Many claim that the tarot began in Egypt or France, and that it came into existence for occult purposes but in fact it began as a playing card game. During the first half of the fifteenth century (1420-1440) the Northern Italians created the first set of tarot cards, not for divination but to play a game called “The Game of Triumphs” which was similar to bridge. The tarot deck, originally called carte da trionfi included the cards 1 through 10 in four suits, court cards page, knight, king AND queen, and then 22 special trump cards, with symbols such as “Emperor”, “Pope”, “Death”, “Devil” which could be played at any time regardless of which suit was in control of the board and outranked all the ordinary cards.
About a hundred years later, approximately 1530, the word tarocchi was used to distinguish the deck in Italy, whereas tarock was used in Germany and tarot in France, pronounced ta-ROE not ta-ROTT. Information on when exactly the tarot cards began to be used for divination is a bit sketchy. There are many places who believe that tarot was spread by the Romany, the gypsies, or that the regular playing cards evolved from the tarot, this author believed the same until she really started researching her hobby. In fact the gypsies preferred to do their fortune telling by reading palms, or used playing cards as their divination tools, and the playing cards that most people use for gin rummy and poker were more likely from Muslim Spain, and the joker was added for poker purposes in the mid-nineteenth century and has no relationship to the Fool from the trumps.
As far as divination, there is evidence of poems being composed describing personality characteristics and their relationship to the tarot cards as early as 1527, including their relation to a person’s fate. In Bologna, around 1700 there is the first unambiguous evidence of tarot divination and meanings assigned to the cards specifically. However, earlier than that as early as 1487 “regular playing cards” had been used for the divination. In 1783 Etteilla published a book with his own meanings of the tarot cards and that began to popularize them as a fortune-telling tool.
Around this same time when Antoine Court de Gébelin, a Swiss clergyman and Freemason, saw a game of tarocchi being played and attributed a great deal of Egyptian symbolism and divinatory power to the cards. He asserted that the symbolism in the now used Marseille deck represented Isis and Thoth. As well as further attributing the tarot cards to the Egyptians he also asserted that the cards were first used by the Gypsies, who were descendants of the Egyptians, while no one has been able to find evidence to support this since, the claim remains a strong part of occult lore.
The use of the cards as a mystical tool was further developed by The Golden Dawn, who passed on the works of Elphias Levi, written in 1854 “Transcendental Magic” and related the cards to the Hermetic Qabbalah and the four elements of alchemy.
Tarot divination became increasingly popular in the New World from 1910 with the publication of the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot deck designed by two members of the Golden Dawn, which replaced the simple ‘pip’ cards with expressive and symbolic scenes and further obscured the original Christian allegories with more mystical ones, changing “Pope” to “Hierophant” and “Papess” to “High Priestess” for example.
Sources:
Decker, Ronald, Michael Dummett, and Thierry Depaulis, A Wicked Pack of Cards
Dummett, Michael, The Game of Tarot
Giles, Cythnia, The Tarot: History, Mystery, and Lore
The Hermitage;
History of Tarot;
Kaplan, Stuart, The Encyclopedia of Tarot, Vol. I & II
Moakley, Gertrude, The Tarot Cards Painted by Bonifacio Bembo
O’Neill, Robert V., Tarot Symbolism
TarotL Tarot History.
Williams, Brian, A Renaissance Tarot
Williams, Brian, The Minchiate Tarot
