What is the Tarot?

Despite what you may have read elsewhere, the Tarot did not originate in Egypt as the "Book of Thoth," nor was it devised by a gathering of magi in Morocco in 1200. It was not a medium for the secret transmission of dangerous esoteric knowledge during the centuries of Roman Catholic dominance in Europe.

Originally, the Tarot was a game.

What we now call the Tarot began somewhere in northern Italy in the first half of the 15th Century, probably in Milan. The oldest Tarot cards in existence were painted by hand for the ruling classes, but we don't know if that's because the game began that way and spread later to the masses, or if the hand-painted cards we have were more elaborate versions of already-existing printed cards which have since been lost. The ephemeral nature of playing cards -- both in the materials and workmanship involved and in the attitudes toward them held by their owners -- makes printed cards of any kind more than a couple of hundred years old rare indeed, while hand-painted cards were valuable enough to have been named in wills even back in the 15th Century when they were new.

Card-playing was relatively new to Europe at the time, having been brought into Spain and Sicily (and perhaps Venice and a few other places) by Muslims playing "Naib," a game that involved a pack of cards very much like our modern poker decks, with a couple of important differences I'll get to later on. Someone -- we will almost certainly never know who, nor precisely where or when -- made some alterations to these decks to create a new game. It is all but certain that the designer's intention was amusement, and perhaps gambling, and neither fortune-telling nor acquisition of esoteric wisdom entered into the creation in any way, shape or form.

Does all this mean that there is "nothing to" the Tarot, that modern-day cartomancers either deluded idiots or fraudulent hucksters, reading meaning into meaningless pieces of pasteboard? Not at all. As will be seen, the existence of symbolic content and "deeper meaning" was, in fact, inherent in the game from the beginning, not to mention the fact that the modern deck differs substantially from those first early decks. Most importantly, though, the Tarot has been invested with power by its practitioners, first and foremost, for your own deck, will be you yourself. If you develop a relationship with the Tarot, you will find yourself receiving answers from it that will astonish you. If you insist that it is "just a pack of cards," you will be losing an enrichment that is available in relatively few forms and places in our modern world.

Why this should be so, given the decidedly mundane origin of the cards and the fact that they are, when all is said an done, nothing but rectangles of stiff paper printed with designs, is a deep mystery we will examine but not expect to answer. Suffice to say that anyone who has had much real experience with the Tarot knows that it is so.