A Cultural History of Tarot: From Entertainment to Esotericism

How this book fits

Traditions: Tarot
Role in the tradition: Secondary source A study of the tradition from outside it: history, scholarship, anthropology or reference.
Public attention: Unmeasured No Wikidata entry could be matched to this book with confidence, so no attention label was assigned.

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In this study

A cultural history of tarot from its use as a card game in Renaissance Italy through French occultism, the Golden Dawn and modern divination.

The introduction (pp. 2–3) separates the early card game from the occult tarot. Farley traces the change to late-eighteenth-century France, where Egyptomania and new esoteric readings turned the deck into a divinatory and symbolic system.