Before there was Tarot
Summary
Playing cards were a Chinese invention which found their way to Europe around 1375, by way of the Mamluk empire. They spread very quickly through much of western Europe. Trick-taking games of some sort, traditionally the most popular form of card game, probably arrived with the cards. However, while we know almost nothing about the games played, the design of the Mamluk decks changed very little as adopted by the Italians, and so-called Moorish cards may have also been used in Europe. The four suits were Swords, Staves (the Mamluk decks used Polo Sticks), Coins, and Cups. Each suit had ten pip cards and three "court cards", a King, Knight, and Page, creating a 52-card deck. While that basic Italian suit system continued to be used, variations developed almost immediately. Spanish decks changed the Staves into Clubs, and altered the designs, and German cardmakers developed a number of alternative suit-systems.
In the earliest known description of playing cards, Brother John described decks in which the number of court cards and even the number of suits were increased from the norm, and some in which female figures were used on the court cards. In addition to regular decks, novelty decks were also produced in the 14th century, including one with images of gods and emblematic animals.
Although Tarot did not appear until the 1440s, the suit-cards used in Tarot were the same as standard Italian playing cards. In some regular Italian-suited decks of the period, Queens had been added to the suit cards, creating a 56-card deck, and such a deck was the basis for Tarot. The subjects illustrated on Tarot's trump cards were also well-known before the 15th century, some them dating back to classical times. Figures such as the Emperor and Pope, allegories of Love, Death, the Wheel of Fortune, the three Moral Virtues, and eschatological subjects from Revelation, were staples of medieval art. Even seemingly enigmatic subjects, such as a female figure with papal attributes or a man hanged by one foot, were far less obscure in that milieu.
The Invention of Tarot
Summary
The idea of trumps appears to be a European invention which first appeared in the 1420s, in the German game of Karnöffel. Tarot was probably created 10-15 years later, around 1440, somewhere in northern Italy. The earliest surviving Milanese Tarot decks and Ferrarese references to Tarot both come from that period. As noted, the Tarot deck consisted of a regular 56-card deck, augmented with a hierarchy of 22 allegorical trump cards. This created the standard 78-card Tarot deck, originally referred to as carte da trionfi, cards with trumps. Each trump triumphed over (trumped) the lower-ranking trumps in the manner of the popular trionfi motif, which also appeared in art, literature, religious processions, festival pageants, and so on.
The subjects pictured on the allegorical cards appear to have been standardized from the beginning. The vast majority of all Tarot decks in the 15th through 17th centuries share that design, and the occasional variants all appear to be derived from that archetypal standard. The series of images was similar to cycles of didactic Christian art of that era, most notably, the Triumph of Death and Dance of Death works popular from the time of the Black Death in the mid-14th century.
Tarot quickly became popular and spread in northern Italy, with Milan, Bologna, and Ferrara being early centers of the game. Richly painted decks with gold and silver leaf backgrounds were commissioned by the wealthy, while printed decks were used by commoners and nobles alike. (A record from 1436 indicates that the d'Este court at Ferrara had their own printing press for making cards.) The sequence of the trumps was altered in minor ways as Tarot spread to new locales, and the iconography was also varied somewhat. Moreover, a few complete redesigns are known, such as the classicized Sola Busca deck and the literary Boiardo deck, but they were dramatic exceptions. Changes of iconography, whether simplifying the original designs or conflating the Tarot images with other subject matter, usually left the underlying standard subjects recognizable.
The Development of Modern Tarot Decks and the Invention of Occult Tarot
Summary
The middle of the 1700s saw a great development in the game of Tarot, a modernized deck, along with a growth in Tarot's popularity. Dummett notes that "The hundred years between about 1730 and 1830 were the heyday of the game of Tarot; it was played not only in northern Italy, eastern France, Switzerland, Germany and Austro-Hungary, but also in Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden and even Russia. Not only was it, in these areas, a famous game with many devotees: it was also, during that period, more truly an international game than it had ever been before or than it has ever been since...." Beginning around 1750, a modernized Tarot deck became popular in many areas. The more common French suit-signs, (Spades, Clubs, Hearts, and Diamonds) replaced the older Italian ones, and around 1780 the trumps began to became double-headed. Tarot's traditional Medieval allegory was replaced with a decorative series of thematically-related but essentially arbitrary images, made possible by the use of large numerals on the trumps. This obviated memorizing the order of images, making the game that much easier to learn. The themes of these decks might include almost anything: animals, pastoral scenes, military triumphs, illustrated proverbs, even advertising. Although in decline in France and Italy, the popularity of the game elsewhere increased during this period.
The later 18th century saw an even more portentous development of Tarot, well beyond its use to play cards. Fortune-telling with playing cards had developed from their use as a randomizing device to pick a page in a book of fortunes in the 1500s, through the use of special fortune-telling decks in the 1600s, and finally to the point of regular decks being given symbolic meaning in the 1700s. A few scattered indications of this appear earlier in the century, but the first book on cartomancy was published in 1770. It was written by Etteilla, the world's first professional cartomancer, who became one of the founders of occult Tarot. In the 1780s he and two other French writers developed much of the occult lore and fortune-telling methods that would reinvent Tarot in the late 1800s.
These three writers changed Tarot forever. Neither knowing nor caring much about Tarot's 350-year history, its original and common use as a game, or the intended meaning of its allegorical cycle, they interpreted the images freely. They used the twenty-two trumps as signs designating the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. These newly-minted correspondences made the Tarot deck into a novel emblem system for Cabalistic magic and mysticism. The two esoteric uses, Cabala and divination, became permanently attached to Tarot. The authors of this newly invented Tarot also wrote up a detailed fantasy about Tarot's origin and history, involving Egyptian initiations, Jewish mystics, and vagabond Gypsies. These fictional histories were intended to validate the correspondences the occultists had devised, by appeal to alleged ancient wisdom and secret traditions.
