|
The tarot (also known as tarocchi, tarock or similar names) is typically a set of seventy-eight cards, comprised of twenty-one trump cards, one Fool, and four suits of fourteen cards each—ten pip and four face cards (one more face card per suit than in Anglo-American playing cards).
Tarot cards are used throughout much of Europe to play Tarot card games such as Italian Tarocchini and French Tarot. In English-speaking countries, where the games are largely unknown, Tarot cards are utilized primarily for divinatory purposes, with the trump cards plus the Fool card making up the twenty-two major arcana cards and the pip and four face cards the fifty-six minor arcana.
History
Playing cards first entered Europe in the late 14th century with the Mamelukes 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 and Spanish 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[citation needed]. 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.
No documented examples exist prior to the 18th century of the tarot being used for divination[citation needed]. 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[citation needed].
Early decks
Playing cards first appeared in Christian Europe some time before 1367, the date of the first documented evidence of their existence, a ban on their use, in Bern, Switzerland[citation needed]. Before this, cards had been used for several decades in Islamic Al Andalus (see playing card history for discussion of its origins). Early European sources describe a deck with typically fifty-two cards, like a modern deck with no jokers. The seventy-eight-card tarot resulted from adding the twenty-two trump cards to an early fifty-six card variant (fourteen cards per suit).
Wide use of playing cards in Europe can, with some certainty, be given from 1377 onwards[citation needed]. Tarot cards appear to have been developed some forty years later, and they are mentioned in the surviving text of Martiano da Tortona. Da Tortona's text is thought to have been written between 1418 and 1425, since in 1418 the painter Michelino da Besozzo returned to Milan, and Martiano da Tortona died in 1425.
Da Tortona describes a deck similar to the cards used for Tarot card games in many specific ways though what he describes is more a precursor to tarot than what we might think of as real tarot cards. For instance, his deck has only sixteen trump cards, with motifs that are not comparable to common tarot cards (they are Greek gods) and the suits are four kinds of birds, not the common Italian suits. What makes da Tortona's deck similar to modern tarot game cards is that these sixteen cards are obviously regarded as trump cards in a card game; about twenty-five years later, a near contemporary of Da Tortona, Jacopo Antonio Marcello, called them a ludus triumphorum, or 'game winner'.
Le Bateleur from the Tarot of Marseilles
The next documents that seem to confirm the existence of objects similar to tarot cards are two playing card decks from Milan (Brera-Brambrilla and Cary-Yale-Tarocchi) — extant, but fragmentary — and three documents, all from the court of Ferrara, Italy[citation needed]. It is not possible to put a precise date on the cards, but it is estimated that they were made circa 1440. The three documents date from 1 January 1441 to July 1442, with the term trionfi first documented in February 1442. The document from January 1441, which used the term trionfi, is regarded as unreliable; however, the fact that the same painter, Sagramoro, was commissioned by the same patron, Leonello d'Este, as in the February 1442 document, indicates that it is at least plausibly an example of the same type[citation needed]. After 1442 there are some seven years without any examples of similar material. The game seemed to gain in importance in the year 1450, a Jubilee year in Italy, which saw many festivities and the movement of many pilgrims.
It seems apparent that the special motifs on the trump cards, which were added to regular playing cards with a 'four suits of fourteen cards' structure, were ideologically determined. They are thought to show a specific system of transporting messages of different content; known early examples show philosophical, social, poetical, astronomical, and heraldic ideas, for instance, as well as a group of old Roman/Greek/Babylonian heroes, as in the case of the Sola-Busca-Tarocchi (1491)[citation needed] and the Boiardo Tarocchi poem (produced at an unknown date between 1461 and 1494).[citation needed] For example, the earliest-known deck, extant only in its description in Martiano's short book, was produced to show the system of Greek gods, a theme that was very fashionable in Italy at the time. Its production may well have accompanied a triumphal celebration of the commissioner Filippo Maria Visconti, duke of Milano, meaning that the purpose of the deck was to express and consolidate the political power in Milan (as was common for other artworks of the time). The four suits showed birds, motifs that appeared regularly in Visconti heraldry, and the specific order of the gods gives reason to assume that the deck was intended to imply that the Visconti identified themselves as descendants from Jupiter and Venus (which were seen not as gods but deified mortal heroes).
This first known deck seems to have had the standard ten numbered cards, but having kings as the only court card, and only sixteen trump cards. The later standard (four suits of fourteen plus twenty-two) took time to settle; trionfi decks with seventy cards only are still spoken of in 1457.[citation needed] No corroborating evidence for the final standard seventy-eight card format exists prior to the Boiardo Tarocchi poem and the Sola Busca Tarocchi.
The oldest surviving tarot cards are three early to mid 15th century sets, all made for members of the Visconti family[citation needed]. The first deck is the so called Cary-Yale Tarot (or Visconti-Modrone Tarot), which was created between 1442 and 1447 by an anonymous painter for Filippo Maria Visconti[citation needed]. The cards (only sixty-six) are today in the Yale University Library of New Haven. But the most famous of these early tarot decks was painted in the mid 15th century, to celebrate the rule of Milan by Francesco Sforza and his wife Bianca Maria Visconti, daughter of the duke Filippo Maria. Probably, these cards were painted by Bonifacio Bembo, but some cards were realized by miniaturists of another school[citation needed]. Of the original cards, thirty-five are in the Pierpont Morgan Library, twenty-six are at the Accademia Carrara, thirteen are at the Casa Colleoni and two, 'The Devil' and 'The Tower', are lost, or possibly never made. This "Visconti-Sforza" deck, which has been widely reproduced, combines the suits of swords, batons, coins and cups and the court cards king, queen, knight and page with trump cards that reflect conventional iconography of the time to a significant degree.
For a long time tarot cards remained a privilege for the upper classes, and, although some sermons inveighing against the evil inherent in cards can be traced to the 14th century, most civil governments did not routinely condemn tarot cards during tarot's early history[citation needed]. In fact, in some jurisdictions, tarot cards were specifically exempted from laws otherwise prohibiting the playing of cards.
Later tarot decks
As the earliest tarot cards were hand painted, the number of the decks produced is thought to have been rather small, and it was only after the invention of the printing press that mass production of cards became possible. Decks survive from this era from various cities in France (the best known being a deck from the southern city of Marseilles and thus named the Tarot de Marseilles). At around the same time, the name tarocchi appeared.
The first wide publicity of divination by tarot came from a French occultist named Alliette, under the pseudonym "Etteilla" (his name reversed), who worked as a seer and card diviner shortly before the French Revolution. Etteilla designed the first esoteric Tarot deck, adding astrological attributions and "Egyptian" motifs to various cards, altering many of them from the Marseilles designs, and adding divinatory meanings in text on the cards. Later, Mademoiselle Marie-Anne Le Normand popularized divination in general during the reign of Napoleon I, through the influence she wielded over Joséphine de Beauharnais, Napoleon's first wife. However, she did not typically use Tarot.
Tarot cards eventually came to be 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.
The idea of the cards as a mystical key was further developed by Eliphas Lévi and passed to the English-speaking world by The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Lévi, not Etteilla, is considered by some to be the true founder of most contemporary schools of Tarot; his 1854 Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie (English title: Transcendental Magic) introduced an interpretation of the cards which related them to Hermetic Qabalah. While Lévi accepted Court de Gébelin's claims about an Egyptian origin of the deck symbols, he rejected Etteilla's innovations and his altered deck, and devised instead a system which related the Tarot, especially the Tarot de Marseille, to the Hermetic Qabalah 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 (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.
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.
|
