Cartomancy and Occultism

[devin]

Just to complicate matters further, we now have a guy arrested circa 1797 for handing out flyers advertising the services of an Italian doing readings in the style of the Egyptians as learned from Pinetti the magician.

 

I need a lie-down.

 

From the ever illuminating Trad. Tarot: https://traditionaltarot.wordpress.com/2022/02/07/cartomancy-revolution-and-the-law/

Edited February 8, 2022 by devin

[Scandinavianhermit]

Well, Lenthall cards existed already in the 1690s: https://www.wopc.co.uk/uk/margary/lenthall

 

At that point, at least, card decks had taken the step from being used to randomly select quotations from Lot Books to a cartomancy using spreads. When lot books are used, the method to pick your quotation from the book is subservient to the book, but as soon as spreads are used, we are talking about the sort of cartomancy we a familiar with today.

[Scandinavianhermit]

Casanova's mistress Zaira used a cartomancy spread in the 1750s or 1760s, a few decades before Etteilla wrote his book about the piquet deck, and even longer before Etteilla began to write about tarot. This is of course 60-70 years after the first Lenthall deck, and it is contemporary with the hand-written source about tarot divination in 1750s Bologna.

 

As a populariser, particularly in France, Etteilla was important, however, and that beyond his own intentions. One year before Etteilla's death, someone began to sell a piquet-deck following a system of cartomancy separate both from Etteilla's piquet-reading method and from the lenormandisation that would later occur with Spiel der Hoffnung. This third piquet-reading system is called Livre du Destin. Etteilla wasn't the only game in town, as it were.