History of the Tarot - Part 3

I'll get into the actual symbolism and meaning of the Tarot cards later. For now, I'll just say that the original cards depicted a fairly standard Christian allegorical sequence of the time. Those who find hidden Neoplatonic, residual pagan, alchemical or astrological symbols in it are both right and wrong. Right, because those things are inescapably part of the symbolism involved. Wrong, because they are hardly hidden, nor would hiding them have been necessary at the time. Much of what passes for "occult" or "neo-pagan" was not thought of as inimical to Christianity in the Middle Ages or the Renaissance - nearly a century after the Tarot was born, newly elected Pope Julius II put off his official investment for three weeks so that it could be held on an astrologically auspicious day. Besides, the strictures placed on philosophy by the Church were beginning to lose their power anyway. In 1373 Bernabo Visconti (for whose descendants the oldest existing Tarot cards were made) not only laughed at the Pope's bull of excommunication but forced those carrying it to him to eat it!

In the next section, I will detail my own theory of how the cards came to be, but I want to finish up this section on their history with what happened to them after 1450.

There is no doubt that for the first few decades of their existence, the cards were primarily, and probably solely, used to play a game. There is no hard evidence of any esoteric or "occult" use of the cards until the late 1700s, nearly four centuries later. But more on that in a moment.

It's likely, for reasons I will go into in the next section, that the cards were originally created at court. But they spread soon to the masses through the medium of printed cards that could be quickly and cheaply made and sold for a fraction of the cost of a hand-painted deck. The intellectual rigor of the original game is shown by the fact that the surviving printed cards and/or woodblock printing plates all have labels or numbers or both on the cards, while the handpainted originals have neither, part of the original game being a test of the players' ability to remember the proper order of the trumps.

You will often read things by card historians that make it sound like it has been firmly established that Court de Gebelin and Etteilla made up the entire nonsense about the cards being used for fortune telling. But that is extremely unlikely, and in fact we know that ordinary playing cards were used for fortune telling as early as the 16th Century, so there's no reason to believe that Tarot cards weren't also used this way.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, particularly when you are dealing with an "underground" activity of the common people. We know for sure that playing cards were used for fortune telling, yet there are very few actual references to the practice. Does that mean that very few people ever engaged in it? Not necessarily.

It's important to note that Etteilla and de Gebelin were writing at about the same time that philosophers were talking about the inborn rights of the common man and folklorists were beginning to gather evidence of how they lived and the stories they told. Up until the late 1700s, the world of literature and art -- the world that left a rich and deep historical record behind -- was the world of the elite, with almost no attention paid to the peasants that tilled the land or the laborers in the cities.

We don't know whether telling fortunes using Tarot cards was a widespread practice that stretched back to shortly after they appeared or whether it was a recent innovation primarily centered around Paris, but there is absolutely no doubt that by the late 18th Century in that part of France an entire tradition of such fortune telling had arisen and attracted two very different men for very different reasons to investigate it. One of them would become the first professional Tarot reader, the first modern to design his own set and the first person (as far as we know) to design a set specifically for the purpose of divination. The other would invent a phony Egyptian etymology that persists to this day as part of a mistaken theory of their origin. But it's almost certain that neither of them would have been drawn to the cards in the first place if a rich tradition of their use by fortune tellers and association with secret meanings and the supernatural had not already existed.

We don't know when exactly that may have happened. We do know that the cards used in Paris at the time were essentially the same as those now known as the Marseilles deck, which differs significantly in a few respects from the original cards made for the game, though certainly still sold at that time primarily to game-players. We don't know if the changes were thought of at the time they were made as symbolically significant, nor if the Marseilles designers were aiming for the injection of esoteric meaning into the cards. There is little reason to suppose they might have been, but certainly no evidence that they were not. The fact that the cards originated in Italy, grew to their highest popularity as a game in Germany, yet it was in Paris that we know for sure they were being used for fortune-telling in the 1700s does make one wonder if this notion began in France, and if so when and where.

The big break for the Tarot came in 1910, when Alfred Edward Waite commissioned Pamela Coleman Smith to design a new deck and issued them along with a book containing his scholarship on their history and insights on their symbolism. We do not know whether drawing representational pictures, rather than just illustrations of the symbols, on the 40 "pip" cards was Waite's idea or Smith's own, but it was an inspired one. The "Rider-Waite" deck, as it is unfortunately known (Rider being the original publisher, but Smith probably having more to do with the designs than Waite as well as certainly having actually drawn the pictures), has certainly the most popular and influential deck for the last century, and the explosion of interest in the Tarot in the last 30 years has seen dozens, if not hundreds, of new decks whose pip cards also have pictures, and whose pictures are loosely or wholly based on those found on the RWS (Rider-Waite-Smith, a compromise name for what should properly be called the "Smith-Waite" deck in my opinion).

This is, of course, a mere sketch -- a whole book could be written on the history of the Tarot -- indeed, multiple books have been written on the subject. But aside from airing for the first time my own personal theory of how the present Tarot deck came to be I shall rest here.