|
Fortunetelling is truly a timeless art. In all ages of history, and in all parts of the world, people have wished to know what the future would hold, and have devised countless ways to determine this. One of the most common methods is to use an element of chance to evaluate a subject's luck. Since chance plays a part in many games, simple fortunetelling methods are often near at hand. The dice we use today evolved from a game originally played with knuckle-bones. Both dice and sheep's knucles are still used for fortuntelling today. By far the best-known use of a game of chance for fortunetelling is the reading of Tarot cards. Tarot is simply the anscestor of the playing card deck we have today. Originally, Tarot decks were hand-painted, requiring an enormous amount of work from an artisan and his apprentices, and would have been affordable only by nobles and the wealthiest of merchants. This is exactly the sort of people who originally commisioned the oldest Tarot decks we know of: noble families such as the Visconti, Medici, and other princely houses of Renaissance Italy. The invention of the printing press allowed playing cards to be mass-produced, however, and soon even Gypsies could afford them. To understand why playing cards were thought to be able to predict the future, one has to know a bit about how people of the age saw their world. |
 |
Home | |