Tarot

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Tarot (

Like the common playing cards, tarot has four

In English-speaking countries where these games are not widely played, only specially designed cartomantic tarot cards, used primarily for novelty and divination, are readily available.^[2] The early French occultists claimed that tarot cards had esoteric links to ancient Egypt, Kabbalah, the Indic Tantra, or I Ching, claims that have been frequently repeated by authors on card divination. However, scholarly research demonstrated that tarot cards were invented in northern Italy in the mid-15th century and confirmed that there is no historical evidence of any significant use of tarot cards for divination until the late 18th century.^[2][3] Historians have described western views of the Tarot pack as "the subject of the most successful propaganda campaign ever launched... An entire false history and false interpretation of the Tarot pack was concocted by the occultists and it is all but universally believed."^[4]

In the occult tradition, tarot cards are referred to as "arcana", with the Fool and 21 trumps being termed the Major Arcana and the suit cards the Minor Arcana,^[5] terms not used by players of tarot card games.

Tarot cards, then known as tarocchi, first appeared in

Playing cards first entered Europe in the late 14th century, but the origin is unknown. The first records date to 1367 in Bern and they appear to have spread very rapidly across the whole of Europe, as may be seen from the records, mainly of card games being banned.^[10][11][12] Little is known about the appearance and number of these cards, the only significant information being provided by a text by John of Rheinfelden in 1377 from Freiburg im Breisgau, who, in addition to other versions, describes the basic pack as containing the still-current 4 suits of 13 cards, the courts usually being the King, Ober and Unter ("marshals"), although Dames and Queens were already known by then.

An early pattern of playing cards used the suits of batons or clubs, coins, swords, and cups. These suits are still used in traditional

The first documented tarot decks were recorded between 1440 and 1450 in

The oldest surviving tarot cards are the 15 or so decks of the Visconti-Sforza Tarot painted in the mid-15th century for the rulers of the Duchy of Milan.^[17] In 15th century Italy, the set of cards that was included in tarot packs, including trumps, seems to have been consistent, even if naming and ordering varied. There are two main exceptions:^[18]

• Some late 15th century decks like the Sola Busca tarot and the Boiardo deck had four suits, a fool, and 21 trumps, but none of the trumps match tarot ones. They seem to have been made on the model of tarot decks, but were voluntary departures from an established standard.
• The Visconti di Mondrone pack, one of the Visconti-Sforza decks, originally had a Dame and a Maid in each suit, in addition to the standard King, Queen, Knight, and Jack. Additionally, the pack includes three trump cards which represent the theological virtues of Faith, Hope, and Charity, and are not present in any other tarot deck of that era.

Although a Dominican preacher inveighed against the evil inherent in playing cards, chiefly because of their use in gambling, in a sermon in the 15th century,^[19] no routine condemnations of tarot were found during its early history.^[2]

Propagation

Because the earliest tarot cards were hand-painted, the number of the decks produced is thought to have been small. It was only after the invention of the printing press that mass production of cards became possible. The expansion of tarot outside of Italy, first to France and Switzerland, occurred during the Italian Wars. The most prominent tarot deck version used in these two countries was the Tarot of Marseilles, of Milanese origin.^[2]

While the set of trumps was generally consistent, their order varied by region, perhaps as early as the 1440s.

In Florence, an expanded deck called Minchiate was later used. This deck of 97 cards includes astrological symbols and the four elements, as well as traditional tarot motifs.^[2] The earliest known mention of this game, under the name of germini, dates to 1506.^[22]

Etymology

The word "tarot"^[23] and German Tarock derive from the Italian Tarocchi, the origin of which is uncertain, although taroch was used as a synonym for foolishness in the late 15th and early 16th centuries.^[24][25] The decks were known exclusively as Trionfi during the fifteenth century. The new name first appeared in Brescia around 1502 as Tarocho.^[26] During the 16th century, a new game played with a standard deck but sharing a very similar name (Trionfa) was quickly becoming popular. This coincided with the older game being renamed tarocchi.^[2] In modern Italian, the singular term is Tarocco, which, as a noun, is a cultivar of blood orange. The attribute Tarocco and the verb Taroccare are used regionally to indicate that something is fake or forged. This meaning is directly derived from the tarocchi game as played in Italy, in which tarocco indicates a card that can be played in place of another card.^[27][28]

Playing card decks

The original purpose of tarot cards was to play games. A very cursory explanation of rules for a tarot-like deck is given in a manuscript by Martiano da Tortona before 1425. Vague descriptions of game play or game terminology follow for the next two centuries until the earliest known complete description of rules for a French variant in 1637.^[29] The game of tarot has many regional variations. Tarocchini has survived in Bologna and there are still others played in Piedmont and Sicily, but in Italy the game is generally less popular than elsewhere.

The 18th century saw tarot's greatest revival, during which it became one of the most popular card games in Europe, played everywhere except Ireland and Britain, the Iberian peninsula, and the

Italian-suited decks were the oldest form of tarot deck to be made, first devised in the 15th century in northern Italy. Three decks of this category are still used to play certain games:

• The
  pip cards
  for a total of 78 cards. Trump 20 outranks 21 in most games and the Fool is numbered 0 despite not being a trump.
• The
  Swiss 1JJ Tarot
  is similar, but replaces the Pope with Jupiter, the Popess with Juno, and the Angel with the Judgement. The trumps rank in numerical order and the Tower is known as the House of God. The cards are not reversible like the Tarocco Piemontese.
• The Tarocco Bolognese omits numeral cards two to five in plain suits, leaving it with 62 cards, and has somewhat different trumps, not all of which are numbered and four of which are equal in rank. It has a different graphical design than the two above as it was not derived from the Tarot of Marseilles.

Italo-Portuguese-suited deck

The

The sole surviving example of a Spanish-suited deck was produced around 1820 by Giacomo Recchi of Oneglia, Liguria and destined for Sardinia. The plain suit cards are copied from the Sardinian pattern designed just ten years earlier by José Martinez de Castro for Clemente Roxas in Madrid but with the addition of 10s and queens. The trumps are largely copied from an early version of the Tarocco Piemontese. At that time, Liguria, Sardinia, and Piedmont were all territories of the Savoyard state.^[32][33][34]

French-suited decks

The illustrations of French-suited tarot trumps depart considerably from the older Italian-suited design, abandoning the Renaissance allegorical motifs. With the exception of novelty decks, French-suited tarot cards are almost exclusively used for

• Industrie und Glück – the Industrie und Glück ("Diligence and Fortune"^[a]) genre art tarock deck of Central Europe uses Roman numerals for the trumps. It is sold with 54 cards; the 5 to 10 of the red suits and the 1 to 6 of the black suits are removed. There are 3 patterns – Types A, B and C – of which Type C has become the standard, whereas Types A and B appear in limited editions or specials.
• Danish Tarok in Denmark. It is also sometimes used in Germany to play Cego
  . Its genre art trumps use Arabic numerals in corner indices.
• Upper Rhine valley and neighbouring mountain regions such as the Black Forest or the Vosges
  It has 54 cards organized in the same fashion as the Industrie und Glück packs. Its trumps use Arabic numerals but within centered indices.
• genre scenes
  similar to those of the Tarot Nouveau, but the Arabic numerals are centred as in the Adler-Cego pack.

• 
  18th century Animal Tarot
• 
  Salzburg veduta trumps, c. 1840
• 
  Industrie und Glück Tarock trumps
• 
  Adler Cego trumps
• 
  Cego Bourgeois Tarot
• 
  Tarot Nouveau

  trumps c. 1910

German Tarock cards

From the late 18th century, in addition to producing their own true Tarot packs, the south German states manufactured German-suited packs labeled "Taroc", "Tarock" or "Deutsch-Tarok". These survive as "Schafkopf/Tarock" packs of the

ace–ten ranking, like klaverjas, where ace is the highest followed by 10, king, Ober, Unter, then 9 to 6. The heart suit is the default trump suit.^[2] The Bavarian pack is also used to play Schafkopf

by excluding the Sixes.

• 
  Württemberg Tarock

  cards

Cartomancy

Main article: Tarot card reading

The earliest evidence of a tarot deck used for

Tarot Nouveau

around 1900, with the result that the Marseilles pattern is now used mostly by cartomancers.

Etteilla was the first to produce a bespoke tarot deck specifically designed for occult purposes around 1789. In keeping with the unsubstantiated belief that such cards were derived from the Book of Thoth, Etteilla's tarot contained themes related to ancient Egypt.^[37]

The 78-card tarot deck used by esotericists has two distinct parts:

• The
  suits
  . Their names and numbers vary, but in a typical scheme, the names are:
  • The Fool. Cards from The Magician to The World are numbered in Roman numerals
    from I to XXI, while The Fool is the only unnumbered card, sometimes placed at the beginning of the deck as 0, or at the end as XXII.
• The Minor Arcana (lesser secrets) consists of 56 cards, divided into four suits of 14 cards each;
  • Ten numbered cards and four court cards. The court cards are the King, Queen, Knight and Page/Jack, in each of the four tarot suits. The traditional Italian tarot suits are swords, batons, coins and cups; however, in modern occult tarot decks, the suit of batons is often called wands, rods or staves; the suit of coins is often called pentacles or disks and the suit of cups is often referred to as goblets.

The terms "Major Arcana" and "Minor Arcana" were first used by Jean-Baptiste Pitois (also known as Paul Christian) and are never used in relation to tarot card games.^[38] Some decks exist primarily as artwork, and such art decks sometimes contain only the 22 Major Arcana.

The three most common decks used in esoteric tarot are the Tarot of Marseilles (a playing card pack), the Rider–Waite Tarot, and the Thoth Tarot.^[37]

Qabalah."^[39] However, the origin of the Tarot pack has since been documented, showing that it was invented in Italy in the early 15th century and is unrelated to any "Holy Qabalah" (see the History

section).

Notes

1. ^ "Diligence and Fortune" is the contemporary meaning of the phrase Industrie und Glück. See, for example, Placardi, Carl (1766). Das Kaiserliche Sprach- und Wörterbuch, Cölln am Rhein: Metternich, pp. 72 and 83.

References

1. ^ Decker, Depaulis & Dummett (1996), p. ix.
2. ^ ^{a b c d e f g h i} Dummett (1980)
3. ISBN 978-94-6091-421-8
   .
4. ^ Decker, Depaulis & Dummett (1996), p. 27.
5. ^ Decker, Depaulis & Dummett (1996), p. 38.
6. ^ Decker, Depaulis & Dummett (1996), pp. 28, 31.
7. ^ ^{a b} Early History of Playing Cards at wopc.co.uk. Retrieved 21 November 2022.
8. ^ Daynes (2000), p. 6.
9. ^ ^{a b c d e} Card Games: Tarot Games Archived 29 November 2019 at the Wayback Machine at pagat.com. Retrieved 20 October 2022.
10. ^ Peter F. Kopp: Die frühesten Spielkarten in der Schweiz. In: Zeitschrift für schweizerische Archäologie und Kunstgeschichte 30 (1973), pp. 130–145, here 130.
11. ^ Hellmut Rosenfeld: Zu den frühesten Spielkarten in der Schweiz. Eine Entgegnung. In: Zeitschrift für schweizerische Archäologie und Kunstgeschichte 32 (1975), pp. 179–180.
12. ^ Detlef Hoffmann: Kultur- und Kunstgeschichte der Spielkarte. Marburg: Jonas Verlag 1995, p. 43.
13. ISBN 0-7316-5794-2
    , p. 67
14. ^ Pratesi, Franco (1989). "Italian Cards - New Discoveries". The Playing-Card. 18 (1, 2): 28–32, 33–38.
15. ^ Pratesi, Franco (2012). "In Search of Tarot Sources". The Playing-Card. 41 (2): 100.
16. Pratesi, Franco. Studies on Giusto Giusti Archived 24 February 2021 at the Wayback Machine
    at trionfi.com. Retrieved 4 February 2018.
17. ^ Decker, Depaulis & Dummett (1996), p. 25.
18. ^ Dummett (1980), p. 76-77.
19. ISSN 2051-3186
    .
20. ^ Dummett (1980), p. 387–417.
21. ^ Dummett & McLeod (2004), p. 13–16.
22. ^ Pratesi, Franco (2015). "1499-1506: Firenze". The Playing-Card. 44 (1): 61–71.
23. ^ The dictionary definition of tarot at Wiktionary
24. ^ Vitali, Andrea. About the etymology of Tarocco Archived 24 February 2021 at the Wayback Machine at Le Tarot Cultural Association. Retrieved 4 February 2018.
25. ^ Vitali, Andrea. Taroch - 1494 Archived 25 February 2021 at the Wayback Machine at Le Tarot Cultural Association. Retrieved 4 February 2018.
26. ^ Depaulis, Thierry (2008). "Entre farsa et barzelletta: jeux de cartes italiens autours de 1500". The Playing-Card. 37 (2): 89–102.
27. ^ "Tarocco". www.treccani.it (in Italian). Retrieved 9 September 2020.
28. ^ "Taroccare". www.treccani.it (in Italian). Retrieved 9 September 2020.
29. ^ Dummett, Michael; McLeod, John (2004). A History of Games Played with the Tarot Pack. Lewiston, New York: Edwin Mellen Press. pp. 17–21.
30. ISBN 0-19-214165-1
    .
31. ^ Tarocco Siciliano, early form Archived 1 March 2021 at the Wayback Machine at the International Playing-Card Society website. Retrieved 26 July 2015.
32. ISBN 978-8870882728
    .
33. ^ Kaplan (2003), pp. 355–358.
34. ^ "Historic Cards and Games: The Stuart and Marilyn R. Kaplan Collection". Christie's. Retrieved 3 September 2023.
35. ^ Pratesi, Franco (1989). "Italian Cards: New Discoveries, no. 9". The Playing-Card. 17 (4): 136–145.
36. ^ Dummett, Michael (2003). "Tarot Cartomancy in Bologna". The Playing-Card. 32 (2): 79–88.
37. ^ ^{a b c} Jensen, K. Frank (2010). "A Century with the Waite–Smith Tarot (and all the others...)". The Playing-Card. 38 (3): 217–222.
38. ^ Parlett, David. "tarot game". Encyclopedia Britannica, 9 August 2012, https://www.britannica.com/topic/tarot-game . Accessed 26 June 2022.
39. ^ Crowley (1969), p. 5.

Works cited

• Samuel Weiser
  .
• Daynes, Daniel (2000). Le Tarot, ses règles et toutes ses variantes. Bornemann.
  ISBN 978-2-85182-622-0
  .
• Decker, Ronald;
  ISBN 0-7156-2713-9
  .
• ISBN 0-7156-1014-7
  .
• Kaplan, Stuart R. (2003) [1978]. The Encyclopedia of Tarot. Vol. 2: Tarot Cards for Fun and Fortune Telling (3rd ed.). New York: U.S. Games Systems.
  ISBN 978-0-913866-36-8
  .

External links

• Media related to Tarot cards at Wikimedia Commons