This is kind of for me, as well as you lovely people who are forced to read this. Except for that Rachael person; she seems to be cool with it. (Hi, Rachael!)
No, I don't know her from Adam. Or I guess Eve.
ANYWAY.
Because I can, I'll be highlighting what I feel are key points on the history of tarot from
tarotpedia - really.
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What are now known today as tarot cards were originally just playing cards in the mid-15th century when they were invented, probably in Italy. This card game gained popularity throughout continental Europe. Some guy named Francesco Marcolini published what is regarded as the first known document of cartomancy, or fortune telling with cards. But they didn't use tarot cards for this, yet! They actually used some other random deck, but that deck fanned out.
Ouch. Bad pun.
Moving on!
"Beginning around 1750, a modernized Tarot deck became popular in many areas. The more common French suit-signs, (Spades, Clubs, Hearts, and Diamonds) replaced the older Italian ones, and around 1780 the trumps began to became double-headed. Tarot's traditional Medieval allegory was replaced with a decorative series of thematically-related but essentially arbitrary images, made possible by the use of large numerals on the trumps. This obviated memorizing the order of images, making the game that much easier to learn. The themes of these decks might include almost anything: animals, pastoral scenes, military triumphs, illustrated proverbs, even advertising. Although in decline in France and Italy, the popularity of the game elsewhere increased during this period.
"Fortune-telling with playing cards had developed from their use as a randomizing device to pick a page in a book of fortunes in the 1500s, through the use of special fortune-telling decks in the 1600s, and finally to the point of regular decks being given symbolic meaning in the 1700s. A few scattered indications of this appear earlier in the century, but the first book on cartomancy was published in 1770. It was written by Etteilla, the world's first professional cartomancer, who became one of the founders of occult Tarot. In the 1780s he and two other French writers developed much of the occult lore and fortune-telling methods that would reinvent Tarot in the late 1800s.
These three writers changed Tarot forever. Neither knowing nor caring much about Tarot's 350-year history, its original and common use as a game, or the intended meaning of its allegorical cycle, they interpreted the images freely. They used the twenty-two trumps as signs designating the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. These newly-minted correspondences made the Tarot deck into a novel emblem system for Cabalistic magic and mysticism. The two esoteric uses, Cabala and divination, became permanently attached to Tarot. The authors of this newly invented Tarot also wrote up a detailed fantasy about Tarot's origin and history, involving Egyptian initiations, Jewish mystics, and vagabond Gypsies. These fictional histories were intended to validate the correspondences the occultists had devised, by appeal to alleged ancient wisdom and secret traditions.
"Although much of the groundwork for today's occult Tarot lore was established in the late-1700s, the only part that became popular during the subsequent century was fortune-telling. Before the more elaborate myths and esoteric systems could become popular, occult Tarot had to be invented a second time. This happened in the mid-19th century. New systems of correspondence were invented and additional layers of legend were overlaid. This second invention came at just the right historical moment, at the beginning of the Victorian occult revival, and by the end of the century both French and British occultists had developed various schools which took the 15th-century game to be the Absolute Key to Occult Science.
"In the late 20th century, Tarot was widely adopted by various New Age enthusiasts, neo-Pagans, and of course, fortune-tellers, as well as people who were simply interested in using the deck for self-exploration without any spiritual or mystical motivation. It was again redefined, largely in the terms of Jungian psychology, but with borrowings from the earlier occultists and from Waite. This development was greatly facilitated by Waite's mystical Tarot deck, whose trumps and pips had been redesigned in a manner consistent with such usage. His deck served as a model for hundreds of derivative decks. The new element, characteristic of contemporary Tarot, was the belief that naive intuition and free association would reveal universal archetypes from the unconscious mind. This liberated Tarot enthusiasts from having to learn complex systems of correspondence, and having to choose between the competing systems.
"In addition to fortune telling, modern Tarot applications include soul-searching exercises and meditation for personal growth, and as a randomized input for free association and brainstorming techniques. Not surprisingly, they have even been used by some psychologists in a therapeutic context. Also in the late 20th century, more historically sophisticated writers have attempted salvage as much of the earlier occult fictions as possible while abandoning most of the obviously false elements. As with other late 20th-century Tarot writers, their basic premise is the existence of universals which are intuitively understood. Given this premise, Tarot must have always been something very close to what it is currently understood to be -- otherwise the supposed universals are not universal. Critics of this viewpoint would say that this preconception leads to the invention of secret coded messages in the trump cards, supported by nothing beyond the anachronistic belief that what people see in the images today must have always been there.
"Despite the invention of new Tarot legends and perpetuation of some of the old ones, another trend is developing. The Internet has begun to provide popular access to the work of playing-card historians. During the last two decades of the 20th century, a great deal of historical evidence was collected, collated, analyzed, and published. Stuart Kaplan's Encyclopedia of Tarot (volumes I & II) presents a great deal of information. However, it is the series of books authored or co-authored by Michael Dummett (from 1980 through 2004) which has thoroughly tried to debunk the majority of earlier Tarot lore while putting the pieces together to form a coherent history of Tarot, the great many forms taken by the game and deck, secondary historical uses such as appropriati, and perhaps most intriguingly, documenting in great detail the development of occult Tarot from the 1780s till the beginning of the modern era, around 1970. Most of that factual history, both pre-occult and the development of occult Tarot itself, remains unknown to some contemporary Tarot enthusiasts. However, some of it is now being presented on the Internet rather than being limited to a few hard-to-find books. One of the reasons for Tarotpedia's Tarot History section is to expand the online availability of that kind of information."
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So if you actually finished that, CONGRATULATIONS. And yes, it's technically made up. Hell, it's
officially made up. But then again, so is religion - arguably. So is ALL thought process. The point of this blog isn't to prove or disprove tarot's origins and therefore its credibility. I can't make you believe in shit, and that's simply that.
I just aim to explore tarot as it is now, not as it began as.
So enjoy that. :D
