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Tarot History in brief
from the ATS's Tarotpedia -
the Online Encyclopedia of Tarot
“Tarot” refers to a family of games played
with an augmented deck, (that is, decks with a fifth “suit” serving
as permanent trumps), and also to the decks themselves.
Most other card games using trumps select one of four regular
suits to serve as trumps for a particular hand. Tarot is
commonly played in various areas of Europe, and has been
played in Italy since the 1440s. “Tarot” also
refers to similar decks that are used for fortune-telling
and other esoteric purposes. In English-speaking countries
this is the only common use of Tarot cards, even though
such use probably did not begin until roughly 350 years
after their invention.
1400 and before - Before there was Tarot
Playing cards were a Chinese invention which found their
way to Europe around 1375, by way of the Mamluk empire.
They spread very quickly through much of western Europe.
Trick-taking games of some sort, traditionally the most
popular form of card game, probably arrived with the cards.
However, while we know almost nothing about the games played,
the design of the Mamluk decks changed very little as adopted
by the Italians, and so-called Moorish cards may have also
been used in Europe. The four suits were Swords, Staves
(the Mamluk decks used Polo Sticks), Coins, and Cups. Each
suit had ten pip cards and three “court cards”,
a King, Knight, and Page, creating a 52-card deck. While
that basic Italian suit system continued to be used, variations
developed almost immediately. Spanish decks changed the
Staves into Clubs, and altered the designs, and German
cardmakers developed a number of alternative suit-systems.
In the earliest known description of playing cards, Brother
John described decks in which the number of court cards
and even the number of suits were increased from the norm,
and some in which female figures were used on the court
cards. In addition to regular decks, novelty decks were
also produced in the 14th century, including one with images
of gods and emblematic animals.
Although Tarot did not appear until the 1440s, the suit-cards
used in Tarot were the same as standard Italian playing
cards. In some regular Italian-suited decks of the period,
Queens had been added to the suit cards, creating a 56-card
deck, and such a deck was the basis for Tarot. The subjects
illustrated on Tarot’s trump cards were also well-known
before the 15th century, some them dating back to classical
times. Figures such as the Emperor and Pope, allegories
of Love, Death, the Wheel of Fortune, the three Moral Virtues,
and eschatological subjects from Revelation, were staples
of medieval art. Even seemingly enigmatic subjects, such
as a female figure with papal attributes or a man hanged
by one foot, were far less obscure in that milieu.
1401 - 1500 - The Invention of Tarot
The idea of trumps appears to be a European invention
which first appeared in the 1420s, in the German game of
Karnöffel. Tarot was probably created 10-15 years
later, around 1440, somewhere in northern Italy. The earliest
surviving Milanese Tarot decks and Ferrarese references
to Tarot both come from that period. As noted, the Tarot
deck consisted of a regular 56-card deck, augmented with
a hierarchy of 22 allegorical trump cards. This created
the standard 78-card Tarot deck, originally referred to
as carte da trionfi, cards with trumps. Each trump triumphed
over (trumped) the lower-ranking trumps in the manner of
the popular trionfi motif, which also appeared in art,
literature, religious processions, festival pageants, and
so on.
The subjects pictured on the allegorical cards appear
to have been standardized from the beginning. The vast
majority of all Tarot decks in the 15th through 17th centuries
share that design, and the occasional variants all appear
to be derived from that archetypal standard. The series
of images was similar to cycles of didactic Christian art
of that era, most notably, the Triumph of Death and Dance
of Death works popular from the time of the Black Death
in the mid-14th century.
Tarot quickly became popular and spread in northern Italy,
with Milan, Bologna, and Ferrara being early centers of
the game. Richly painted decks with gold and silver leaf
backgrounds were commissioned by the wealthy, while printed
decks were used by commoners and nobles alike. (A record
from 1436 indicates that the d’Este court at Ferrara
had their own printing press for making cards.) The sequence
of the trumps was altered in minor ways as Tarot spread
to new locales, and the iconography was also varied somewhat.
Moreover, a few complete redesigns are known, such as the
classicized Sola Busca deck and the literary Boiardo deck,
but they were dramatic exceptions. Changes of iconography,
whether simplifying the original designs or conflating
the Tarot images with other subject matter, usually left
the underlying standard subjects recognizable.
1501 - 1600 - Appropriati and Florentine Decks
The game spread from Italy to France, then to Switzerland,
Germany, and beyond, and became very popular in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries. During this period the Tarot
trumps also found employment as a literary motif. For example,
an involved riddle was published in which the answer was
Tarot. There are a number of surviving sixteenth-century
examples of tarocchi appropriati, suggesting a kind of
parlor game in which people creatively spun out associations
by which a given card or cards could be used to describe
themselves or another person. The cards were not given
any special meaning; instead, their obvious subjects were
worked into verse as a playful exercise of verbal agility,
humor, and flattery. The meaning of the Medieval allegory
may have been already forgotten, and was probably ignored
from the beginning. From the players’ perspective,
they were just trumps in a card game.
Perhaps the most curious item from the 16th century concerns
Tarot’s Devil card. Venetian Inquisition records
suggest that the Devil card was used by witches for Satanic
ritual and adoration. Whether this was true or not, it
demonstrates that some inquisitors were familiar with Tarot,
but, contrary to modern Tarot folklore, did not speak against
it. The Church never spoke against Tarot, and the one known
sermon which strongly condemns Tarot, along with dice and
regular playing cards, does not suggest that Tarot was
anything other than a game of chance. The confused preacher
denounces Tarot for its moral allegory in which the Emperor
and Pope are subject to the same allegorical and eschatological
fate as the rest of mankind. This is exactly the same kind
of moral allegory painted on church wall and in Books of
Hours.
Variations such as the expanded Minchiate deck were developed.
In that deck additional allegorical cards were added, raising
the ratio of trumps to suit cards, and it became and extremely
popular form of Tarot (other Tarot decks achieved a higher
trump/suit-card ratio by leaving out the lowest-ranking
pips). In Florence, iconographic changes were made to some
trumps which altered the highest-ranking images from a
medieval Christian triumph of God to a humanistic triumph
of Fame. The World card showed Europe as the center of
the world, and triumphing over that was the Fama card with
a picture of Florence. This was more in keeping with Renaissance
sensibilities and Florentine hubris. Other card games with
allegorical, symbolic, or merely novel content continued
to be developed, including one based on the triumphs of
Petrarch, a game of Apostles with our Lord, a game of seven
virtues; and a game of planets with their spheres. None
of these other games became popular enough to leave any
trace beyond the single document which mentions their names.
One well known non-standard deck which has survived is
the Hofämterspiel, showing the social structure of
royal courts during the late Middle Ages. Another is the
Book of Trades by Jost Ammon.
1601 - 1700 - Rules & Marseille-style Decks
The earliest extant rules for the game of Tarot were
published in 1637 (1585?). A few decades later, rule books
for various games were being published in several languages.
Tarot was included among the games in a 1659 collection,
La Maison des jeux academique, which included several French
versions of Tarot and a Swiss one.
Although Michael Dummett wrote that “a million
is probably a highly conservative estimate of the number
of Tarot packs produced in France during the seventeenth
century”, only a handful have survived in whole or
part. Nonetheless, these surviving French decks (based
on a 15th-century Milanese style) include examples of the
style later popularized by occultists, which is also the
only style known outside of Italy prior to the mid-18th
century. Although originating in Milan and produced in
many areas beyond Italy and France, the style is commonly
referred to as ‘Tarot de Marseille’. Tarot
was also introduced to Sicily in the 1600s, where another
variant deck developed.
1701 - 1800 - The Development of Modern Decks and the
Invention of Occult Tarot
The middle of the 1700s saw a great development in the
game of Tarot, a modernized deck, along with a growth in
Tarot’s popularity. Dummett notes that “The
hundred years between about 1730 and 1830 were the heyday
of the game of Tarot; it was played not only in northern
Italy, eastern France, Switzerland, Germany and Austro-Hungary,
but also in Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden and
even Russia. Not only was it, in these areas, a famous
game with many devotees: it was also, during that period,
more truly an international game than it had ever been
before or than it has ever been since....” Beginning
around 1750, a modernized Tarot deck became popular in
many areas. The more common French suit-signs - Spades,
Clubs, Hearts, and Diamonds - replaced the older Italian
ones, and around 1780 the trumps began to became double-headed.
Tarot’s traditional Medieval allegory was replaced
with a decorative series of thematically-related but essentially
arbitrary images, made possible by the use of large numerals
on the trumps. This obviated memorizing the order of images,
making the game that much easier to learn. The themes of
these decks might include almost anything: animals, pastoral
scenes, military triumphs, illustrated proverbs, even advertising.
Although in decline in France and Italy, the popularity
of the game elsewhere increased during this period.
The later 18th century saw an even more portentous development
of Tarot, well beyond its use to play cards. Fortune-telling
with playing cards had developed from their use as a randomizing
device to pick a page in a book of fortunes in the 1500s,
through the use of special fortune-telling decks in the
1600s, and finally to the point of regular decks being
given symbolic meaning in the 1700s. A few scattered indications
of this appear earlier in the century, but the first book
on cartomancy was published in 1770. It was written by
Etteilla, the world’s first known professional cartomancer,
who became one of the founders of occult Tarot. In the
1780s he and two other French writers developed much of
the occult lore and fortune-telling methods that would
reinvent Tarot in the late 1800s.
These three writers changed Tarot forever. Neither knowing
nor caring much about Tarot’s 350-year history, its
original and common use as a game, or the intended meaning
of its allegorical cycle, they interpreted the images freely.
They used the twenty-two trumps as signs designating the
twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. These newly-minted
correspondences made the Tarot deck into a novel emblem
system for ‘Cabalistic magic’ and mysticism.
The two esoteric uses, Kabalah and divination, became more
firmly attached to Tarot. The authors of this newly invented
Tarot also wrote up a fantastic tales about Tarot’s
origin and history, involving Egyptian initiations, Jewish
mystics, and vagabond Gypsies. These fictional histories
were intended to validate the correspondences the occultists
had devised, by appeal to alleged ancient wisdom and secret
traditions.
1801 - 1900 - Development of Occult Tarot
Although much of the groundwork for today’s occult
Tarot lore was established in the late-1700s, the only
part that became popular during the subsequent century
was fortune-telling. Before the more elaborate myths and
esoteric systems could become popular, occult Tarot had
to be invented a second time. This happened in the mid-19th
century. New systems of correspondence were invented and
additional layers of legend were overlaid. This second
invention came at just the right historical moment, at
the beginning of the Victorian occult revival, and by the
end of the century both French and British occultists had
developed various schools which took the 15th-century game
to be the Absolute Key to Occult Science.
1901 - 2000 - Rationalization of Occult Tarot
During the occult revival, which continued into the early
20th century, there was a great deal of anthropological
revisioning of older traditions. Arthur Edward Waite, a
Christian mystic and scholar of the occult, explicitly
rejected the core of occult Tarot. He wrote, “I am
not to be included among those who are satisfied that there
is a valid correspondence between the Hebrew letters and
the Tarot Trump symbols.” His own novel interpretation
of the trumps drew on many sources (especially the occultists)
to create an eclectic but tightly integrated representation
of his preferred mystical philosophy. This was all in keeping
with common ideas of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
century regarding comparative religion and the universality
of myth and mysticism. Waite described Smith’s new
creation as “a true Tarot under one of its aspects”,
and “not occult, but mystical”.
In the late 20th century, Tarot was widely adopted by
various New Age enthusiasts, neo-Pagans, and of course,
fortune-tellers, as well as people who were simply interested
in using the deck for self-exploration without any spiritual
or mystical motivation. It was again redefined, largely
in the terms of Jungian psychology, but with borrowings
from the earlier occultists and from Waite. This development
was greatly facilitated by the Waite-Smith Tarot deck,
whose trumps and pips had been redesigned in a manner consistent
with such usage. Their deck served as a model for hundreds
of derivative decks. The new element, characteristic of
contemporary Tarot, was the belief that naive intuition
and free association would reveal universal archetypes
from the unconscious mind. This liberated Tarot enthusiasts
from having to learn complex systems of correspondence,
and having to choose between the competing systems.
In addition to fortune telling, modern Tarot applications
include soul-searching exercises and meditation for personal
growth, and as a randomized input for free association
and brainstorming techniques. Not surprisingly, they have
even been used by some psychologists in a therapeutic context.
The main distinctions between Waite and the contemporary
Tarot enthusiasts are specificity and authority. Waite
was in some ways closer to the earlier occultists who saw
and emphasized a particular design to the trumps and their
sequence, rather than the contemporary approach which validates
any intuition one might posit about what are seen as archetypal
subjects. Waite’s authority for his design included
personal insight and the history of Christian mysticism
and magic, whereas the contemporary Tarotist is likely
to cite C.G. Jung and neo-Jungian psychologists.
Also in the late 20th century, more historically sophisticated
writers have attempted salvage as much of the earlier occult
fictions as possible while abandoning most of the obviously
false elements. As with other late 20th-century Tarot writers,
their basic premise is the existence of universals which
are intuitively understood. Given this premise, Tarot must
have always been something very close to what it is currently
understood to be -- otherwise the supposed universals are
not universal. Critics of this viewpoint would say that
this preconception leads to the invention of secret coded
messages in the trump cards, supported by nothing beyond
the anachronistic belief that what people see in the images
today must have always been there.
2001 - present - Tarot History in the Making
The most popular book to expound on Tarot in the new
century has been Dan Brown’s 2003 novel, The Da Vinci
Code’. Taking most of its background ideas from Lincoln,
Baigent, and Leigh’s 1982 Holy Blood, Holy Grail,
Brown also includes ideas on Tarot taken directly from
the writings of Margaret Starbird. Both writers call the
Trumps a flash-card catechism of heretical teachings, and
repeat earlier fantasies about coded secrets, Knights Templar,
[Freemasonry, heretical doctrines, Albigensians, pagan
mysteries, and so on.
Despite the invention of such new Tarot legends and perpetuation
of the old, another trend is developing. The Internet has
begun to provide popular access to the work of playing-card
historians. During the last two decades of the 20th century,
a great deal of historical evidence was collected, collated,
analyzed, and published. Stuart Kaplan’s Encyclopedia
of Tarot (volumes I to IV) presents a great deal of information.
However, it is the series of books authored or co-authored
by Michael Dummett (from 1980 through 2004) which has thoroughly
debunked the majority of earlier Tarot lore while putting
the pieces together to form a coherent history of Tarot,
the great many forms taken by the game and deck, secondary
historical uses such as appropriati, and perhaps most intriguingly,
documenting in great detail the development of occult Tarot
from the 1780s till the beginning of the modern era, around
1970. Most of that factual history, both pre-occult and
the development of occult Tarot itself, remains unknown
to some contemporary Tarot enthusiasts. However, some of
it is now being presented on the Internet rather than being
limited to a few hard-to-find books. One of the reasons
for Tarotpedia’s Tarot History section is to expand
the online availability of that kind of information.
External links
http://tarotpedia.com/wiki/index.php/Tarot_History:_Links
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