The First Accounts Of Tarot Decks
The first description of tarot decks appeared as early as the start of the fifteenth century when Martiano da Tortona described a number of card games that resembled a lot to tarot decks. The symbols on these early illustrations were Greek gods and goddesses with the suits made of four different types of birds, which differed greatly from the regular Italian suits. These forefathers of tarot decks had only sixteen cards, but they surely enjoyed great popularity. Later, during the same century other mentions of tarot decks are found in Italian documents. The ideology and the symbolism of the cards were very impressive even then with social, heraldic, poetical and philosophical implications.
The oldest tarot decks preserved to our times were designed according to the specifications of the Visconti family. The sixty-six cards are presently on public display at the Yale University Library in New Haven. Another famous deck was painted by Bonifacio Bembo at the request of Maria Visconti, two cards from these tarot decks were lost or missed from the very beginning. The design and fame of these cards have grown under the Visconti-Sforza patronage.
Plenty of modern reproductions combine coins, cups, swords and batons with trump cards as the clear image of the classic iconography specific to the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.
The number of initial tarot decks must have been small given the amount of work involved in the making and the painting of these miniature works of art. Tarot decks have survived from Marseilles, Egypt or Switzerland and in time they came to be associated with magic and mysticism. People with occult occupations were the ones to embrace and widely use the cards for all sorts of symbolic interpretations that have passed on to our modern world too.
Some analysts discovered all sorts of origins for the tarot decks with etymologists identifying the Egyptian meaning of the very word tarot: tar stands for royal while ro means road, tarot would thus mean the royal road. In the line of tradition, Gypsies are said to have spread the tradition of card reading in the first place, but the exact period when tarot decks started to serve for predictive purposes is not clear. As for the passage of tarot popularity to the English speaking world, Eliphas Levi was the one to make the transfer possible, and introduce tarot to aristocratic and middle classes too.
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