Playing cards reached Europe via the Islamic world in the mid-14th century. These early cards, known as the Malmuk cards, had the same structure as our regular playing cards today: four regular suits, each containing 10 pip cards, and three court cards. The original signs of the suit were cups, coins, swords and polo sticks. Polo was not played in Europe at the time, so they became sticks. These costumes are now known as Latin costumes and were worn by all of Europe, although they are now only worn by Latin countries. The court cards were a king, a horseman, and a footman. All men’s court cards are still used in the Latin suits, as well as the German and Swiss packs.
The Queen makes her first appearance in a Milanese pack that features six courts in each suit, one male and one female of each rank. Two of the extra courts were removed, and for a time the 56-card pack was standard in the region. It was to this deck that an additional set of illustrated cards was added in the mid-15th century. These additional cards were themed after a traditional Christian trump procession, so they were named trionfi, which means trumps, and from which we get our word trump: it was the invention of the tarot that marked the invention of trumps in card games! cards! The game later took on the name Tarocchi, probably from the old Italian vernacular Tarocus, meaning to play the fool. This name became Tarock in other countries and only France dropped the guttural at the end to make Tarot.
The tarot has no occult origin, and contrary to popular myth, the church never took offense at the cards being recognized as Christian. Seen through modern eyes, some of the ancient designs seem mysterious, even heretical, but examined in the context of when they were created, we get a different picture. For example, the Woman Pope raises many questions, and yet by the 15th century she was a common figure in Christian art, symbolizing things like the New Covenant and the virtue of faith. The Hanged Man has also received attention, suspended by one foot! However, in Italy, this card was called The Traitor, and this is how traitors were killed, hung by one foot, and left to die slowly and publicly. No mystery at all!
However, as the cards spread to other regions, new players and card creators were unfamiliar with some of the imagery and, in a climate of religious caution, altered some of the cards. The Belgian pattern replaces the Pope and the female Pope with Bacchus and the Spanish Captain. The Besancon pattern replaced the same cards with Jupiter and Juno (this is still found in Swiss 1JJ). In Bologna, due to politics rather than religion, the pope, the emperor, the empress, and the pope were replaced by the four Moors, four trumps that are treated as having equal rank.
Other major decks include the Florentine Minchiate, this tarot has an additional block of trumps to make 97 cards in total. Another is the Tarocco Siciliano, a 63-card pack, almost as small as a Patience pack, and features some unique trumps along with some borrowed from the Minchiate.
In the early 18th century, German playing card manufacturers began producing French suited decks with new trumps that featured a range of original trump designs. French suits were much cheaper to produce, requiring only templates rather than carved blocks of wood, and the new trumps allowed card makers to show off their skills in a time of great competition. These cards are now used for most games, with France being the last to adopt them in the early 20th century.
Towards the end of the 18th century, Paris-based occultist Antoine Court de Gabelin wrote an article on tarot cards for his Encyclopedia The Primitive World. He stated that the cards were the codified wisdom of the ancient Egyptian priests, essentially a series of hieroglyphs that were very much in vogue at the time. He offered no evidence for his theory, but it became a popular myth. For about a century, occult tarot and divination with cards was only known in France, it was not until members of the Golden Dawn, who based much of their occult beliefs on the cards, began to import them, publish translations of the French. texts, and redesigning them specifically for occult practice, that the myth reached the English-speaking world.
Today, English speakers still know the cards of their occult myths and, of course, fortune telling. However, Europe continues to play an impressive variety of card games with them. France, Austria, and Hungary maintain particularly strong tarot playing traditions, as does Bologna in Italy.
The main countries where tarot is currently played are: Italy, Sicily, Switzerland, Hungary, Austria, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Slovakia, Romania, Germany, France and Denmark.
The games are largely what we call point-trick games. That means that, just like whist, bridge, and spades, players win cards at tricks. Unlike those games, different cards have different point values, so it’s not the number of tricks you take that wins the game, but the number of card points you earn on them.
Some games, such as Ottocento and Minchiate, also score points for card combinations and sequences won in tricks, adding an extra dimension to the game. Others rely much more on earning advertised bonuses for scoring the most points, by far the most interesting of these is Royal Tarokk which removes points from cards entirely.