Brief History of the Tarot
Brief History of the Tarot
The tarot (also known as tarocchi, tarock or similar names), pronounced tɑ rou is typically a set of seventy-eight cards.
Tarot cards are used in various parts of Europe to play Tarot card games such as Italian Tarocchini and Frenc Tarot. For game-playing purposes, there are four suits corresponding to the four suits of a standard 52-card pack, though the suit symbols are often different and the number of court cards is always different. There is also a separate 21-card trump suit, and a card known in English as the fool, which may act as the top trump or may be played to avoid following suit, depending on the game.
In English-speaking countries, where the games are largely unknown, Tarot cards are used primarily for divinatory purposes, with the trump cards plus the Fool making up the twenty-two card major arcana cards and the ten pip and four face cards in each suit the fifty-six card minor arcana. The terms Major Arcana and Minor Arcana are used in tarot divination but not by tarot card players.
The Goddess Tarot
The divinatory meanings of the cards are traced by some occult writers to sources like ancient Egypt or the Kabbalah of Jewish mysticism, but there is no documentary evidence of such meanings before the eighteenth century.
The Englishand French word tarot (or tarocchi, tarô, tarock, tarok etc. in other languages) does not have a precise origin-nobody knows its true etymology.
Some occult writers believe it comes from the Arabic word turuq, which supposedly means "four pathways".Alternatively, it may be from the Arabic tarach, "reject". According to a French etymology, tarot is borrowed from the Italian tarocco, derived from tara: "devaluation of a merchandise; deduction, the act of deducting".
Playing cards first entered Europe in the late 14th century with the Mamluks of Egypt, with suits very similar to the basic 'Latin' suits of Swords, Staves, Cups and Coins (also known as disks, and pentacles), which are still used in traditional Italian, Spanish and Portuguese decks. Although there are quite a number of alternative theories on the origin of Tarot, current evidence seems to indicate that the first decks were created between 1410 and 1430 in either Milan, Ferrara, or Bologna, in northern Italy, when additional trump cards with allegorical illustrations were added to the more common four suit decks that already existed. These new decks were originally called carte da trionfi, triumph cards, and the additional cards known simply as trionfi, which evolved into the word "trumps" in common English. The first literary evidence of the existence of carte da trionfi is a written statement in the court records in Ferrara, in 1442.
The oldest surviving Tarot cards are from fifteen fragmented decks painted in the mid 15th century for the Visconti-Sforza family, the rulers of Milan.
Viscinti-Sforza
No documented examples exist prior to the 18th century of the tarot being used for divination However, divination using similar cards is in evidence as early as 1540; a book entitled The Oracles of Francesco Marcolino da Forli shows a simple method of divination using the coin suit of a regular playing card deck. Manuscripts from 1735 (The Square of Sevens) and 1750 (Pratesi Cartomancer) document rudimentary divinatory meanings for the cards of the tarot, as well as a system for laying out the cards. In 1765, Giacomo Casanova wrote in his diary that his Russian mistress frequently used a deck of playing cards for divination.
Tarot cards would later become associated with mysticism and magic. Tarot was not widely adopted by mystics, occultists and secret societies until the 18th and 19th centuries. The tradition began in 1781, when Antoine Court de Gébelin, a Swiss clergyman and Freemason, published Le Monde Primitif, a speculative study which included religious symbolism and its survivals in the modern world. De Gébelin first asserted that symbolism of the Tarot de Marseille represented the mysteries of Isis and Thoth. Gébelin further claimed that the name "tarot" came from the Egyptian words tar, meaning "royal", and ro, meaning "road", and that the Tarot therefore represented a "royal road" to wisdom.
De Gébelin also asserted that the Gypsies, who were among the first to use cards for divination, were descendants of the Ancient Egyptians (hence their common name; though by this time it was more popularly used as a stereotype for any nomadic tribe) and had introduced the cards to Europe. De Gébelin wrote this treatise before Jean-François Champollion had deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs, or indeed before the Rosetta Stone had been discovered, and later Egyptologists found nothing in the Egyptian language to support de Gébelin's fanciful etymologies. Despite this, the identification of the Tarot cards with the Egyptian "Book of Thoth" was already firmly established in occult practice and continues in modern urban legend to the present day.
Original Rider-Waite-Smith deck
Tarot divination became increasingly popular in the New World from 1910, with the publication of the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot (designed and executed by two members of the Golden Dawn), which replaced the traditionally simple pip cards with images of symbolic scenes. This deck also further obscured the Christian allegories of the Tarot de Marseilles and of Eliphas Levi's decks by changing some attributions (for instance changing "The Pope" to "The Hierophant" and "The Popess" to "The High Priestess"). The Rider-Waite-Smith deck still remains extremely popular in the English-speaking world.
The next recognized advance in the Tarot was the deck designed by occultist and writer Aleister Crowley
THOTH tarot deck BY ALEISTER CROWLEY
Since then a huge number of different decks have been created, some traditional, some vastly different. The use of Tarot for divination, or as a store of symbolism, has inspired the creation of Oracle card decks. These are card decks for inspiration or divination containing images of angels, fairies, goddesses, Power Animals, etc. Although obviously influenced by Tarot, they do not follow the traditional structure of Tarot; they lack any suits of numbered cards, and the set of cards differs from the traditional major arcana.