I’ve always loved puzzles and mysterious, as well as history and spirituality, so it’s really no surprise that I fell in love with tarot cards. I remember getting my first deck as a 16-year old, the Morgan-Greer tarot, and thinking it was amazing that I might be able to tell the future using these magical cards.
Skip ahead quite a few decades and an older, wiser and much more skeptical me doesn’t believe there is any magic in the cards at all, but I still find many puzzles and mysteries when exploring Tarot history. We are pretty sure we know when they were invented (early-1400s), where (Italy), why (trick-taking card game), but still pretty unclear on the actual who and how. Someone took a deck of 52 cards, added an additional court card (the queen) to each suit, and then added a permanent “trump” suit which would be more powerful than the other suits and key to winning the game. But we’re still left with some important questions:
Why these subjects? Why 22? Why this order?
Twenty or so years ago I used to co-moderate the Historical Tarot section on Aeclectic Tarot, what was then the largest Tarot forum in the world. 17 years ago, I started a new forum dedicated just to Tarot history and purchased www.tarothistory.com to host it. I’ve just started redesigning the main site and updated the forum.
Tarot History Forum
Tarot History Homepage
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Warberg Institute Tarot Exhibition
I was lucky enough to go with a local interest group to London to see the Tarot Exhibition at the Warberg Institute. It was amazing to see cards ranging from the very earliest examples from over 500 years ago to the paintings by Lady Freda Harris of some of the Thoth Tarot cards from the 1940s. To say I was like a kid in a candy shop really is an understatement, one of the nicest days I’ve had in many years.
