The Tarot: A Short Treatise on Reading Cards
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Revised and expanded edition of Mathers' original treatise. Three methods of reading cards are included, along with instructions for the game of tarot, which can be played by two or three people. This is a classic text that will be appreciated by anyone interested in the study of the tarot.
S. L. MacGregor Mathers
The Tarot includes works by some of the most important founders of the modern tarot and esoteric movement, including: Arthur Edward Waite, Papus, Harriette Augusta Curtiss & F. Homer Curtiss, S. L. MacGregor Mathers, Eliphaz Levi, P. R. S. Foli, P.D. Ouspensky, Manly P. Hall, and A.E. Thierens.
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The Tarot - S. L. MacGregor Mathers
THE TAROT
To enter, within the limits of this short treatise, upon any long inquiry into the history of cards is utterly out of the question; and I shall, therefore, confine myself to examining briefly into what relates to their most ancient form, the Tarot, or Tarocchi Cards, and to giving, as clearly and concisely as possible, instructions which will enable my readers to utilize them for fortune-telling, to which they are far better adapted, from the greater number and variety of their combinations, than ordinary cards. I shall also enter somewhat into their occult and Qabalistical significations.
The term Tarot, or Tarocchi, is applied to a pack of 78 cards, consisting of four suits of 14 cards each (there being one more court card than in the ordinary packs—the Cavalier, Knight, or Horseman), and 22 symbolical picture-cards answering for trumps. These latter are numbered from 1 to 21 inclusive, the 22nd card being marked Zero, 0. The designs of these trumps are extremely singular, among them being such representations as Death, the Devil, the Last Judgment, etc.
The idea that cards were first invented
to amuse Charles VI of France is now exploded; and it is worthy of note in this connection that their supposititious inventor
was Jacques Gringonneur, an astrologer and Qabalist. Furthermore, cards were known prior to this period among the Indians and the Chinese. Indeed, Etteilla gives, in one of his tracts on the Tarot, a representation of the mystical arrangement of these cards in the Temple of Ptah at Memphis, and he further says:
Upon a table or altar, at the height of the breast of the Egyptian Magus (or Hierophant), were on one side a book or assemblage of cards or plates of gold (the Tarot), and on the other a vase, &c.
This idea is further dilated upon by P. Christian (the disciple of Eliphas Levi) in his Histoire de la Magie, to which I shall have occasion to refer later. The great exponents of the Tarot, Court de Gebelin, Levi, and Etteilla, have always assigned to the Tarot a Qabalistico-Egyptian origin, and this I have found confirmed in my own researches into this subject, which have extended over several years.
W. Hughes Willshire, in his remarks on the general history of playing cards, says:
The most ancient cards which have come down to us are of the Tarots character. These are the four cards of the Musee Correr at Venice; the seventeen pieces of the Paris Cabinet (erroneously often called the Gringonneur, or Charles VI cards of 1392), five Venetian Tarots of the fifteenth century, in the opinion of some not of an earlier date than 1425; and the series of cards belonging to a Minchiate set, in the possession of the Countess Aurelia Visconti Gonzaga at Milan, when Cicognara wrote.
W. A. Chatto, in his History of Playing-Cards, says that cards were invented in China as early as A. D. 1120, in the reign of Seun-Ho, for the amusement of his numerous concubines.
J. F. Vaillant, in Les Romes, histoire vraie des vraies