catboxer
Kiama:
That's an intelligent question, and in the final analysis I think it can only be partially answered.
Your observation that the suited cards originally had no intrinsic meanings is right on, since, besides their not containing any obviously symbolic pictures as the trumps do, they are not in any way peculiar to the tarot deck. Playing cards using those suit signs had been around in Europe for at least 50 years before the invention of the tarocchi deck.
So meanings assigned to the suited cards would have originated when people first started using the deck for divination, and nobody knows exactly when that was, although it was probably some time in the 18th century. The very earliest record we have of people using the cards that way comes from the memoirs of Giacomo Casanova. In 1765, when he was in Russia, he kept a teen aged mistress who was a card reader, and he tells how he returned to his apartment after a night of debauchery, and she greeted him with tears and anger. She had laid out 25 cards in which she claimed to be able to see everything he had done. The number of cards she employed tells us that she was using either a) a full tarot deck, or b) a deck of playing cards.
The first published system of interpretation of suited cards was indeed by Etteilla, in 1770, but his first book was designed for use with a French piquet deck. This is a 32-card deck of regular playing cards from which the pips two through six have been removed from each suit. It's similar to a contemporary 40-card Mexican deck I have from which the sevens, eights, and nines have been removed. Starting in 1781, Etteilla published systems of divination for the tarot deck.
As for the pips of the antique decks being ugly, I'll just say that some of us prefer those decks. Setting aside that Italian oddity, the Sola-Busca deck, illustrated minors are a twentieth-century innovation, or in other words, not traditional. Also, there are nearly as many ways of interpreting suited cards as there are decks.
Just one more thing: why people still argue about the origins of tarot is a mystery to me. Tarot was an Italian invention, and all the 15th-century references to it are Italian. It spread to France and Switzerland in the 16th century as a result of regional warfare. All the pertinent primary documents have been published by Stuart Kaplan in his Encyclopedias, and have been available for some time.
(catboxer)
That's an intelligent question, and in the final analysis I think it can only be partially answered.
Your observation that the suited cards originally had no intrinsic meanings is right on, since, besides their not containing any obviously symbolic pictures as the trumps do, they are not in any way peculiar to the tarot deck. Playing cards using those suit signs had been around in Europe for at least 50 years before the invention of the tarocchi deck.
So meanings assigned to the suited cards would have originated when people first started using the deck for divination, and nobody knows exactly when that was, although it was probably some time in the 18th century. The very earliest record we have of people using the cards that way comes from the memoirs of Giacomo Casanova. In 1765, when he was in Russia, he kept a teen aged mistress who was a card reader, and he tells how he returned to his apartment after a night of debauchery, and she greeted him with tears and anger. She had laid out 25 cards in which she claimed to be able to see everything he had done. The number of cards she employed tells us that she was using either a) a full tarot deck, or b) a deck of playing cards.
The first published system of interpretation of suited cards was indeed by Etteilla, in 1770, but his first book was designed for use with a French piquet deck. This is a 32-card deck of regular playing cards from which the pips two through six have been removed from each suit. It's similar to a contemporary 40-card Mexican deck I have from which the sevens, eights, and nines have been removed. Starting in 1781, Etteilla published systems of divination for the tarot deck.
As for the pips of the antique decks being ugly, I'll just say that some of us prefer those decks. Setting aside that Italian oddity, the Sola-Busca deck, illustrated minors are a twentieth-century innovation, or in other words, not traditional. Also, there are nearly as many ways of interpreting suited cards as there are decks.
Just one more thing: why people still argue about the origins of tarot is a mystery to me. Tarot was an Italian invention, and all the 15th-century references to it are Italian. It spread to France and Switzerland in the 16th century as a result of regional warfare. All the pertinent primary documents have been published by Stuart Kaplan in his Encyclopedias, and have been available for some time.
(catboxer)
