Tarot 101

Tarot gaming decks

The 18th century saw tarot’s greatest revival, during which it became one of the most popular card games in Europe, played everywhere except Ireland and Britain, the Iberian peninsula, and the Ottoman Balkans.  French tarot experienced a revival beginning in the 1970s and France has the strongest tarot gaming community. Regional tarot games—often known as tarock, tarok, or tarokk are widely played in central Europe within the borders of the former Austro-Hungarian empire.

Italian-suited tarot decks

• The Tarocco Piemontese consists of the four suits of swords, batons, cups and coins, each headed by a king, queen, cavalier and jack, followed by the pip cards for a total of 78 cards. Trump 20 outranks 21 in most games and the Fool is numbered 0 despite not being a trump.
• The Swiss 1JJ Tarot is similar, but replaces the Pope with Jupiter, the Popess with Juno, and the Angel with the Judgement. The trumps rank in numerical order and the Tower is known as the House of God. The cards are not reversible like the Tarocco Piemontese.
• The Tarocco Bolognese omits numeral cards two to five in plain suits, leaving it with 62 cards, and has somewhat different trumps, not all of which are numbered and four of which are equal in rank. It has a different graphical design than the two above as it was not derived from the Tarot of Marseilles.

Italo-Portuguese-suited tarot deck

The Tarocco Siciliano is the only deck to use the so-called Portuguese suit system which uses Spanish pips but intersects them like Italian pips.  Some of the trumps are different such as the lowest trump, Miseria (destitution). It omits the Two and Three of coins, and numerals one to four in clubs, swords and cups: it thus has 64 cards but the ace of coins is not used, being the bearer of the former stamp tax. The cards are quite small and not reversible.

French-suited tarot decks

The illustrations of French-suited trumps depart considerably from the older Italian-suited design, abandoning the Renaissance allegorical motifs. With the exception of novelty decks, French-suited tarot cards are almost exclusively used for card games. The first generation of French-suited tarots depicted scenes of animals on the trumps and were thus called “Tiertarock” (‘Tier’ being German for ‘animal’) appeared around 1740. Around 1800, a greater variety of decks were produced, mostly with genre art or veduta. Current French-suited decks come in these patterns:

• • The Industrie und Glück (Industry and Luck) genre art deck of Central Europe uses Roman numerals for the trumps. It is sold with 54 cards; the 5 to 10 of the red suits and the 1 to 6 of the black suits are removed.
  • The Adler-Cego animal tarot is used in Germany’s Black Forest and has 54 cards organized in the same fashion as the Industrie und Glück. Its trumps use Arabic numerals but within centered indices. The Tarot Nouveau has 78 cards and is commonly played in France. Its genre art trumps use Arabic numerals in corner indices.

     

    German-suited tarot decks

  • German-suited decks for Bauerntarock, Württemberg Tarock and Bavarian Tarock are different. They are not true packs, but a Bavarian or Württemberg pattern of the standard German-suited decks with only 36 cards;

  • the pip cards ranging from 6 to 10, Under Knave (Unter), Over Knave (Ober), King, and Ace. These use Ace-Ten ranking, like Klaverjas, where Ace is the highest followed by 10, King, Ober, Unter, then 9 to 6.

  • The heart suit is the default trump suit.  The Bavarian deck is also used to play Schafkopf by excluding the Sixes.

    Tarot card reading

    An early prototype for Etteilla’s tarot (1785). The Justice card.

    The earliest evidence of a deck used for cartomancy comes from an anonymous manuscript from around 1750 which documents rudimentary divinatory meanings for the cards of the Tarocco Bolognese.  The popularization of esoteric started with Antoine Court and Jean-Baptiste Alliette (Etteilla) in Paris during the 1780s, using the Tarot of Marseilles.  French tarot players abandoned the Marseilles tarot in favor of the Tarot Nouveau around 1900, with the result that the Marseilles pattern is now used mostly by cartomancers.

    Tarot decks in occult usage

    Etteilla was the first to issue a deck specifically designed for occult purposes around 1789. In keeping with the misplaced belief that such cards were derived from the Book of Thoth, Etteilla’s tarot contained themes related to ancient Egypt.

    The 78-card deck used by esotericists has two distinct parts:

    • The Major Arcana (greater secrets), or trump cards, consists of 22 cards without suits:
      • The Magician, The High Priestess, The Empress, The Emperor, The Hierophant, The Lovers, The Chariot, Strength, The Hermit, Wheel of Fortune, Justice, The Hanged Man, Death, Temperance, The Devil, The Tower, The Star, The Moon, The Sun, Judgement, The World, and The Fool. Cards from The Magician to The World are numbered in Roman numerals from I to XXI, while The Fool is the only unnumbered card, sometimes placed at the beginning of the deck as 0, or at the end as XXII.
    • The Minor Arcana (lesser secrets) consists of 56 cards, divided into four suits of 14 cards each;
      • Ten numbered cards and four court cards. The court cards are the King, Queen, Knight and Page/Jack, in each of the four suits. The traditional Italian suits are swords, batons, coins and cups; in modern occult decks, however, the batons suit is often called wands, rods or staves, while the coins suit is often called pentacles or disks.

     

  • The terms “Major Arcana” and “Minor Arcana” were first used by Jean-Baptiste Pitois (also known as Paul Christian) and are never used in relation to card games. Some decks exist primarily as artwork; and such art decks sometimes contain only the 22 major arcana.

    The three most common decks used in esoteric tarot are the Tarot of Marseilles, the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot deck, and the Thoth tarot deck.

    Aleister Crowley, who devised the Toth deck along with Lady Frieda Harris, stated of the Tarot: “The origin of this pack of cards is very obscure. Some authorities seek to put it back as far as the ancient Egyptian Mysteries; others try to bring it forward as late as the fifteenth or even the sixteenth century … [but] The only theory of ultimate interest about the deck is that it is an admirable symbolic picture of the Universe, based on the data of the Holy Qabalah.”