The tarot (first known as tarocchi , also tarock and similar names), pronounced /ˈtɑːroʊ/ , is a pack of cards (most commonly numbering seventy-eight), used from the mid fifteenth century in various parts of Europe to play card games such as Italian Tarocchini and French Tarot. From the late 18th century until the present time the Tarot has also found use by mystics and occultists in efforts at divination or as a map of mental and spiritual pathways.
The tarot has four suits corresponding to the suits of conventional playing cards. Each of these suits has pip cards numbering from ace to ten and four face cards for a total of fourteen cards. In addition, the tarot is distinguished by a separate 21-card trump suit and a single card known as the Fool. Depending on the game, the Fool may act as the top trump or may be played to avoid following suit.
Rabelais gives tarau as the name of one of the games played by Gargantua in his Gargantua and Pantagruel ; this is likely the earliest attestation of the French form of the name. Tarot cards are used throughout much of Europe to play card games. In English-speaking countries, where these games are largely unknown, Tarot cards are now used primarily for divinatory purposes. Occultists call the trump cards and the Fool "the major arcana" while the ten pip and four court cards in each suit are called minor arcana. The cards are traced by some occult writers to ancient Egypt or the Kabbalah but there is no documented evidence of such origins or of the usage of tarot for divination before the eighteenth century.
Etymology
The English and French word tarot derives from the Italian tarocchi , which has no known origin or etymology. One theory relates the name "tarot" to the Taro River in northern Italy, near Parma; the game seems to have originated in northern Italy, in Milan or Bologna. Other writers believe it comes from the Arabic word turuq , related to "tariq" which means "way". Alternatively, it may be from the Arabic tarach , "reject". According to a French etymology, the Italian tarocco derived from tara : "devaluation of a merchandise; deduction, the act of deducting".
History
Playing cards first entered Europe in the late 14th century, probably from Mamluk Egypt, with suits very similar to the Tarot suits of Swords, Staves, Cups and Coins (also known as disks, and pentacles) and those still used in traditional Italian, Spanish and Portuguese decks. The first documentary evidence is a ban on their use in 1367, Bern, Switzerland. Wide use of playing cards in Europe can, with some certainty, be traced from 1377 onwards.
The first known Tarot cards were created between 1430 and 1450 in Milan, Ferrara and Bologna in northern Italy when additional trump cards with allegorical illustrations were added to the common four-suit pack. These new decks were originally called carte da trionfi , triumph cards, and the additional cards known simply as trionfi , which became "trumps" in English. The first literary evidence of the existence of carte da trionfi is a written statement in the court records in Ferrara, in 1442. The oldest surviving Tarot cards are from fifteen fragmented decks painted in the mid 15th century for the Visconti-Sforza family, the rulers of Milan.
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. But manuscripts from 1735 ( The Square of Sevens ) and 1750 ( Pratesi Cartomancer ) document rudimentary divinatory meanings for the cards of the tarot as well as a system for laying out the cards.Giacomo Casanova wrote in his diary that in 1765 his Russian mistress frequently used a deck of playing cards for divination.
Early decks
Picture-card packs are first mentioned by Martiano da Tortona probably between 1418 and 1425, since in 1418 the painter he mentions, Michelino da Besozzo, returned to Milan while Martiano himself died in 1425. He describes a deck with sixteen picture cards with images of the Greek gods and suits depicting four kinds of birds, not the common suits. However the sixteen cards were obviously regarded as "trumps" as, about twenty-five years later, Jacopo Antonio Marcello called them a ludus triumphorum , or "game of trumps".
Special motifs on cards added to regular packs show philosophical, social, poetical, astronomical, and heraldic ideas, Roman/Greek/Babylonian heroes, as in the case of the Sola-Busca-Tarocchi (1491) and the Boiardo Tarocchi poem, written at an unknown date between 1461 and 1494.
Two playing card decks from Milan ( the Brera-Brambrilla and Cary-Yale-Tarocchi)—extant, but fragmentary—were made circa 1440. Three documents dating from 1 January 1441 to July 1442, use the term trionfi . The document from January 1441 is regarded as an unreliable reference; however, the same painter, Sagramoro, was commissioned by the same patron, Leonello d'Este, as in the February 1442 document. The game seemed to gain in importance in the year 1450, a Jubilee year in Italy, which saw many festivities and the movement of many pilgrims.
Three mid-15th century sets were made for members of the Visconti family.The first deck, and probably the prototype, is called the Cary-Yale Tarot (or Visconti-Modrone Tarot), was created between 1442 and 1447 by an anonymous painter for Filippo Maria Visconti. The cards (only sixty-six) are today in the Cary collection of the Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale University, New Haven. The most famous was painted in the mid 15th century, to celebrate Francesco Sforza and his wife Bianca Maria Visconti, daughter of the duke Filippo Maria. Probably, these cards were painted by Bonifacio Bembo or Francesco Zavattari in 1451-53. Of the original cards, thirty-five are in the Pierpont Morgan Library, twenty-six are at the Accademia Carrara, thirteen are at the Casa Colleoni and two, 'The Devil' and 'The Tower', are lost or else never made. This "Visconti-Sforza" deck, which has been widely reproduced, reflects conventional iconography of the time to a significant degree.
Hand-painted tarot cards remained a privilege of the upper classes and, although some sermons inveighing against the evil inherent in cards can be traced to the 14th century, most civil governments did not routinely condemn tarot cards during tarot's early history. In fact, in some jurisdictions, tarot cards were specifically exempted from laws otherwise prohibiting the playing of cards.
Because the earliest tarot cards were hand painted, the number of the decks produced is thought to have been rather small, and it was only after the invention of the printing press that mass production of cards became possible. Decks survive from this era from various cities in France, being the most popular pattern today a deck from the southern city of Marseilles, thus named the Tarot de Marseilles.
Tarot, tarock and tarocchi games
Main article: Tarot, tarock and tarocchi gamesThe original purpose of tarot cards was for playing games, with the first basic rules appearing in the manuscript of Martiano da Tortona before 1425. The game of Tarot is known in many variations (mostly cultural), first basic rules for the game of Tarocco appear in the manuscript of Martiano da Tortona (before 1425; translated text), the next are known from the year 1637. In Italy the game has become less popular; one version named Tarocco Bolognese: Ottocento has still survived and there are still others played in Piedmont, but the number of games outside of Italy is much higher. The French tarot game is the most popular in its native country and there are regional tarot games often known as tarock , tarok ,or tarokk widely played in central Europe.
Divinatory, esoteric and occult tarot
Main article: Divinatory, esoteric and occult tarotTarot cards would later become associated with mysticism and magic. Tarot was not widely adopted by mystics, occultists and secret societies until the 18th and 19th centuries. The tradition began in 1781, when Antoine Court de Gébelin, a Swiss clergyman and Freemason, published Le Monde Primitif , a speculative study which included religious symbolism and its survivals in the modern world. De Gébelin first asserted that symbolism of the Tarot de Marseille represented the mysteries of Isis and Thoth. Gébelin further claimed that the name "tarot" came from the Egyptian words tar , meaning "royal", and ro , meaning "road", and that the Tarot therefore represented a "royal road" to wisdom. De Gébelin also asserted that the Gypsies, who were among the first to use cards for divination, were descendants of the Ancient Egyptians (hence their common name; though by this time it was more popularly used as a stereotype for any nomadic tribe) and had introduced the cards to Europe. De Gébelin wrote this treatise before Jean-François Champollion had deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs, or indeed before the Rosetta Stone had been discovered, and lat
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