will find this informative and thought-provoking, whether or not they agree with all my conclusions.

The word Tarot may have derived from:

- Torah (Hebrew), "The Law - Law Giver" - Thoth Egyptian god - Tarosh (Egyptian), "The royal way" - Ator, from the Egyptian goddess Hathor - Torah -Torus in Sacred Geometry or Creation - "Taurus" - Astrology - Rota (Latin), "Wheel" - Wheel of karma - Wheels Within Wheels - The Taro river in Northern Italy - Orat (Latin), "It speaks, argues" - Taru (Hindu), "Cards" - Troa (Hebrew), "Gate" - Tares, meaning the dot border on old cards - Tarotee, meaning a pattern on the backs.

THEORIES ABOUT THE HISTORY OF TAROT
The origins of Tarot are somewhat obscure. the most common theories are Egypt - Thoth and the connection to the ancient mystery school teachings. The most common myth is that it was brought to Europe by the Gypsies. I have also read that there is a link as far back as ancient China. It is believed that all ancient civilizations developed some kind of mysticism.

Tarot as we know it today is a collection of images and symbols from a wide variety of cultures, from the ancient Greeks and Romans to the prehistoric Norse peoples, from the ancient religions of India and Egypt to the medieval courts of Italy and France.

The first clear reference that we have to Tarot cards is from a sermon that was collected with many others about 1500AD in Italy found in the Steele Manuscript. The sermon is thought to date from about 1450AD to 1470AD and is a diatribe against games of chance. It gives a detailed description of the Tarot trumps, not only numbering them but naming them as well.

The oldest group of surviving Tarot cards, called Tarocchi in Italian, appears to date from 1420 to 1450. Although the oldest cards that we have are hand-painted ones, many scholars believe that printed or wood block cards predate the hand-painted ones. However, as most early printed cards were much-used and of poor quality, the earliest printed cards date from later than the hand-painted ones by twenty to fifty years so that there is no physical evidence to show which type of cards were the first to be created. By about 1500AD, Tarot decks had become fairly standardized although there were individual differences from deck to deck even as there are today.

Antoine Court de Gebelin, (1725-84AD), a French linguist, cleric, occultist, Mason, member of the Lodge of the Philalethes, and author of the nine-volume work Le Monde Primitif - was convinced of the mystical significance of the Tarot and fond of Egyptian lore, this pre-Rosetta Stone. He believed the cards' birth place was ancient Egypt, where they served as tools of initiation into the priesthood. For him, the Tarot's Major Arcana was the Book of Thoth, a synthesis of all knowledge once held in hieroglyphic form in burned Egyptian temples and libraries.

He claimed that it had escaped the destruction of the Library of Alexandria. At the time he was writing this, the skill of reading hieroglyphics had been lost for almost 1200 years and there existed the widely held belief that they were magical symbols concealing the lost knowledge of antiquity. He saw the Tarot as a contemporarily available pictorial embodiment of this occult wisdom, a tangible link with the past.

French man, (erroneously believed by some to have been barber, he merely had lodgings above a barbers shop) named Alliette, writing under the pseudonym Etteilla (his name spelled backwards), followed de Gebelin's lead and revised the Tarot to comply with his own idiosyncratic idea of Egyptian mysticism. It has to be said, his Tarot has had less influence upon subsequent designs than have his ideas.

In the mid 1850s a third Frenchman, Alphonse Louis Constant (originally a deacon of the Catholic Church), began to publish occult works. For the purposes of authorship he translated his name into Hebrew and wrote under the name Eliphas Levi (he dropped the final Zahed?. His books contained Tarot references and symbolism and it was he who first established the link between the Tarot and cabala (or Qabalah).

He felt that the god Thoth-Hermes made the original deck. His theory contains mathematical ideas similar to those of Pythagoras, whom he admired.

Eliphas Levi (real name: Alphonse Louis Constant, author of 'History of Magic|'), 1810-1875, was a French priest and Rosicruician who thought the Tarot the key to the Bible, the Jewish Qabbalah, and all other ancient spiritual writings. He attempted to link the 22 cards of the Major Arcana to the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. He drew parallels between Tarot suits and the four letters of the Tetragrammaton, YHVH ('Yahweh').

Differences in Decks
Shapes: Square, rectangular, round
Size: Regular card size, tiny, large
Number if cards: 78 standard - More - Less
Based on a particular mythic cycle - psychological theory - channeled information Cards are laid out in a variety of standard spreads or created by the person using them.