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.

Hello everyone, I’m Dr Angela Puca, and welcome to my Symposium. I’m a PhD. 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. 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 first 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 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 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 to James Vitale for reaching out and commissioning a video on this topic.

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REFERENCES

Farley, H. (2009) A Cultural History of Tarot: From Entertainment to Esotericism. London, I B Tauris & Co Ltd.