'Lord Curzon's Notes on Persia: About 1889-1890' [‎688r] (1396/1486)

May 10 . 1889 ]
JOURNAL OF 1HE SOCIETY 01 ARTS.
573
in four groups of 13 each, He was clearly
writing not of the tarot pack of 78 cards,
of which I shall speak presently, but of the
picquet pack of 52 cards as best known
now to us; therefore it may be with certainty
assumed that this year might be considerably
ante-dated to arrive at a period indicative of
the origin of the game of which he writes.
In the National Library in Paris there is a
MS. translation of the Cite de Dieu of Saint
Augustin, by Raoul de Presle, of the date 1375 ,
which has a minature representing three per
sonages sitting at a table and playing at
cards, and in the “ History of Jean de Saintre,”
who was a page of Charles the Fifth, we find
the governor of the pages reproaching them
for playing at cards ; while in the “ Pilgrim
age of Man,” a poem composed in 1350 by
William de Guilleville, and printed by Verard
in Paris in 1501 , we find, “ Jeux de tables et
<ie cartes.”
There are earlier dates referred to in
various MSS., one of them so early as 1299 ,
but they are more or less open to doubt, on the
grounds of want of accuracy in copying ; but
taking the evidences before us, and allowing
for questionable authority, we may take it as a
fact that playing-cards were in common use
in the early part of the 14 th century, and that
thus to assign a period of 500 years for their
familiar use is quite within the mark.
“ Tarot ” cards are the earliest form of play
ing cards known to us, and we have to account
for their introduction into Europe by means of
the gypsies—supposedly some Pariah or low
caste Hindoo race, swept by a northern irruption
westward through Persia and Arabia, through
Egypt, and along the Mediterranean into
Spain, and so through Europe. Cards in con
nection with gypsies are matters of common
recognition, and fortune-telling and gypsies are
almost synonymous. In Southern Europe as in
England cards are part of the stock in-trade of
this wandering and predatory race of curious
people. Tarots are not known to us in Eng
land except as curiosities, awakening specula
tion by the strange series of 21 ” atouts ” —
the major card, known as the ” fou,” and the
four “ cavaliers,” which, together with the
usual 52 cards, make up the tarot pack of 78 .
Tarots are still made in France, largely in
Italy, and in lesser quantity in Germany,
and they have preserved, with little variation,
the same singular features as to the “ atouts ”
which were seen in the tarot cards of 400 years
ago. The comparison of a pack of a date about
1500 with one of Italian manufacture of the
present day, shows among the four variations
which occur among the ‘‘atouts” —a card
bearing a similar figure to that now named
‘‘lepape,” but then named ‘‘la papesse,” a
seeming survival of the fabulous story of the
election, in the 9 th century, of a female Pope.
The cards known as the cards of Charles VI.
belong to a tarot pack, and you have now on
the screen a facsimile of one of them.
‘‘Tarot,” or tarocchi, is still played in South
ern Europe, and it is to this game that we owe
the creation of the very artistic series of
designs by Mitelli, which illustrates the
tarocchi of Bologna, produced about the
year 1664 . I do not follow the ingenious but
far-fetched fancies of Court de Gebelin, who,
in 1781 , wrote a very remarkable article on the
subject of tarots, finding all through them an
entirely Egyptian origin ; but we have enough
before us to enable us to adopt the tarot cards
as the earliest form of playing cards, and to see
in them a distinctly Eastern symbolism, which
fits them to the hypothesis that it is to the
gypsies that we may look as the carriers of the
game westwards from the east. To discuss the
features of Chinese playing cards, and to find in
them some remarkable semblance to the tarot
cards, would take us too far a-field, but such
resemblances cannot but suggest a common
origin, and when the intense conservatism of
the Chinese be borne in mind, we may well
conjecture for their cards a date far beyond
anything within our historic period. In this
immediate connection it is noticeable that
in the playing cards of Southern India we
find among the suit marks the sword, money,
and bells, as in the modern tarot packs of
Europe. It is easy to follow this idea on
to the 15 th century, and to link the past
and the present by a reference to the names
upon the earliest existing examples of cards
bearing the suit signs best known to us in
England, viz., spades, diamonds, hearts, and
clubs, for on these early examples we find
not the heroes of that period, but those of an
earlier period, ‘‘Coursube,” ‘‘Appollin,” &c.
It being conceded that cards were of Eastern
origin, it needs only for us to trace the natural
course of travel westward for us to name the
country which in Europe may claim their first
adoption; and as this course would certainly be
along the northern African coast to Tangier, it
is in Spain that we may reasonably look for their
first foothold ; and this idea is strengthened
by the fact that all the earliest games of
cards are of Spanish invention, and that the
Spaniards have to this day retained the dis-