Fortune Telling by Playing Cards - Containing Information on Card Reading, Divination, the Tarot and Other Aspects of Fortune Telling

FORTUNE-TELLING BY PLAYING-CARDS

IT is safe to affirm that no pastime in the history of the world has exercised such a deep fascination over the mind of man as card-playing. From their obscure and far-off beginning in the mysterious East—home of so many of the world’s most significant inventions, throughout the centuries to modern times, when the use of playing-cards is universal—mankind has found an unfailing and irresistible allure in the manifold hazards and combinations that are possible in cards.

Contrary to what might have been expected, however, cards were not generally known in Europe until a comparatively late period. There is an old legend that Odette de Champdivers, the mistress of Charles VI, the mad king of France, was responsible for introducing them into the French court in the course of her efforts to find a means of distracting her royal lover during his recurring fits of insanity.

It is said that Charles soon fell under the fascination of gambling and started a fashion which spread throughout France and the rest of Europe. It is certain, at least, that a painter, Jacquemin Gringonneur, was commissioned in 1392 to make three packs for the king’s own use.

The manufacture of playing-cards was among the earliest uses to which the woodcut was adapted, while some of the foremost painters of the Renaissance—including, it is said, the great Mantegna himself—considered it no indignity to their art to apply it to the designing of cards.

In place of the suits that are usual to-day, the earliest European cards bore hearts, bells, acorns and leaves. Later packs, like the tarot (afterwards to be described), were marked with cups, deniers (or money), staves and swords; while the modern devices of hearts, diamonds, clubs and spades did not appear until the sixteenth century.

Concerning the rational basis of cartomancy, as the art of divination by cards is known, we shall content ourselves here with suggesting that in some way, which is a complete mystery even to advanced students of occult science, the vast psychic power that fills all space and time exerts a magnetic influence upon the nervous system and the fingers of the person who shuffles, cuts, chooses or arranges the cards (who thus becomes essentially a medium), and so opens wide—in all its marvellous clarity and significance for those who have eyes to read—the Book of Life and Fate.

For the benefit of sceptics we would say that cartomancy, like phrenology and palmistry, is claimed to be an empirical science; that is to say, its revelations are based upon the portents and consequences that, throughout the ages, have been observed to accompany or follow the fall of the individual cards and their various groupings.

Perhaps the two most celebrated card-diviners of recent times were Etteilla and Mlle. Lenormand. The former, who is often called the father of cartomancy (a title which might have some justification if card-divining were not an art which flourished centuries before his time), was a barber and wigmaker in Paris, whose real name was Alliette—Etteilla is Alliette read backwards, in cabbalistic fashion. This remarkable man devoted thirty years to a profound study of cards, and especially of the tarot in all its subtleties, and his methods of divination gave rise to an enormous popularity of the science towards the end of the eighteenth century.

Mlle. Lenormand displayed great intuitive power in her readings, and some remarkable anecdotes are related of her predictions. On one occasion, in January, 1804, Bernadotte, one of the great Napoleon’s generals, and his aide-de-camp repaired under the guise of business men to the house of Mlle. Lenormand, where Bernadotte begged to be told of the outcome of some supposed commercial ventures. Mlle. Lenormand, on consulting the cards, promptly remarked, You are no merchant, but an officer of high rank. This the general strenuously denied, but the sibyl, again scrutinizing the cards, once more affirmed, You are not only of high rank, but you are, or will be, related to him who will be emperor.

Continuing to read the fateful cards one by one, she went on, Yes, he will become emperor of France . . . see how his star is in the ascendant! And you . . . you, too, will be a king! History tells us that Napoleon became emperor at the end of 1804, while in 1818 Bernadotte himself was crowned king of Sweden and Norway as Charles XIV.

It should be assiduously born in mind that cartomancy is governed by the same esoteric influences as other