﻿Arcana is Latin for secrets and we have minor and major ones in a Tarot deck.
Yet, how did the Tarot evolve from being playing cards to a divination tool?
Stay tuned, because you’re about to find out.
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Hello everyone, I’m Dr Angela Puca, and welcome to my Symposium.
I’m a PhD and a university lecturer and this is your online resource for
the academic study of magick, Esotericism, Paganism, Shamanism, and all things occult.
Today’s video is brought to you by James Vitale! Thank you so much
James for commissioning this video and I look forward to hearing what you think of it.
It may surprise you to know, that although there are innumerable books on the Tarot,
there are very few academic sources on the topic. The most comprehensive text
in academic scholarship, which is going to be the source of this video’s content,
is ‘A cultural history of the Tarot’ by Helen Farley.
There are many theories on the origins of the Tarot but we know from historical
records that there was a proliferation of references to playing cards from 1370,
references we don’t find in prior history. The deck’s appearance occurred most certainly
in Italy, through the prosperous seaport of Venice that was dealing with a brisk trade with
the countries of the East and the Near East. Upon its first emergence, the deck already had a stable
structure of fifty-two cards distributed through four suits. This makes it highly unlikely that
these cards were a local invention as there is no evidence of progenitor or transitional decks.
There are a few theories on the importation of the cards to Europe. A couple of popular speculations
indicate that they might have developed from the Indian game of Ganjifa or from a Chinese
card game, both of which present similarities with the first decks that emerged in Italy. After all,
Venice was a seaport entertaining trade relations with many countries around the world.
However, historical evidence points at a more likely Arabic derivation, from the Mamlūk
Empire, possibly entering Europe via Muslim Spain or Italy. We know this is the case
as we find several references to the cards as having such roots.
As Farley reports, «An inventory of the possessions of the Duke of Orléans
written in 1408, expressly detailed ‘a Saracen card deck’. Dummett also cited an inventory
of 1460 contained in the archive of the Barcelona notary which included the
entry: ‘Packs of ordinary playing cards and other Moorish games». Most famously, Juzzo da Coveluzzo,
in his Istoria della città di Viterbo, refers to the cards as a ‘Saracen invention'.
There's also a theory that sees the origin of the tarots in Egypt, most notably upheld
by the Freemason, protestant clergyman, and esotericist Antoine Court de Gébelin
just before the French Revolution. Another theory that points at a French derivation of the tarot
trumps was proposed by the American scholar Charlene Gates in her doctoral dissertation,
hypothesising that the symbolism of the tarot trumps was derived from a common pool
of medieval iconography that arose in southern France in the twelfth century.
However, documentary evidence indicates that the arrival of the ordinary playing
card deck in Europe predated the appearance of tarot by about fifty years and that the oldest
extant tarot decks were from northern Italy, dating to the first half of the fifteenth century.
The cards were initially called ‘cartes de trionfi’, in old Italian, indicating
that one card would ‘triumph’ over another during the play. This was a descriptive term
to distinguish the tarot deck from regular playing cards. By the sixteenth century,
this term was replaced by ‘tarocchi’, though the etymology remains mysterious.
Anecdotally, in Italy, we still use the term 'Tarocchi' to refer to the Tarot cards,
and colloquially, when we say that something is 'Tarocco', it means that it's fake or fabricated.
The tarot was probably invented at the Court of Milan either for or by Duke Filippo
Maria Visconti as stated by Jacopo Antonio Marcello in his letter to Queen Isabella.
The first decks, referred to as Visconti di Modrone and Brambilla,
were the blueprint for the one that followed - the Visconti-Sforza deck.
These first decks were likely used as playing cards, as there is no evidence
of their use for fortune-telling before the eighteenth century.
The deck spread, from Milan to Ferrara and Bologna getting the trump order altered
at every passage. It was still from Milan that the game spread to the rest of Europe,
especially after the city fell to France and Switzerland in the sixteenth century,
and then later became a popular game in the continent by the end of the eighteenth century.
The Tarot de Marseille became the most common deck
in France and Switzerland around the seventeenth century, establishing the
pattern of cards and visual representations that have endured as a reference for the later decks.
The images on the first decks were meant to symbolically represent the life and history of the
families Visconti and Sforza. Yet, when they lost their contextual meaning, having entered a foreign
country and a different culture, the messages conveyed by those pictures became mysterious and
obscure. Fostered by the emergence of different occult traditions in France, speculations
started to emerge on what the hidden meaning of those cards could have been. It was here,
in eighteenth-century France, that the tarot moved from being seen as a game to a divinatory
tool. Two key figures in this process were Antoine Court de Gébelin – who reinterpreted the deck as
the lost Book of Thoth, containing the secrets of Egyptian wisdom - and Éliphas Lévi who established
correspondences between the tarot trumps and astrology, kabbalah, and other such systems.
Shortly after, in England, the occult revival saw, at first, the tarot playing no role in it. It was
then, thanks to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, founded in 1888, that the inclusion of the
Tarot in the occult practices first occurred. The Golden Dawn additionally associated the pathways
of the Tree of Life with the tarot trumps. This connection was of seminal importance
as it constitutes the foundation of most modern forms of divinatory interpretation.
'Two Golden Dawn members' in Farley's words 'were to make invaluable contributions
to the esoteric use of the tarot. First, Aleister Crowley expanded the association of tarot trumps
with various esoteric schemes.’ Second, Arthur Edward Waite illustrated the minor arcana cards,
the ones that started as pip cards, corresponding to the four suits of the Mamlūk deck, and Waite
did so to facilitate their use in divination. Furthermore, Waite linked tarot to the Grail
Mysteries and Christian mysticism, an association that persists to this day within esoteric circles.
In a future video, I will investigate the Rider, Waite, Smith Tarot deck in more detail.
So stay tuned for that.
This is it for today’s video.
Thank you again, James Vitale, for reaching out and commissioning a video on this topic.
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