From the Broom Closet IV: Cartomancy with Playing Cards

2 March 2026

The tarot's celebrity obscures a plainer historical fact: for most of the history of card reading, the cards were ordinary playing cards. The fifty-two card deck, which reached Europe from the Mamluk world in the late fourteenth century, is actually the tarot's elder; the trumps were added in fifteenth-century Italy to make a game. And when Europeans began systematically divining with cards in the eighteenth century, the instrument was the common deck: the Parisian print trade sold cartomancy instruction sheets for the piquet pack, and Etteilla, the first professional cartomancer we can name, published his manual for ordinary cards in 1770, turning to tarot only later in his career. Through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the household fortune-teller's instrument remained the deck already in the house, and in several living traditions it still is.

Systems of correspondence

The common folk system maps suits to domains: hearts to love and the emotional life, diamonds to money and material affairs, clubs to work and enterprise, spades to conflict and difficulty. The mapping shares ancestry with the tarot's minors, since cups, coins, batons, and swords are the same four suits in Italian dress, and the reader who knows one system can walk into the other across that bridge. Number symbolism does the rest of the work: aces as beginnings and gifts, tens as culminations, court cards as persons in the querent's life, with reds and blacks inflecting toward ease or friction. Regional systems elaborate differently. The Lenormand tradition, which grew out of a German parlor game published by Johann Kaspar Hechtel around 1800 and took its name from the celebrated Parisian fortune-teller Marie Anne Lenormand, reads cards in grammatical pairs rather than singly. The American conjure workers interviewed by Harry Hyatt read the deck with meanings of their own, braided into spiritual work.

The discreet virtue, and a practice note

For this series' purposes the playing card deck has one decisive advantage over the tarot: it is a game, and looks like one. A deck on the shelf declares nothing, travels anywhere, and can be read in a coffee shop as apparent solitaire, which returns us to the theme of the first installment: the oldest camouflage is the ordinary object. Practically, the advice of the older readers holds: fix one system of meanings and keep it, since the cards teach through consistency; read with written records as recommended in The Practice; and let the court cards accumulate identities from your actual acquaintance, which is how the folk readers used them. Those interested in the tarot's parallel journey from game to oracle, and its later career as a magical instrument, will find that history in Tarot as Talisman.