Rosanne said:
I actually knew they were used as playing cards, but I thought like you there had always been another way of using them, for the reasons you said...Why this deck? So I wanted to know if there was any documentation of actual Tarot readings/ or spreads etc. Thats what I meant by 'use' For example before Rider Waite they must have used TdM? I mean Pamela Colman Smith. I mean it as in- Egypt rose fully formed- no developing culture - that type of query. Regards Rosanne
I seem to remember reading that Tarot is confirmed to have been used in divination relatively late (17th century) but that since ordinary playing cards were used in divination before that, the inference is that so were tarot cards.
The use of the Marseille is a matter for hot debate - many think, with some justification (from iconography and analogy) that it served orginally as some sort of teaching tool, or aide-mémoire, or, more likely, a demonstation of a spiritual path of initiation - not occult, and certainly open to all sorts of uses (like games and divination) but not primarily designed for games and divination. An interesting analogy, as a friend wrote the other day, would be alchemical iconography, which were printed in books without text and stood for the text, so rich were their symbolism.
The other day a friend and I were visiting a castle nearby. In one of the rooms was a curious late 18th-century contraption - a large wooden box with, at is end, a huge kind of magnifiying glass through which you looked inside the box - at the other end of the box (inside, seen though the magnifier) was a picture of an Arcadian scene magnified several times its size and in 3-D. It occurred to me then that this was a playful child of Newton's studies in optics over a century before. We accept that science will eventually be used to make games (think of the large numbers of sophisticated computer games) yet have trouble applying this concept to the Tarot, which has, in structure and iconography, at least as good a claim as optics to have started as study or demonstration or manifestation of a spiritual kind, eventually to become a game. It's even possible that its original use was abandoned or lost, as the game became popular and new generations of scholars and mystics turned to other means to convey meaning and structure.
Divination - and its modern variation of psychological readings - also turned up some times along the long history of Tarot!
Fulgour wrote down all the well-known Tarot occultists of the 18th and 19th centuries. But I doubt very much if the great readings of the past were ever recorded - just as great theatre performances, they are moments in time. They probably would mean nothing to us today.
