Cards as Fantasy

         Pretty much as long as there have been playing cards in Europe, since the 14th century, they have been used for fortune-telling.  This should come as no surprise because humans seem to be willing to use practically anything to try to divine the future.  To look back at the history of playing cards, you can do a quick review of my post on Cards as Block Prints.  To look at some of the wide array of things that have been used for prophecy, read my post on Words of the Future.  I want to state at the outset of this post that although there are people who find the use of cards (especially oracle decks like tarot) to be useful in helping them focus on their intuitions and subconscious, I believe that any actual magic ascribed to fortune-telling or fortune-telling cards is pure fantasy, and that’s precisely why I’m interested in it here in my blog about fantasy.

        With that, let’s begin with the reminder that early playing cards in Europe were not standardized, and often included illustrations on all the cards, not just the face cards that have pictures in a standard deck today.  (You can see a sampling of these charming illustrations in the previous post.)  Around 1420 a Duke of Milan commissioned a deck of cards that included a fifth suit of 16 trump cards illustrated with Greco-Roman gods.  This is the earliest known appearance of such a suit of trumps, and it was followed by variations throughout most of Europe, all of which were used for trick-taking games.  Presumably they were also used for fortune-telling, just as other playing cards were, but they were not specially designed for the purpose.

        The invention of the printing press simultaneously spread cards more widely and made them more standardized.  The Tarot of Marseille (which originated in Milan in the early fifteenth century but was being manufactured in Marseille in the nineteenth century) became a standard that is used to this day both for games and for divination.  It includes 56 cards in 5 suits: swords, cups, coins, batons, and trumps.

        Not until 1781, when Antoine Court de Gébelin published an essay claiming that the tarot cards had a special occult connection with ancient Egyptian wisdom, did the idea spread that there was some particular esoteric significance to the tarot deck.  Once the idea was started, however, it was embraced with enormous enthusiasm.  In 1785 Jean-Baptiste Alliette (aka Etteilla) published a highly influential book about divination using the tarot deck, and in 1789 he published his own deck designed especially for occult use.  Ever since, new versions of decks have been designed to emphasize their magical meanings.  Despite these French origins of the idea, it’s in the English-speaking world that we look on the tarot deck as being exclusively for divination, since we have never had a tradition of playing the games for which the decks were invented.  One of the most famous and foundational modern decks, the Rider-Waite Tarot, was published in 1909, designed by members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a secret society dedicated to occultism.

        I’ve got a lot of pictures to share, and I’m starting with some of the very early hand-painted cards, which demonstrate why decks of cards (magic or mundane) were luxury items before they were printed.  There are two versions of the World card, plus a card probably from the wands suit, which I picked because he appears to have a pet basilisk.  And then I’ve got some early printed cards all from one deck: the Popess, Star, and Magician.

        Next is a collection of trumps from  seventeenth and eighteenth century printed decks, all of which are pretty crude compared with the painted and illuminated works of art with which we started.  The entire first row comes from one deck, and demonstrates that the modern subjects of the cards were by no means mandatory.  XIII in this deck is Death, which is true in some other decks, as well, including the last card on the bottom row (which I picked because it looks so oddly friendly).  I’m guessing XXIIII is Justice, which is a subject that appears in many other decks, but not with that number (and why does it have a weasel on the scales and a hedgehog below?)  However, the others don’t seem to correspond with any of the standard modern trumps, so hold that thought because it will be important when I get to a future post.  On the second row I’ve got the Devil, then the Emperor and Justice from one garishly painted deck, and then Bacchus.  He replaces the Pope in an otherwise fairly standard deck, and this, too, was not too unusual.  The Pope and the Woman Pope or Popess seem to have been a little controversial in areas where Catholics and Protestants were in direct conflict, and they were sometimes switched out for various different figures - but I think replacing the Pope with Bacchus is kind of funny.

        Carrying on with a variety of decks that follow the fairly standard tarot assortment, I’ve got a Magician with a fabulous outfit and an array of interesting props on his table; the High Priestess (in place of the Popess) from the famous Rider-Waite Tarot; and Lovers from a deck of much higher quality woodcuts than those in the last grouping.  I chose the Devil in the next row because it looks so nicely different from the one above, Temperance because she’s a really lovely woodcut, and the Star from a deck printed with more modern nineteenth century methods.  She has particularly nice scenery.  The cards in the bottom row show a double-ended deck, which shows you that it was really for playing card games rather than fortune-telling, but these are consistent with the now-standard tarot cards: Death again, the Tower (which looks doubly catastrophic when it’s falling down from both ends), and the Star with very different iconography from the one above.  (You can also see that the two Stars are numbered differently.)

        Generally I’m only interested in the Major Arcana: the trumps (including the Fool) because in a lot of decks the Minor Arcana looks too much like a regular deck of cards to scratch my itch for magic.  However there are decks - mostly among the older ones and the newer ones - that give every card its own interesting and potentially magical picture.  In the same deck from which I shared the Lovers above, the knave-equivalent face cards in each suit are some sort of hybrid mythical creature.  The one for cups is especially intriguing, since it combines human with fish tail, mammal forepaws, and bird wings.  Then I have the 2 and 9 of swords from the Rider-Waite deck, which both look Highly Significant, just as a deck of occult mysteries should.  And the last card in this group is the 6 of cups from the Thoth Deck, another influential reimagining from another one-time member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.  This one leans hard into almost Rorschach-like imagery.

        Although I’ve naturally spent a lot of time in this post on the decks that are more directly related to what is now called the tarot, that’s never been the only option when you’re looking for mystical meanings in cards.  One whole branch of decks made for the tarocchi card game used animals for the trumps, and the choice of animals was pretty wide open.  I’ve chosen several fantastical versions from different decks, a unicorn, a seahorse-unicorn, and a double-ended card in which the two sides are different, combining a dragon and a bat.  In the second row are two more cards from the deck that you should be able to recognize from earlier: a salamander for card XX and “Fame Flies” for an unnumbered card.  And then I’ve given you four cards from a deck that had a whole theme of merpeople.  In card XIV we’ve got the mer version of Carmen Miranda, while card XV has an alchemist with a mermaid and sea lion, XVI has a merman hoisting some kind of crazy fish, and card XIX has a gorgeous pagoda along with a couple of beautiful mermaids.  These decks, despite their magical imagery, were designed and produced primarily for playing cards rather than for any occult purposes.

        So then finally we come to the not-quite-tarot decks that were actually designed with the intention of using them for divination.  The Game of Hope was invented in Germany around 1799 and came with a booklet that gave instructions for using the deck either to play a parlor game or for divination.  The first two cards in this last batch come from one of these decks and you can see that each card has both a picture to which meanings can be ascribed and also insets with regular cards with both German and French suits.  The Game of Hope was adopted by Marie Anne Lenormand, who became a wildly famous and successful fortune-teller after the French Revolution.  (She claimed to have read cards for various leaders of the French Revolution, as well as Empress Josephine and Tsar Alexander I.)  Her success led to many versions of these decks being marketed as Lenormand decks for fortune-telling, and the ship comes from one such, while the key comes from another that dispensed with the inset playing card design and instead added little rhyming proverbs.  The last two cards here were designed by the celebrity fortune teller I mentioned at the beginning of this post: Etteilla, from roughly the same era as Lenormand.

        So now we’ve had the history of block printing cards, and we’ve had the future as foretold by cards, but there’s still more cartomancy to come.  My next trick will be to give you Words of the Month connected with cards and cartomancy.

[Pictures: World, from the Este tarocchi cards, paint and illumination, Italy, ca. 1450 (Image from Yale Beinecke Library);

World, from the Visconti di Modrone tarocchi cards, paint and illumination by Bonifacio Bembo, Italy, 1442-47 (Image from Yale Beinecke Library);

XVI (something of wands?) from the Sola Busca tarot deck, painted, Italy, 1491 (Image from Wikimedia Commons);

Popess, Star, Magician, wood block print cards, Italy, ca. 1550, (Image from Yale Beinecke Library);

5 cards from a tarot pack, wood block prints, Italy, ca. 1675 (Image from The British Museum);

Le Diable from the tarot deck of Jean Dodal, France, 1701-15 (Image from Wikimedia Commons);

L’Empereur and Justice from tarot pack, wood block prints, Switzerland, 1783 (Image from The British Museum);

Bacus from tarot pack, wood block print, pub. by Jean Gisaine, Flemish, 18th century (Image from The British Museum);

XIII (Death) from tarot pack, wood block print, Germany, 18th century (image from The British Museum);

Il Bagatto from tarot deck, wood block print with stencil, pub. by F.F. Solesio, Italy, 1865 (Image from Bibliothèque nationale de France);

The High Priestess, 2 of Swords, 9 of Swords from Rider-Waite tarot deck, illustrations by Pamela Coleman Smith to design by Arthur Edward Waite, 1909 (Image from WaiteSmith.org);

V (Lovers), Knave of Swords, Knave of Cups, Knave of Coins, XX (Salamander), Fama Volat from minchiate deck, wood engraving with stencil, pub. by A. Baragioli, Italy, 1860-90 (Image from Bibliothèque nationale de France);

Le Diable from Les Récréations de la Cartomancie by Mlle Lemarchand, 1867 (Image from Bibliothèque nationale de France);

Temperance from a Venetian tarot deck, wood block print, Italy, undated (before 1896) (Image from The British Museum);

Le Stelle card from tarocchi deck, chromolithograph pub. by Fratelli Avondo, Italy, 19th century (Image from The British Museum);

Death, Tower, Star cards from tarocchino deck, woodcut pub. by Germano Natali, Italy, early 19th century (Image from The British Museum);

Six of Cups from Thoth Tarot deck, illustration by Frieda Harris as designed by Aleister Crowley, 1944 (Image from Crowley-Thoth.com);

VII (Unicorn) card from tarok pack, wood block print pub. by Johann Gottlob Hegewalt, German, ca. 1770 (Image from The British Museum);

VIII (crocodile/Bat) card from tarok pack, wood cut pub. by Joseph Fetscher, German, late 19th century (Image from The British Museum);

IX (Sea Unicorn) card from tarok pack, woodcut, German, late 19th century (IMage from The British Museum);

XIV, XV, XVI, XIX cards from tarok pack, woodcuts pub. by Johan Norbert Hofmann, German, 19th century (Image from The British Museum);

19, 20 cards from Das Spiel der Hoffnung, etchings pub. by GPJ Bieling, German, 1800-50 (Image from The British Museum);

3 (10 of Spades) card from a Lenormand deck, ca. 1890 (Image from Wikimedia Commons);

33 (Success, key) card from Wahrsagekarten Lenormand deck, color lithograph pub. by Ch. Didot, French, ca. 1890 (Image from Yale Beinecke Library);

48 (Amour), 1 (Etteilla) cards from Etteilla deck designed by Jean-Baptise Alliette (aka Etteilla), ca. 1840-90 (Image from WaiteSmith.org).]