Tarot
In the late 18th century French occultists made elaborate, but unsubstantiated, claims about their history and meaning, leading to the emergence of custom decks for use in divination via tarot card reading and cartomancy.
However, some older patterns, such as the Tarot de Marseille, originally intended for playing card games, are also used for cartomancy.
In addition, and unlike standard packs, the tarot also has a separate 21-card trump suit and a single card known as the Fool.
The use of tarot playing cards was at one time widespread across the whole of Europe except the British Isles and the Iberian Peninsula.
[5] Denmark appears to be the only Scandinavian country that still plays tarot games,[5] Danish Tarok being a derivative of historical German Grosstarock.
[5] Tarot cards, then known as tarocchi, first appeared in Ferrara and Milan in northern Italy, with the Fool and 21 trumps (then called trionfi) being added to the standard Italian pack of four suits: batons, coins, cups and swords.
[6] Scholarship has established that the early European cards were probably based on the Egyptian Mamluk deck invented in or before the 14th century, which followed the introduction of paper from Asia into Western Europe.
[8][9][10] 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.
The 16 cards were regarded as "trumps" since, in 1449, Jacopo Antonio Marcello recalled that the now deceased duke had invented a novum quoddam et exquisitum triumphorum genus, or "a new and exquisite kind of triumphs.
[3] The first documented tarot decks were recorded between 1440 and 1450 in Milan, Ferrara, Florence and Bologna, when additional trump cards with allegorical illustrations were added to the common four-suit pack.
The earliest documentation of trionfi is found in a written statement in the court records of Florence, in 1440, regarding the transfer of two decks to Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta.
There are two main exceptions:[16] 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,[17] no routine condemnations of tarot were found during its early history.
[20] The word "tarot"[21] 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] During the 16th century, a new game played with a standard deck but sharing a very similar name (Trionfa) was quickly becoming popular.
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 Ottoman Balkans.
Regional tarot games—often known as tarock, tarok, or tarokk—are widely played in central Europe within the borders of the former Austro-Hungarian empire.
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.
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.
"[34] The earliest evidence of a tarot deck used for cartomancy comes from an anonymous manuscript from around 1750 which documents rudimentary divinatory meanings for the cards of the Tarocco Bolognese.
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] Aleister Crowley, who devised the Thoth deck along with Lady Frieda Harris, stated of the tarot: "The origin of this pack of cards is very obscure.
Some authorities seek to put it back as far as the ancient Egyptian Mysteries; others try to bring it forward as late as the fifteenth or even the sixteenth century ... [but] The only theory of ultimate interest about the tarot is that it is an admirable symbolic picture of the Universe, based on the data of the Holy Qabalah.
