Tarot...but not as you know it!
If you have read any of the Blood Traffic books, you will
have seen that in their world, tarot cards are used for playing card games
rather than for fortune telling. But did you know that this is also the case in
our world? More than that, tarot cards were invented for playing card games -
games that are still played in more than a dozen countries throughout
continental Europe today.
There are a lot of very strange things said on the internet
and in occult literature about tarot cards and where they came from, some of it
very imaginative, fanciful, entertaining, and almost entirely wrong. Of course,
there are many tarot readers who do know and tell the truth about the cards’
history - which only makes it all the more odd to me that so many others insist
upon obscuring it. And yet, obscure it they do, with the help of the popular
media that still enjoys portraying the cards as occult and magical, if not
downright satanic!
So, here is a brief and possibly unexpected account of the
history of tarot cards...
Playing cards are generally accepted by historians to have
developed from Chinese money games, which some believe may even have been
played with actual currency, and which featured such suits as coins and stacks
of coins. It is possible that these evolved into the round and long suits of
cups and coins, and swords and batons. Playing cards arrived in Europe during
the 14th century thanks to trade with the Mamluks of North Africa. These cards
were distinctly Islamic in appearance and very beautiful. They had four suits
of cups, coins, scimitars (a type of curved sword), and polo sticks. Each suit
had ten pip cards and three court cards featuring a King and two lieutenants
(in some interpretations of Islam, the portrayal of living creatures is
forbidden, so these three figures were represented with calligraphy).
In Europe, the cards underwent a little modification.
Firstly, Europeans didn’t play polo at that time, so the polo sticks lost their
paddles to become batons. The court cards were drawn to depict the figures of a
King, a Rider, and a Footman. The results are now known as the Latin suits and
are still used for playing regular card games today, particularly in Italy,
Spain, and parts of South America.
In the 15th century, enterprising card makers in Italy
began experimenting with adding to packs like this to create a new family of
card games. Tarot is the result these experiments and flourished to become one
of the most popular card games throughout the European continent! The extra
cards, which modern occultists like to call a Major Arcana, feature popular
medieval Christian figures, well known and understood in Italy of the time.
Indeed, contrary to popular myth, the Catholic Church did not try to ban the
cards at all - we even had examples of regional bans placed upon playing cards
in which tarot cards are cited as exempt!
It was not until the end of the 18th century that we see
any other use for tarot cards beyond games. It was a Parisian occultist,
Antoine court de Gebelin, who first published a claim that the cards were of
ancient Egyptian origin, encoding the wisdom of their priests, and brought to
Europe by the Gypsies (who, at that time, were believed to have come from
Egypt). His claims were spurious, backed by demonstrably false claims about the
origin and meaning of the word ‘tarot’, and have long been put to bed by
historians. Sadly, they endure anyway. But then, there are still geocentrists
in the world, so perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised.
During the 19th century, various French occultists adopted
these myths and further built upon them, developing the idea of using the cards
for divination - though for a century, such notions were limited only to
France. Then, a small number of British occultists discovered them, translating
the French works and introducing the now occult tarot into the English speaking
world where there was no remembered history of the games at all. Here there was
fertile ground and no opposition and the story of the occult tarot as we know
it today become engrained into the culture and promoted by the popular media.
This was further helped by the radical redesign of the cards to explicitly
represent occult ideas and which rendered the resulting cards quite unsuitable
for game play.
It was not until 1980 that a truly comprehensive academic
study of the tarot pack’s history was published. The Game of Tarot by Michael
Dummett should have put paid to the myths - but myth is stronger than truth and
can endure any amount of reason or evidence if it is preferred by those who
believe it. In Europe however, the games endure.
Neither Neill or I are historians, we do not profess to be
and leave such work to those better suited to it and more inclined toward it -
we will listen to what they have to say. Our concern in this page is not really
history, though you can find more about that in the books and sites listed
below. Instead, our interest is in the card games and we hope to offer a new
introduction to the games here.
Neill first began a project to popularise tarot games over
the internet a fair while ago now but the project sadly floundered a little due
to limitations on his time. Now he has a little more and a little help, so
together we shall undertake to revise his earlier work, presenting you with an
introduction to how to play, along with the rules to a wide range of the games.
Where our accounts will differ from those of others is that we shall endeavour
to standardise the various terms into a single body in English, as well as some
of the conventions. We will change nothing that will alter the games per se,
or, especially, to ‘dumb them down.’ However, by using such a set of standard
terms and conventions, once you have learned one game, it can provide a
foundation on which you can learn more games, without having to learn new terms
in unfamiliar languages and new conventions that add nothing to the game. Not
every will approve of this method, and to an extent, we do sympathise with that
sentiment - but at the end of the day, we believe that what we are doing is
perfectly valid. For those of you who seek a greater ‘authenticity’, I recommend
the books authored by Michael Dummett and John McLeod, as well as John
McLeod’s excellent web site: Pagat - in
fact, whatever your preference in approach, I urge you to look at this site and
bookmark it. If you enjoy card games at all, there is no greater resource in
the English language for them!
As we post to this blog, we hope
that you will comment with any suggestions or concerns. If something is
unclear, please let us know what so that we can rectify it. When we have
completed the task of presenting all the games in our list, then we will put
them together in a new eBook that will be available for free either at Amazon
or as a download in multiple formats for our own websites - both the Blood
Traffic site and Neill’s own, non-commercial sites: Tarocchino and Game of
Tarot.
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