Tarot cards have had a troubled history over the last 200 years, they have gone from being one of the most popular card games in Europe to being recognized throughout the English speaking world as essentially occult objects. Popular myth is recounted in countless texts on the bookshelves, in newspapers, magazines, film, Television, and across the internet. The truth is, as has always been the case, having a hard time - you will find it for the most part in rare and costly academic texts or widely available but in other languages.

 

I don’t intend this to be a history book, there are far more knowledgeable people who have already written exhaustively about the history of tarot. However, I do feel the need to say something about the cards and their confused identity. There are a variety of muddled and conflicting perceptions, interests, and uses which need untangling.

 

So, where do tarot cards come from? There are many stories you may have heard but here’s one fancied by some historians, though by no means all, based upon evidence rather than upon fancy. Playing cards arrived in Europe in the 14^th century from the far east via the Islamic world, having probably developed from tile games. They arrived in much the form they have now, with four suits, each with ten pip cards and three court cards. They differed in having what we now call the Italian suits (being batons or polo sticks, swords, cups, and coins) and having three male court cards that were not pictured as we know them - Islam does not allow the depiction of living creatures - but were represented by abstract patterns. The first account we have of a queen being added was in a Milanese pack, which had six court cards in each suit, a male and a female of each rank, the number of court cards then dropped to four, retaining the queen plus the original three and for some time this 56 card pack proved popular in the region.

 

The first tarot pack seems to have been created in Milan in 1425 by the Duke, who had it commissioned as part of the celebrations for his daughter’s birth. This pack added a fifth suit of 16 trump cards - which marked the invention of the trump in card games - and featured the Pantheon of Olympian gods. To further mark the occasion, the Duke commanded a triumph procession that year - and this could be important to the story.

 

When his daughter was to be married, the Duke commissioned a second pack of cards, this time with the designs familiar to us and they are known as trionfi, meaning triumphs (from which we get our English word, trump). Could it be that the new cards took as their theme, the triumph procession that had marked his daughter’s birth? We cannot be certain but the gesture would be fitting, the name of the trionfi explained, and the cards themselves do indeed depict the very subjects that we would expect to see in such a procession and in much the order we might expect them.

 

With the rise of printing, tarot, known in Italy as tarocchi, gained in popularity and spread beyond the boarders to eventually become one of the best known and most widely played card games in all Europe. Of course, the spread of printing and of cards also led to experiments with new designs. The French suits of spades, trefoils, hearts and diamonds proved the most popular for the common 52 card pack - largely for economic reasons: while the Italian suits required expensive wood blocks, these pips could be reproduced with cheap stencils and with far less labour! It was only a matter of time before tarot cards adopted the same suites. This happened first in Germany, where the Italian trump designs were also replaced with double ended pictures cards featuring rural scenes. This is known as the German pattern and is now used for the card games in all countries but for Switzerland, Italy, and Sicily. This change in pattern has probably saved the game from extinction due to the rise of occultism and it is to occultism that we must now turn…..

 

By the late 18^th century, tarot games, while maintaining their popularity in other regions and countries, had dropped into obscurity in Paris. At a friend’s country house, Antoine Court de Gebelin, a resident of Paris, was introduced to a game of Tarot being played with the designs most familiar to us, the Marseille pattern. He claims in his encyclopaedia, Monde Primitif, that he at once recognized their significance. He claimed that they were a lost repository of ancient knowledge, hermetic hieroglyphs codified by Egyptian priests in these images and disguised as a card game to keep it safe from the book burning hordes. For which, of course, he gave no evidence beyond his own intuition. He even identified the ancient Egyptian etymology of the name Tarot – however, the words he identified don’t exist in the Egyptian lexicon. He could not have known that as the Rosetta stone had not yet been decoded, so no-one actually knew ancient Egyptian at that time. He was not the first or the last man in history to invent his own erudition.

 

Court de Gebelin’s fairy tale quite captured people’s imagination and too often, a good story is preferred to a true one. The next of Court de Gebelin’s lasting contributions was to begin the practice of reversing the academic method of changing a story to fit the facts, by changing the facts to fit his story. The first of the ‘rectified’ packs was produced, making changes to the cards that were, we are assured, returning original symbols lost over the centuries of card making and copying. He began by turning The Hanged Man, upside-down and calling it prudence. It was a small start but the practice has proved a fruitful inspiration for many occultists since. The Occult Tarot was born. Before long, more occultists and ‘spiritual teachers’ had recognized a band-wagon and jumped on, giving their own fanciful accounts for the cards, teaching fortune telling, and creating their own ‘rectified’ packs. Needless to say, none of them backed up their claims with a shred of evidence - attractive rhetoric proved sufficient.

 

Although the occult interest really began to snowball in the 19^th century, it might yet have remained a French anomaly, had it not been for members of the Golden Dawn and other organizations introducing the cards to Britain and translating various French occult texts. Here was one of the few European countries that had no history of the game, the cards were completely new and exotic and people proved ready to believe anything. Belief and business have boomed together. There are literally thousands of different occult tarot packs, and countless thousands of occultist books about them. As I write this, there are in print, only two books written by historians or that just give a factual history about the cards and I have only learned of handful ever written in the English language.

 

Well, we know from history that tarot cards were created for playing card games. There really is no doubt about that. While we cannot be certain as to what, if anything, the trump designs represented, we do know that the accounts given by the occultists don’t stand up to examination. The question then, is do we declare that occultists should have nothing to do with tarot? Are they simply wrong to think the cards represent anything spiritual? Should the cards only be seen as instruments of play? Now, I have a special interest here - the occult tarot has thrived at the expense of the gamers’ tarot - but need it be so? Can the occult tarot and the gamers’ tarot co-exist?

 

I think that we gamers have to make some concessions to the modern occultists. History may not give them a claim to the cards but perhaps use and modern design may give them an equal claim of sorts. You see, words and symbols have meanings because of the way that we use them and the way that we use them often changes over time. Consider the word ‘nice’. These days we use the word in a complimentary fashion - but it was not always so. When Jane Austin’s characters refer to someone as ‘nice’ they don’t intend a compliment, they intend an insult, they used the word to indicate that someone was plain, simple and perhaps a dullard. Because, historically, the word had a different meaning, does not tell us that we are using it incorrectly today. Nor, when we read Jane Austin today, do we read her use of the word ‘nice’ to be a compliment - because we read the word in the context of when it was written. There is no metaphysical connection between the word ‘nice’ and some abstract thing ‘simpleton’ that determines its meaning, there is only the way that we use the word. Now, occultists use tarot cards to symbolize elements of their spiritual and magical beliefs, so in the context of occultism, they have those meanings. To further strengthen this position, we can take into account that occultists usually use ‘rectified’ packs. We can question that they are really rectifying anything, that is a matter of history and can be debated with reference to evidence, but we cannot deny that these are new designs created with the intent that they contain occult symbolism. While it is true that some of these new designs are quite hideous, it would be churlish to deny that a great many of them are beautiful and deserve to be called art. I can say that as an atheist because as such, I can still see the beauty in more familiar religious art, be it by Mozart or Leonardo da Vinci.

 

This is perhaps more of a concession than many card players and sceptics would wish to make and yet, there is still more to say on the matter – we must step back a moment and make sure that I have not been tilting at windmills all along. There are giants out there but we need to make clear who they are. My attacks have been levelled against those occultists who have tried to present an account of history that is simply false, people for whom the occult really has been about revealing hidden knowledge in its traditional sense - these are some of the giants and they do still exist. However, the world of occultism has changed a lot since the days of Court de Gebelin and even since the Golden Dawn. Over the last quarter of a century there has been a shift in occultism and new ageism to begin to look upon religions, spiritual beliefs and tarot cards, with almost post-modernist eyes. These people are perhaps more relativist in their outlook and choose a tarot pack, not according to how well it reflects a system of occult belief they accept as ‘true’, but according to its appeal to them personally and how it reflects their view and experience of the world. The people of this new trend do not recognize themselves in the likes of the old school occultists - and those who pursue their interest in tarot to any degree, often know and accept the cards’ history as a game. For these occult tarotists, the new designs of occult tarot cards are no longer understood as ‘rectified’ designs but as personal ones.

 

However, there is still another giant to tilt against and that is public perception. The old occultist myths have become a part of the public consciousness, and have so much appeal within it that breaking the myth is far harder than it should be. You can explain the truth about their history and take out a pack of cards designed without any occult reference, only to find that people will still say that they are uncomfortable with playing a game with them – I have had this response even with the French suited cards! It is this general public perception that is my principle target.

 

If there is blame to be laid anywhere for this public perception, I do not lay it with the modern tarot reader - as I’ve said, many of them seem to accept the historian’s picture of things. There are occultists who do still spread the fictions and yet still, I do not put all the blame with them. Rather, and now I am venturing more deeply into personal opinion, I tend to blame the popular media. Be they TV producers, publishers, magazines, or newspapers - they can be seen everyday to put the story they think will sell above any responsibility to educate or to simply be honest. Of course, we are talking about businesses, they exist to make money, for their owners, for their shareholders - but I do not believe that this excuses anyone from basic moral responsibilities.

 

What my argument does not concede is that people learn anything about the world from studying the cards. Nor do I concede that by ‘reading’ the cards people can divine anything about the future. I do not think that they can do either but these are other debates for other books and do not concern us here. What this does all mean is that the occultists’ tarot and the gamers’ tarot are distinct and can co-exist, that the grounds for accord between us are there if we two sides are willing to meet in the middle - and enjoy a nice game of cards.