The Hermitage
A Tarot History
This site is devoted to the history of tarot
cards.
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) 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, 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.
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. Their fascination with the cards led to the
reputation tarot presently has as a divination tool and occult
artifact.
One objective of tarot history is to trace the many
changes the cards have undergone through the centuries, as they were taken to
different locales and redesigned by different artists and cardmakers. Many
variant designs are beautiful, intriguing, or provocative, giving us a window on
the popular culture of different times and places.
A second objective is to find clues pertaining to the
recalcitrant mystery of the origin of the tarot cards: What was on the mind
of the original designer? Did the symbolic pictures have a deeper meaning
and purpose, or were they merely game pieces? The question is surprisingly
difficult to answer. We can gather some evidence from the art, literature, and
popular culture of the time. We can also look at the cards themselves, and the
occasional written references to them that have survived. From such evidence, it
is possible to build up a picture of what the tarot symbols might have meant
when the cards were first created. Different people, though, come up with very
different pictures! The evidence is ambiguous.
On these pages, I display some of the pertinent evidence
and present the conclusions I draw from it. I hope that others who share my
fascination with the tarot will find this informative and thought-provoking,
whether or not they agree with all my
conclusions.
