To make a panoramic on various suppositions related to the origin of the Tarots, some believe, that their origin is antecedent to the Egyptian Culture and that it is connected to some group of people disappeared by now, o perhaps have been long forgotten, to a phantasmal or real Atlantis, other confirm that the Tarots were actually the instruments on which secret messages engraved, under the form of symbols and codes, which the Hermetic Orders zealously treated as a “private and personal knowledge” to be handed down to their disciples. The divinatory Korean arrow
The Korean deck Htou-Tjyen (composed of 80 cards) may derive from divinatory arrow.
They are rectangles of oil-paper decorated with plummed arrows.
The deck is composed of eight suits.
The cards of Fez, Morocco
A hypothesis of Paul Foster Case (The Tarots, a Key to the Wisdom of the Ages) affirms that the cards of tarots may be born in 1200, in Fez, Morocco. Here a group of scolars arriving from all around the world, united and in order to improve the communication and the diversity of languages they created a drawing book. Crusades
Other sources related to the introduction of playing Crusades cards.
Among many hypotheses, there are also some people who believe that the Tarots have nothing to do with enigmatic stuff nor with magical-esoterical one. They are only a game invented with a single purpose of entertaining people. One thing is certain, nevertheless, that none of these hypotheses, neither those which give magical-esoteric and initiated sense, nor those which consider the Tarots as simple instruments of game can be accepted as establishing theories, but we conclude, at this point, with a phrase of Eliphas Lévi, which comments on the value of the Tarots: Conclusions
Although many books have been written on this argument, still today, for almost five centuries since its first apparition historically documented, this game has always been representing the absolute mystery. All the anthropoligical theories, which concern the birth of the cartomancy as “phenomenon”, are to be considered exclusively as a hypothesis, therefore, we have not found yet the indisputable prooves which unequivocally outline the origine and the use of these instruments.
OTHER HYPOTHESES
Among various hypotheses on the origin of Tarots we also quote:
And this, may be, according to the scholar, the prototype of the Tarots Arcana, comprehensible to all. No proof has certificated this theory.
About this subject matter, we remember that the occultist, Oswald Wirth, in his great work on the world of Tarots, placed the birth of playing cards and Tarots in Bologna, by Francesco Fibbia Castracani (see picture).
This noble man lived at Felicini building, the place where the legend sets as the site in which Leonardo da Vinci painted the Gioconda.
Probably he tried, through this personage, to praise an origin related to the world of the Crusades and more occultedly to the knowledge of the Templars, of which Francesco Fibbia Castracani appears to have in possession secretly.
In this building a painting has an inscription where it read:
«Francesco Antelmitelli Castracani Fibbia, prince of Pisa, Monte Giori, and Pietrasanta, and lord of Fusecchio, son of Giovanni, descended from Castruccio Duke of Lucca, Pistoia, Pisa, fled to Bologna employed at Bentivoglij, was made Generalissimo of Bolognese army, and the first of this family which was called in Bologna Dalle Fibbie, had as a wife Francesca, daughter of Giovanni Bentivoglij. Inventor of a game of Tarots in Bologna since the fourteenth Riforming of the city had priviledge of placing the Fibbia arm in the Queen of Wands and his wife in the Queen of Pentacles. Born in 1360 dead in 1419».
This tradition is, however, contradicted to the history, which certifies the presence of a member of the family Fibbia Castracani in Bologna only in 1441, namely twenty-two years later the death of Francesco, contributing to confirm the hypothesis, that it has something to do with a fake projected only in the seventeenth century, the period of which the painting was made and created in order to add value to the house.
Only a game…
«It is a genuine philosophical machine which impedes the spirit to disspear, and help it find the initiative and liberty; it is the mathematics applied to the absolute, it is the alliance of an ideal positivity, it is a thinking combat all rigorously exactly like the numbers; it is perhaps, at the end, as much as the human genius can apprehend the simplest and at the same time the greattest».
(Eliphas Lévi, Dogma of the High Magic)
The researchers on the literature of the Middle Ages until the end of the fourteenth century have not given any light to any books which refer to a tarot. The troubadours, the novelists, the moralists who have described the daily life in the castles, the middle-class houses and the pothouses; the preachers who, from pulpit, struggle against the vices, condemn different games, but have never mentioned the tarot.
