Sepharial's Book of Card Fortune Telling [antikvár]

chapter 1a brief history of the pack of cardsIt is a popular belief that cards were invented in order to amuse King Charles VI of France, at a time when that monarch was mentally unstable. This legend, however, like so many stories of the past, has no foundation in fact, as cards were known long before the mad monarch's days.It is true that a court miniature painter, named Gringon-neur, did paint or originate some cards which he introduced to the King, but cards were first used in the East in ancient days and it is a curious fact that the other great world-popular indoor game, chess, also originated in the East and is still played today by means of a pack of cards.It is also probable that cards reached the West in the same way and by the same route as chess, probably through the gipsies, that unconquerable Eastern race of wanderers, whose actual origin still baffles our researches.Naturally, a race of people with no settled home or nationality would find much difficulty in moving their personal belongings from place to place and would appreciate any amusement that could be reduced in bulk to the form of a pack of cards.Cards may have been a game originally, but as known by the gipsies they were used for the purposes of divination, or fortune telling, and up to the present day they still form a popular and widespread means of testing the fortune.Known as Tarocchi, or Tarots, the divination cards numbered seventy-eight and were without numbersor