A Brief History of Tarot Cards

Have you tried learning about your future career through Divination? Were you amazed by the tarot card reading interpretations that your psychic friend told you about your love life? Then maybe it’s time to discover more about a tarot card deck, and what better way to start your learning than diving into its origin and history?

Tarot Cards – Major and Minor Arcana

The map of the subconscious, tarot cards are considered by many psychics as instruments in tapping one’s deepest self and reveal his/her innermost truths. One deck is composed of 78 beautifully illustrated cards that are further broken down into two portions, the Major Arcana and the Minor Arcana.

The Major Arcana cards, which represent a particular facet of one’s everyday life, is consist of 22 trump cards. These cards are numbered from zero to twenty-one, and each has a detailed illustration or imagery that is thought to be connected to the subconscious. Some of the Major Arcana cards are The Chariot, The High Priestess, The Fool, and The Magician. You can get the real good options on Juneau Empire.

While the Minor Arcana cards are divided into four different suits, namely cups, wands, pentacles, and swords. One suit is composed of numbers one to ten and four face cards known as the prince, princess, king, and queen cards with a total of fourteen cards for each suit.

Tarot Cards History

Sumptuous pizza, fresh-smelling cologne, the refreshing jacuzzi – like these three great things and many others, the intricate tarot cards originally came from Italy. In contrast to what most of us believe, tarot cards weren’t originally used as a divination instrument, but as a medieval pastime.

Tarot Cards Origin

It is believed that the initial tarot cards were used for fun and games by the wealthy Italian families in the early 1400s. They enjoyed playing it to pass the time, just like how we use the modern-day 52-card deck nowadays.

Sometime in the 15th century, the four-suit tarot cards were crafted by the Italian artists to play a game called “tarocchi,” a game known today as the bridge. The game then transformed and included a permanent set of triumph cards (trump) that had higher ranks than the four suits.

Originally, only a few privileged people can afford to own a deck of tarot cards since each card is painstakingly hand-painted by the craftsmen. More people, even the common ones, were able to play a tarot deck when the printing press was invented in the mid-1400s.

Tarot Cards as Divination Tools

It was in England and France that the tarot cards were initially used for Divination. Occultists started the tarot card reading by interpreting the Renaissance symbolism as having an inner spiritual connotation.

In the year 1781, a French clergyman, Antoine Court de Gebelin, published a book that says the hidden symbols in the tarot cards are the key to knowing the ancient Egyptian gods’ wisdom. Ten years later, Jean-Baptiste Alliette, a French occultist, designed the first-ever deck of divination tarot cards based on Gebelin’s ideology.

Increasing Usage and Popularity

Many upper-class households became interested in occultism towards the end of the Victorian era. They would casually perform tarot card readings or seances whenever they hold house parties.

In the early 1900s, the tarot cards as tools for spiritual means started gaining popularity when A. E. Waite published his masterpiece entitled “The Pictorial Key to the Tarot.” The illustrations of the tarot cards in that book were done by Pamela Coleman and was named the Rider-Waite tarot deck. It is still the most frequently used tarot deck up to this day.

Tarot card reading has gone a long way from a pastime game of the rich to the window of mystic insights of anyone who believes. You can also start letting a tarot deck guide and direct your current situation and future goals with each cards’ fascinating image, symbols, history, and meaning.