The Occult

The first description of tarot decks appeared as early as the beginning of the 15th century when Martiano da Tortona mentioned some card games that resembled a lot to tarot. The motifs on these early representations were Greek deities with the suits made of four different types of birds, which differed greatly from the regular Italian suits. These precursors of tarot decks counted only sixteen cards, and their popularity seemed to be quite impressive at the time. Later, during the same century other mentions of tarot decks are found in Italian documents. The ideology and the symbolism of the cards were very impressive even then with social, heraldic, poetical and philosophical implications.

As for the oldest tarot decks ever preserved, they date from the mid 15th century and they were made on the special order of the Visconti family. There are sixty-six cards in the deck and they are displayed at the Yale University Library of New Haven. Another famous deck was painted by Bonifacio Bembo at the request of Maria Visconti, they are preserved with the exception of two who were either lost or never existed. These latter tarot decks are known as Visconti-Sforza and their design is very popular nowadays too.

Lots of modern reproductions combine coins, cups, swords and batons with trump cards that represent a clear image of traditional iconography of the old times. The number of initial tarot decks must have been small given the amount of work involved in the making and the painting of these miniature works of art. Tarot decks have survived from Marseilles, Egypt or Switzerland and in time they came to be associated with magic and mysticism. Occultism and magic fans were the ones to embrace and widely use the cards for all sorts of symbolic interpretations that have survived to our modern world too.

Some analysts discovered all sorts of origins for the tarot decks with etymologists identifying the Egyptian meaning of the very word tarot: tar stands for royal while ro means road, tarot would thus mean the royal road. According to tradition, Gypsies seem to have been the first to use cards for divination, but the exact period when tarot decks started to serve for predictive purposes is not clear. As for the passage of tarot popularity to the English speaking world, Eliphas Levi was the one to make the transfer possible, and introduce tarot to aristocratic and middle classes too.