Fortune-Telling by Cards — The Conjure Compass Institute

Chapter I — OriginsThe claim, and the record1

The Eastern origin · The Romany folk · Suits and signs

1The actual and authentic history of playing cards only goes back about five hundred years […] It is an established fact that in past ages many eastern peoples, notably those of India, China, and Chaldea, possessed cards which differed materially both in use and design from those known in the West at a later date.¹

2It is thought by many that we owe our cards to the gipsies, who are supposed to have been the offspring of a low caste of Hindus […] years of persecution only deepened their craftiness, sharpened their intuition, and rendered them more keen to assert their mysterious power over those who oppressed and yet inwardly feared them.²

3These Romany folk have preserved intact the ancient lore of the East, while incredulous Europe has turned the sacred pages of divination from the book of fate into mere instruments of amusement […] The gipsy remains a past master in the art of Cartomancy.³

4A writer of the latter part of the fifteenth century says that cards were first known at Viterbo in 1379, and that they had been introduced by the Saracens […] It is certain that at first cards were called by the name naibi; and the Hebrew and Arabic words, Nabi, naba, nabaa, signify "to foretell." It is also widely believed that the idea of playing games with cards was an after-thought, and that their original purpose was for the practice of divination.⁴

5The earliest cards were the Tarots […] it is supposed that some one had the bright idea of adding the numeral to the symbolical cards, so as to play games with them.⁵

6The original quartette were: — Cups, supposed to be emblematical of Faith; Money, representing Charity; Swords, figuring Justice; and Clubs, typical of Fortitude. These signs are still retained in the Tarots, and in Italian and Spanish cards.⁶

7We would urge those of a morbid and unhealthy turn of mind to beware of letting this practice take too strong a hold upon them […] no sane person would take a pack of cards as the rule and guide of life, the final court of appeal in any matters of moment.⁷

8Any one with the slightest knowledge of occultism is aware that sympathy with the inquirer or subject is essential […] it may also — in all seriousness I say it — inspire hope in the place of despair, assuage sorrow, and send the inquirer away comforted; surely no insignificant result.⁸

1§1 · "About five hundred years"

This much he has right, and it is the one dating in the chapter that holds. Playing cards appear in European records in a sudden cluster in the 1370s — Florence, Basel, Paris, Barcelona — with no earlier mentions, which is the signature of an import rather than a local invention.Record

2§2 · The Romani theory

Chronologically it does not work. Cards are documented across Western Europe from the 1370s; Romani communities are documented in Western Europe from the early 1400s. The cards arrived first.Record

Set the dating aside and what remains is a slur wearing the costume of a theory — "low caste," "craftiness," a people defined by persecution having sharpened them. Foli means it admiringly, which is precisely how this kind of writing did its damage. Romani people were the objects of these fantasies, not their authors, and they paid for them in law and in blood across the same centuries.Ethics

Why does European occultism so consistently locate its authority in a people it was simultaneously prosecuting?Open Question

3§3 · "Preserved intact"

The vanishing-tradition move: an outside group is credited with holding an unbroken ancient wisdom, which conveniently cannot be checked and which the writer then transmits on their behalf. It flatters both parties and documents neither.Method

4§4 · Saracens and naibi

Here he is closer than he knows. The likeliest route into Europe is the Mamluk deck of Egypt and Syria — a surviving example in the Topkapı Palace has four suits of cups, coins, swords and polo-sticks, with court ranks but no queens. That maps directly onto the earliest Italian and Spanish suits.Record

His etymology is folk etymology. Italian naibi is far more plausibly from Arabic nā'ib, "deputy" or "viceroy" — a Mamluk court-card rank. Foli reaches instead for Hebrew nabi, "to foretell," because it delivers the conclusion he wants: that cards were for divining before they were for playing.Language

He had the true route in front of him — Saracens, Spain, naibi — and walked past it. What made the mystical derivation more attractive than the documented one?Open Question

5§5 · "The earliest cards were the Tarots"

Inverted. Ordinary four-suit packs come first, in the 1370s. The tarot is a later Italian addition to them: a fifth suit of trumps, the trionfi, documented in Milan, Ferrara and Bologna from the 1440s, invented to play a trick-taking game in which those trumps beat the other suits.Record

The trumps were not added to a divination deck to make it playable. They were added to a playing deck to make a better game.Record

6§6 · Suits as virtues

Cups, coins, swords, batons are genuinely the old Latin suits and survive in Italian and Spanish packs. The assignment of Faith, Charity, Justice and Fortitude to them is a later interpretive overlay, not a design intention recoverable from the earliest decks.Context

Note that the four he lists are three theological-and-cardinal virtues plus one — a tidy scheme that would be tidier still with Hope or Prudence. Neatness is not evidence.Observation

7§7 · The caution

Worth marking, because it is unusual for the genre and it is good advice. The book that is about to give you a hundred and four card meanings tells you plainly not to make them the rule and guide of your life.Observation

8§8 · "Send the inquirer away comforted"

The book's actual thesis, stated once and then dropped. The value claimed is not accuracy but consolation — and the mechanism named is sympathy between reader and inquirer, which is a description of counselling rather than of divination.Observation

If the stated good is comfort, what obligations follow for the reader who delivers the nine of spades?Open Question

◇ The chronology, laid side by side

Foli's sequenceAncient Eastern divination decks → Book of Thoth → Romani carriers → Europe → games invented as an afterthought → the modern pack as a degraded remnant. The documented sequenceMamluk four-suit gaming packs, 14th c. → Europe, 1370s → Italian trumps added for a game, 1440s → cards used for divination in a systematic, published way from the later 1700s.

Both stories are about legitimacy. His makes the practice ancient and therefore serious. Does a practice need to be old to be worth doing — and if the answer is no, what is lost by saying so plainly?

Threads to follow

Mademoiselle Lenormand — named in §7 of his chapter; Marie Anne Adelaide Lenormand, 1772–1843, the Revolution-era Paris cartomancer whose posthumous brand became a whole deck. Viterbo 1379 — a real and frequently cited notice, though the manuscript's reliability is argued over. "The Devil's books" — the preachers' name for the pack, and evidence that the objection was to gambling long before it was to divining.

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