Is a form of fortune-telling or divination using a specialist deck of cards. The practice of cartomancy has been around since playing cards first came into use in Europe in the 14th century. Practitioners of cartomancy are usually known as cartomancers, card readers or, simply, readers. Some practitioners have claimed that cartomancy's origins date back as far as the ancient Egyptian times, the art being derived from wisdom given to the ancient Egyptians by the scribe-god Thoth, although this belief is by no means common today.
According to some traditionals, a deck that is used for cartomancy should not be used for any other purpose other than that. Cartomancers generally feel that the deck should be treated as a tool and cared for in that manner. Some cartomancers also feel that the cards should never be touched by anyone other than them, their owner.
Methods of Cartomancy
Although a standard card deck can be used for cartomancy, many other decks have also been designed that are intended specifically for use for divination, the most well known are tarot decks. In the view of some, including the webmaster of the Aeclectic Tarot website, any deck that is not a tarot deck is referred to simply as a cartomancy deck; however, others are of the view that the use of any cards (including tarot cards or non-tarot oracle cards) in this way is still a form of cartomancy.
The Tarot deck is slightly different from the standard deck used for cartomancy. The Tarot deck consists of 22 Major Arcana cards, and 56 Minor Arcana cards (Arcana means "hidden things"). Each Minor Arcana suit consists of 4 court cards normally including king, queen and page, along with 10 numbered cards. The fifty-six minor cards are similar to the regular deck of playing cards most people know today, while the Major Arcana cards are present only in the Tarot decks.
Tarot history
There are many different ideas as to the true origin of the Tarot deck, but the first documented deck was painted in the fifteenth century in Italy.
Several other early tarot style sequences of portable art survive to place the Visconti deck in context. Later confusion about the symbolism stems, in part, from the occult decks, which began a process of steadily attributing paganism to it and universalizing the symbolism to the point where the underlying Christian allegory has been somewhat obscured.
Tarot cards have now come to be associated widely with mysticism and magic. Tarot was not widely adopted by mystics, occultists and many secret societies until the 18th and 19th century. The tradition began in 1781, when Antoine Court de Gébelin, a Swiss clergyman, published Le Monde Primitif, a speculative study which included religious symbolism and its survivals in the modern world.
Although tarot cards were used for fortune-telling in Bologna, Italy in the 1700s, they were first widely publicized as a divination method by Alliette, a French occultist who reversed the letters of his name and worked as a seer and card diviner shortly before the French Revolution.
Etteilla designed the first esoteric Tarot deck, adding astrological attributions and "Egyptian" motifs to different cards, altering many of them from the Marseille designs, and adding divinatory meanings in text on the cards. Etteilla decks, although now fully designed by two different artists, now remain available.