page_title: Tarot card reading
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Tarot card reading / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Antoine Court de Gébelin Русский: Антуан Кур де Жебелен
context_page_description: Tarot card reading is the practice of using tarot cards to gain insight into the past, present or future by formulating a question, then drawing and interpreting cards. Reading tarot cards is a type of cartomancy.
context_section_description: One of the earliest reference to tarot triumphs, and probably the first reference to tarot as the devil's picture book, is given c. 1450–1470 by a Dominican preacher in a fiery sermon against the evils of the devil's instrument. References to the tarot as a social plague continue throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, but there are no indications that the cards were used for anything but games anywhere other than in Bologna. As philosopher and tarot historian Michael Dummett noted, "...it was only in the 1780s, when the practice of fortune-telling with regular playing cards had been well established for at least two decades, that anyone began to use the tarot pack for cartomancy."
  The belief in the divinatory meaning of the cards is closely associated with a belief in their occult properties: a commonly held belief in the 18th century propagated by prominent Protestant clerics and freemasons. One of them was Court de Gébelin (see below). 
  From its humble uptake as an instrument of prophecy in France, the tarot went on to become a thing of hermeneutic, magical, mystical, semiotic, and even psychological properties. It was used by Romani people when telling fortunes, as a Jungian psychological apparatus capable of tapping into "absolute knowledge in the unconscious", a tool for archetypal analysis, and even a tool for facilitating the Jungian process of Individuation.
caption: Antoine Court de Gébelin
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