There
are different versions but this seems to make the most sense and has been
researched by different interested parties.
Playing
cards of the type used for playing games in general are first mentioned in the
14th century when the town council of Regensburg banned their use in
1378. During 1397 in Paris, their use by the so called common people during ordinary working days
was prohibited.
During
the early 15th century printing from wooden blocks was first used in
Southern Germany, this was used to print the bible and playing cards both of
which then became available to the
masses. In 1415, there is a mention of a hand painted set of Tarot Cards
prepared for the Duke of Milan, both paying cards and Tarot seem to spread
rapidly throughout Europe over the next few centuries.
It
was during
this period that amusing, decorative and instructive packs were published and
their popularity came and went every 40 or 50 years, and it was in the quiet
periods that the cards were only used by Gypsies and Fortune
Tellers. Sometime during the 16th century when cards where
going through a popular phase printers added their own changes to different
packs and their signature, the packs of cards were also taxed (nothing changes
much there then!). Later on esoteric writers like Lévi, Waite and Crowley would
make their own interpretations of how the cards should look, which lead to more
variations of tarot decks appearing.
None
of the early historical references has any real indication of where the cards
originally came from and it wasn’t until the early eighteen century that
people started taking the Tarot seriously. During that time Antoine Court De
Gébelin wrote a series of books about customs, religion, science and ides of
ancient times comparing with their modern day equivalents. In volume eight, he
discussed the “Game of Tarot” speculating on its ancient Egyptian origins,
these books were written in the 1770’s when European Scholars were discovering
huge hoards of Egyptian antiquities, this included hieroglyphics that were
obviously writing but nobody could decipher. This was about 20 years before the
discovery of the Rosetta Stone: which finally allowed the hieroglyphics to be
deciphered, at this time all Europe was going mad for anything Egyptian. De
Gébelin ideas were taken up by Allietee who wrote books on the subject in the
mid 1780’s under the pen name Etteilla, he enthusiastically adopted the
Egyptian theory and gained an enormous following.
About 70 years later the most
famous French occultist a certain Alphonse Louis Constant wrote two major books
in 1855 and 1856 under the name of Eliphas Lévi, by this time the hieroglyphics
had been deciphered and discovered they had nothing to do with tarot so he had
to go elsewhere for his mystic source so he chose to connect the Tarot to the
Qabalah also known as Kabbalah. The Qabalah is a Jewish mystic system
based on the link between letters and numbers of the Hebrew alphabet. By
changing the letters in a name to the corresponding number, it was possible to
decipher the mysterious names in the old testament to give support to a very
complicated vision of the universe. Again there was no real evidence offered,
only that the system worked. Later on in his career, Lévi became convinced the
cards originated in the middle east, but were actually brought to Europe by the
gypsies. It was well known that the gypsies had traveled all over the face of
the earth and could trace their origins back to ancient Egypt.
