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71-479: Thoth Tarot is an esoteric tarot deck painted by Lady Frieda Harris according to instructions from Aleister Crowley . Crowley referred to this deck as The Book of Thoth , and also wrote a 1944 book of that title intended for use with the deck. Crowley originally intended the Thoth deck to be a six-month project aimed at updating the traditional pictorial symbolism of the tarot. However, due to increased scope,

142-606: A Greek fable about avarice . Although the ancient Egyptian language had not yet been deciphered, Court de Gébelin asserted the name "Tarot" came from the Egyptian words Tar , "path" or "road", and the word Ro , Ros, or Rog , meaning "King" or "royal", and that the word literally translated to "the Royal Road of Life". Subsequent research by Egyptologists found nothing in the Egyptian language to support Court de Gébelin's etymologies . Despite this lack of any evidence,

213-616: A dissertation on the origins of the symbolism in the tarot in volume VIII of work Le Monde primitif in 1781. He thought the tarot represented ancient Egyptian Theology , including Isis, Osiris, and Typhon. For example, he thought the card he knew as the Papesse and known in occult circles today as the High Priestess represented Isis . He also related four tarot cards to the four Christian Cardinal virtues : Temperance , Justice , Strength and Prudence . He related The Tower to

284-833: A double loop in the zodiac-number and letter-number correspondences compared to the Golden Dawn deck, where there is no loop. All these old letters of my Book are aright; but צ is not the Star. Tzaddi is the letter of The Emperor, the Trump IV, and He is the Star, the Trump XVII. Aquarius and Aries are therefore counterchanged, revolving on the pivot of Pisces, just as, in the Trumps VIII and XI, Leo and Libra do about Virgo. This last revelation makes our Tarot attributions sublimely, perfectly, flawlessly symmetrical. For The Star

355-470: A series of paintings between 1938 and 1942, owes much to Crowley's development of Thelema in the years following the dissolution of the Hermetic Order. While the deck follows Golden Dawn teachings with respect to the zodiacal associations of the major arcana and the associations of the minor arcana with the various astrological decans, it also: While Crowley managed to print a partial test run of

426-478: A supernatural force or a mystical energy is guiding the cards into a layout. Alternatively, some practitioners believe tarot cards may be utilized as a psychology tool based on their archetypal imagery, an idea often attributed to Carl Jung . Jung wrote, "It also seems as if the set of pictures in the Tarot cards were distantly descended from the archetypes of transformation, a view that has been confirmed for me in

497-465: A thick backing; the acidity of the backing, according to a report from 2006, resulted in discoloration of borders, and to some extent, the paintings themselves. The paintings also required cleaning and the repair of small tears. A conservation plan called for cleaning the surfaces, the removal of backing (while retaining original inscriptions), reuse of the hand-painted window mats, and replacement of overlays with acid-free, museum-quality paper. The project

568-434: A very enlightening lecture by Professor Bernoulli." During a 1933 seminar on active imagination , Jung described the symbolism he saw in the imagery: The original cards of the Tarot consist of the ordinary cards, the king, the queen, the knight, the ace, etc., only the figures are somewhat different, and besides, there are twenty-one [additional] cards upon which are symbols, or pictures of symbolical situations. For example,

639-571: A visit at Ferrara of the young Milanese heir of the dukedom Galeazzo Maria Sforza in July/August 1457. Each deck consisted of 70 cards — the modern Tarot deck typically has 78. The first attestation of a deck with 78 cards was in a poem by Matteo Maria Boiardo of Ferrara written between 1461–1494. The deck was structured like modern tarots, but the motifs and suits signs of the Boiardo deck are totally different. He used classical figures for

710-477: Is associated with a suit in alternating descending order of Eagle, Phoenix, Turtledove, Dove. For example, Jove, Apollo, Mercury, and Hercules are associated with the suit of Eagles. Marziano da Tortona's account is the second earliest description of the configuration of a pack of cards in Europe, after John of Rheinfelden 's report in 1377 of a four-suited, 52-card pack. Two decks from June 1457 seem to relate to

781-628: Is lost, but Marcello provided a copy of da Tortona's description which offers details about the deck and a cursory explanation of how it is played. It likely had a total of 60 cards (four kings , forty pip cards and sixteen trumps ). The forty-four plain-suited cards used birds as suit signs ("of virtues, the Eagle ; of riches, the Phoenix ; of continence, the Turtledove ; of pleasure, the Dove ") and

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852-563: Is referred to Aquarius in the Zodiac, and The Emperor to Aries. Now Aries and Aquarius are on each side of Pisces, just as Leo and Libra are on each side of Virgo; that is to say, the correction in the Book of the Law gives a perfect symmetry in the zodiacal attribution, just as if a loop were formed at one end of the ellipse to correspond exactly with the existing loop at the other end. Crowley accepted

923-523: The Kabbalah , Indic Tantra , or the I Ching have been frequently repeated by authors on card divination. However, scholarly research reveals that, having been invented in Italy in the early 15th century for playing games, there is no evidence of any significant use of tarot cards for divination until the late 18th century. In fact, historians have described western views of the Tarot pack as "the subject of

994-595: The Major Arcana and Minor Arcana . French-suited playing cards can also be used; as can any card system with suits assigned to identifiable elements (e.g., air, earth, fire, water). 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

1065-707: The Piquet pack , as well as tarot cards likely derived from the Tarot de Marseille . Following her death in 1843, several different cartomantic decks were published in her name, including the Grand Jeu de Mlle Lenormand , based on the standard 52-card deck, first published in 1845, and the Petit Lenormand , a 36-card deck derived from the German game Das Spiel der Hoffnung , first published around 1850. The concept of

1136-805: The 1440s. Michael Dummett placed them into three categories. In Bologna and Florence, the highest trump is the Angel , followed by the World . This group spread mainly southward through the Papal States , the Kingdom of Naples , and finally down to the Kingdom of Sicily but was also known in the Savoyard states . In Ferrara, the World was the highest, followed by Justice and the Angel. This group spread mainly to

1207-631: The Astral Light and according to Dummett, he claimed to be the first to: Lévi accepted Court de Gébelin's claims that the deck had an Egyptian origin, but rejected Etteilla's interpretation and rectification of the cards in favor of a reinterpretation of the Tarot de Marseille . He called it The Book of Hermes and claimed that the tarot was antique, existed before Moses, and was in fact a universal key of erudition, philosophy, and magic that could unlock Hermetic and Qabalistic concepts. According to Lévi, "An imprisoned person with no other book than

1278-399: The Golden Dawn's changed names of all the court cards which can cause some confusion for people used to the more common decks. Specially since he changed the structure of the court cards, while each of the places retains much of the original meanings, there are subtle differences. The typical corresponding names are as follows: Harris' renditions of the tarot are on watercolor paper affixed to

1349-473: The Mountain Dream Tarot of Bea Nettles , the first photographic tarot deck, released in 1975. The 1980s and 1990s saw the rise of a new generation of tarotists, influenced by the writings of Eden Gray and the work of Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell on psychological archetypes. These tarotists sought to apply tarot card reading to personal introspection and growth, and included Mary K. Greer ,

1420-570: The Revised New Art Tarot, by Manly P. Hall with art by J. Augustus Knapp , as well as Case's own deck. Executed by Jessie Burns Parke , the artwork of Case's deck, the B.O.T.A. Tarot , generally resembles that of the Rider–Waite–Smith deck, but the deck also shows influences from Oswald Wirth and the original design of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn tarot. Case promoted the deck in his 1947 book The Tarot: A Key to

1491-503: The Romani. In fact, there is "virtually no evidence" that Romani people used any form of playing card for telling fortunes until the 20th century. The first to assign divinatory meanings to the tarot cards was cartomancer Jean-Baptiste Alliette (also known as Etteilla ) in 1783. According to Dummett, Etteilla: Etteilla also suggested that tarot was: In his 1980 book, The Game of Tarot , Michael Dummett suggested that Etteilla

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1562-790: The Rose-Cross (1888) served as the seeds for further developments in the occult tarot in France. The French occultist Papus was one of the most prominent members of these societies, joining the Isis lodge of the French Theosophical Society in 1887 and becoming a founding member of the Kabbalistic Order of the Rose-Cross the next year. Among his 260 publications are two treatises on the use of tarot cards, Le Tarot des Bohémiens (1889), which attempted to formalize

1633-481: The Tarot was the first work to use the metaphor of the "Fool's Journey" to explain the meanings of the major arcana. The work of Eden Gray and others in the 1960s led to an explosion of popularity in tarot card reading beginning in 1969. Stuart R. Kaplan's U.S. Games Systems , which had been founded in 1968 to import copies of the Swiss 1JJ Tarot , was well positioned to take advantage of this explosion and reissued

1704-424: The Tarot, if he knew how to use it, could in a few years acquire universal knowledge, and would be able to speak on all subjects with unequaled learning and inexhaustible eloquence." According to Dummett, Lévi's notable contributions included the following: Occultists, magicians, and magi all the way down to the 21st century have cited Lévi as a defining influence. Among the first to seemingly adopt Lévi's ideas

1775-607: The Wisdom of the Ages , which also marked one of the first references to the work of Carl Jung by a tarotist. Esoteric use of the Rider–Waite–Smith Tarot was also promoted in the works of Eden Gray , whose three books on the tarot made extensive use of the deck. Gray's books were adopted by members of the 1960s counter-culture as standard reference works on divinatory use of tarot cards, and her 1970 book A Complete Guide to

1846-485: 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

1917-551: The author of Tarot for Your Self: A Wookbook for the Inward Journey (1984), and Rachel Pollack , the author of Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom (1980/1983). Tarot cards also began to gain popularity as a divinatory tool in countries like Japan, where hundreds of new decks have been designed in recent years. The democratization of digital publishing in the 2000s and 2010s led to a new explosion of tarot decks as artists became increasingly able to self-publish their own, with

1988-476: The basis for most of tarot interpretations by the Golden Dawn and its immediate successors, including such features as: The Golden Dawn also: The Hermetic Order never released its own tarot deck for public use, preferring instead for members to create their own copies of a deck designed by Mathers with art by his wife, Moina Mathers . However, many of these innovations would make their first public appearance in two influential tarot decks designed by members of

2059-765: The belief that the tarot cards are linked to the Egyptian Book of Thoth continues to the present day. The actual source of the occult tarot can be traced to two articles in volume eight, one written by Court de Gébelin, and one written by M. le C. de M.***, who has been identified as Major General Louis-Raphaël-Lucrèce de Fayolle, Comte de Mellet. This second essay is "considerably more impressive" than de Gébelin's, albeit "as full of assertions with no basis in truth", and has been even more influential than Court de Gébelin's. The author makes no acknowledgement of de Gébelin and, although he agrees with all his main conclusions, he also contradicts de Gébelin over such details as

2130-399: The cards as a mystical key was extended by Éliphas Lévi . Lévi (whose actual name was Alphonse-Louis Constant) was educated in the seminary of Saint-Sulpice, and was ordained as a deacon, but never became a priest. Michael Dummett noted that it is from Lévi's book Dogme et rituel that the "whole of the modern occultist movement stems." Lévi's magical theory was based on a concept he called

2201-403: 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." Claims by the early French occultists that tarot cards had esoteric links to ancient Egypt ,

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2272-522: The contemporaneous empowerment of feminist, LGBTQ+ and other marginalized communities providing a ready market for such work. Tarot is often used in conjunction with the study of the Hermetic Qabalah . In these decks all the cards are illustrated in accordance with Qabalistic principles, most being influenced by the Rider–Waite deck. Its images were drawn by artist Pamela Colman Smith , to

2343-693: The esoteric tarot practices of the Golden Dawn in the United States was driven in part by the American occultist Paul Foster Case , whose 1920 book An Introduction to the Study of the Tarot made use of the Rider–Waite–Smith deck and assorted esoteric associations first adopted by the Golden Dawn. By the 1930s, however, Case had formed his own occult order, the Builders of the Adytum , and began to promote

2414-410: The face cards and trumps. Pier Antonio Viti of Urbino ( c. 1470-1500), brother of Timoteo Viti , provided a commentary of Boiardo's poem as well as rules. He likely commissioned the production of these decks of which two incomplete packs have survived. Both the rules and the deck were likely conscious departures from common trionfi decks. The order of the trumps varied by region, perhaps as early as

2485-537: The first British work primarily focused on the tarot in his 1888 booklet entitled The Tarot: Its Occult Signification, Use in Fortune-Telling and Method of Play . 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

2556-415: The first neo-occultist cartomantic deck (and first cartomantic deck not derived from Etteilla's Egyptian deck). Released in 1889 as Les 22 Arcanes du Tarot kabbalistique , it consisted of only the twenty-two major arcana and was revised under the title of Le Tarot des imagers du moyen âge in 1926. Wirth also released a book about his revised cards which contained his own theories of the occult tarot under

2627-521: The illustrations showed the influence of astrology as well as Qabalistic principles. The following is a comparison of the order and names of the Major Trumps up to and including the Rider–Waite–Smith and Crowley (Thoth) decks: Next to the usage of tarot cards to divine for others by professional cartomancers , tarot is also used widely as a device for seeking personal guidance and spiritual growth. Practitioners often believe tarot cards can help

2698-471: The individual explore one's spiritual path. People who use the tarot for personal divination may seek insight on topics ranging widely from health or economic issues to what they believe would be best for them spiritually. Thus, the way practitioners use the cards in regard to such personal inquiries is subject to a variety of personal beliefs. For example, some tarot users may believe the cards themselves are magically providing answers, while others may believe

2769-478: The instructions of Christian mystic and occultist Arthur Edward Waite , and published in 1911. A difference from Marseilles -style decks is that Waite and Smith use scenes with esoteric meanings on the suit cards. These esoteric, or divinatory meanings were derived in great part from the writings of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn group, of which Waite had been a member. The meanings and many of

2840-407: The meaning of the word "Tarot" and in how the cards spread across Europe. Morever, he takes de Gébelin's speculations even further, agreeing with him about the mystical origins of the tarot in ancient Egypt, but making several additional, and influential, statements that continue to influence mass understanding of the occult tarot even to this day. He made the first statements proposing that the tarot

2911-537: The method of using tarot cards in ceremonial magic first proposed by Lévi in his Clef des grands mysteries (1861), and Le Tarot divinatoire (1909), which focused on simpler divinatory uses of the cards. Another founding member of the Kabbalistic Order of the Rose-Cross, the Marquis Stanislas de Guaita , met the amateur artist Oswald Wirth in 1887 and subsequently sponsored a production of Lévi's intended deck. Guided entirely by de Guaita, Wirth designed

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2982-517: The most successful propaganda campaign ever launched... An entire false history and false interpretation of the Tarot pack was concocted by the occultists; and it is all but universally believed". The belief in the divinatory meaning of the cards is closely associated with a belief in their occult properties, a commonly held belief in early modern Europe propagated by prominent Protestant Christian clerics and Freemasons . From its uptake as an instrument of divination in 18th-century France ,

3053-564: The motifs found in trionfi are found in trionfo , theatrical processions that were popular in the Italian Renaissance . The Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara , once owned by the ducal House of Este , contains many murals depicting these floats . Petrarch wrote a poem called I Trionfi which may have served as inspiration. The earliest known use of the name "Trionfi" in relation to cards can be dated to 16 September 1440 in

3124-540: The northeast to Venice and Trento where it was only a passing fad. By the end of the 16th century, this order became extinct. In Milan, the World was the highest, followed by the Angel. This spread to Switzerland and France during the Italian Wars , becoming famous as the " Tarot of Marseilles ". The earliest known appearance of the word "Tarocho" as the new name for the game is in Brescia around 1502. "Tarochi"

3195-533: 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

3266-433: The order of the trumps of Justice and Strength, but essentially preserved the traditional designations of the court cards. The deck was followed by the release of The Key to the Tarot , also by Waite, in 1910. The Thoth deck , first released as part of Aleister Crowley's The Book of Thoth in 1944, represent a somewhat different evolution of the original Golden Dawn designs. The deck, executed by Lady Frieda Harris as

3337-695: The order: the Rider–Waite–Smith deck and the Thoth deck . In addition, occultist Israel Regardie involved himself in two separate recreations of the original Golden Dawn deck, the Golden Dawn Tarot of 1978 with art by Robert Wang, and the New Golden Dawn Ritual Tarot by Chic and Sandra Cicero , released, after Regardie's death, in 1991. The central document containing the Golden Dawn's Tarot interpretations, "Book T",

3408-454: The popularity of Trionfa which usurped the old name. The word taroch was used as a synonym for foolishness in the same period. Expensive hand-painted, and usually gilded, decks custom-made for powerful clients have been preserved in greater numbers than mass-produced decks. More cards from the 15th and early 16th centuries have survived than those from the late 16th or 17th century. There are around 15 Visconti-Sforza tarot decks made for

3479-513: The project eventually spanned five years, between 1938 and 1943. The illustrations of the deck feature symbolism based upon Crowley's incorporation of imagery from many disparate disciplines, including science and philosophy and various occult systems (as described in detail in his The Book of Thoth ). As reported in the table below there are six known major versions of the Thoth Tarot with significant differences. Crowley renamed several of

3550-467: The reading of the conditions of the present moment. Skeptic James Randi once said that: For use as a divinatory device, the tarot deck is dealt out in various patterns and interpreted by a gifted "reader." The fact that the deck is not dealt out into the same pattern fifteen minutes later is rationalized by the occultists by claiming that in that short span of time, a person's fortune can change, too. That would seem to call for rather frequent readings if

3621-516: The records of a Florentine notary, Giusto Giusti. He recorded a transaction where he transferred two expensive personalized decks to Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta . In a letter from 11 November 1449, Antonio Jacopo Marcello used the expression triumphorum genus for a deck that was produced sometime between 1418 and 1425. It was commissioned by the duke of Milan , Filippo Maria Visconti , painted by Michelino da Besozzo and described in an accompanying text by Martiano da Tortona. The deck itself

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3692-545: The regions it demarcates." As a historian, Dummett held particular disdain for what he called "the most successful propaganda campaign ever launched", noting that "an entire false history, and false interpretation, of the Tarot pack was concocted by the occultists; and it is all but universally believed." Many Christian writers discourage divination, including tarot card reading, as deceptive and "spiritually dangerous", citing, for example, Leviticus 19:26 and Deuteronomy 18:9–12 as proof texts . Trionfi (cards) Many of

3763-517: The same title the year following. Outside of the Kabbalistic Order, in 1888, French magus Ély Star published Les mystères de l'horoscope which mostly repeats Christian's modifications. Its primary contribution was the introduction of the terms ' Major Arcana ' and ' Minor Arcana ', and the numbering of the Crocodile (the Fool) XXII instead of 0. The late 1880s not only saw the spread of

3834-514: The standalone deck using seven color plates included in The Book of Thoth , it was not until the 1960s, after Crowley and Harris's deaths, that the deck was first printed in its entirety. 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

3905-461: The symbol of the sun, or the symbol of the man hung up by the feet, or the tower struck by lightning, or the wheel of fortune, and so on. Those are sort of archetypal ideas, of a differentiated nature, which mingle with the ordinary constituents of the flow of the unconscious, and therefore it is applicable for an intuitive method that has the purpose of understanding the flow of life, possibly even predicting future events, at all events lending itself to

3976-421: The system is to be of any use whatsoever. Tarot historian Michael Dummett similarly critiqued occultist uses throughout his various works, remarking that "the history of the esoteric use of Tarot cards is an oscillation between the two poles of vulgar fortune telling and high magic; though the fence between them may have collapsed in places, the story cannot be understood if we fail to discern the difference between

4047-707: 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. Adoption of

4118-401: The tarot to ancient Egypt , divine hermetic wisdom, and the mysteries of Isis . The first was Antoine Court de Gébelin , a French clergyman, who wrote that after seeing a group of women playing cards he had the idea that tarot was not merely a game of cards but was in fact of ancient Egyptian origin, of mystical Qabalistic import, and of deep divine significance. Court de Gébelin published

4189-500: 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 . Many involved in occult and divinatory practices attempt to trace

4260-417: The then out-of-print Rider–Waite–Smith Tarot in 1970, which has not gone out of print since. Tarot card reading quickly became associated with New Age thought, signaled in part by the popularity of David Palladini's Rider–Waite–Smith-inspired Aquarian Tarot, first issued in 1968. Artists soon began to create their own interpretations of the tarot for artistic purposes rather than purely esoteric ones, such as

4331-452: The trumps compared to earlier arrangements, and also re-arranged the numerical, astrological and Hebrew alphabet correspondences of 4 trumps compared to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn 's inner order deck in accordance with the Tarot of Marseilles , his 1904 book The Book of the Law ( Liber AL vel Legis ) and its "New Commentary." In the "New Commentary" and The Book of Thoth , Crowley demonstrates that his trump arrangement forms

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4402-470: The trumps presented sixteen Roman or Greek gods (in ascending order): Jove , Juno , Pallas , Venus , Apollo , Neptune , Diana , Bacchus , Mercury , Mars , Vesta the Virgin , Ceres , Hercules , Aeolus , Daphne , and Cupid ). In two suits (Phoenices and Doves), the pip cards are in reverse order as in many of the oldest card games. The suits do not have any "right over another," but each trump

4473-549: The trumps). Batons (wands) become Scepters, Swords become Blades, and Coins become Shekels. However, it wasn't until the late 1880s that Lévi's vision of the occult tarot truly began to bear fruit, as his ideas on the occult began to be propounded by various French and English occultists. In France, secret societies such as the French Theosophical Society (1884) and the Kabbalistic Order of

4544-433: Was Jean-Baptiste Pitois . Pitois wrote two books under the name Paul Christian that referenced the tarot, L'Homme rouge des Tuileries (1863), and later Histoire de la magie, du monde surnaturel et de la fatalité à travers les temps et les peuples (1870). In them, Pitois repeated and extended the mythology of the tarot and changed the names for the trumps and the suits (see table below for a list of Pitois's modifications to

4615-454: Was "The Book of Thoth " and made the first association of tarot with cartomancy. Meanwhile Court de Gébelin was the first to imply the existence of a connection between the Tarot and Romani people , although this connection did not become well established in the public consciousness until other French authors such as Boiteau d'Ambly and Jean-Alexandre Vaillant began in the 1850s to promote the theory that tarot cards had been brought to Europe by

4686-447: Was attempting to supplant Court de Gébelin as the author of the occult tarot. Etteilla in fact claimed to have been involved with tarot longer than Court de Gébelin. Mlle Marie-Anne Adelaide Lenormand outshone even Etteilla and was the first cartomancer to people in high places, through her claims to be the personal confidant of Empress Josephine , Napoleon and other notables. Lenormand used both regular playing cards, in particular

4757-609: Was completed in 2011. The paintings are stored by the Warburg Institute ; work was completed by the Institute's in-house specialist, Susan Campion. Divinatory tarot Tarot card reading is a form of cartomancy whereby practitioners use tarot cards to purportedly gain insight into the past, present or future. They formulate a question, then draw cards to interpret them for this end. A traditional tarot deck consists of 78 cards, which can be split into two groups,

4828-526: Was executed by Pamela Colman Smith , a fellow Golden Dawn member, and was the first tarot deck to feature complete scenes for each of the 36 suit cards between 2 and 10 since the Sola Busca tarot of the 15th century, with certain designs likely based in part on a number of photographs of them held by the British Museum. The deck followed the Golden Dawn in its choice of suit names and in swapping

4899-449: Was first published openly, if not under that title, by Aleister Crowley in his occult periodical The Equinox in 1912. The volume was later republished independently in 1967. The Rider–Waite–Smith deck , released in 1909, was the first complete cartomantic tarot deck other than those derived from Etteilla's Egyptian tarot. ( Oswald Wirth 's 1889 deck had only depicted the major arcana. ) The deck, designed by Arthur Edward Waite ,

4970-462: Was to become established as a tool in the English-speaking world. Of the three founding members of the Golden Dawn, two, Samuel Liddell Mathers and William Wynn Westcott , published texts relating to the occult tarot prior to the founding of the order. Westcott is known to have made ink sketches of tarot trumps in or around 1886 and discussed the tarot in his treatise Tabula Bembina, sive Mensa Isiaca , published in 1887, while Mathers had published

5041-517: Was used in June 1505 in Ferrara. In December 1505, "Taraux" decks are mentioned as being produced in the papal enclave of Avignon in France. Around this time, the word Trionfi seems to modify its character in a playing card context; it appears as a game of its own ( Rabelais knows a "Tarau" and a "Triumphe" game) and seems no longer connected to the specific allegorical cards. This is most likely due to

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