The History of Tarot Cards

 Hello Charlie !

So today I will be writing my first blog post (please be indulgent) about tarot cards! 

The main reason why I am writing this article is because a lot of people are not familiar with tarot cards or just with the hollywood way that they are portrayed in media : as someone who practices tarot reading, these misconceptions do get on my nerves so I am here to explain all as simply as I can ! I will be doing a quick explanation on what tarot cards are and their history.

Hopefully soon enough I will write another one about ''how do tarot cards work".

Tarot cards are a form of divination (fortune telling ,if you wish) using  a deck of 78 cards :

- the minor arcana : 56 cards divided in 4 courts : wands, swords, pentacles and cups.

- the major arcana : 22 cards that represent the circle of life.

Each card has two meanings, depending on it's sense (upward or reversed) which gives us about 156 meanings in one deck.

In a two card pull, there are 12,090 card combinations and in a three card pull, there are 620,620. Mathematics play an important part in tarot (it might be interesting but with my math skills I won't linger on that).

Now the history part ! The origins of tarot are a bit confusing as they didn't come from one specific place :

To this day, tarot cards are heavily associated with Romani people  and that is because in the Renaissance, it was believed that they descended from the ancient egyptians, they were called the 'gypsies' from that. Of course, this theory was proven wrong and we now know that the Romani people originated from India, where card games were famous so it's not impossible that the tarot cards were actually brought to Europe by them in the first place.

The first record of tarot cards was in North Italy in the 15th century. But originally, they weren't used as a divination tool but simply as a game, they were pretty much the ancestor of bridge. Games back then were taken much more seriously then now, it wouldn't be comparable to a simple monopoly game for exemple.

Then the cards moved to the north of france where they became very popular.

Many historians were trying to find ancient symbolism within these cards :

In the 18th century a frenchman, Jean Baptiste Alliete published a book called "Esoteric Ancient Tarot" on how to read the tarot cards as well as his own deck. He gave a meaning to each of the cards. He claimed to have borrowed heavily from vague ancient egyptian beliefs. He was also the first one to give an order to the cards, as well as a 'reversed' meaning which are both still used today .

And then, in the 19h century, a Frenchman called Eliphas Levi  releases a book called ''The doctrine and ritual of high magic'', associating those cards with the hebrew alphabet, the elements, planets and zodiac signs. The cards had made their way into the occult.

Many tarot decks were created ,all with different symbolism and uses. Tarot only became this big thing that we know of today when, in the late 19th century, an englishman, Arthur Edward Waite, who rejected the idea that tarot was tied to the egyptians, the gypsies or the planets, created his own tarot deck which is still one most common and classic one to this day : the originalA. E. Waite tarot deck

Additional fun fact : even though there are still hundreds of different tarot cards designs (despite all of them having now the same meanings), another classic and older one takes it's name from our city as it is called "Tarot de Marseille". 

So that's about it regarding the history of tarot ! It was longer than I expected, hope you learned more or less interesting stuff from my article!