A Brief History of Tarot
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With no wish to drag this history session out any longer than necessary... after all, we don't much believe in "pedigrees" here in the Garden of the Midnight Moonchild... however we really do feel it may be important to the serious student of Tarot to understand the forces which played a part in shaping the Tarot of today, so we feel we would be remiss if we didn't provide you with the following historical background. You don't need to memorize this information... there isn't gonna be a test or anything... but, you might find it helpful, so, here goes.
Well... let's start with the many myths there are lurking around out there about the history and origin of Tarot cards. Some claim they were invented in ancient Egypt, or they were discovered in the palaces of India, or they were smuggled past the Great Wall of China. These ideas may come more from a desire to grant the folks offering them with greater mystical knowlege than the average person (or maybe just plain, old profiteering) than to any hard evidence.
The most popular myth is that Tarot cards were brought from India by the Gypsies (who, as their name suggests, were originally rumored to have wandered out of Egypt). This particular myth was proffered in "Le Monde Primitif" (1781) by Court de Gebelin. Despite the actual printing of this myth, the true origin of the Tarot cards remains unknown, but, what is known is that cards similar to those we have today first appeared in Italy and France in the late 14th century.
The earliest Tarot cards still in existence have been dated from 1392 and, of this deck, if it ever even was a full deck, only 17 remain. Some scholars believe they were painted for Charles VI of France by Jacquemin Gringonneur, but, while it is recorded that in 1392, Jacquemin Gringonneur was paid to paint three decks of cards for Charles VI, these were probably playing cards, not Tarot. The deck in the Bibliotheque Nationale de France is a late-15th century hand-painted deck of the Northern Italian type (probably from Venice or Ferrara), and again, it is very possible that they are far less ancient Tarocchi of Venice cards. This full deck was painted in 1422 by Italian artist Bonifacio Bembo and is known as the Visconti deck after the family name of its commissioner, the Duke of Milan.
The standard modern deck consists of 78 cards split into two sections: the 22 cards of the Major Arcana (the archetypal Tarot cards, such as the Lovers, Strength, and The World). The 56 cards of the Minor Arcana are comprised of four suits of fourteen cards numbered from one to ten (the "pips" cards), and four additional depictions of humans in the various stations of Kings, Queens, Knights, and Pages known as the "court" cards. This structure is a derivation of the Venetian or Piedmontese Tarot, but, not all the early decks followed this structure. In fact, there were several types of decks with varying numbers of cards. Examples of early European decks related to the Tarot include:
Tarocchi of Venice (also known as the Lombardi Deck), which has the same structure as a modern Tarot deck.
Tarocchi of Mantegna, consisting of five series of ten cards each.
Tarocchino of Bologna, which differs from the standard structure in having no court cards in the Minor Arcana.
Minchiate of Florence, a 98-card deck consisting of the standard 78 cards with the inclusion of twenty additional major cards representing the twelve signs of the zodiac, the four elements (Fire, Water, Air and Earth) and four cardinal virtues (Hope, Prudence, Faith and Charity).
Even though there isn't much actual evidence for the existence of the Tarot before the 14th century, It is difficult not to argue that many of the ideas symbolically depicted on the cards are far more ancient. Even though cards like the Pope (Hierophant), the Devil and the Last Judgement seem fully at home in the context of medieval Christian Europe, others, such as the High Priestess, The Magician, and the Moon, have a distinctly pre-Christian feel to them.
It is also a widely popularized inaccuracy to credit the name "Tarot" as variously Egyptian, Hebrew, or Latin. And while it is tempting to claim it is an anagram for "tora" (a misspelling of Torah?) our current historical understanding is that the earliest names for the tarot are all Italian.
Originally the cards were called Carte da Trionfi (cards of the triumphs), but around 1530 (about 100 years after what can best be established as the origin of the cards), the word "tarocchi" (singular tarocco) began to be used to distinguish them from a new game of "triumphs" or "trumps" then being played with ordinary playing cards.
The etymology of this new word is not known. The German form is Tarock, the French form is Tarot. The Italian form is Tarocchi. Even if the etymology were known, it would probably not tell us much about the idea behind the cards, since it only came into use 100 years after they first appeared.
As it comes to names in general as related to Tarot history, you may want to be aware that the terms "major arcana", "minor arcana", "High Priestess", and "Hierophant" are out of place when referring to the older Tarot decks. The historically appropriate terms are "the trumps" and "the Fool", "the suit cards", "Papess" or "Popess", and "Pope". Also "pentacles" and "wands" are relatively recent substitutions for the traditional suit names of "coins" and "staves" or "batons".
The original Italian titles of the cards were also in some cases different from the later titles that have become familiar to us through the Tarot de Marseille and its descendants as well as the numerical order of the Major Arcana which varied considerably in Italy where the cards originated. The most notable of which is the transposition of "Strength" and "Justice" which can be found among many of today's Tarot decks. Since it is not known which ordering is the earliest one, (for goodness sakes, even the number of cards in the deck varied a great deal!) it is best to be careful in making judgements about the original meaning of the cards based on the familiar titles and ordering.
The intention of the original designer(s) of the Tarot in selecting the symbols for the trump cards is unknown, although there are many conjectures, some more plausible than others. Some are merely (if powerfully) intuitive, and for that reason is is important to us to avoid any declaration that the intention is known or obvious. An almost perfect example of this is the Joker which originated in the United States around 1857, and was used as a wild card in poker and as the highest trump in Euchre. It appears to have no direct relationship to the Fool of the Tarot even though this association is so tempting as to defy rejection, and it is very difficult to shake the intuitive connection most Tarot enthusiasts find between the Joker and the Fool.
The connection between the Tarot and ordinary playing cards is also uncertain. Playing cards came to Europe from Islam, probably via spanish Muslims, about 50 years before the what is considered the earliest development of Tarot. They appeared almost simultaneously in many different European cities sometime between 1375 and 1378. This gives many contemporary scholars reason to believe that those European playing cards were an adaptation of the Islamic Mamluk cards. These early cards had suits of cups, swords, coins, and polo sticks (seen by Europeans as staves or wands), and court cards consisting of a king and two male underlings, the knight and the page. The Tarot adds the Fool, the Major Arcana, and a set of queens to this system. Some time before 1480, the French introduced cards with the now-familiar suits of hearts, clubs, spades, and diamonds which correspond with the cups, staves, swords, and coins of earlier suits which are still preserved in the Tarot and in present-day Italian and Spanish playing cards.
Initially, the Tarot may have been used for playing games, and our contemporary playing cards are effectively a demonstration of that. What is recognized as the present day 56 card deck seems to be a direct derivation of the Minor Arcana of Tarot with the court cards included. In modern Italy, there still exists a card game called Tarocchi. No one really knows, though, whether playing cards evolved from the Tarot or vice versa. What we do know is that, over time, the cards evolved into tools for meditation and divination.
During the 15th century, circulation of the cards was limited to the very rich who could afford to commmission the work as they had to be hand-painted or drawn, but as new printing techniques became available, Tarot became more accessible. By the 16th century, a deck called the Marseilles Tarot was widely popularized.
The cards, particularly the 22 cards of the Major Arcana, have strong esoteric associations, and the exploration of these associations were documented from the 18th century onwards with the cards (or the images depicted on them) mentioned in relation to many areas of mystical study.
In the 19th century, Eliphas Levi, a scholar and teacher of the Kabbalah, explored the link between the Tarot and the Kabbalah. Though others before him had suggested such a link, most notably the Comte de Mellet, whose short article on the tarot was published in Court de Gebelin's "Le Monde Primitif (1781)", was the first to write of a connection between the Hebrew letters and the cards. Court de Gebelin also mentioned the idea in passing in his own essay. However, Levi's was the work that defined this association in occult study, and the Kabbalah-Tarot system became a primary model for the interpretation of the Tarot in the Western Mystery Tradition. Levi himself felt that the Tarot was born from Kabbalistic teachings. Of course, there is no hard historical evidence for this belief.
There are many, many systems of correspondences for the Tarot. None can be proven to go back to the Tarot's origins. While the French tradition exemplified in the works of Eliphas Levi predates the English tradition now familiar through the works of Waite and Crowley, this factoid does not, in and of itself, mean that Tarot sprang from the teachings of the Kabbalah. Most sets of correspondences in any area of esoteric study have a rationale and system that make them meaningful and useful when studied within their own tradition and less meaningful and useful when taken out of context. Correspondences are a matter of individual choice and are more properly grounded in a school of thought rather than a discussion of "who came first" in some misguided effort to credit one system with being more right or wrong than another.
The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw the study and application of occult teachings flourish, and many of the associations between the Tarot and other mystical systems were developed or refined at this time. One of the most influential was the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, an English Rosicrucian society founded in 1888. Members of this Order after an apparent schism within the Order itself, separately produced the two of the most popular and seminal modern Tarot decks: the Rider-Waite deck and the Thoth deck.
Arthur Edward Waite was a prominent member of the Golden Dawn. In 1910, he published "The Key to the Tarot" in which he wrote: "the true tarot is symbolism, it speaks no other language and offers no other signs". He collaborated with a fellow member, Pamela Colman Smith, in painting the imagery and design of the deck now known as the Rider-Waite (Rider was Waite's publisher, and that was apparently the sum total of the contribution necessary to get his name linked for all time to this hugely influential Tarot deck, Colman-Smith is not often referred to in association with this prodigious work despite her massive contribution to the final product especially in the innovative creation of fully illustrated scenes for the minor arcana. although there does seem to be a small pocket of Tarot enthusiasts who refer to this as the Smith-Waite or Rider-Waite-Smith deck.).
The Rider-Waite-Smith deck was created in 1909, making it a relative newcomer in the almost-600-year history of the tarot. For many years, the Rider-Waite-Smith deck was the only one readily available in the US, so it became familiar to whole generations of tarot readers. There is actually no "definitive" version of the tarot.
The well-known Celtic Cross spread, publicized by Waite as "an ancient Celtic method of divination" is also relatively recent, although it was not invented by Waite, nor did he claim any credit for it.
Another member of the Order of the Golden Dawn, Aleister Crowley, designed the Thoth deck, which was painted by Lady Frieda Harris. This deck was developed between 1938 and 1943. Purportedly, Crowley thought the design and publishing of this deck would only take two or three months, but, as some of you may have already discovered, the Tarot reveals it's secrets over time, and in it's own way. Perhaps this accounts for the many years this deck was in development. Though Crowley published his study of the Tarot, "The Book of Thoth", in 1944, the deck itself didn't get published until 1969, after both designer and artist were dead. Incidentally, Thoth, the Egyptian god (the equivalent of the Roman Mercury), is credited with the invention of hieroglyphics. If you want to know more about Thoth, you may want to visit the God/dess of the Month for greater details.
Both the Rider-Waite and the Thoth decks are steeped in esoteric symbolism that were intended to combine important symbolic aspects of earlier decks with Kabbalistic, Astrological, Numerological, Alchemical, and Magical references. The more you learn about the symbols, the more you will be likely to "get" from your experiences with Tarot.
These days there are a host of decks to choose from, but in the eyes of some, more may actually be less. There are those voices that will argue we have lost a certain discrimination where the Tarot is concerned and the evidence for this is found among the many decks that are merely money-making gimmicks with scant regard for the history or symbolism of the Tarot.
We would tend to stand back and let the user decide this matter for themselves. After all, some changes are clearly justified, (for a good example of this, look at the expanded size of the Enochian Tarot which has 30 cards in the Major Arcana in order to accommodate the underlying system of Enochian Magic upon which it is based). As we are fond of saying almost everywhere else in our garden, changing things to make a "better fit", as it were, is the privelege of the practitioner alone and cannot be determined by anyone else. We would hope, however, that you at least know why you are accepting a change and fully understand the underlying reasoning for what has already been established before you launch on a series of willy-nilly alterations that may result in something that fits none.
There are so many decks based around myriad spiritual traditions, from Paganism, Witchcraft, Druidry, Native American Spirituality and Zen Buddhism, to Greek, Norse, Egyptian, and Arthurian mythology, that you can, indeed you almost MUST make some sort of choice right from the outset. But, whatever the strengths and drawbacks of these many Tarot decks, their very existance confirms the "life" of the Tarot and its application to all times and all cultures. We believe that the best of these new developments have grown from established Tarot tradition and symbology to demonstrate that all who study the art of Cartomancy can deepen and evolve their use and understanding of the Tarot just as the cards and the images depicted upon them evolve and deepen with meaning over time.