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History of Tarot
It's hard to believe but Tarot cards were not originally designed to tell the future! They were first used in the 16th century Paris to play a card game similar to Bridge. As there were no soap operas in those days, the cards were also put to another entertaining use. The face cards, such as the Queen of Cups, King of Swords and so forth were modeled on the personas of popular celebrities of the day. These cards were shuffled and then arranged into scandalous story lines. This parlor game was a source of great amusement for both royalty and peasants alike.
In addition, 16th century poets used the cards to compose poems called tarochi apporporati. The poems would be constructed about the characters in the trump cards in the deck, such as the Queens, Kings, Knights and Pages to tell a tragic or romantic story.
Tarot cards were not associated with divination until the 1800s, when a secret order of warlocks in Venice found significance in their numbers and symbols. Before that these decorative cards were not used for fortune telling. As these warlocks were the illuminati of their day, their reading methods were kept very secret. The first known records of the divinatory meanings assigned to Tarot cards did not appear until the 1700s in Bologna.
Ordinary playing cards have been connected with divination as early as 1487. The gypsies were adept at reading plain playing cards for centuries before the Venetian warlocks got their hands on French Tarot Deck. It is safe to assume that the Tarot card meanings and spreads that are used to day are based on a hybrid of techniques derived the gypsy system of reading a plain deck of cards, French parlor games and Venetian interpretations of occult symbols!
