The history of Tarot

Playing cards date back to the Tang Dynasty in China, 618 A.D. to 907 A.D, where cultural or mythical references are illustrated on the cards and used for games. However, it is said (and this is legend only) that the emperor’s concubines would use these playing cards to tell fortunes. That was their way of dealing with the mind-numbing boredom when the emperor wasn’t, ahem, in their bedchambers. Through trade, these cards were taken to the Middle East in 1370.

Through more trade, they ended up in Europe. In the 1440s, a deck of 78 cards with illustrations steeped in Judeo-Christian mythos surfaced. Tarot was a card game, mostly among the wealthy. The Church banned playing cards under anti-gambling laws, but in many instances carved out exceptions for tarot because tarot was a game played by the powerful aristocrats of the time. The earliest record we have of the tarot being used for divination is 1780 in France and England using a tarot deck now known as the Tarot de Marseille, solidifying the earliest tarot divination system. Now for a listing of key occultist players who rose to prominence as tarot scholars: Eteilla in the 1790s; Eliphas Levi in the 1850s; Encausse, otherwise known by his penname Papus in the 1890s; members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn thereonafter and well through the 1900s. Then came A. E. Waite in 1909 with the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot system (Rider for the deck’s first publisher, Waite for A. E. Waite, and Smith for Pamela Colman Smith, the artist). That is the system I am most comfortable with. Waite and this other fellow, Aleister Crowley, didn’t much get along. So Crowley created his own deck in the 1940s, which was published posthumously in 1969 and is now known as the Thoth tarot system. There are just as many similarities as there are differences between the three tarot systems.

Today there are countless versions of tarot on the market, most of them based loosely on the Tarot de Marseille, Rider-Waite-Smith, or Thoth system. Some of the contemporary decks I like are the Robin Wood, the Goddess Tarot, the Hermetic Tarot, and the Golden Tarot. Most of the time, though, I still read with my trusty 1971 Rider-Waite (a.k.a. Rider-Waite-Smith) - I generally use these pictures on my website and Facebook/Instagram.

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