The Tarot deck was created sometime around 1000 A.D. as an expansion on the original deck of 52 playing cards. It is believed that it was adopted from ancient Egyptian playing cards. The full Tarot deck is 78 cards, 21 trump cards, the fool card, and a deck of 56 cards with the court cards being king, queen, page and knight.
The oldest surviving Tarot deck was created in the 1400’son commission of a Duke of France.
The Tarot deck gets it’s name from the game that was played with it, called Tarot. The rules for the game of Tarot have been lost with time, but there is speculation that it was played until the early 19th century.
The meanings of the strange images on the Tarot deck have also been lost with time. It is believed that the images would have been easily recognizable to people living in the time that the images were created. It is also believed that the images of the Tarot reflect the Renaissance period of France and that these images are supposed to reflect on such issues as death, vanity, and money.
For hundreds of years, Tarot was just another card game.
Then in the 18th century, the Tarot deck was becoming was used for fortune telling. A French man named Alliette turned his name backward into Etteilla. He did this for mystique in his fortune telling business. Etteilla was the first person to get paid for fortune telling with the Tarot cards as his method of divining the future. He assigned meanings to each Tarot card. It’s his meanings we use today in modern fortune-telling.
In the late 18th century, the occult stigma had begun to be associated with the Tarot deck. 2 Frenchmen tried to find the roots of the tarot to find out what the symbolism meant. While looking into the roots, they found connections to ancient Egypt. At this time, ancient Egyptian rite and rituals carried a great deal of clout with occultists.
Since then, every major occultist has created and used their own Tarot deck.Alleister Crowley, the most famous (or infamous) occultist ever, created his own tarot deck with the help of an artist, Frieda Harris, and created what is known as the Thoth Tarot deck. This deck took 5 years to complete. The imagery is supposed to affect everyone who sees it on an emotional level. The Thoth Tarot deck is the most popular Tarot deck.
Currently, the Tarot is used for divination, guidance, and meditation.Nearly all fortune tellers have a deck in their shop.
The Tarot has also been used in voodoo practices where guidance is needed. The bones and shells of traditional voodoo practice only tell the future, not giving any kind of guidance like the Tarot is supposed to. Voodoo also has it’s own Tarot deck.
Because records from the original makers of the tarot deck 1000 years ago have been lost or were never created in the first place, we may never know what the Tarot deck was originally created for.
Because the Tarot-like all cards-is incredibly simple and complex at the same time, people will always look for special meaning in them. They will find it too, the cards are created in such a way that anyone can find whatever meaning they want.
Maybe that was the point.
