fortune-telling. The first tarot decks were created in Italy in the 1430s by adding a fifth suit of 21 specially designed cards called trionfi (“triumphs”) and an odd card called il matto to an already existing four-suited pack (“the fool). (The modern joker, which was created in the late 19th century as an unsuited jack in the game of euchre, is not related to the fool.)
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What is the tarot’s past?
In the late 14th or early 15th century, northern Italy is where tarot cards most likely first appeared. The Visconti-Sforza deck, the earliest surviving set, was allegedly influenced by the costumed characters that marched in carnival parades.
How old is tarot, exactly?
The origin of playing cards is unknown, although they initially arrived in Europe in the late 14th century. The earliest records, mostly of card games being outlawed, are from Berne in 1367, and they appear to have spread throughout all of Europe quite quickly. Little is known about the design and quantity of these cards; the only significant information is found in a text written in Freiburg im Breisgau in 1377 by John of Rheinfelden, who, in addition to other versions, describes the basic pack as consisting of the four still-in-use suits of 13 cards, with the courts typically being the King, Ober, and Unter (“marshals”), although Dames and Queens were already well-known by that time.
The suits of Batons or Clubs, Coins, Swords, and Cups were one of the earliest card patterns to emerge. These suits are still present in classic decks of playing cards from Italy, Spain, and Portugal, as well as in contemporary (occult) tarot cards that originally appeared in the late 18th century.
Between 1440 and 1450, in Milan, Ferrara, Florence, and Bologna, additional trump cards with allegorical pictures were added to the conventional four-suit pack, resulting in the first known tarot decks. The additional cards, known simply as trionfi, later became known as “trumps” in English. These new decks were known as carte da trionfi, triumph cards, and trionfi. The first recorded account of trionfi can be discovered in a 1440 Florence court document referring to the transfer of two decks to Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta.
The about 15 Visconti-Sforza tarot decks that were painted in the middle of the 15th century for the rulers of the Duchy of Milan are the oldest surviving decks of tarot cards. Martiano da Tortona likely wrote about a missing tarot-like pack that Duke Filippo Maria Visconti had ordered between 1418 and 1425 because the painter he describes, Michelino da Besozzo, left for Milan in 1418 and Martiano himself passed away in 1425. He spoke of a deck of 60 cards, 16 of which featured Roman gods, and four different bird suits. The sixteen cards were referred to as “trumps” because Jacopo Antonio Marcello said that the now-deceased duke had created a new and magnificent category of triumphs in 1449. The Sola-Busca and Boiardo-Viti decks from the 1490s are two other early decks that also had classical themes.
The Minchiate enlarged deck was in use in Florence. Along with conventional tarot imagery, this 97-card deck also features astrological signs, the four elements, and other themes.
Tarot was not routinely condemned in its early history, despite a Dominican priest railing against the sinfulness of cards in a sermon from the 15th century (mostly because of their usage in gambling).
The initial decks of tarot cards are said to have been few in number because they were all hand-painted. The printing press was the first tool that made mass production of playing cards feasible. During the Italian Wars, tarot began to spread outside of Italy, first to France and then to Switzerland. The Tarot of Marseilles, which has Milanese origins, was the most widely used tarot deck in these two nations.
What tarot decks date back the furthest?
The Visconto-Sforza tarot deck is the oldest in existence. When we consider their antiquity and the fragile quality of the paper they were painted on, it is amazing that just 35 cards of this lovely deck are still in existence. The Duke of Milan, Filippo Visconti, and his son-in-law, Francesco Sforza, who ordered the deck in 1425, are known as the Visconti-Sforza deck.
At the time, woodblock printed playing cards were available for the general public, but this hand-painted set was both expensive and special.
The pictures in this deck, according to tarot historian Gertrude Moakley, were influenced by the typical costumed characters of medieval Italian carnivals.
What kind of faith did the tarot cards come from?
Tarot cards are frequently cited as a component of New Age thought and practice along with astrology, aspects of Buddhism, paganism, and First Nations teachings in the eclectic scholarly approach to the New Age.
Who is the tarot’s inventor?
The first tarot decks were created in Italy in the 1430s by adding a fifth suit of 21 specially designed cards called trionfi (“triumphs”) and an odd card called il matto to an already existing four-suited pack (“the fool).
Who was the tarot card’s creator?
The sniper threatening Greater Washington, D.C. placed a taunting tarot card near the shooting scene with the words “Dear Policeman, I am God.” Where are tarot cards made?
In the late 14th or early 15th century, northern Italy is where tarot cards most likely first appeared. The Visconti-Sforza deck, the oldest surviving set, was made for the family of the Duke of Milan sometime around 1440. The cards were used to play tarocchi, a bridge-like game that was then quite popular among nobility and other leisure enthusiasts. The whimsical designs on the cards, from the Fool to Death, were reportedly inspired by the costumed characters that marched in carnival parades, according to tarot historian Gertrude Moakley.
How were tarot cards used by the Egyptians?
Contrary to what some people may believe, the tarot did not begin in ancient Egypt. However, the occult tradition that derives from 18th-century myths about the Egyptian mysteries underpins modern Tarot decks. Tarot cards are frequently used by mystery schools to outline the stages of their initiations and incorporate Egyptian god forms and symbolism.
According to Mystery Schools, words and symbols have secret significance that can only be discovered by personal experience and cannot be taught. The educational institutions direct a person through a sequence of ceremonies that start or “start the process of awareness transformation. This wakes the body’s organs and subtle energies, triggering powers that the general public is typically unaware of. The highest level of these teachings and abilities is thought to have been obtained in Egypt. Manly Palmer Hall, an expert on the occult, felt that these institutions are the institutions of Isis, the mother of the Mysteries, from whose dark womb initiates are born into a second or philosophical birth. The descendants of Isis are all adepts. Each initiate is a Horus, a hawk of the sun, whose mission is to exact revenge on wisdom’s destruction, which is represented by the assassination of his father Osiris. The widow Isis is the Mystery School itself, and she keeps producing possible saviors from within herself.
But what relevance does tarot have to this? The issue is that between 1420 and 1440, Northern Italy rather than Egypt was the place where tarot first appeared. The belief in the mystical power of images was a defining feature of this time period. At the same time, there was a massive migration of scholars and manuscripts from Constantinople, which was being conquered by Muslim Turks, and from Spain, where Jews were being persecuted. Cities in Northern Italy that took in these refugees developed into centers of learning with libraries stocked with texts on magic, astrology, and long-lost Greek philosophical writings. Alexandria, Egypt, which is home to a diverse collection of Egyptian, Coptic, Greek, Roman, Hebrew, and East Indian learning, has retained a large portion of this information. The Hieroglyphics of Horapollo, a Greek book from the fifth century, arrived in Florence in 1422. It greatly influenced Renaissance thought and mistakenly claimed to unveil the hidden meaning of Egyptian hieroglyphs. Although few of the pictures directly appear in the tarot, they added to the myth that Egypt was the source of ancient knowledge.
Pythagoras, the creator of one of history’s most important mystery schools, studied in Egypt. Through him, the sacred mathematical concepts entered Western culture. Egyptians were regarded as the wisest men by Plato, Pythagoras, and Plutarch, among others, and their temples served as archives for mystical studies. The Eleusinian mysteries of Demeter and Persephone were united with those of Osiris and Isis in Greco-Roman Alexandria to create the Serapis and Isis mysteries, which later spread throughout Europe. In Paris, the Notre Dame cathedral was constructed on an Isis temple, and many of the oldest “Isis and her son Horus are depicted in sculptural form as black Madonnas.
Tarot cards didn’t become prominent in relation to the adoption of Egyptian-inspired initiation rituals by the Rosicrucian and Masonic secret societies until the height of France’s 18th-century Enlightenment. There was a scholarly movement in France looking for the origins of language, which was thought to be a kind of Hebrew preserved from the language of the gods recorded in Egyptian hieroglyphs. Their phonetic properties and genuine meanings weren’t understood until the translation of the Rosetta Stone in the 1830s.
The Comte de St. Germain, Cagliostro, Anton Mesmer (who invented hypnotism), Benjamin Franklin, and Antoine Court de Gbelin, the head Egyptologist of the French Academy, were all involved with Egyptian rites of Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism in pre-revolutionary France, as were many other extraordinary individuals. The Krata Repoa, a compilation of ancient and Hermetic writings on Egyptian mysteries organized into seven initiation rites, served as the basis for these and was originally published in Venice in 1657.
Court de Gbelin was the first to attribute occult knowledge to the cards when he declared that an ancient Egyptian book, the Book of Thoth, still existed in his encyclopedic work of anthropological linguistics, Le Monde Primitif (1781). He asserted that it was the only thing to survive the destruction of their libraries and that it contained their most fundamental beliefs in a form that had been widely disseminated, albeit unappreciated, throughout most of Europe by gypsies, whom he believed to be Egyptian. He explained that this book of odd figures on 78 leaves is definitely symbolic and adheres to ancient Egyptian ideas. One evidence was the existence of both male and female priests. The triple cross on the Pope or Hierophant card symbolizes the renewal of all of Nature and is the djed pillar (backbone) of Osiris. The star depicted on the Star card is Sirius, the Dog-Star, which rises at the beginning of the New Year in Leo along with the Nile’s flood. Isis, Queen of Heaven, is seen below spilling water from her jars since it was her tears that caused the annual flooding of the Nile. When it was time for the Nile to rise, one of her tears would fall from the Moon. The mighty demon Typhon (or Set) appeared on the Devil card. The Hebrew alphabet’s letters were represented by the twenty-two trump cards. Swords represented aristocracy, Cups the priests, Staffs (or cudgels) represented agriculture, and Coins represented trade. These four suits represented the four social groups in ancient Egypt.
This “He claimed that the book of destiny was entirely Egyptian, being made up (falsely) of the words tar, which means “way, road,” and ro, which means “king, royal.” Thus, it demonstrated the “We must pursue the Royal Path of Human Life. The tarot helps us understand how events unfold and how they end, and the Egyptian wise men used these sacred images to foretell the future and decipher dreams.
One hundred years later, French occultist Paul Christian described an Egyptian initiation ceremony that was exactly that old compilation of classical sources, the Krata Repoa, to which he had added a section involving the tarot trumps in his book The History and Practice of Magic. He claimed that the Giseh Sphinx functioned as the entryway to the holy chambers where the Magi conducted their examinations. The Great Pyramid’s underground passageways led to areas where the applicant had to endure potentially fatal situations. A hidden entrance into a long gallery with twenty-two statues in facing pairs depicting enigmatic beings and symbols was located after he descended a seventy-eight step ladder into a bottomless pit. The candidate was here welcomed by the “guardian of the sacred emblems” with these words:
Is astrology a branch of tarot cards?
These days, almost everyone you know possesses a tarot deck and regularly receives readings. Tarot is no longer simply for the esoteric. Tarot has evolved over time into an intuitive art that may assist you in planning for both the best and worst scenarios. Tarot cards are filled with symbolism, but you might not be aware of how closely it is related to astrology. For instance: In the Major Arcana, a card corresponds to each sign of the zodiac.
Do you know how to say “tarot”?
Depending on whether British English or American English is being used, the proper pronunciation of “tarot” in English significantly changes. The “t” in “tarot” is never uttered, in any scenario. The word “tarot” is pronounced “tah-row” in British English and “teh-row” in American English.
What is the age of the oldest Tarot deck?
The Sola Busca is the oldest complete tarot deck. About 4050 years after the ViscontiSforza tarot, it was published in 1491. Copper etchings were used to construct the Sola Busca tarot, which gave it more detail and shading than the more typical woodblock-printed tarocchi decks of the era. Black ink was used in the original printings on white paper, which were subsequently sent to various Italian studios for painting and gilding. The outcome was a card that resembled the gold foiling on Visconti-Forza tarot decks in look. The minor arcana that follow in contemporary Rider-Waite-Smith tarot decks are similar to some of the pips in the Sola Busca; we’ll talk more about that well-known deck later. The Sola Busca deck would have been accessible to Pamela Coleman Smith, who created the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, in 1909, when she visited the British Museum.
