Ronald Decker

When the Tarot was invented in Italy during the early fifteenth century, it was simply a pack of cards used for playing games, but today the cards are used throughout the world and not only for fortune telling – for true believers they are the key to secret knowledge and the meaning of life. A History of the Occult Tarot is the classic work on the history of the Tarot deck and its use in occult circles. Decker and Dummett examine how the Tarot became the favoured divination tool of occultists from the late nineteenth century – a bridge to the spirit world, a map of the unconscious. From Theosophical to Aleister Crowley to the Order of the Golden Dawn and P. D. Ouspensky, this compelling survey of the Tarot's history describes the many fascinating decks imagined over time as well as the secret histories of the mystics who devised them.

When the Tarot was invented in Italy during the early fifteenth century, it was simply a pack of cards used for playing games, but today the cards are used throughout the world and not only for fortune telling – for true believers they are the key to secret knowledge and the meaning of life. A History of the Occult Tarot is the classic work on the history of the Tarot deck and its use in occult circles. Decker and Dummett examine how the Tarot became the favoured divination tool of occultists from the late nineteenth century – a bridge to the spirit world, a map of the unconscious. From Theosophical to Aleister Crowley to the Order of the Golden Dawn and P. D. Ouspensky, this compelling survey of the Tarot's history describes the many fascinating decks imagined over time as well as the secret histories of the mystics who devised them.

That the Tarot originated in ancient Egypt as a divinatory tool is a romantic misconception. Ron Decker's meticulous scholarship will surprise practitioners and academics alike, revealing the Tarot's true evolution and meanings as its inventor(s) understood it. The Tarot consists of the Minor Arcana, four suits of cards similar to our modern deck, and the Major Arcana, twenty-two allegorical or "trump" cards. Decker says the four-suit deck was invented in Asia Minor before AD 1000; Italian courtiers added the trumps in the 1400s. But Tarot was first used as a game. Tarot divination was only created in the 1700s by a Parisian fortuneteller who based the trump images on Hermeticism, which merges Greco-Egyptian alchemy, astrology, numerology, magic, and mysticism. Today, the suit-cards are often traced to the ancient Jewish Cabala. But, says Decker, they, too, acquired their meanings only in the 1700s, and he cites a lost numerical system based on Cabala at that time Decker's interpretation integrates three whole systems-astrological, arithmological, mystagogical (concerning initiation rites into the Mysteries). His depth of knowledge makes the book a must-have for serious students of Tarot and esotericism