The Devil's Picture Book: A Brief History of Tarot Cards

People have practiced divination for millennia, hoping that a glimpse of the future will put them on the path to success, longevity, or power. The variety of divination methods is staggering: dice (astragolomancy, a subset of cleromancy), tea leaves (tasseography), the lines on a palm (palmistry), entrails (anthropomancy), the flight of birds (ornithomancy), and so on. Another method of divination that has been popular for nearly 600 years is the use of cards (cartomancy).

Cartomancy, like cleromancy, is a general umbrella under which several more specific types of divination fall. The most well-known derivation of cartomancy is tarot.

Playing cards are originally of Chinese origin and were later adopted as a form of entertainment in Egypt, likely around the 14th century. From there, they were brought to Spain and Portugal, with the earliest mention of naipes, (from the Arabic nā’ib) found in a Catalan rhyming dictionary from 1371. By 1380, naipero, or “card maker” was a recognized profession.

The Catholic Church was quick to label these decks “the devil’s picture book,” despite the predominantly Christian themes used on the face cards and the fact some decks may have been used to teach those who couldn’t read Christian beliefs. Nevertheless, they banned their use in Barcelona. (Racism – it isn’t new.)

Photo via mahjongmuseum.com

Despite the church ban, cards remained a popular item in both Spain and Italy (via the Iberian peninsula), the designs derived from Middle Eastern designs in which the suits are coins, cups, swords, and wands. The face cards are sota (page/knave/jack), caballo (horse/knight), and rey (king).

Some decks had a fourth face card, the reina (queen), worth more points than the caballo and less than the rey. If you purchases playing cards in Spain, these are the cards you’re most likely to get, rather than the standard American clubs, spades, hearts, and diamonds. The design of the best-selling deck in Spain comes with a fair bit of history; it was first produced in 1889.

The cards produced in Italy are similar to their Spanish cousins, though in Italy, playing cards were known as tarocchi and used to play a game of the same name with its rules first recorded in 1425. The oldest surviving (partial) deck is the Visconti-Sforza, commissioned in the mid-15th century, its colorful and fantastical face cards modeled on Carnivál costumes.

Tarocchi were first mentioned as a divinatory tool in documents in 1750, but using them as such wasn’t a popular pursuit until Antoine Court and Jean-Baptiste Alliette used the Tarot of Marseilles as such in 1780s Paris, associating the cards with esoteric, “ancient Egyptian wisdom.” Other contemporary essays chose Kabbalah, I-Ching, Tantra, or Romany tradition as the origin of the practice. At that time, there were no specialized cartomancy decks; the same decks were used for play and for divination.

Early 20th century spiritualists took the practice a step further after seeing tarot readings in the salons of Paris on London, and they designed decks specifically intended for cartomancy. One of the first, which remains popular to this day, is the Waite-Smith Deck, conceived by members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and another, the Book of Thoth, by famous “Satinist” Aleister Crowley.

Because these decks were derived from the tarocchi specifically, they use the Italian suits – cups, swords, and wands – though many substitute pentacles for coins (pentacles are, in this case, an element of Earth and represent “property, money, and achievement”). The face cards remain pages, knights, queens, and kings.

Cards are not necessarily intended to be interpreted literally but rather to increase self-awareness, enhance creativity, and “hone intuition.” The practice remains popular, with mediums around the country, due at least in part to the easy portability of the tool, the ability to customize one’s collection of decks to one’s liking, the vast array of decks available, and the fact the practice is so well known. There is an official American Tarot Association from which one can obtain a certification to read for others, and the oldest psychic institution in the country – Bottom of the Cup Tea Room (est. 1929) in New Orleans – is so popular, reservations are required to have a reading done.