~ History of the Tarot ~
Playing cards first appeared in Europe around the end of the 14th century, with suits quite similar to the tarot suits of Swords, Cups, Staves, and Pentacles. The first
known tarot cards were created between 1430 and 1450 in Milan, Ferrara and Bologna in northern Italy, when additional allegorical illustrations were added to the typical four-suit pack. These new decks were initially
called triumph cards, and the additional cards known simply as trionfi, "trumps" in English.
Though originally intended for the playing of games, divination using playing cards is in evidence as early as 1540 in a book entitled The Oracles of Francesco Marcolino da Forli which allows a simple
method of divination, though the cards are used only to select a random oracle and have no meaning in themselves. Writings from 1735 and 1750 document rudimentary divinatory meanings for the cards of the tarot
as well as a system for laying out the cards.
Tarot cards would eventually become associated with mysticism and magic but they were not widely adopted by seers, mystics,
and occultists until the 18th and 19th centuries. In 1781 a Swiss clergyman Antoine Court de Gébelin published a study that included the topic of the survival of religious symbolisms in the modern world. Gébelin
asserted that the name "tarot" came from the Egyptian words tar, "royal", and ro, "road", and that the Tarot represented a "royal road" to knowledge. He proposed that symbolism of the Tarot de Marseille
represented the mysteries of Isis and Thoth. De Gébelin also asserted that the Romanies, who were among the first to use cards for divination, were descendants of the ancient Egyptians and had introduced the
cards to Europe, though no Egyptian writings discovered so far validate this assertion. Regardless, the identification of the tarot cards with the Egyptian Book of Thoth was firmly established in occult practice
and continues to the present.
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French occultist Jean-Baptiste Alliette, in the 1780's, was the first to issue a tarot deck specifically designed for divination rather than game playing. In keeping with the belief that tarot cards are derived
from the Book of Thoth, his tarot contained themes related to ancient Egypt. In the nineteenth century occultist Eliphas Levi attributed the origins of the Tarot to Israel, when he asserted the existence
of a correlation between the Kabbalah and the Tarot. In 1910 Arthur Waite and artist Pamela Coleman Smith produced a Tarot deck that was a culmination of the wisdom of many societies and became an unofficial
standard, the influence of which can be seen in very many modern decks.
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