History of Tarot- Lesson 1

It is unknown and debatable where the Tarot cards originated. However, it is widely believed that the cards appeared around early 13th century when Arabic Mamluk cards found their way to the ports of Southern Europe: Italy, Spain and Southern France. In North of Italy were used in playing a card game similar to bridge. Oldest surviving cards are the Visconti Tarot cards. In 1428, Visconti Filippo, last duke of the great Visconti family married Maria de Savoy. The tarot cards were a wedding gift. The cards were called initially trionfi, but by 1516 have become known as tarocchi. These cards consisted of pictorial cards, court cards and small cards, were hand painted, expensive to produce and in the hands of wealthy aristrocrats. In the 17th and 18th century tarot cards were being created around the French port of Marseilles using woodcuts. These were cheaper to produce and helped to increase the circulation of the cards. At the end of 18th century France when tarot began to be used as an esoteric tool.

Tarot connections with the Egyptian mysteries and the gypsies did not exist until Antoine Court de Geblin “discovered” a relationship in 1781. It is quite clear that the gypsies did not use the tarot cards until the 19th century. In 1781, Antoine Court de Gebelin wrote “Le Monde Primitif, Analyse et Compare avec Le Monde Moderne” (The Primitive World, Analyzed and Compared with the Modern World). In volume 8 of this work, he claimed that the symbols included in the Tarot of Marseille enclosed a secret knowledge from the Egyptian mythology and was brought over by gypsies ( “the Bohemiens”).

Comte de Mellet (1727-1804) has developed knowledge of Geblin’s discovery in the Book of Thoth that explains for the first time that the cards correspond to the Hebrew alphabet. Jean Baptiste Alliette (Le Grand Etteila) produced his own set of cards with astrological associations as well as a number of books. Etteilla was the first to publish information on using the cards for divination in the late 18th century.

Eliphas Levi (1850- Alphonse Louis Constant) was a key figure in the French magical revival of the mid-nineteenth century. In 1854 he published “Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie” (translated in English by A. E Waite as Transcendental Magic). Levi accepted Court de Geblein’s claims of the Egyptian origin of the tarot cards and rejected Etteila’s beliefs and his modified deck. Levi wrote about a system that related the tarot with the Kabbalah.

1870- Paul Christian was a Levi’s disciple who 1st used the name “arcana”(magical secrets) published “History of Magic” under the pen name Jean- Baptise Pitois. It was Levi’s ideas that started the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1888, a secret magical society. The two founders were Dr William W. Wescott and S. L MacGregor Mathers and his wife Moina. The most influential tarot deck until today was created by A.E. Eaite and Pamela Coleman Smith and it is called the Rider-Waite Tarot. Other influential decks were created by Aleister Crowley and Frieda Harris, Paul Foster, etc. We will address these decks in particular in other lesson.

In 1960 NY Bookseller Eden Gray self-published the 1st of the books that made easy to anyone to do a Tarot reading.