Card Fortune Telling, a Lucid Treatise Dealing with All the Popular and More Abstruse Methods
Cód:
491_9781443771023
IT is a very popular belief that cards were invented in order to amuse King Charles V1 of France, at a time when that monarch was mentally unstable. This legend, however, like so many pretty stories of the past, has no foundation in fact, as cards were known long before the mad monarchs days. It is true that a court miniature painter, named Gringonneur, did paint or originate some cards which he introduced to the Icing, but cards were first used in the East in very ancient days, and it is a curious fact that the other great world-popular indoor game, Chess, also originated in the East, and is still played to-day by means of a pack of cards. It also seems obvious that cards reached the West in the same way and by the same route as Chess, probably through the gipsies, that strange, unconquerable Eastern race of wanderers, whose actual origin still baffles our researches. Naturally a race of people with no settled home or nationality would find much difficulty in moving their personal belongings from place to place, and would appreciate any amusement that could be reduced to the form of a pack of cards.Chess was the great Eastern game, and is in many ways characteristic of a people to whom Time was of no importance. Cards may have been a game originally, but as known by the gipsies they were only used for the purposes of Divination, or Fortune Telling, and right up to the present day they still form the most popular and widespread means of testing the fortune. Known as Tarocchi, or Tarots, the Divination cards numbered seventy-eight, and were without numbers--or pips, as we call them-which were introduced in Europe for the sake of simplicity, in the fourteenth century. Such packs are still in use in parts of the Continent, but the Western pack has gradually taken its place, both for the purpose of Divination and for playing games-in fact, it is usual to speak of a pack of Playing cards, a distinction that is hardly necessary nowadays, as it is not easy to obtain a pac
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