History of the Tarot

Some time in the first half of the fifteenth century, somewhere in northern Italy, someone created the first set of tarot cards. Like the playing cards of the time, the tarot deck included number cards (1 through 10) known as pips in four suits, and court cards page, knight, and king. But the tarot deck had more: a queen was added to each of the courts, and 22 special cards, not belonging to any suit, were added. These special cards bore symbolic pictures, with such subjects as the Emperor, the Pope, The Wheel of Fortune, Death, the Devil, and the Moon.

The tarot cards were used to play a new type of card game, similar to bridge, but with 21 of the special cards serving as permanent trumps there were the Pip cards 1-10 of each suit and the Royals along with the Trumps, which could be played regardless of what suit was led, and outranked all the ordinary cards. This Game of Triumphs, as it was called, became extraordinarily popular, particularly among the upper classes, and spread through northern Italy and eastern France. As the game spread to new locales, changes were often made in the pictures, and also in the ranking of the trumps, which usually bore no numbers. In time, tarot spread south to Sicily and north to Austria, Germany, and the Low Countries. The first recorded use of the tarot was at court in Ferrara in 1422 and the oldest surviving cards are from the mid 15^th century designed by the Visconti-Sforza family, the rulers of Milan at the time. The first deck that is known of did not actually have seventy eight cards, but had the typically ten numbered cards and only a king for a royal, then sixteen trumps, there is no real mention of a seventy eight card deck until 1450.

Centuries later, devotees of the occult arts in France and England encountered the tarot and saw mystical and magical meaning in the enigmatic symbolism of the cards. There were many devotees to the Tarot as an occult divination and magical tool, such as Eliphas Levi, the occultist believed the tarot was the key to the universal magical words and therefore the key to the dogmas of all ancient religions. He was the first to associate the elements and regenerate the idea of the link between the Hebrew letters and the tarot.

-The ten numerical cards of each suit corresponded to the ten Cabalistic Sephiroth (centers of divine energy)

-The four suits corresponded to the Four Elements, Coins (pentacles) is Earth, Cups is Water, Scepters (Wands) is Air, and Swords is Fire;

-Although he was not the first to link Tarot to the Hebrew alphabet, he was the first specifically to write that the Juggler (Magician) was Aleph, the Papess (High Priestess) was Beth, etc.

Even though Levi could not prove his claims as to the origin and metaphysical meanings behind the cards he continued to express his views despite opinions and proof that may have showed the opposite. Many to this day still use some form of Levi’s system of divination. Levi himself never created a deck however he did create a Chariot card and was the first to use Egyptian influence in form of sphinxes one white and one black that take the place of where horses or bulls would usually be. He included this picture in his text Dogme et rituel [1854-55]). It is believed that Eliphas Levi is in fact the father of the modern tarot system, in his book Dogme et rituel he gave specific instructions and meanings for each of the cards, this literature would later be translated by Arthur Waite in a text entitled Transcendental Magic. Eliphas Levi’s belief in the tarot was carried on and honored by the Hermetic Tradition of the Golden Dawn. Arthur Waite was so impressed by Levi that he created his own deck which included a similar design and so have many other modern tarot artists.

A. E. Waite, who hasn’t heard of his deck of tarot cards? Let’s talk a little bit about him, he was a scholar and mystic who attempted to study occultism as a spiritual tradition instead of a science. He co-created the Rider-Waite deck and authored a companion book in 1911 entitled The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, the cards were the first to be fully illustrated all seventy-eight cards, including the twenty two major arcana cards. Pamela Colman Smith was the artist who designed the pictorial imagery of the cards by the instruction of Waite, Smith was a member of the hermetic tradition called the Golden Dawn. Although this deck looks very simple in it’s drawings it in fact holds much in the way of symbolism, also the strictly Christian symbolism in the name of the cards such as the “Pope” was toned down and became the Hierophant. These cards were influenced the most by Eliphas Levi and were printed by the Rider company in 1909 This deck has become the most popular in the United States the Tarot de Marseille being the most popular in latin countries. This deck created a “big boom” effect with tarotists and artists everywhere, after Rider-Waite’s deck it became common practice to design and illustrate all of the cards in the deck instead of just using basic imagery and to call the cards by the names of Hierophant and High Priestess instead of the Christian names they were originally titled by.