CONTEXT

ORIGINS

The first written references to tarot packs occurred between 1440 and 1450 in northern Italy, for example in Milan and Ferrara, when additional cards with allegorical illustrations were added to the common four-suit pack. These new packs were called carte da trionfi, triumph packs, and the additional cards known simply as trionfi, which became "trumps" in English.

One of the earliest references to tarot triumphs is given c. 1450–1470 by a Dominican preacher in a sermon against dice, playing cards and 'triumphs'. References to the tarot as a social plague or indeed as exempt from the bans that affected other games, continue throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, but there are no indications that the cards were used for anything but games. As philosopher and tarot historian Michael Dummett noted, "it was only in the 1780s, when the practice of fortune-telling with regular playing cards had been well established for at least two decades, that anyone began to use the tarot pack for cartomancy."

DIVINATION OF TAROT CARDS

From its uptake as an instrument of divination in 18th-century France, the tarot went on to be used in hermeneutic, magical, mystical, semiotic, and psychological practices. It was used by Romani people when telling fortunes, as a Jungian psychological apparatus for tapping into "absolute knowledge in the unconscious," a tool for archetypal analysis, and even a tool for facilitating the Jungian process of individuation.

The first to assign divinatory meanings to the tarot cards was cartomancer Jean-Baptiste Alliette (also known as Etteilla) in 1783. Furthermore, Etteilla was said to also have done the following:

■ wrote a cartomantic treatise of tarot as the Book of Thoth,
■ created the first society for tarot cartomancy, the Société littéraire des associés libres des interprètes du livre de Thot.
■ created the first corrected tarot (supposedly fixing errors that resulted from misinterpretation and corruption through the mists of antiquity), The Grand Etteilla deck
■ created the first Egyptian tarot to be used exclusively for tarot cartomancy, and
■ published, under the imprint of his society, the Dictionnaire synonimique du Livre de Thot, a book that "systematically tabulated all the possible meanings which each card could bear, when upright and reversed."

The concept of the cards as a mystical key was extended by Éliphas Lévi. Lévi worked to break away from the Egyptian nature of the divinatory tarot, bringing it back to the Tarot de Marseille(standard pattern of Italian-suited tarot pack with 78 cards), creating a "tortuous" kabbalistic correspondence, and even suggested that the Major Arcana represent stages of life.

SPREADING THE TAROT

Occultists, magicians, and magi all the way down to the 21st century have cited Lévi as a defining influence. The late 1880s not only saw the spread of the occult tarot in France, but also its initial adoption in the English-speaking world. In 1886, Arthur Edward Waite published The Mysteries of Magic, a selection of Lévi's writings translated by Waite and the first significant treatment of the occult tarot to be published in England. However, it was only through the establishment of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1888 that the occult tarot was to become established as a tool in the English-speaking world.

The tarot was also mentioned explicitly in the Cipher Manuscripts that served as the founding document of the Hermetic Order, both implicitly and in the form of a separate essay accompanying the manuscript. This essay was to serve as the basis for most of tarot interpretations by the Golden Dawn and its immediate successors, including such features as:

■ placing The Fool before the other 21 trumps when determining the Qabalistic correspondence of the Major Arcana to the Hebrew alphabet
■ swapping the positions of the eighth and eleventh arcana (Justice and Strength)
■ renamed the suits of Batons and Coins to Wands and Pentacles
■ swapped the order of the King and the Knight among the court cards, renaming them the Prince and the King, respectively, changed the Page to become the Princess
■ associated each of the 36 cards ranked from 2 to 10, inclusive, with one of the 36 astrological decans.

Two of the earliest publications on tarot in the English language were published in the United States, including a book by Madame Camille Le Normand entitled Fortune-Telling by Cards; or, Cartomancy Made Easy, published in 1872, and an anonymous American essay on the tarot published in The Platonist in 1885 entitled "The Taro". The latter essay is implied by Decker and Dummett to have been written by an individual with a connection to the occult order known as the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor. While it is not clear to what extent the Hermetic Brotherhood used tarot cards in its practices, it influenced later occult societies such as Elbert Benjamine's Church of Light, which had tarot practices (and an accompanying deck) of its own.