The Four Cartomantic Traditions

As a game designer, I often find myself spending a lot of time studying the history behind my chosen medium of expression. As anyone who studies history can tell you, when you look into history, you never know where your research will take you. For me, for some reson, I keep winding up landing in the occult. Whether it's researching the historical reality of alchemy as christian taoism, or researching what a "spell" actually was before fiction authors needed a macguffin- or studying antique divination techniques -I always seem to keep coming back to the more effeminate arts of implication and emotion.

Divination is particularly fun, because behind all the ghost story mumbo-jumbo, what you essentially have is a primitive form of story-telling game! Cartomancy is my favorite. Sure, I've done card readings before, but do you know what's far more exciting? Just making up a whole work of fiction using nothing more than a pack of cards. You never really know what's going to happen next, and when inspiration strikes, it's like uncovering a hidden subplot in your favorite TV show!

I'll eventually write a detailed article about the history of cards and how to use a pack of cards as a writing prompt. For now though, I'm just going to share something I've noticed about cartomancy that nobody really seems to talk about within divination communities:

1. Cartomancy is a purely Western European phenomenon. Many cultures had playing cards before tarot ever appeared, and many other cultures inherited them through trade later, but no new cartomantic movements have ever developed outside of the Western European sphere of influence.
2. Furthermore, within Western Europe, there are essentially 3 major traditions of cartomancy. One in the South, one in the Northwest, and one in the Northeast.
3. There is a 4th modern movement, but I think we can safely dismiss that as simple commercialization and commodification that goes hand-in-hand with mass industry.

Itallian

Tarot, the most recognizable of the 3, represents the Italian tradition. The tarot deck is the closest modern descendent of ancient Italian suited playing cards, which inspired the French-derived suits a century later through trade. Tarot retains a suit of dedicated Trump cards, an innovation unique in the history of card game design, not present in any of the preceding or following designs.

Italians and other latinate cultures still use tarot cards as just normal cards. They can play any game for the French suited cards by simply removing the trumps and subbing our suits for their tarot equivalent. While there are French tarot cards, French suited packs with trumps, these are rare at best.

The strong symbolism of the tarot deck made it ideal for early cartomantic practices, which most likely originated in India and were spread indirectly to Italy with their cards the century before. This may have been in conjunction with the exodus of the Romani, but it seems to have actually began well before that. One thing is certain: tarot cards are not Egyptian in the slightest, and never were. Card history has a clearly documented lineage in which all card game systems are ultimately descended from ancient Chinese gambling games where early paper bills were used as the game pieces. Because Tarot was one of the earliest traditions to gain significant reputation among noble houses and the peasantry alike, it has also been the most enduring.

Tarot treats the pack as a highly abstract and symbolic form of reading, dealing with potentials, feelings, and ideas more than physical reality or events. It is likely that earlier cartomancy was originally an expression of spiritual beliefs that were either misunderstood or intentionally misrepresented to have oracular capacity, and that this attitude ultimately spawned cartomancy. Remember, this was at a time where "magic" was just the word for an evil "miracle". People believed angels were ever-present, that god was actively involved in everyone's personal lives, and that the heavens were constantly trying to communicate with us in a direct and literal way.

The big innovations in tarot came when diviners (Lenormand, Etteilla, Crowley, etc.) decided to have dedicated oracle cards made from the tarot pack, resulting in the rider-waite-smith pack. With all cards nolonger reversible as though they were face cards, it then became possible to create secondary meanings for cards when they appear in the reverse, or "prone" position after using an inverting shuffle, such as a riffle. While this is unique to tarot, it is not universal, and there is much less consensus on reversed card meanings. Modern practice also tends to make use of tarot as a primarily reflective, introspective, or meditative practice of self-exploration, rather than pure divination.

French

The French tradition uses the nameless pack, sometimes referred to as the French or German suits. The German suits are actually an artistic misunderstanding of the original French suits. (Or maybe it was the other way around. It all happened very quickly, and not enough records were kept. However, because the French suits retain some semblance of the Italian names, it is more likely that they came first)

Some people recognize the English naming of the French suits as its own pack, despite simply being a mispronounciation of the original French words, (Spade=Espada) or an anglicization thereof (Club=Baton). The French, English, and German naming and art schemes are all part of the French tradition of cartomancy.

The original French pack came into existence as an attempt to make new cards instead of importing them. The more northern countries had a larger population of poor people with expendable income however, so it was rational to try and make a pack that was affordable to the market. This was primarily accomplished by stripping the art down to icons that were very nearly monocolor dots; pips; though it was also achieved by reducing the number of cards printed, often starting with the elimination of the trumps suit, and following with some portion of the pips or faces. There were packs published with as few as 20 cards. As a consequence, people at home using these partial decks made up games that fit them, which is the cause for the glut of old card games in these packs which require players to remove some portion of the deck. After decades of variation, the 52 card pack became standard as a way of being able to play most of the contemporary games people talked about in these countries.

The French tradition of cartomancy was born directly out of the Italian tradition, hence many of the similar readings for equivalent cards, and common card spreads and reading conventions between them. However, the French tradition tends to focus primarily on affirmations; yes/no readings, with a specific interest in the material of reality, especially regarding romance from the perspective of a woman of the time.

German

The German tradition is the least known and least recognizable. The decks used in the German school are not used to play any modern games, and so are mostly unknown to the general public. The German school arose in the 19th century, beginning somewhere near the end of the 18th century in France. Packs of cards began to be developed specifically for the purposes of divination, as there was a growing interest in the subject in the region. While some of these "gypsy" packs were indeed designed and used to play certain types of games, very few of these are known today, and none are even widely played.

By the 1830s, there was a significant increase in the number and variety of these card packs. However, because they had to compete with an existing card industry, gambling industry, and gaming culture, their popularity was limited. Additionally, by this time, divination was beginning to be painted in a satanic light... and the packs themselves were highly variable from one brand to another making it hard to make any stable games that could be played from one place to another by memory without bringing a specific pack with you. In an attempt to improve the market, many packs were printed with card names in multiple languages. Despite all of this, they did flourish in their target demographic: diviners.

Because many diviners of the day exaggerated their exoticism to seem mysterious and supernatural, and many were also travelling attractions, they were later on recognized as a group as "gypsy" cards, or even more generically as fortune telling cards. While the majority of the production was in France, the majority of these cards actually were marketed and sold in Germany, with the German diviners developing their own unique reading method from scratch. Here we can see the beginning of a cynical sort of commercialism, hell-bent on taking advantage of the spiritual and uneducated.

Because the objective was symbolism, even the most barren of gypsy cards have well defined artworks. However, they still needed to be affordable, so they were often small, with the majority centering on a 32-36 card range, with the typical loss of the trumps and 2-5 or 6-9 seen in many of the old regional French packs.

This limited range of symbols to pull from prompted diviners to invent ways of creating more depth, specifity, and meaning. Like their counterparts in other places, they did this by drawing more cards. However, unlike the Italians and French, they created a whole new system of cross-referenced meanings derived from card pairs. Like the French, they decided to focus on literal, material, physical readings, but they focused on the general, over-all picture like with tarot.

Because there is little precedent for single-card readings in these packs, there was never much incentive to develop inverted card meanings as occurred in tarot.

Over time, a pattern developed in this tradition, where certain brands would name their pack after a famous fortune teller- whether that person ever actually used their cards or not- to increase sales. As a result, several of the German tradition persist today, complete with incompatibility. The earliest are the Sybille decks, of which there were always many variations. Following are the less-known hegenauer, beidermeier, kipper, and zigeuner packs. Finally, the most famed set, the lenormand pack, named after mademoiselle lenormand, supposed fortune teller to Napoleon.

Given the time period, it is actually likely that she was at least aware of the German decks and their reading methods, but since her nepphew destroyed all of her stuff after her death, we'll never know! In fact, aside from word-of-mouth, we basically know next to nothing about her.

(From eye witness descriptions, it sounds as though she did a combined reading using multiple types of decks. The querent would pose their question, and she would then decide the most appropriate spread from each deck. The querent would then be told to draw the appropriate number of cards from each pack for the individual spreads, and Mlle. Lenormand would lay them out all in order to obfuscate the actual spreads in use.)

The most famous model is the petit lenormand, which is a rebranded version of a game-deck in the German tradition called The Game of Hope. (Think of it as monopoly crossed with snakes and ladders with a randomized board.)

Oracle Cards

And, of course, we have the modern tradition of oracle cards. Unlike the other three traditions, which evolved out of using a toy to predict the future, no oracle cards can be used to play any sort of game whatsoever. Oracle cards are designed exclusively for fortune telling purposes. The vast majority of oracle cards do not have any foundation in past traditions, they are a wholly unique construct in their own right. Most oracle card packs are nothing more than modern art packs with generic new age horse crap attached to them. Overall, the entire oracle card tradition is nothing more than the extreme commercialist/materialist nature of modern society colliding with the idea of cartomancy as a sellable product.

Terminologically, many cartomancers who study beyond a single pack will refer to unique decks as their own fortune telling "system", though this is a misnomer. The system is the methodology of extracting information from the cards. Technically, it is absolutely possible to use the system of one tradition with a pack from another- it would just require a lot of work to get started. For example, to use a lenormand pack in a tarot spread, you would need to research the original single-card meanings, and then reinterpret those meanings into the abstract. To use tarot cards for a German tradition reading, you would need to invent paired meanings for every possible combination of cards in the tarot pack; an onerous task indeed.

That said, there is something of value in the cards themselves which lend them inherently to the methods in which they are used. Simply because a system is theoretically interchangeable with any medium, doesn't mean every combination will be as effective. If one follows the original spiritual foundations of cartomancy- that the heavens communicate directly to all of us in literal ways by arbitrarily manipulating the incidental arrangement of materials- we can see that cartomancy is, at its roots, a form of indirect necromancy. Unlike traditional necromancy, In which the diviner is a vessel-like medium for a channeled spirit, cartomancers instead consult the spirits on their own terms, with the card pack acting as a surrogate host, or medium of possession.

Doesn't this just say it all though? Two 19th century white girls asking a brown girl to use magic to tell them who they'll marry.