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Ronald Decker - Thierry Depaulis - Michael Dummett
A WICKED PACK OF CARDS
The origins of the Occult Tarot
Duckworth & Co. Ltd. (1996)
cm. 24 X 16 - 308 pp.
Original texts in English. Preface, introductions, notes and comments in English
Cardboard cover with jacket
ISBN 0 7156 2713 9
Tarot cards were invented in Italy in the early fìfteenth century, and for almost four centuries used exclusively for playing games. In late eighteenth-century France, however, they were purloined from the card-players for fortunetelling and the occult. For a hundred years, the use of Tarot cards for divination, and their interpretation as enshrining an occult meaning, remained all but exclusively confìned to France. Professional French fortune-tellers, French exponents and practitioners of magie, and the occasional French charlatan, developed uses for Tarot cards and baseless theories about them which were virtually unknown in other countries. The authors trace this phenomenon through the writings and activities ofmany advocates of Tarot occultism, including Court de Gébelin, Etteilla, Lévi, and Papus, showing how an extraordinary variety of occult theories - from Hermetism to Rosicrucianism, from the Cabala to Freemasonry - was brought to bear on a pack of playing cards. In the twentieth century Tarot divination has spread throughout the Western world; the very word 'Tarot' is now identified with the occult, fortune-telling, and cartomancy. This book tells the fascinating story of how Tarot divination was born and grew to maturity in a single country.
RONALD DECKER has thirty years' experience in teaching art and art history at all levels. He is currently the curator of a notable collection of antique cards at the United States Playing-Card Company, Cincinnati, Ohio.
THIERR Y DEPAULIS is an independent historian specialising in the history of games and playing-cards.
MICHAEL DUMMETT was Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford from 1979 to 1992, and is the author of The Game of Tarot (1980), Il Mondo e l'Angelo (1993) and other books on Tarot cards and games, as well as books on philosophy and voting theory.
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