However, I have recently discovered a suggestion that magick was being practiced with Tarot cards as early as the 16th century, barely 100 years after the creation of the deck.

The evidence comes from the book, Witchcraft and Inquisition in Venice, 1550-1650,³ by Ruth Martin. As the title suggests, the book explores the beliefs and practices of Venetian witches in relation to the response of the Venetian authorities, particularly the Inquisition. The records of the Inquisition provide a wealth of information regarding both what people believed and did, as witches,⁴ as well as what others believed about them.

On page 162, Martin writes (here detailing more serious examples of devil worship, which involves both conjurings of a demon, as well as literal sacrilege, mocking portions of the sacraments):

Another episode in 1589, is also revealing, in that a certain Angela had told her client that ‘...you need to adore the devil [or The Devil?] if you want to get help’ and had suggested getting hold of a tarot card. Although Angela was not in the event traced by the tribunal, every effort was made to find her, indicating the utmost gravity with which the tribunal viewed the actual worship of the Devil, as opposed to mere invocation.—7 Oct. 1589—Sant’ Uffizio, ASV Records of the Inquisition in Venice, from a denunciation.

Another quote from Martin's book, this from the same 16th-century source as above, a record of the Inquisition in Venice, indicates a similar "magick" usage of Tarot:

(She had)...a light (cesendello)⁵ which burned continuously in the kitchen in front of a devil and the tarots.—14 Jan. 1589

So, at the least what these testimonies affirm is that people included references to Tarot in their accusations against others for conjurings or worship of demonic forces. That suggests that, in the minds of the accusers, Tarot cards were an obvious accompaniment to such activities and would likely be thought so by the Inquisition. More than this, if these denunciation records are legitimate accusations, pointing to real acts, this makes a case that in the late 16th century in Venice people were using Tarot cards for doing magick.

Now, why is that important?

Well, it is interesting in that it links to a chain of occurrences, some known, some speculative, that point to Venice as a center of the development of what may be called cartoculture, the varied usages (and beliefs concerning these) that people make of decks of playing cards. There are three particular links in this chain I would like to put forward for consideration:

1. Here I will quote from Dummett's The Game of Tarot:⁶

The overwhelming probability, then, is that, in about 1370-75, playing cards came to Europe, very likely through Venice, from Mamluk Egypt, where they had been known for some time.

2. Again, a quote from Dummett's The Game of Tarot:

A genuine exception to the rule that fortune-telling with ordinary playing cards is unknown in Europe before the eighteenth century is provided by a book by Francesco Marcolino da Forli, entitled Giardino di pensieri and published in Venice in 1540. This book is indeed intended solely to provide a means of foretelling the future by the use of playing cards.

Dummett concludes about this book, however:

This light-hearted diversion has nothing to do with the occult, and it is impossible to imagine anyone taking it seriously as an oracle.

3. Here, I reference the above quotes already provided from Ruth Martin's book, which again are from the records from the Inquisition in Venice, 1589. By this time, forty-nine years after Marcolino's book was published, the Church in Venice had gone beyond complaining about the abuses of the cards by the upper (gambling) classes, beyond concern that people might be using playing cards for doing "lighthearted" fortune-telling, and was now focusing the attention of the Inquisition upon the magickal application of Tarot by witches in the community. Playing cards had gone from gaming to conjuring in Venice in less than two centuries (and probably in a lot less time than that). And because magick seems to often go hand in hand with divination, indeed as Ruth Martin points out, sometimes the ritual difference between conjurations and divinations were not all that apparent, this hints at the possibility that Tarot cards were being used in Venice in 1589 for divination (and not just the lighthearted variety).

There is something else which I think is interesting here, and which I've not explored yet but which I hope to examine in the future. This has to do with a curious coincidence, which is that the development of alternative applications of playing cards and Tarot in Venice seems to coincide with the arrival in Venice of Jews, and the development of a Jewish community (eventually the Jewish Ghetto). The question, it seems to me, should be asked: did Jews invent or help contribute to the invention of cartomancy? Or, was this a transcultural development, a cartocultural extension of an already existing tradition of magick and divination in various subcultures?

It seems to me as well that attention should now be focused on the 16th century (and perhaps earlier) in answering questions concerning the origin of alternative uses of playing cards and Tarot. The 18th century, while obviously still the temporal focus for the beginning of our modern, occult, versions of Tarot, must now be seen as an inheritor of an already long-established tradition of Tarot magick (which most likely includes Tarot divination).

Of course, for many people the "news" that apparently people were using Tarot cards for magick from very early on in the history of the cards is not going to be particularly earth-shattering. Sometimes the demands of history, as a science, take away from the demands of common sense. Negative evidence can be overplayed, that is, the lack of evidence for an activity should not necessarily be thought to be positive evidence of an absence of the activity. Nevertheless, history, as science, demands more than feelings or even common sense to support a theory. And this "new find" (which is of course eleven years old), at least in the context of Tarot, is very interesting and I hope will encourage other researchers to dig deeper along these same lines.

J. Karlin

June 5, 2000