However, if we turn to the fundamental code of the venerable De Givry "Anthology of the Occult" (1931), we can find out that the first documentary evidence of the existence of the Tarot is of German (!) Origin and dates back to 1329. Thus, we, following De Givry, consider it established and proven that the teaching of the Tarot appeared in Europe in the XIV century, that is, a century before the arrival of the gypsies in Europe! As for the first officially "registered" full deck of Tarot cards, here the palm, apparently, belongs to Italy. True, back in 1392, the French king Charles VI, in order to avoid melancholy and unwind a little, ordered the artist Jacquemain Gringonnier to make a deck of Tarot cards. The artist successfully coped with the task assigned to him, showing the eyes of his monarch a pack of 22 cards of the Major Arcana (from the Latin arcanum - secret), made on calf parchment, with a gold edge and, in addition, having shirts inlaid with silver.

And the first complete, of 78 cards of the Major and Minor Arcana, the so-called Visconti-Sforza deck was created by the court artist Bonifacio Bembo in 1428. It should be especially noted that there are sources according to which this deck of cards was nevertheless created later - in 1441, when the still poor, but very ambitious Milanese condottiere Francesco Sforza married Bianca Maria Visconti, the illegitimate daughter of the third Milanese Duke Filippo Visconti. However, the third date, 1450, is much more likely, since it marks the acquisition of the title of the fourth Duke of Milan by Francesco Sforza, due to the fact that his wife's father had no other heirs. And although a year later a solemn celebration took place dedicated to the tenth anniversary of the marriage of Francesco and Bianchi, which is also a significant reason for the appearance of the deck, nevertheless, 1450, as the year the Visconti-Sforza deck was created, seems to us more reliable. Oddly enough, but then, until the 18th century, Tarot cards did not manage to gain popular recognition!

The situation changed radically by 1773-1784, when Count Antoine Court de Gebelin, who had previously studied theology at the University of Lausanne, and then, already an itinerant preacher of the Reformed Church, became interested in mythology and sacred sacraments and began to publish his unprecedented syncretic work Le Monde in parts primitive, analyse et compare avec le monde moderne ("The primitive world, its analysis and comparison with the modern world"). The next volume (1781) of his astonishing study contained an essay "On the game of Tarot", in addition, as an appendix appeared "A study of the Tarot, including the possibility of divination by means of cards", belonging to his pen.

It is there that Gebelin first proclaims the hypothesis concerning the Egyptian roots of the Tarot, and raises the teachings of the Tarot to the legendary Book of Thoth. This was the beginning. And two years later, a student of de Gebelin, the Parisian hairdresser Aliette (1738-1791), published under the name of Ettail (he changed his name in 1781, joining the Masonic Lodge, of which his teacher, de Gebelin, became a member back in 1776 year) "A way to have fun through a deck of cards called Tarot", and after 5 years he begins to trade in Paris with his own deck of 78 cards, richly saturated with Masonic symbols, and it is he who owns the primacy of introducing commercial divination into everyday life. Etteilla enthusiastically told the Parisians on Tarot cards (and it was very expensive at that time) and very soon made a fortune on it. This circumstance - in addition to some liberties allowed in the symbolism and order of the cards - contributed to his unfavorable reputation in the opinion of followers.

In 1788, Simon Blockel published a deck that was a variant of Etteila's deck. Later, he publishes a monograph by Giulia Orsini devoted to the description and study of this deck. By the way, half a century later, with an interval of 20 years, two more versions of the Etteilla deck were published.

And in 1855, the French occultist Alphonse-Louis Constant (1810 - 1875), whom we now know as Eliphas Levi, published his book Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie ("Teaching and Ritual of Higher Magic"), which became the cornerstone in the rise of the occult. The structure of his book seemed very intriguing: two parts of twenty-two chapters, each of which corresponds to a certain Arcana of the Tarot. Eliphas Levi was little interested in the divinatory sphere of the use of Tarot cards. To a greater extent, he gravitated toward revealing the sacred mysteries of the Jewish Kabbalah: in his understanding, the cards embodied a secret alphabet that was closed from the understanding of the uninitiated, and each of the Major Arcana corresponded to a specific place on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life.

W.B. Yeats

It is curious that the works of Eliphas Levi, which influenced the activities of a number of occultists, among whom, by the way, it is appropriate to name Arthur Edward Waite, inspired the venerable British prose writer Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803 - 1873) to create impressive novels: "The Persecuted and the Persecutors", "Zanoni", "The Coming Race", "Amazing Story", filled with mysticism and references to the Tarot. These novels had an indelible impact on mystics and occultists such as S.L.M. Mathers, W.B. Yeats, who taught A.E. Waite in hermeneutics, and A. Crowley, whose activities were closely connected with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn founded in 1886 by Dr. Win Westcott, which determined the development of occultism in England in the late XIX - early XX centuries.

S.L.M. Mathers

Moina Bergson

Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers (1854 - 1918), a prominent Rosicrucian, developed the main rituals of the Order of the Golden Dawn and was in the 90s of the XIX century, when the Order was considered especially influential, its leader. Mathers was the author of a small treatise on the interpretation of Tarot cards - The Tarot: Its Occult Signification, use in fortune telling, and method of play ("Tarot: Occult meaning, use for divination, game technique", 1888), and his wife Moina Bergson, who had the ability to draw and was the sister of the amazing French intuitive philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941), who, by the way, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927, drew a special Tarot deck, the innovative composition or, more precisely, the order of the cards of which was determined by Mathers: in addition to changing the iconography of a number of cards, he assigned the number VIII to the Force, and XI to the Justice, but most importantly, he assigned the I position to the Mad! This is how the "Tarot of the Golden Dawn" was created, which revealed the English version of the Tarot to the world and formed the basis of the A.E. Waite.

Before moving on to Waite itself, it is advisable to mention a number of researchers, without whom the history of the Tarot is almost impossible to imagine. First of all, this is a follower of Eliphas Levi, Gerard Encausse (1865-1916), who became famous under the name of Papus. He was the author of such monographs as "Gypsy Tarot" (1889) and "Predictive Tarot" (1909). A significant detail: an album of 78 cards appeared as an appendix to the last book. Since the paper was crappy, in order to avoid their imminent death, it was proposed to cut out the cards first, and then stick them on cardboard.

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Drawn pictures have long been used for divination for the future - they have become the most ancient and very powerful tool for predictions.

The history of Tarot cards goes back to ancient times, and it is still not known for certain who first introduced this method of divination to the world.

There are several varieties of decks, each of which has its own characteristics.

Gypsies or not?

The most popular hypothesis about the appearance of Tarot cards today is the legend according to which these magic cards were first seen in wandering gypsy soothsayers.

However, historians strongly disagree with this. Their research suggests that the first mention of these cards appeared in Germany in 1329, which happened a century before the arrival of the gypsies in Europe.

At the present time, there is no way to verify whether that ancient scripture really referred to predictive cards, since documentary evidence of how they looked did not survive to our times.

The first images of the Major Arcana were published in 1392 in France. King Charles IV wanted to somehow brighten up his leisure time and asked the court painter to draw him a deck of cards. These cards, numbering 22, looked very solid: calf leather, gold trim and shirts inlaid with real silver!

Tarot Visconti - the beginning of the history of tarot cards

The first full-fledged deck containing not only the Major Arcana, but all 78 cards, was the Visconti-Sforza Tarot. Historians disagree on the exact date of his birth: according to some sources, this happened in 1428, according to others - a little later, in 1441, while others generally call 1450.

The “customers” of the magic deck were the Milanese condottiere Francesco Sforza and his wife Bianca Maria Visconti, and the artist Bonifacio Bembo painted it.

The exit of the magic deck into the big world

Until the 18th century, Tarot cards were not very popular, and their publication occurred only in the 1770-1780s, when Count Antoine Cour de Jeleben began to study secret knowledge and mythology, after which he structured the knowledge gained in his works " About the game of Tarot" and "Tarot Research". It was there that for the first time we talked about the possibility of predicting the future with the help of maps.

The Count's apprentice, the hairdresser dell'Aliette, went even further. This man joined the Masonic Lodge, took the pseudonym Eteyla, and then released not only a book about predictive cards, but also his own deck, which was called the "Tarot Eteyla."

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, three more variations of the Ettail deck were released.

Eliphas Levi and his followers

A great contribution to the development of the use of Tarot cards was made by the French occultist Alphonse-Louis Constant, known to the world under the pseudonym Eliphas Levi. The great mystic was not at all interested in the possibility of divination on this deck, and the purpose of his research was the connection of the mysterious Jewish teaching about Kabbalah with the interpretation of the Major Arcana.

Levi's writings were appreciated: several famous mystics and occultists of the 19th century revised his teachings, releasing their own works on the subject of the magical Tarot deck.

History of the Golden Dawn Tarot Cards

In the 19th century in England, a secret occult society, the Order of the Golden Dawn, gained particular influence among mystics. It consisted of people whose names are still well known - this is the great Aleister Crowley and Arthur Waite. It is their decks that are considered the most popular today.

But even before each of these masters developed their own deck, they all studied the Golden Dawn Tarot, a deck created by Samuel Mathers and his artist wife Moina Bergson.

Map studies in France and other countries

Separately, it is worth mentioning the French direction in the history of these fortune-telling cards. The most popular person here was Gerard Encausse, who became famous under the pseudonym Papus. He introduced the world to two of his decks - "Gypsy Tarot" and "Predictive Tarot", which were released in 1889 and 1909, respectively.

Other big names associated with the magic deck include the Swiss occultist Oswald Wirth, who compiled his own version of divination cards, as well as Paul Christian and Elbert Benjamin, authors of detailed books on the art of understanding and working with the deck. Thanks to the work of these researchers, the popularity of Tarot cards in the world has increased dramatically.

Arthur Waite and his tarot cards

Today, one of the most famous decks used by most tarologists on the planet is Arthur Waite's Tarot.

This man devoted his whole life to magical research and the occult. He was a member of the Order of the Golden Dawn, which helped him penetrate deeply into the symbolism and meaning of the Tarot.

Many years of study led the master to release his own deck, drawings for which were made by his longtime girlfriend, also a member of the Order - Pamela Coleman Smith. This event took place in 1909 and became a real revolution in the history of Tarot cards.

Legendary Tarot of Thoth

Along with the Waite deck, Tarot Thoth is also very popular today - the result of many years of work by the famous mystic Aleister Crowley and artist Frida Harris.

Crowley's deck has no analogues in the world, and is considered a truly unique and incredibly detailed magical tool. Crowley's teachings, which he expressed in the cards, cover many areas, including the magical traditions of different countries, mythology, the science of Kabbalah, astrology, numerology and practical magic.

Modernity

Today in the world there are a huge number of different Tarot decks. Some of them are reworked versions of the maps of classical schools, while others are completely author's exclusive works.

However, none of them has yet succeeded in outdoing the popularity of the Waite and Crowley decks. But who knows, maybe the history of Tarot cards is not over yet, and after a century or two the world will see another revolution of the ancient predictive system.

The first reliable historical references to Tarot cards date back to 14th century Europe. This is the century of the defeat of the Order of the Temple, the Hundred Years War, Joan of Arc. The age of Dante and his Divine Comedy...thus, modern tarot cards are of medieval origin (which, by the way, makes them a particularly interesting tool for those who are fond of medieval studies).

However, there is reason to believe that the cards themselves are much older, and many historians, writers and occultists vied with each other to offer their versions of their origin. It is not this that is striking, but the extent to which the information that is given in the literature on the Tarot on this subject is chaotic.

Sometimes sources worthy of all respect in matters of the history of the Tarot turn out to be blatantly superficial and full of factual errors. We decided to conduct our research in order to recreate as plausible a historical context as possible and to clarify this issue. If you have any additional information on the history of the Tarot - send us, we will be happy to add them to the piggy bank. If you have any questions, ideas - write, we will search and think together.

All the early Tarot decks that have come down to us were works of art created by artists commissioned by famous people (by the way, even today a Tarot deck is not so cheap to buy).

The oldest of the complete decks containing all 78 cards that have survived to this day is the deck of the Visconti-Sforza family, created in the first half of the 15th century in Italy.

Around 1432, the engagement of Francesco Sforza, the future fourth Duke of Milan, and Bianca Maria Visconti took place, and it is assumed that a deck made to order by the court artist Bonifacio Bembo (a real work of art) was one of the gifts. This does not mean that there were no Tarot cards before. Earlier decks have not completely reached us.

There are many hypotheses and assumptions that preceded their appearance, but none is supported by actual evidence, so they are equally difficult to prove or disprove. But the authors of all the assumptions agree on one thing - it is unlikely that such a well-structured and deep system of images, moreover, endowed with phenomenal stability (the composition of the Tarot deck has not undergone practically any changes over the centuries), was simply invented on the occasion of the ducal wedding.

Perhaps most intriguing is that neither the 22 Major Arcana nor the 56 Minor Arcana were in any way signed. It seems that medieval Tarot lovers knew the sequence of the Arcana and their meaning very well. Today's publishers in 90% of cases consider it their duty to make life easier for the user by writing cards and helping to understand who is who, where is the Mage, where is the Emperor, where is the Hierophant...

And in those days, images were identified without text keys. In other words, in the 15th century, people did not need a cheat sheet to understand the structure of the deck, as if it was something taken for granted, in which no errors and misconceptions were expected.

This is all the more significant since the deck was used both for divination and for playing “tarocchi” (tarocchi), and the game usually requires quick and unmistakable thinking (you won’t ask in the midst of the action “oh, tell me, what is it me for a card?)".

The explanation found in books that in the Middle Ages pompous processions were often held at royal courts (a tradition rooted in Roman saturnalia and triumphs), and therefore the sequence of the Major Arcana (trump cards-triumphs, "trionfi") was known to all, does not stand up to criticism.

In the 18th century, the French writer, theologian and occultist Antoine Court de Gebelin (Gebelline, Zhablen) in his work "Du Jeu des Tarot" put forward quite

the now popular version of the Egyptian roots of the Tarot.

According to this version, the Tarot is a sacred book created by one of the oldest secret Egyptian mystical organizations that united the followers of the Asar-khapi cult (better known by the Greek name Serapis, which literally translates as "bull's tomb").

Presumably, the book was a set of hieroglyphic tablets (or a collection of individual papyri) and contained the immortal teachings of Thoth - the Scribe of the gods, the Master of all sciences and arts, the Connoisseur of all crafts, the Keeper of the Book of Life and the author of the famous Emerald Tablet (aka Hermes Trismegistus, "Thrice Greatest").

And now there is an opinion that the Tarot Arcana is a simplified and encrypted version of the immortal book of Thoth.

According to legend, this book contained the "key to immortality", that is, the secret of the process by which the complete rebirth of man takes place. In more modern terms, the Tarot describes the path of development of the human "I" towards its highest, transcendental essence.

The Major Arcana describe the stages of spiritual transformation, while the Minor Arcana describe the life lessons through which this transformation occurs. This book was used in the Mysteries, during occult practices, initiations. By the way, there is a version that in ancient Egypt itself, this teaching was purely secret for the reason that the book of Thoth foreshadowed the inevitable fall of the royal dynasty and the destruction of the Egyptian kingdom. According to legend, she was among the few miraculously saved during a fire in the Library of Alexandria in 47 BC, from there she got to Ancient Rome, where she lived to the centuries of Christianity.

Papus, in his “Key to the Occult Sciences,” puts forward the version that when the danger of destruction hung over Egypt (just at that very time), the priests of the mystical society considered many options on how to preserve sacred knowledge for future generations of initiates.

The oral tradition could be interrupted at any moment, and in general everything on earth is subject to change and destruction - not only the repositories and carriers of information, but religions, ideologies, societies ... And the priests reasoned that the only thing that is little subject to change is itself faulty human nature, full of excitement and frivolity.

On the basis of one of the most ancient and widespread human addictions - the love of gambling - they created a repository of information, a deck of cards, encrypting in it the symbols of age-old wisdom for the initiated, for the uninitiated remaining fun or primitive pictures. Like it or not, the cards seem to really last forever.

And the version that the allegories of the Major Arcana are rooted in the teachings of the secret schools of Egypt, and describe the stages of development of a novice on the path of becoming a true master, is very stable.

Let us listen to Gebelin himself: “Imagine the surprise if we learned that the works of the ancient Egyptians still exist today ... If we added that this book is widely used in most of Europe, and that it has been around for several centuries almost in everyone's hands, then of course it would be amazing ...

We own it without actually owning it, because we have never tried to decipher even one of its pages...”. Zhebelin draws attention to the amazing stability of the structure of the Tarot, to the fact that its numerous and dissimilar figures in their separateness represent a riddle that no one has yet tried to unravel.

The famous French philosopher, occultist and Kabbalist Alphonse-Louis Constant, known as Eliphas Levi, wrote about the book of Thoth, encrypted in the form of 78 Tarot Arcana: “This is a monumental and unique work, simple and strong, like the structure of the pyramids, and therefore just as durable.

This is a book that contains the quintessence of all knowledge and whose endless combinations can solve any problem. By talking to us, she makes us think; it generates and governs all possible concepts... By placing the Tarot cards in a certain order, everything that can be known about God, the Universe and man can be revealed.

A prisoner deprived of books, possessing only Tarot cards and the ability to use them, could in a few years learn universal science and communicate on any subject with inexhaustible eloquence.

He believed that using the Tarot as a tool for divination is the most superficial (after the game) way, but in reality it requires a much more elitist intellectual and spiritual approach, being a repository of vast knowledge.

Well, apparently it is, and this is very noticeable when looking at the literature dedicated to the Tarot. Some of the books are devoted to divination and the interpretation of the Arcana, and some (much more difficult to understand) to the study of their deep essence, as an example, we can mention the books of Oswald Wirth and Valentin Tomberg.

So, the sources associated with the Tarot can be considered the teachings of the secret schools of Ancient Egypt, which were partially inherited by the curious and restless ancient Greeks, as well as Kabbalah, the mystical Jewish teaching. The order of the Major Arcana is associated with Hebrew writing and the counting system. We will consider this topic in more detail in the section of the site devoted to the connections of Tarot with other esoteric sciences, since in general it is the connections of Tarot with Kabbalah that are most clearly visible.

The number of the Major Arcana really coincides with the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and the number of the numbered Minor Arcana with the number of sefir on the Tree of Sephiroth. The 22 cynarots or "paths" link the 10 sefir to form the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. And finally, it should be noted that there is a connection between the first persons of ancient Judaism and Egypt, which fully allows for the leakage of knowledge.

Suffice it to recall Joseph, who ruled Egypt in time immemorial, and Moses, who was one of the Egyptian high priests. Note that the "kabbalistic" version of the origin of the Tarot corresponds with the "book of Thoth" precisely through sacred writing and numerology.

According to legend, Thoth invented speech and the alphabet, in which all letters are divine ideas, all ideas are numbers, and all numbers are signs containing a huge array of information.

In the Kabbalistic teaching, letters and numbers are also considered as repositories of divine energy, containing a huge amount of information for the initiates. How can one not recall Pythagoras, who studied in Egypt, and his ideas about the sacred, divine nature of numbers!

India also occupies a certain place in the disputes about the origin of the Tarot. In the ancient Indian game of the Four Kings, there is a significant resemblance to the four card suits. However, four suits, reflecting the four elements of the world - a variety of cultures could come to this idea.

In theory, the Major Arcana and the four suits of the Minor Arcana could easily have arisen separately (the first as a symbolic repository of certain ideas, and the second as a game), and only then someone inventive mind combined them into one deck, which would be ingenious to preserve the higher ideas encrypted in the Major Arcana. And the fact that the game of cards itself, in all likelihood, really originated from Indian or Chinese chess, is practically beyond doubt.

Egypt, India, Israel - this, of course, is good. But it makes no sense to dismiss Europe itself from historical accounts, in which there have always been plenty of their own secret religious groups, whose spiritual views did not coincide with the dogmas of the Catholic Church, and only after the Crusades, which opened the cultural gateways to the east, God knows what began to happen. Attempts to "restore order" with the help of the Inquisition only perfected the art of keeping the teachings secret. Most of the decks were created in Marseille in the south of France, which says a lot to knowledgeable people.

The south of France in Europe is the historical center of heretical mystical knowledge, alternative to the teachings of the church. It is no coincidence that it was the French occultists who for centuries held the palm in the study of Tarot - Gebelin, Etteilla, Eliphas Levi, Papus ... Marseille Tarot, which has successfully survived to this day, and

has exactly the same structure as the Milanese Visconti-Sforza Tarot, with illustrated Major and figured Arcana, and by the end of the 15th century it was widely used. And in 1594, the Parisian card masters in the charter of their guild already call themselves "tarotiers" (tarotiers).

Zhebelin believed that the esoteric symbols of the Tarot entered Europe thanks to nomadic gypsies, known for their addiction to divination on cards. However, with the "gypsy version" there are ambiguities. The first ambiguity is the discrepancies in the ideas about the origin of the gypsies themselves, either Egyptian, or Indian, or one does not exclude the other .... Zhebelen, like his followers, believed that the gypsies descended from one of the tribes that lived in Ancient Egypt. However, history reports that at the beginning of the 15th century, the Islamic conqueror Tamerlane expelled them from the Hindustan peninsula, and the camps began a mass movement to the west across the Indus River, Afghanistan, the deserts of Persia and Arabia ... and Egypt, if it was in their biography, then much later . Then the Balkans, Germany, France ... in Paris, the gypsies appeared, according to the chronicles, in 1427. And here lies the second ambiguity. By this time the cards were already in circulation in Europe.

According to another version, the decks of numbered cards that existed in the Middle East were brought to Europe by the crusaders, and the Templars play a special role - perhaps deservedly, since the knights of this order very consistently built contacts with Muslims during their almost two hundred years of stay in the Holy Land, where there was generally a fantastic a mixture of Arab, Jewish, Byzantine cultural phenomena - a real alchemical cauldron.

Therefore, the fact that the Major Arcana can hardly be of Islamic origin does not mean anything. The Holy Land at that time was flooded with people from various regions of the Middle East, so that the Templars did not deal only with the Arabs. What and from whom they got there for two hundred years - on this score, apparently, neither the kings, nor historians, nor the popes of Rome were aware of. What is certain is that intensive interaction with Middle Eastern cultures has enriched Europe with many ideas, discoveries and finds.

Medicine and fashion, philosophy and optics, mathematics and cooking, fighting techniques and chess - it seemed that there was not a single gap in European life that the east would not seep into. Borrowings also concerned spiritual life - this time created the ground for the flourishing of a huge number of secret societies, whose views did not coincide with the doctrines of Catholicism.

True, the main references to playing cards in Europe appeared almost a century after the end of the Crusades. The Italian chronicler Coveluzzo reports that at the end of the 14th century, a card game appeared in their area, originating from the country of the Saracens and called “Naib”.

Well, the Spanish name of the playing cards naipes (and the Moors at one time fairly battered Spain) is a strong argument both in favor of the Saracen origin of the cards, and in favor of the crusading version. There is also the Hebrew word naibes, reminiscent of the old Italian name for cards naibi - and in both languages, interestingly, this word means magic, divination, divination.

Here they are, the mysteries of history!

The crusaders seem to have left the scene too early, and the gypsies appeared on it too late, to reliably explain the appearance of maps in Europe.

However, according to some sources, Tarot cards appeared in Europe at the very beginning of the XIV century, just at the time of the end of the Crusades and the extermination of the Knights Templar.

Today it is believed that the first written mention of a certain card game in Europe dates back to 1337 and belongs to a certain Dominican monk (“Tractatus moribus et disciplina humanae conversations”). And the surviving historical evidence does not exclude the existence of others, earlier and have not come down to us.

For example, in the collection of the British Museum (London) there is a manuscript of a certain monk Johann of Brefeld, who reports that it is not known where, when and by whom the invented card game (ludus cartarum) appeared in their area (the territory of modern Switzerland) in 1377. He writes that it is comparable to the game of chess, since "both have kings, queens, nobles and commoners", it has four kings, people color these cards according to their own mind and use the most diverse ways of playing.

It is known that even then in Europe bans on such games began to appear (in any case, for money). This did not prevent the French king Charles VI in 1392 from ordering three gilded decks from Jacquemin Gringonnier.

There is no reason to think that Gringonnier invented them - he was a gifted draftsman, and reproduced on parchment the images already known by that time, easily identified with the modern symbols of the Major Arcana of the Tarot.

These were only 22 cards of the Major Arcana. No more no less. The gambling edict could hardly be broken with such a thing.

What were they to the king? Unless the French monarch of the XIV century was much better aware of their essence than we think ... In general, it seems that the Major and Minor Arcana Tarot have two different stories. Perhaps they really came to Europe in different ways?

Perhaps some really originated in the Middle East as a system of spiritual knowledge, while others in the Far East as a game? Or was it the other way around? Why are the Minor Arcana known to literally everyone under the guise of four card suits, and the Major Arcana at some point “disappeared” from the deck? Why did only one of them remain in it - the Jester, better known as the Joker (and it is he who breathes life into the entire system of the Major Arcana)? And after all, he really retained his seniority, the position of "trump cards to all trumps", beating any card in the deck ...

Why did the Knights disappear from the deck? Pages, Ladies, Kings are known to everyone, and for some reason the Knights turned out to be personas "non grata" ... And why did you need to rename the suits of the Minor Arcana? All these spades, hearts, crosses, tambourines ... Why these allegories, why it was impossible to call swords - swords, and bowls - bowls?

Sometimes it seems that the evolution of the card deck indirectly tells us about one of the most painful and mystical secrets of the Middle Ages - the extermination of the Knights Templar, whose swords, according to a stable legend, kept the Chalice .... The great occultist Aleister Crowley eliminated the Kings in his deck and gave their place to the Knights. Inexplicable step....

Whatever it was and no matter where the cards had their mysterious origin, but in the XIV - XV centuries they firmly settled in Europe and, having passed the bumps of the Middle Ages, entered the Renaissance. It has been noted that the cards served as court entertainment for the European nobility, like chess. They accompanied the titled persons both in grief and in joy, both men and women laid them out, but it is difficult to say whether they were given serious esoteric significance.

There is very extensive information about the use of Tarot for divination in the XVI-XVII centuries. It was in that era, despite the activities of the Inquisition, that there was a special breadth of thinking, which made it possible to combine a deep faith in God, the development of scientific views on the world, and the active use of occult practices. Examples include the astrologer and occultist John Dee, who used the Tarot for "conversations with angels" and William Lilly with his "Christian Astrology".

It can be said that, by unbiasedly studying the meaning of the Arcana and the possibilities of the Tarot, we all symbolically become “Renaissance people”, because, willy-nilly, we broaden our horizons and learn to see the relationship of seemingly mutually exclusive teachings.

The space for studying the Tarot is unique in that here the traditions of Gnosticism and Christian mysticism coexist with ancient pagan wisdom (from which they largely grew, subsequently entering into an almost irreconcilable conflict). Tarot is associated with such esoteric traditions as alchemy and astrology, numerology and Kabbalah, there is a place for both mythology and Eastern philosophy, and sooner or later all this falls into the circle of attention of the one who took up the cards.

It is interesting that the heyday of both games and divinatory practices fell on the Age of Enlightenment - so rational, so reasonable ... It was in the 18th century that the study of Tarot began.

It was in the 18th century that the aforementioned French linguist, theologian, occultist and freemason, Count Antoine Court de Gebelin, first explored the archetypal meaning of the Major Arcana.

There is an opinion that the revelation came to him while playing cards in one of the Parisian salons. However, it must be admitted that the descent of this revelation was very well prepared by the earl's previous occupations and was not at all accidental. After graduating from the theological faculty at the University of Lausanne, de Gébelin became an itinerant preacher, and this occupation and frequent travel led him to study cultural differences, fascination with mythology and sacred mysteries.

He believed that all known religions contain the same truths, and as a linguist, he sought to revive the ancient hieroglyphic language that would explain the principles of myth-making. In 1773-1784, he began to publish in parts a unique work called "The Primitive World, Its Analysis and Comparison with the Modern World", better known under the abbreviated title "Le Monde primitif".

The next volume of this amazing study, published in 1781, contained a treatise “On the game of Tarot” (“Du Jeu des Tarot”), in which Zhebelin put forward a version that is now quite popular about the Egyptian roots of the Tarot, that it should be perceived as a book and that the Tarot is analyzed from the point of view of the sacred number 7 for the Egyptians (each suit contains twice seven cards, and the Major Arcana - three times seven cards, plus there is a Jester who embodies the "mystery of the number zero").

In Gebelin's book, in addition to the idea, there was an appendix called "Tarot research, including the possibility of divination through cards", where all 78 images were presented.

The great interpreter of the Tarot, Jean-Francois Aliette, better known by his Masonic name-shifter - Etteila, became a student and successor of Zhebelin. It is curious that he joined the Lodge in the same year that his teacher published his famous treatise on the Tarot. Two years later, he himself published "A Way to Have Fun Through a Deck of Cards Called Tarot", and put this very method on a commercial basis.

It is interesting that it was men who were the original figures in this area, and, perhaps, it is Etteila that modern fortune-tellers and fortune-tellers should consider the “godfather”. Firstly, Etteila created his own deck of 78 Arcana, saturated with Masonic symbols (subsequently, entire monographs were written devoted to the study of this deck, and various versions of it were also created), and successfully sold this deck!

Secondly, he enthusiastically told the Parisians right and left, getting good money for his art. They say that in his former life he was either a hairdresser or a bookseller, but this could not be compared with the success that he had as a fortuneteller.
There is debate as to who exactly, Etteila or de Gebelin, proposed a curious interpretation of the word Tarot itself as a combination of "tar" (road) and "ro" (royal).

In those days, there was much more room for fantasy in deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs than now, but how can one not recall Freud with his “royal road to the unconscious”. There is also the idea that the basis is the Egyptian word taru, meaning "to demand an answer" (which largely reflects the meaning of mantic practices).

Other researchers believe that the name of the cards comes from Hebrew and is a corruption of the word "Torah". It is believed that Tarot is an anagram of the Latin word rota ("wheel"). Noted 20th-century occultist Paul Foster Case produced as many as four anagrams, resulting in the phrase "Rota Taro Orat Ator", roughly translated as "The Tarot Wheel heralds the law of wisdom" (Ator is the Egyptian goddess of initiation).

In the books of the Rosicrucians and Freemasons, the term "Rota Mundi", "Wheel of the World" is often found. It should be noted that while working on his book, in 1776, Zhebelin joined the Masonic Lodge, so the information he provided about the origin of the Tarot could well not be his own hypothesis, but information gleaned from his teachers.

It only remains to add that the Freemasons and Rosicrucians stubbornly insisted that they were the spiritual heirs of the Templars (and some modern researchers believe that they had reason for this), and according to one version, it was the Templars who became the "godfathers" of the Tarot, bringing them to Europe from the Middle East.

Be that as it may, they were far from the first and far from the only seekers of the book of Thoth. The Gnostics and alchemists of antiquity, the Templars and Rosicrucians, theosophists and "freemasons" ... all who managed in one way or another to touch the secret knowledge of antiquity, contributed to this search.

After the success of the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment, Tarot conquered new times and new spaces. It entered the 19th century, marked by a huge interest in the occult, esotericism and mysticism, and penetrated from Europe to other continents, primarily to North America. A big name in the history of the Tarot of the XIX century was the name of the famous French occultist Alphonse-Louis Constant, better known as Eliphas Levi

He was an abbot of the Roman Catholic Church, passionate about the study of symbols and mystical Judaism. Naturally, taking into account his profession and rank, he could not openly publish his famous work “The Doctrine and Ritual of Higher Magic” (“Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie”), so he translated his name into Hebrew.

He believed that the Tarot is a sacred occult alphabet, which everyone - Egyptians, Jews, Greeks - attributed to someone "of their own" (Egyptians - Thoth, Jews - Cain's eldest son Enoch, and so on).

About Tarot, he wrote the following: “Tarot cards ... are the most perfect divination tool that can be used with complete confidence due to the proportional accuracy of the figures and numbers depicted on them.

In fact, the predictions of this book are always strictly reliable, and, even when it does not predict anything, it always reveals something that has been hidden, and gives the wisest advice to those who ask it from her.

With this, perhaps, we can agree. It also seems that everyone who is now seriously interested in the Tarot willy-nilly come to the same philosophy as Eliphas Levi: guess, guess, but do not forget that the cards are the keys to a deep understanding of human nature and the laws of life. It would seem - a set of numbered pictures ... It is truly said - "such wealth lies in such poverty"!

The successor of the ideas of Eliphas Levi was the French physician Gerard Encausse, who wrote under the pseudonym Papus.

He was especially interested in the correlation of the Tarot, astrological symbols and the letters of the Kabbalah. In 1908, he published the book "Predictive Tarot", supplied with an album of 78 cards, which were proposed to be cut out and pasted onto cardboard. This deck inspired the Swiss hypnotist, freemason and occult master Oswald Wirth to create its very refined modification (some tarot readers consider Wirth's deck to be one of the most "high-level" to this day) and write the difficult monograph "Le Tarot des Imagiers du Moyen Age".

It was Papus who, in his book The Key to the Occult Sciences, finally formulated the idea of ​​an encrypted card key for transmitting knowledge about the laws of the universe in a concise form. In the ancient world, knowledge was transferred after strict checks by word of mouth, but as civilization developed, this practice became too risky and the Initiates had to look for some new “know-how” to save their achievements from oblivion and loss.

By the way, one of the most speculative versions of the origin of the cards reports that the Egyptians, in turn, created the book of Thoth out of the blue, and the Tarot is generally a fragment of the Atlantic civilization, continuing to exist for thousands of years in a highly distorted form ... However, Papus did not go so far into his assumptions, and was inclined to think that for the first time the wisdom of the Tarot was nevertheless encrypted in the foreseeable era.

One of the most striking events in the history of the Tarot should undoubtedly be considered the emergence in 1888 in Victorian Britain (just the time of Conan Doyle) of an extremely influential occult society - the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

The Society was founded by doctors and Freemasons William Woodman and Win Wescott, as well as a great expert in various esoteric traditions, Samuel Liddell Maggregor Mathers (Mothers). All of them, in turn, were members of the Rosicrucian occult society Societas Rosicruciana. With their light hand, the magic of Ancient Egypt, Kabbalah and medieval mysticism intertwined into a completely consistent system of occult beliefs, but the Tarot of the Golden Dawn is practically the only thing left of it.

The radical distinguishing feature of this order was the presence of women (as a rule, Masonic and Rosicrucian lodges accepted only men into their ranks). It was from this environment that the two most famous tarologists of the 20th century came out, giving an “ideological tilt” regarding the Golden Dawn system, so to speak, and, interestingly, in diametrically opposite directions.

In 1903, the first of them, Arthur Edward Waite, broke away from the famous order. He led his own esoteric group, the Holy Order of the Golden Dawn. It is significant that the title differs from the original in only one word.

Waite was an outstanding mystic and highly regarded his teachers, but differed from them in his pronounced adherence to Christian religious traditions.

Waite's biographers claim that during an illness in childhood, he experienced a state of almost clinical death, and after coming out of it, he quickly recovered and, despite his exceptionally early age, firmly intended to devote his life to the occult sciences, revealing the unity of the world and man.

He studied alchemy and the Kabbalah, the mysteries of Christian mysticism, the ideas of the Masons and Rosicruisers - with such training, he was naturally accepted with open arms into the Order of the Golden Dawn.

However, as usual, esoteric factions tend to split. Waite never joined the neo-Egyptian paganism that was cultivated by the adherents of the order. For him, religious and knightly ideals and legends about the Holy Grail were much more important.

He came to the conclusion that the four suits of the Tarot symbolize the sacred objects described in knightly legends - the Spear, the Chalice, the Sword and the Shield (according to another version, the Diskos, one of the sacred objects used in the Communion ritual along with the bowl).

Waite put forward the idea that not only do the Major Arcana describe the mystical Path of the Soul, but each of the four suits of the Minor Arcana describes the path to gaining one of the four important spiritual values. Together with the artist Pamela Colman Smith, who chose him as her mentor, he created a unique deck containing the fully illustrated Minor Arcana for the first time, which explains its popularity.

In 1909, thanks to publisher William Ryder, this deck saw the light of day. Therefore, the deck was subsequently called the Rider-Waite deck, and the decks created on the basis of its Arcana and following their traditions were called “rider clones”. Knowing about Waite's religiosity, many today consider his deck not "ideologically free" enough.

In fact, if the minimal Christian symbolism that is present on the Arcana becomes a serious obstacle to working with this unique and universal deck, then this speaks much more about someone's ideological enslavement than all Waite's stained glass windows and tiaras combined.

A year later, Waite published the monograph "A Pictorial Key To the Tarot", where he made a comparative analysis of pre-existing systems, described the meanings of the cards and gave their interpretations in a direct and inverted position.

He did his best to keep the manual simple and clear. It is quite obvious that it did not contain even a tenth of Waite's knowledge.

Theoretical calculations about astrology, cabalism and other related sciences were reduced to a minimum, if not to zero. Perhaps the author kept the secrets of his Order, but it is more likely that his goal was different - he sincerely wanted the cards to "go to the people."

And he definitely succeeded. It is enough today to look into online stores selling Tarot decks to be convinced of this. As well as the fact that there are many versions of the Rider-Waite deck itself, although the differences between them are not very significant.

In 1971, an authorized version was released in the United States with accurate images and original colors - based on the personal deck of Arthur Waite himself, still in the possession of his ninety-year-old daughter, Sybil Waite.

A little later than Waite, in 1907, having borrowed the main ideas of the Order of the Golden Dawn, the second mega-tarologist of the 20th century, Aleister Crowley, founded his esoteric group.

He himself considered himself the incarnation of Eliphas Levi. He is rightfully considered one of the most odious and eccentric figures in the occult environment.

If Waite was an adherent of Christian traditions, then Crowley, who joined the Order of the Golden Dawn under his patronage, later became famous for his aversion to Christianity, addiction to heroin and sexual occult practices.

His order of the Silver Star was the focus of magic of the appropriate kind. Scandalous and self-destructive behavior did not negate Crowley's outstanding occult talent and enormous erudition.

In the 40s, Crowley took almost the same move as Arthur Waite, who collaborated with Pamela Smith, namely, in collaboration with the talented artist Lady Frida Harris, he created his own deck of Tarot cards.

This deck uses the symbols of almost all the great civilizations of antiquity, the influence of Tantrism is felt, in general it is exceptional in the richness and complexity of the ideas contained in it.

The deck was completed in 1944 and was not published until 1971, with the assistance of the Ordo Templi Orientalis fraternity of magicians, which Crowley at one time headed.

It remains to be regretted that the names of the two most popular decks contain the name of the developer and do not contain the name of the artist. In fairness, they should be called the Waite-Smith Tarot and the Crowley-Harris Tarot.

There is no doubt that the Tarot has a history, a future, but it prefers to keep the distant past under the cloak of secrecy.

As Massimiliano Filadoro aptly pointed out, we will not get answers to the mysteries of the Tarot by knowing where the cards come from or by determining who invented them.

Some works create themselves, and the whole of humanity can rightly be considered the author of the Tarot. The problems that the Tarot poses, its archetypal images, the topics to which it is addressed, will always arouse a keen interest in people. The symbolism of the cards is universal, linked across many cultures and philosophies, and can truly be seen as a book of occult knowledge that can lead to a deeper understanding of the life process and of ourselves.

Our days can rightly be considered a true renaissance of the Tarot. Having discovered the inexhaustible archetypal possibilities provided by the structure of the Arcana, publishers vied with each other to release thematic decks, in fact adapting the most diverse areas of human experience to this structure. Tarot is used in a wide variety of areas of counseling, becoming something much more flexible and versatile than a divination tool.

Its uses are extremely varied. It can be said that it is precisely in our days that the Tarot begins to reveal its true potential, its colossal ability to reflect the universal patterns of human experiences and life situations, crises of internal growth and the lessons of external events that we all go through. It really is perceived as a book of wisdom that has absorbed the myths and knowledge of different peoples and tells us the ancient story of the Hero's Journey ... which is each of us on our life path.

Sources used in the preparation of the material:
1. Banzhaf Hayo (2006) Rider-Waite Tarot. - St. Petersburg, Ves Publishing Group, Glazgora Publishing House, 208 p. Original edition: Banzhaf Hajo (2001) Das Tarotbuch.
2. Banzhaf Hayo, Akron (2006) Crowley's Encyclopedia of the Arcana Tarot. Full interpretation of the cards. - St. Petersburg, Ves Publishing Group, 240 p. Original edition: Banzhaf Hajo & Akron (1995) The Crowley Tarot. The handbook to the cards by Alister Crowley and lady Frieda Harris
3. Banzhaf Hayo, Bridget Theler (2006). Tarot Thoth Aleister Crowley. Keywords. - St. Petersburg, Ves Publishing Group, Original edition: Banzhaf Hajo & Theler Brigitte (2001) Keywords for the Crowley Tarot. ISBN 1-57863-173-4.
4. Banzhaf Hajo, Hemmerlein Eliza (2009). Rider-Waite Tarot and Aleister Crowley Tarot. Practical guide. - St. Petersburg, Ves Publishing Group, Original edition: Banzhaf Hajo & Hemmerlein Elisa (1999) Tarot as Your Companion. The Rider-Waite and Crowley Thoth Tarot decks. A Practical Guide.
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7. Wirt Oswald (2003). Tarot of magicians. - St. Petersburg, Ex-libris.
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11. Barbara Moore (2006) So different TARO. - St. Petersburg, Ves Publishing Group, Glazgora Publishing House. Original edition: Moore Barbara (2004) What TAROT can do for you.- Llewellyn Publications St. Paul. USA
12. Papus (2004). Kabbalah. Predictive Tarot. - Moscow, AST Publishing House.
13. Rachel Pollack (2006) Tarot. Complete illustrated guide. - Moscow, AST, Astrel. Original edition: Pollack Rachel (1999) Complete Illustrated Guide to Tarot. Harper Collins Publishers Ltd.
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18. Shmakov Vladimir (1993). Holy Book of Thoth. Great Arcana Tarot. - Kyiv, Sofia.

From ancient Egyptian magic to a pack of cards among wandering gypsies, this is the way the Tarot cards developed, the origin of which is still as mysterious as the symbolic images presented on them. Today, no one knows exactly where and when Tarot cards appeared. The impressive images on the twenty-two cards of the mystical Major Arcana have much in common with ancient creeds and religious practices. The Minor Arcana, divided into four suits, probably served as the basis from which the modern playing cards that have become familiar to us originated.

Tarot cards for lovers

Tarot cards for lovers are limited to the Major Arcana alone. The Major Arcana are “great secrets” and at the same time the designation of fairy-tale pictures, starting with the image of the Fool and ending with the image of the World. The Minor Arcana are applicable only to the general interpretation of phenomena due to minor interests within short periods of time, while the Major Arcana is always focused on a broader interpretation of what is happening. It is to the "great mysteries" that we turn in our desire to more deeply comprehend the essence of things.

So what is the historical information about Tarot cards? There are not many of them, but they are quite interesting. Of all the earliest decks known to us, only seventeen have survived. They date back to 1392. We also know earlier maps, because in Italy, in Florence, they were banned in 1376. The dominant church there considered them heretical and dangerous, so they were repeatedly condemned, confiscated and even publicly burned.

Tarot Visconti: the history of occurrence

The Visconti card deck is the earliest and most complete deck of cards that has been preserved intact and in its original form. The Italian artist Bonifacio Bembo worked on it. These elaborate maps, dating from the early 15th century, were specially commissioned by the Duke of Milan and bear his surname. Illustrations, for example, the image of the High Priest or the High Priest, the images of the Magician and the Fool, seem to easily fit into the reality of the medieval world, leading some researchers to assume that Tarot cards are a kind of oracle of the medieval era.

However, a number of images that cannot be so easily interpreted in this context. The image of the Empress - a clear image of the great mother goddess, the image of the High Priestess, another no less obvious image of some goddess, as well as the image of the Hanged Man suggest that the origins of the Tarot cards belong to a more distant past. These quivering and exciting paintings date from the period before the Renaissance and even before the establishment of the dominance of Christian beliefs. They are associated with ancient esoteric teachings, such as the cults of female gods, shamanism, paganism and legends, the study of which led to the formation of an independent science of mythology. Such is the original nature of these images, which apparently ensured the vitality of the Tarot cards and led to their current heyday.

The ordered set of images that make up the Major Arcana comes from the language of universal symbolism, which functions for every person in the depths of his soul at the level that is referred to as the unconscious. This level of the human psyche is located in the area that the alchemists called Anima Mundi, that is, the soul of the world, and the outstanding Swiss psychologist Carl G. Jung defined it as the “collective unconscious”.

The images of the Major Arcana are ordered in such a way that the desire of the soul for enlightenment is symbolized. Each image represents some stage of both internal and external development, and as humanity moves forward along the path of knowledge, this ordered set of images is repeatedly reproduced in various variations.

Images of the Major Arcana are closely related to other mystical or magical systems:

• astrology;
• ritual magic;
• Jewish doctrine of Kabbalah.

In addition, these images are also relevant to psychoanalysis and to the mechanisms of dream formation already studied at the present time.

Many researchers who studied these cards came to the conclusion that the symbolic images on the cards are also related to other teachings.

Tarot cards for lovers and astrology

In order to comprehensively present Tarot cards for lovers, a table has been proposed that will help you, through the Major Arcana, determine and understand your position on your life path. Each card of the Major Arcana is associated either with an astrological sign, or with an astrological planet, as well as with a certain fundamental element of the universe. These connections are known to those who have already studied astrology. They are set according to the principle of similarity in the interpretation of each card, so people who are unfamiliar with the zodiac should not worry about not knowing this information. The fundamental elements of the universe, which have a universal sphere of influence, are also associated with astrology. These include:

• FIRE intuition, foresight, inspiration;
• EARTH practicality, sensuality, the physical world;
• AIR spirit, intellect, conscious desire;
• WATER feelings, creativity, the unconscious.

In the process of laying out and interpreting the cards, it is useful to remember these meanings of the elements. They form the foundation or platform for discovering your own connections, which you intuit when you are in a state of great excitement.

In addition, the interpretation of each card is associated with the choice of keywords that determine its main meaning and the type of love relationship it represents. As you master the Tarot cards, addressed primarily to lovers, keywords can serve as auxiliary means for summarizing and remembering the meaning of the identified phase of your life path.

The meanings of cards with the upper part of the image turned down are not contained in the table below. This is because such reversed cards in most cases have the opposite interpretation of the interpretation of non-reversed cards with a direct image.

Gradually, the TARO cards will become familiar to you, and then you will see how each of them symbolizes a certain phase. When these kinds of energies circulate freely within you or within your life situation, they will certainly achieve their true goals.

In general, inverted cards indicate that the inner "I" does not find an appropriate outlet, that is, in the language of a psychologist, unconscious desires and needs are either ignored or suppressed.

The true spiritual meaning of each card corresponds to its direct image, revealing everything that applies to you, to your partner, to your relationship and to your future.

Astrological table of tarot cards for lovers

Tarot cards: history of occurrence (video)

Reading time 6:19, 98% useful

It is reliably known that playing cards consisting of four "suits" entered Europe around 1200, apparently from the Middle East. Around 1400 they were already in full use as a popular game of chance. Tarot cards (and in a simple way tarochchi, tarot or tarok) include all these four suits, but, in addition, they also have a fifth, trump, or "senior" suit, consisting of a larger number of cards. Cards of this suit first appeared in Northern Italy in the Quattrocento era (XIV century) as a board game. It is still played in Southern Europe and French North Africa; moreover, the drawings of the Marseille Tarot, which can be seen on these cards, were created at the end of the 15th century. Around the same time, the order of their numbering was also standardized.

The first mention of a game of colored pictures, which was called trionfi ("triumphs") and came into fashion at the princely court of Ferrara, dates back to 1442. The oldest surviving deck was created by the artist Bonifacio Bembo as one of the gifts for the wedding that connected the Sforza and Visconti. Around 1500, the first printed decks appeared, and Tarot became a popular game among the general public.

The first text about tarot divination is dated 1526. At that time, this was mainly done by gypsies - a nomadic Indo-European people who penetrated Europe in the 15th century .. The gypsies were considered to come from Egypt, and this gave rise to an extremely romantic legend about the "ancient Egyptian" origin of the Taro. The mysterious symbols of the Tarot have long been considered the Keys to the Ancient Mysteries; however, for the first time this was announced in 1781 by the French Protestant priest Antoine Cour de Gebelin (Court de Gebelin). Studying ancient myths, he came to the conclusion that this "simple gambling" is nothing more than the lost Egyptian Book of Thoth, capable of revealing the innermost secrets of a lost civilization.

The next outstanding researcher and systematizer of the Tarot was the Parisian hairdresser Aliete, a younger contemporary and student of the Cours de Geblen. He became seriously interested in the occult, abandoned his craft and took the pseudonym Eteyla (having read his own surname "in Hebrew", i.e. from right to left). Being not a very educated person, Eteyla was not fond of the "philosophical" aspect of the Tarot symbolism, but systematized and polished the fortune-telling system on the cards. This system, and with it the cards, acquired its final form by 1780 (according to other sources, by 1783). Probably at the same time, Eteilla was one of the first to open a specialized fortune-telling salon in Paris.

In 1850, the provincial French publisher Baptiste Paul Grimaud printed the most popular of the Eteilla decks, the so-called Egyptian Tarot. Thus, the Tarot system took on its modern form.

Further researchers who studied and developed divination on the Tarot proceeded already from the developments of Eteyla. However, in the XIX century. divination on ordinary playing cards came into fashion, the Tarot receded into the shadows and became the privilege of mystics and occultists. These people had little interest in the predictive use of the cards: they paid much more attention to the "philosophical" and "mystical" aspects of their symbolism. At this stage, the Tarot (and, in particular, 22 cards of its "highest suit") turned into a symbolic alphabet and a kind of encyclopedia of European mysticism. In the second half of the XIX century. the famous French occultist Eliphas Levi (Alphonse Louis Constant) identified the 22 Major Arcana with the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, which served as the basis of the extremely influential mystical system of the Kabbalah. This greatly expanded the Tarot system of meanings and finally turned the old deck of cards into a very influential and respectable mystical system.

The final processing of the Tarot in the spirit of Higher Ritual Magic was completed at the end of the 19th century. English Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. It was in this environment that the most popular Tarot deck of our time arose - the Ryder Tarot, (named after its publisher). This deck was designed by Christian occultist Arthur Edward Waite and designed by set designer Pamela Coleman Smith. It was published in millions of copies and greatly influenced the modern perception of Tarot. It usually serves as a "baseline" version against which all sorts of innovations in the field are compared.

One of the main reasons for its popularity was a radical innovation in design. The traditional Tarot consisted of 22 "trumps" (or Major Arcana) and 56 ordinary cards. The Major Arcana had a traditional pattern, and ordinary cards had only numbers and symbols of suits. Pamela Smith abandoned this custom. She provided all the cards with drawings of the corresponding symbolic scenes, and in this she is still imitated. Drawings sometimes greatly facilitate the interpretation of cards and make fortune-telling accessible not only to specialists.

About divination by tarot cards

There are questions that can be answered by reasoning. Even the future can be judged more or less accurately when it comes to deriving from known premises, when one only needs to find the effect of known causes. But, besides the usual causal relationship, there can be another, albeit hidden, but no less close connection between phenomena, uniting things that at first glance are separated by an immeasurable abyss. This connection, or, more precisely, this relationship, was called differently at different times - similarity, affinity, sympathy, analogy, considering it an expression of a single world law: "What is below is similar to what is above." This was understood by Hermes Trismegistus, a magician and scientist who lived in Egypt five thousand years ago. The closest descendants considered him a god (Thoth), and the more distant ones considered him a semi-mythical person who never wrote his works that have come down to us. He himself did not consider himself a god. Using the method of analogies, he tried to understand this hidden connection that exists between the movement of maps, planets and the movements of the human soul, believing that the will of God is manifested in it - or the gods, as people then imagined.

However, representatives of various religions often asked themselves: is it not a sin to try to know God's will? Maybe God (or gods) deliberately hides it from people? Is it not for nothing that the name given to the hermetic sciences in honor of their founder Hermes Trismegistus ("thrice the greatest") is also interpreted as "the doctrine of the hidden, the secret"?

Yes, the hermetic sciences help to lift the veil of the future and to know what cannot be known in any other way. But the knowledge of the hermetic sciences can be likened to the possession of letters: a person can read a book, but he is not free to change its content. There is no sin if a person learns what Providence has prepared for him.

One of the most important branches of the hermetic sciences should be considered divination. There are a lot of divination methods. Tradition claims that a person can, with the help of divination, find out everything he needs in order to change the unfavorable course of his life, or, conversely, preserve and strengthen its favorable aspects, gaining inner freedom, because the answer to his questions is already inscribed in his soul. , and fortune-telling symbols only help to read this answer.

Most importantly, a person should really need an answer at the moment when he decides to turn to one of the methods of divination, and not use this sacrament out of boredom, for the sake of checking for authenticity or as entertainment! In the latter case, no fortune-telling will ever give the correct answer and the right advice!

The cards of the Major Arcana symbolize the life path of a person. They also represent the twenty-one fundamental principles of the universe. The 22nd (or 0) card is conditionally ranked as the Major Arcana, it is, as it were, a generalized sum of the rest. And since the number 21 is, in particular, the converted wavelength of hydrogen, the most common element in our Universe, it becomes clear how great the role of this number is for all living things. Each of us is built from these principles, carries them in himself in different proportions (just like in each individual horoscope, all the planets and signs of the Zodiac are expressed with different strengths). By laying out the Tarot cards, we learn about the distribution of these beginnings in our soul at the moment.

The presence of a large number of symbols (78 cards of the Major and Minor Arcana) favorably distinguishes Tarot from many other divination methods, where the same values ​​\u200b\u200bare presented here elementarily have to be obtained by combining several symbols. The advantage of Tarot divination is also the possibility of interpreting the cards depending on how they lay down - in a straight or upside down position. Thanks to this, we have not even 78, but as many as 156 fortune-telling symbols. And more often than not, the position of each card greatly changes its meaning.

The cards of the Major Arcana are in some cases laid out separately from the Minor Arcana: with their help, they often determine the personality of a person and the main points of his fate. Among the suits of the Minor Arcana (Staffs / Wands, Cups, Swords and Pentacles / Denarius) there are curly cards (King, Queen, Knight and Page) and simple ones. Each figure card can correspond to a person of a certain gender and age: Page usually corresponds to a child or youth; Knight - to the young, King - to the mature person; The queen is a woman. However, it should be borne in mind that the boundaries between ages are conditional. In addition, the Queen card can sometimes mean a man, just like a Knight and a Page - a woman. This happens when a card is not previously selected in the layout, denoting a specific person who is being guessed at, but is opened during fortune-telling.

The Minor Arcana cards are laid out separately from the Major Arcana when they want to get an answer to a specific question regarding the future, present or past. The question should always be formulated quite specifically. To an ambiguous question and the answer will be evasive. In addition, the questioner himself must be sure that he wants to receive an answer and the moment for receiving an answer must be right.

A person who turns to fortune-telling needs a lot of life experience: one should always remember that fortune-telling is not entertainment, but hard work that requires great effort of the mind, memory, intuition, deep penetration into the secrets of cards and the human soul. The fortuneteller not only learns the future, but also receives psychological help in anticipation of the future.

Each card is a window into the subconscious, it helps to focus and peer into what is behind it. A comment to it only gives a push in the right direction. The symbols depicted on the cards may evoke different associations for different people. They should be different: when guessing on Tarot cards, you need to be able or learn to overcome the old habit of our mind to reduce everything to already known things. As dreams with their seeming "illogicality" help to overcome the prevailing stereotypes of thinking, so do Tarot cards: if the mind does not penetrate into their meaning, intuition should be called for help. Therefore, in the process of divination, do not reason, but observe; do not comprehend, but contemplate; operate not only with the words of the interpretation of the cards, but also with the images. And then you will come to an understanding of what answer to your question the cards give you, through their inherent symbolism.

It should be noted that most Tarot cards are inherent in ambiguity and therefore each of the cards that fell out in the layout can be perceived differently not only by different people, but also by the same person at different times. When interpreting the cards, one must proceed, first of all, from the topic of divination and the original question, using the value of the dropped card closest to the topic. It is impossible to transfer meaning to another person and another situation.

"Reguessing" (that is, laying out the cards for the same question again on the same day), if something does not suit you, is strongly discouraged, and it's useless: the cards most often will not only answer the question itself "in a different way", how much to reveal the deeper causes of its occurrence, and not everyone wants to know them. It is possible and even necessary to "guess" when the same question, having not been resolved in due time, does not lose its relevance and arises again. In this case, you should not remember how the cards lay down last time, because it is impossible to restore a situation that has already gone to the past: it is better to lay them out again.