You may have seen this on Boing-Boing, but that’s not where I found it (we have a ‘naughty’ links site to thank for that, so I can’t show you) — nor does the Boing-Boing cool factor alone warrant it’s appearing here.
Called Boris Kobe’s Tarot Cards*, these cards date from 1945, when Kobe, a Slovenian architect and painter, was a political prisoner at the Allach concentration camp, a sub-camp of Dachau.
However these are not the cards we think of when we think of tarot cards. Mainly we think of tarot cards as those fortune telling cards, cards for divination; but tarot is a family of games played with decks with a fifth “suit” serving as permanent trumps. These decks consisted of a regular 56-card deck, augmented with a hierarchy of 22 allegorical trump cards. This created the standard 78-card Tarot deck, originally referred to as carte da trionfi, cards with trumps. Each trump triumphed over (trumped) the lower-ranking trumps in the manner of the popular trionfi motif, which also appeared in literature, religion, etc.
This makes more sense of Kobe’s cards, really. For while it’s easy to imagine the prisoners in concentration camps wishing to know their futures (or, because of the fear of a lack of a future, the outcomes of the war, their families etc.) it makes more sense that games to pass the time would be desired even more so. (How many times can you ask the questions you fear the answers to, let alone interpret the meaning of the cards?)
Tarot is the name also given to the decks themselves. However, it seems Kobe’s are would most likely have been called Tarock or Tarokk cards, the names in German, Austrian, Hungarian, Slovenian etc. (And as Tarocchi in Italian, the plural form of Tarocco.)
Tarot/Tarock games are commonly played in many areas of Europe. It has been played in Italy since the 1440s and while there has been a revival of interest in these card games among the Medieval and Renaissance re-enactment crowd, in English-speaking countries fortune-telling is currently the most common use of Tarot cards — even though such use did not begin until roughly 350 years after their invention.
Beginning around 1750, a modernized Tarot deck was popular. The French suits of Spades, Clubs, Hearts and Diamonds replaced the older Italian ones, and around 1780 the trumps started to appear double-headed.
The traditional Medieval theme or allegory was replaced with a decorative series of thematically-related but essentially arbitrary images — this was made possible by putting large numerals on these trump cards for identification, making the game much easier to learn and much more popular.
The themes of these decks might include almost anything: animals, pastoral scenes, military triumphs, illustrated proverbs, even advertising.
In Part Two I’ll discuss the transformation from the more traditional card games to fortune-telling.
Meanwhile, for more on the history of the cards as well as the etymology of the name, see here. And you can see more examples of tarot/tarock cards here.
* Note: Between the writing of and the publication of this piece the museum has updated their notes to reflect the matter of these being Tarock cards.
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