Tarot Cards: Origin and Structure of the Five-Suit Deck
This post isn’t about fortune-telling, but rather a trick-taking game in the same family as Bridge or Whist. A bit more mundane perhaps, yet no less fascinating. This might sound like bad news for cartomancy enthusiasts, though I believe it just might spark the curiosity of more than a few.
Before diving into the analysis of both the game and its deck, it’s worth making a brief historical stop and step back into Renaissance Europe.
In the mid-15th century, the latest craze among the nobility of northern Italy was a novel 78-card deck created for the game of Tarocchi. Illustrious houses such as Visconti and Sforza commissioned lavish sets adorned with gold leaf, turning the game into one of the ultimate courtly luxuries. This new fascination soon spread to neighboring countries and across the rest of Europe.
It was in mid-17th-century France that the deck's configuration became standardized with the appearance of the renowned Tarot of Marseille. It's worth noting that for three hundred years these cards retained a purely ludic nature; it wasn’t until the "Occult Revolution" of the 18th century that they left the gaming tables to venture down the paths of divination.
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Tarot is a trick-taking game with distinct traits that set it apart from other traditional card games. First and foremost, it's asymmetrical: it pits a single player against a group of three. These teams aren't chosen at random, but decided through an opening auction where players "buy" the right to play as the attacker based on the strength of their hand.
The game is inherently tied to the anatomy of its deck, which is split into two main categories:
The Trumps (Atouts): A suit of 22 numbered cards, which occult literature eventually labeled the Major Arcana, even though at the gaming table their role is purely hierarchical. They function as permanent trumps that beat any other suit. Among them, the unnumbered card, L'Excuse (corresponding to The Fool), is special: it acts as a sort of wild card allowing a player to avoid following suit without losing the card. This dedicated suit is precisely what distinguishes Tarot from other similar games such as briscola.
The remaining 56 cards (which esoteric tradition grouped under the name Minor Arcana) are divided into four suits. Each features ten pip cards and, most interestingly, four court cards: Valet (Knave/Jack), Knight, Queen, and King. This 16-court structure is fascinating, as it seems to merge the traditions of the Spanish and French suits into a "super deck."
Anyone familiar with "traditional" Tarot decks can imagine how unwieldy a game can be with that hyper-stylized, mysterious-looking iconography and its slightly sinister, otherworldly aura that suits cartomancy so well. This is precisely what led to the definitive separation between gameplay and occultism in the late 19th century, namely the introduction of the Tarot Bourgeois pattern, embodying the triumph of functionality over mysticism. I’ve decided to cover it in the next post, as this one has grown a bit long and I don't want to deprive it of the spotlight it deserves.
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