Tarot Pack
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[edit] Definition
The minor arcana come in four suits: cups, coins, wands and swords, each suit consisting of number cards from one to ten, plus a knave, knight, queen and king.
The major arcana, in the standard pack used today, are twenty-two in number, and come in the order the Fool, the Magician, the High Priestess, the Empress, the Emperor, the High Priest, the Lovers, the Chariot, Strength, the Hermit, the Wheel of Fortune, Justice, the Hanged Man, Death, Temperance, the Devil, the Tower, the Star, the Moon, the Sun, Judgment, and the World. They are numbered in that order from zero to 21.
The Tarot pack may be used for card games, but today is more often used for divination.
[edit] Provenance
Playing games with cards or with other things divided into suits (such as mah-jong tiles) appears to have originated in China and to have spread across Asia westward. The Chinese, though, had nothing to correspond to the trumps in the Tarot deck: and none of their extensive records show any use of their cards for divination. The practice spread to the Islamic world, where again cards are associated only with playing games. Of particular interest is the pack used by the Egyptian Mamelukes, with four suits: cups, coins, polo sticks, and swords, with values from one to ten plus three court cards (all representing male figures) in each suit. Again, the trumps in the Tarot deck were unknown to them.
It is this deck which was transmitted to Europe, an event which, from the surviving documents, historians date with confidence to the 1370s. Today, the identities of the four suits vary from country to country in standard packs of playing cards: Italian and Spanish playing cards still retain the old suit system of coins, cups, swords and "clubs" (polo being unknown in medieval Europe). In modern decks, one of the male figures in the Mameluke pack has been removed, and a Queen added.
The court cards of the Tarot are based on an early variant in which the queen was added but the knight was not removed from the deck: apart from that they correspond to the Mameluke pack.
The trumps which make the Tarot deck so distinctive seem to have been added in Italy some time in the fifteenth century.
This, at least, is the provenance given by historians. Pseudohistorians have their own opinions:
- "The origins of Tarot are somewhat obscure. The most common theories are Egypt - Thoth and the connection to the ancient mystery school teachings. The most common myth is that it was brought to Europe by the Gypsies. I have also read that there is a link as far back as ancient China."[1]
[edit] Discussion
[edit] Ancient Origins?
There is no reference to the use of cards either for playing games nor for divination in the Egyptian literature; there are no references to it in Classical literature; there are no references to the Tarot in any form until we first hear of the card game being condemned from the pulpit in the mid-fifteenth century: given the Church's hatred of divination and of gambling, we may safely assume that the Tarot was not in use for these purposes before that date.
The earliest surviving decks of Tarot cards are found to be of Italian Renaissance origin. Moreover, we find that these early decks are not at first standardized, with a great deal of difference between the trumps in the different decks, just as you would expect if the concept had a fifteenth-century origin. Today's usual deck --- "the" Tarot --- is derived from the Piedmontese version.
Moreover, the major arcana portray symbols unknown to the Egyptians, but well-known to Renaissance artists, such as the Wheel of Fortune and the Devil. The iconography also fixes the culture that produced the cards --- the Egyptians, for example, were obviously familiar with death --- but not as an animated skeleton wielding a scythe.
[edit] Card game or Occult Knowledge?
All the earliest references we have to the Tarot all refer to its use for gambling, not for divination. The vocabulary used also points this way: we find no talk of "major arcana" in the early literature, but rather of "triomphe" --- triumphs --- from which we get our word "trumps". The fact that the Tarot deck is made by adding the trumps to an existing pack used for card games and not for divination also suggests that at first the Tarot was used for playing games; as does the fact that the trumps are numbered, which is essential in a card game, to see who wins the trick, but serves no purpose in divination.
[edit] The role of the Gypsies
The notion that "Gypsies" brought the Tarot or anything else from Egypt is a blunder. The Gypsies can be clearly identified by their language as hailing from North India.
One might then wonder if they had some part in transmitting the Tarot from India. However, the first references to playing cards in India is in the early sixteenth century, a hundred and fifty years after they appear in Europe, and hundreds of years after the Gypsies left India; the original deck used in India has no resemblance to the minor or the major arcana; and, indeed, the original Indian decks did not have suits at all: the idea was introduced by the Portuguese, so the use of suits should be traced from the Mamelukes via Europe to India, and not from the Indians via the Gypsies to Europe.
Finally, we may notice that at least the ordinary cards and suits which would form the basis of the minor arcana were present in Italy before any Gypsies are recorded there.
[edit] Origins of the Myth
The link between Tarot cards, Gypsies and Egyptians seems to have been formed in the late eighteenth century: indeed, there is no other time in history when it could have arisen, for it rests on a collection of misconceptions unique to this period. The scholars at that time had become aware that there was an impressive civilization in ancient Egypt, and they were aware of hieroglyphics, but unable to read them, and supposed from their pictorial form that they were dealing with a symbolic language, in which, for example, a hawk stood for some hawklike property rather than for a sound. At the same time, they were also not advanced enough in linguistic studies to know that the Gypsies have no cultural connection with Egypt. Now given the association of Gypsies with fortune-telling, it was the work of a moment to associate the esoteric pictures on the Tarot, as used by Gypsies, with the supposedly esoteric pictures used in hieroglyphs used by the ancient Egyptians. It was not, at the time, a completely silly hypothesis, but modern linguistic scholarship shows it to be wrong.
