HISTORY

The first identifiable playing card decks came into being in China in the 800s A.D., during the Tang dynasty. There is a reference to a princess of the royal family playing the ‘leaf game’ with her in-laws in 868 A.D. There were even drinking games which evolved with the emergence of these decks. The practice of using playing cards as an amusement spread from China to Persia and Arabia, and by the 1100s and 1200s A.D., it appears people all over the Middle East were playing with card decks. I don’t know how the Chinese set up their earliest decks, but by the time the habit hit the Middle East, the standard structure of the playing card deck was the Mamluk deck, with two Court Cards (usually the King and the Vizier, not the Queen) and ten pip cards. The cards were divided up into four suits: the coins, the cups, the swords, and the polo-sticks.

Playing cards came to Europe in the latter-half of the 1300s, and were most-likely based on the Mamluk deck. Four-suited playing cards are first mentioned as being in Southern Europe in 1365 A.D. and one scholar on the subject says “Wide use of playing cards in Europe can, with some certainty, be traced from 1377 onward” (Hajo Banzhaf. Il Grande Libro Dei Tarocchi, 1994, p. 16).

The suits underwent some changes over the centuries, depending on the country. Because polo wasn’t well-known in Europe at the time playing cards were introduced, the polo sticks became batons or cudgels in a lot of places. There were variations, though. Some German and Swiss-German card decks employed bells, acorns and leaves as suits, instead of coins, clubs and swords (and some decks still do). But in the end, the standard playing card deck as we know it today, with hearts, diamonds, clubs, and spades, was pretty-much set by the French by around 1780 A.D.

Roughly-concurrent with the arrival and evolution of the playing card decks were the Tarot decks, with their major and minor-trumps. One source states the oldest surviving Tarot decks were designed by a Frenchman named Jacquemin Gringonneur for King Charles VI of France in 1392. Another source, quoted on Wikipedia, states that the oldest surviving tarot deck is the Visconti-Sforza deck from around the mid-1400s. But there is no mention of the Tarot deck being used for divination until the French cartomancer Etteilla issued a Tarot deck, specifically-designed for occult purposes, in 1789.

So which came first, the standard playing card deck or the Tarot deck? Both seemed to have evolved around the same time, and sources differ. Some insist the Tarot deck was invented first, but existing evidence suggests the playing cards came first, followed shortly thereafter by the Tarot deck. But it’s clear from the existing history that both decks were originally created to be playing card decks. The divination-use came later. In fact, according to Wikipedia, use of the Tarot deck for regular play has been revived in Europe over the past half-century.

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