In Jorge Luis Borges’s 1923 poem “El truco”, the name of an Argentine trick card game with origins dating back to fifteenth-century Valencia, we learn that these forty cards can be considered a stand-in for life as “decorated cardboard talismans.” Through these cards, the players not only lose track of time but also travel within it, replaying and repeating hands of players past. Borges’s poem aims to re-enchant the commonplace card deck with a “homemade mythology” that gives life, personality, and hidden meaning to cards—especially the two strongest, the ace of swords and seven of coins, which he connects with a wise medieval figure and the feeling of hope.
The way Borges describes these cards as representing emotions or personalities is similar to older uses of cards developed centuries past as not only chance-games but vehicles for allegorical lessons. Furthermore, the personalization of decks today mirrors their original status symbol as elaborate painted pocket-pieces of art.
What can cards teach us? How can we connect pastimes with prophecies and hidden reminders? How is the variety of decks today reminiscent of their earlier function in society? Let’s briefly trace the history of playing cards, tarot, and lotería to fully appreciate the power that, to borrow once again from Borges, “decorated cardboard” can have on our emotions. In so doing, we can gain a greater appreciation for the networks of cultural exchange of cards throughout the Mediterranean, both sides of the English Channel, and across the Atlantic.
Playing Cards
16th-century Mamluk playing cards (kanjifah) – image by Countakeshi / Wikimedia Commons
While playing cards in general were most likely developed in the ninth-century Tang dynasty in modern-day China, the earliest surviving playing cards are from the Mamluk Empire—today’s Egypt and Levant. There are a few fragments from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and a nearly complete set from the fifteenth century that was discovered in the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul just a few years after Borges first published his poem in 1939. These cards have four suits: polo-sticks, coins, swords, and cups, each with ten pip cards and three court cards, totaling 52 cards. By the fourteenth century, playing cards were produced in European kingdoms based on the Mamluk deck, which likely entered Europe via what is now Spain and Italy.
We may be most familiar with the French-suited playing cards that, despite keeping the ranks ace through 10, altered these original suits to the now quickly recognized clubs, diamonds, hearts, and spades. This deck, even with its regional patterns, is the most widespread—especially in the English-speaking world. Their three court cards further deviate from the original Mamluk set with the inclusion of a queen. By the eighteenth century, this style, particularly the one most popular in Paris, used historical or mythical figures as portraits for each of the court cards—like Charlemagne as the king of hearts and Lancelot as the jack of clubs. We’ll see this idea again with tarot.
That said, the Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese playing cards—as well as tarot, which we will see soon—all kept the relatively same suits as the Mamluk cards: batons or clubs, coins, swords, and cups. The main differences were that the Iberian and Italian decks only had nine pip cards—ace through 9—and, like the Mamluk set, had three court cards for each suit. These decks now totaled 48 cards, which made production simpler as they could all better fit on two uncut sheets.
While all three have the same suit styles as the earlier Mamluk style, the differences among them are subtle. For example, in the Spanish and Portuguese sets, the swords are straight and the clubs are knobby, whereas the Italian swords curved and the clubs were more like ceremonial batons. In the Italian decks, both the batons and swords suit pips were designed with those items intersecting with each other, whereas the Spanish ones did not, though the Portuguese sets often did.
These card styles—and their various regionally specific patterns—continued to travel not only throughout Europe, but the Spanish decks in particular became popular in Latin America as early as the sixteenth century. The court cards led to unique cultural expression, especially with contemporary decks, with the differences ranging from subtle clothing changes to complete re-imaginings of these figures as popular celebrities or folkloric representations—similar to what we saw with the French-suited court cards—all with the same four suits.
Early Tarot and Occult Interests
Anyone familiar with tarot will recognize those same four suits—the wands, coins or pentacles, cups, and swords—as the foundation for the 56 pip and court cards making up the “minor arcana,” as it would later be called. This time, we have an ace through 10 for each suit and four court cards, including a queen, which was missing in the Iberian and Italian decks. What we also have is the introduction of 21 trump cards and a “fool” card, which would become part of what would later be called the “major arcana.” These trump or triumph cards contained allegorical illustrations and surfaced all over Italy in the fifteenth century. Together, those 78 cards became the foundation of tarot.
The moon card from the Visconti Sforza tarot deck, dating to the 15th century – Wikimedia Commons
The oldest extant tarot cards are the Visconti-Sforza, which consist of roughly 15 nearly complete decks painted in the fifteenth century for the Duchy of Milan. Their pip cards echo the Mamluk-style cards, and by extension the Iberian and Italian playing cards, in their appearance. The court cards in particular offer a window into the nobility of Milan, as they likely served as portraits of aristocracy. These cards were painted by hand, and as such, owning them was also a luxury that indicated status, implying the available leisure to not only use the cards in play but to observe and appreciate their every detail.
Another extant fifteenth-century Italian tarot deck is the Sola Busca, which, while containing four suits, a fool, and the 21 trumps, visually deviates from the standard tarot deck. This deck survives in its entirety, making it the oldest complete tarot deck to date. The Sola Busca depicts literary and historical figures, many of which are tied to the Roman Empire as well as Alexander the Great as the king of swords. It is also the first to illustrate the pip cards and coincidentally led some scholars to conclude that the artist Pamela Colman Smith of the twentieth-century RWS Tarot deck was inspired by this early set of cards. Consider, for instance, the Three of Swords and their visual similarities in both decks.
Card from the Sola Busca tarot deck, created in Italy during the late 15th century – Wikimedia Commons
As time went on, more and more styles developed for these decks. Recall, too, that they were used both for card games and to portray lessons and serve as windows into the culture of the area. Stemming from the Italian-suited cards in Milan came the Tarot of Marseille deck, which was very popular in France, especially later on in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. You’ll notice that, like the Italian-suited playing cards, the wands here are ceremonial batons and the swords are curved. Where things change slightly is in the names given to the trump cards, but for the most part, they have equivalencies with those of the Italian-style tarot decks—excluding, of course, the Sola Busca.
Manière de se récréer avec le jeu de cartes nommées tarot
It was eighteenth-century France that saw both a renewed interest in tarot decks—especially the Tarot of Marseille style—being used for trick games, as well as their more occult use in cartomancy or divination. Among others, a famed French occultist of this time period was Etteilla (1738–1791). Jean-Baptiste Alliette, who used the pseudonym Etteilla derived from the reversal of his last name, published a foundational reference work for tarot cartomancy in the late eighteenth century: Manière de se récréer avec le jeu de cartes nommées tarot (Way To Recreate Yourself With the Deck of Cards Called Tarot). This work linked tarot with astrology, the four elements, the four humors, and its presumed ancient Egyptian origins. Each card was dissected and given interpretive meanings in both their regular and reversed positions. He even published his own tarot deck and founded a school for the study of magic in Paris.
Lotería
While there are many more occultists we could discuss from the nineteenth century, instead let’s cross the Atlantic once more to Mexico. We saw above how Spanish-style cards were brought into New Spain as early as the sixteenth century. Another game they brought was Lotería, a game that, like tarot, has its origins in fifteenth-century Italy. Like the early luxurious tarot decks, the game began as a pastime for the wealthy and soon transformed into something that anyone could access thanks to the traveling fairs. Many of the cards in this deck mirror those of the trump cards or “major arcana” in tarot, like the Death card with La Muerte or the Star and Moon cards with La Estrella and La Luna. While not its traditional use, these cards can also be used in cartomancy.
A standardized version of Lotería was published in 1887 in Mexico by a French immigrant and businessman, Don Clemente Jacques, under his “Gallo” brand name. That instantly recognizable rooster echoed back to his native France, further showcasing the complex cultural networks of any set of cards. Through his food and canning factory, he began distributing the standardized card game to soldiers along with their rations. To this day, his legacy lies in the beloved Lotería, or “Mexican Bingo.”
Home-made Lotería boards (Spanish: “Tablas de Lotería”). Lotería is a traditional Mexican game of chance. Image by Alex Covarrubias / Wikimedia Commons
His version, which set the standard for future variations, featured a standard 54-card deck and various “tablas,” or boards, containing 16 of the 54 cards in a 4×4 grid. One person, the cantor, would then call out each card, sometimes stating the name of the card and other times using a phrase or riddle. Whoever completes the pre-determined pattern on their board first shouts “lotería!” and wins.
Curiously, in 1923, the same year Borges’s “El truco” was published, Don Clemente Jacques also created a standardized Mexican version of the Spanish playing cards through his “Gallo” brand, where one key difference was that the knave among the court cards was now exclusively female. Just a few years later, in the 1930s, the Catholic Church created a liturgical Lotería meant to teach about sacred objects. This more educational and allegorical use can tie back to the philosophical meanings of the trump cards as virtues and life lessons in Europe.
Esoteric Tarot
Let’s return across the Atlantic, but this time to London in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with the secret society, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Here, members studied esoteric philosophy for enlightenment through the four elements, astrology, tarot, geomancy, alchemy, Hermetic Qabalah, and more. Like Etteilla before this, it is the intersection of these many practices and philosophies that added further richness to the possible hidden messages and newfound usages of the cards. While the order did not last long—with it being founded in 1887 and dissolved in 1903—it did serve as the base training for creators of two of the most common styles of tarot decks for divination: the Rider–Waite–Smith Tarot (1909) and Thoth Tarot (1944).
A modern reproduction of the Tarot de Marseilles created in 1760 by Nicolas Conver.- British Museum 1904,0511.47.1-78 / Wikimedia Commons
Those two decks, along with the Tarot of Marseille, are the three most popular styles that continue to inspire numerous specialized decks to this day. Both the Tarot of Marseille and the Thoth Tarot maintain suit-specific pip cards that are not illustrated with characters and mirror the Italian-style playing cards—with some exceptions in the Thoth deck, drawing likely inspiration from both the Italian and Spanish styles, as while some swords are curved and most wands are ceremonial batons, some batons appear more knob-like and some swords are straight. On the other hand, the RWS combines the illustrated nature of the Sola Busca Tarot in both its pip and trump cards, tied to the Spanish-style playing cards, as the wands are knobby and all the swords are straight. All three styles can be used for divination and deeper esoteric personal development when paired with occult teachings.
Each new deck and usage brings with it culture, identity, and personality. Whether these “cardboard talismans” were used to trick one’s opponents in a game or as tools to converse with our inner selves, each card style and artistic flair tells its own story. Be they the regional characteristics of past decks or the modern novelty decks inspired by celebrities, generational quirks, or cats, they all offer us a meditation on our self “re-creation,” to borrow from Etteilla’s famed title. While different in form and function, these cards—whether used in truco, tarot, or lotería—share a common history. Together, they speak to one of Borges’s repeated themes: the cyclicality of time and the diversity in unity. His poem may have been about truco, but just as the poem itself evokes medieval Iberian figures, so too can the cards speak to neighboring traditions of tarot, lotería, or other games and the ability to read into the cards more than just a clever hand.
Veronica Menaldi is an independent scholar and vice president of the Societas Magica. Previously she served as an assistant professor at the University of Mississippi. She is the author of Love Magic and Control in Premodern Iberian Literature. You can visit Veronica’s YouTube Channel or follow her on Instagram or TikTok.
By Veronica Menaldi
In Jorge Luis Borges’s 1923 poem “El truco”, the name of an Argentine trick card game with origins dating back to fifteenth-century Valencia, we learn that these forty cards can be considered a stand-in for life as “decorated cardboard talismans.” Through these cards, the players not only lose track of time but also travel within it, replaying and repeating hands of players past. Borges’s poem aims to re-enchant the commonplace card deck with a “homemade mythology” that gives life, personality, and hidden meaning to cards—especially the two strongest, the ace of swords and seven of coins, which he connects with a wise medieval figure and the feeling of hope.
The way Borges describes these cards as representing emotions or personalities is similar to older uses of cards developed centuries past as not only chance-games but vehicles for allegorical lessons. Furthermore, the personalization of decks today mirrors their original status symbol as elaborate painted pocket-pieces of art.
What can cards teach us? How can we connect pastimes with prophecies and hidden reminders? How is the variety of decks today reminiscent of their earlier function in society? Let’s briefly trace the history of playing cards, tarot, and lotería to fully appreciate the power that, to borrow once again from Borges, “decorated cardboard” can have on our emotions. In so doing, we can gain a greater appreciation for the networks of cultural exchange of cards throughout the Mediterranean, both sides of the English Channel, and across the Atlantic.
Playing Cards
While playing cards in general were most likely developed in the ninth-century Tang dynasty in modern-day China, the earliest surviving playing cards are from the Mamluk Empire—today’s Egypt and Levant. There are a few fragments from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and a nearly complete set from the fifteenth century that was discovered in the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul just a few years after Borges first published his poem in 1939. These cards have four suits: polo-sticks, coins, swords, and cups, each with ten pip cards and three court cards, totaling 52 cards. By the fourteenth century, playing cards were produced in European kingdoms based on the Mamluk deck, which likely entered Europe via what is now Spain and Italy.
We may be most familiar with the French-suited playing cards that, despite keeping the ranks ace through 10, altered these original suits to the now quickly recognized clubs, diamonds, hearts, and spades. This deck, even with its regional patterns, is the most widespread—especially in the English-speaking world. Their three court cards further deviate from the original Mamluk set with the inclusion of a queen. By the eighteenth century, this style, particularly the one most popular in Paris, used historical or mythical figures as portraits for each of the court cards—like Charlemagne as the king of hearts and Lancelot as the jack of clubs. We’ll see this idea again with tarot.
That said, the Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese playing cards—as well as tarot, which we will see soon—all kept the relatively same suits as the Mamluk cards: batons or clubs, coins, swords, and cups. The main differences were that the Iberian and Italian decks only had nine pip cards—ace through 9—and, like the Mamluk set, had three court cards for each suit. These decks now totaled 48 cards, which made production simpler as they could all better fit on two uncut sheets.
While all three have the same suit styles as the earlier Mamluk style, the differences among them are subtle. For example, in the Spanish and Portuguese sets, the swords are straight and the clubs are knobby, whereas the Italian swords curved and the clubs were more like ceremonial batons. In the Italian decks, both the batons and swords suit pips were designed with those items intersecting with each other, whereas the Spanish ones did not, though the Portuguese sets often did.
These card styles—and their various regionally specific patterns—continued to travel not only throughout Europe, but the Spanish decks in particular became popular in Latin America as early as the sixteenth century. The court cards led to unique cultural expression, especially with contemporary decks, with the differences ranging from subtle clothing changes to complete re-imaginings of these figures as popular celebrities or folkloric representations—similar to what we saw with the French-suited court cards—all with the same four suits.
Early Tarot and Occult Interests
Anyone familiar with tarot will recognize those same four suits—the wands, coins or pentacles, cups, and swords—as the foundation for the 56 pip and court cards making up the “minor arcana,” as it would later be called. This time, we have an ace through 10 for each suit and four court cards, including a queen, which was missing in the Iberian and Italian decks. What we also have is the introduction of 21 trump cards and a “fool” card, which would become part of what would later be called the “major arcana.” These trump or triumph cards contained allegorical illustrations and surfaced all over Italy in the fifteenth century. Together, those 78 cards became the foundation of tarot.
The oldest extant tarot cards are the Visconti-Sforza, which consist of roughly 15 nearly complete decks painted in the fifteenth century for the Duchy of Milan. Their pip cards echo the Mamluk-style cards, and by extension the Iberian and Italian playing cards, in their appearance. The court cards in particular offer a window into the nobility of Milan, as they likely served as portraits of aristocracy. These cards were painted by hand, and as such, owning them was also a luxury that indicated status, implying the available leisure to not only use the cards in play but to observe and appreciate their every detail.
Another extant fifteenth-century Italian tarot deck is the Sola Busca, which, while containing four suits, a fool, and the 21 trumps, visually deviates from the standard tarot deck. This deck survives in its entirety, making it the oldest complete tarot deck to date. The Sola Busca depicts literary and historical figures, many of which are tied to the Roman Empire as well as Alexander the Great as the king of swords. It is also the first to illustrate the pip cards and coincidentally led some scholars to conclude that the artist Pamela Colman Smith of the twentieth-century RWS Tarot deck was inspired by this early set of cards. Consider, for instance, the Three of Swords and their visual similarities in both decks.
As time went on, more and more styles developed for these decks. Recall, too, that they were used both for card games and to portray lessons and serve as windows into the culture of the area. Stemming from the Italian-suited cards in Milan came the Tarot of Marseille deck, which was very popular in France, especially later on in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. You’ll notice that, like the Italian-suited playing cards, the wands here are ceremonial batons and the swords are curved. Where things change slightly is in the names given to the trump cards, but for the most part, they have equivalencies with those of the Italian-style tarot decks—excluding, of course, the Sola Busca.
It was eighteenth-century France that saw both a renewed interest in tarot decks—especially the Tarot of Marseille style—being used for trick games, as well as their more occult use in cartomancy or divination. Among others, a famed French occultist of this time period was Etteilla (1738–1791). Jean-Baptiste Alliette, who used the pseudonym Etteilla derived from the reversal of his last name, published a foundational reference work for tarot cartomancy in the late eighteenth century: Manière de se récréer avec le jeu de cartes nommées tarot (Way To Recreate Yourself With the Deck of Cards Called Tarot). This work linked tarot with astrology, the four elements, the four humors, and its presumed ancient Egyptian origins. Each card was dissected and given interpretive meanings in both their regular and reversed positions. He even published his own tarot deck and founded a school for the study of magic in Paris.
Lotería
While there are many more occultists we could discuss from the nineteenth century, instead let’s cross the Atlantic once more to Mexico. We saw above how Spanish-style cards were brought into New Spain as early as the sixteenth century. Another game they brought was Lotería, a game that, like tarot, has its origins in fifteenth-century Italy. Like the early luxurious tarot decks, the game began as a pastime for the wealthy and soon transformed into something that anyone could access thanks to the traveling fairs. Many of the cards in this deck mirror those of the trump cards or “major arcana” in tarot, like the Death card with La Muerte or the Star and Moon cards with La Estrella and La Luna. While not its traditional use, these cards can also be used in cartomancy.
A standardized version of Lotería was published in 1887 in Mexico by a French immigrant and businessman, Don Clemente Jacques, under his “Gallo” brand name. That instantly recognizable rooster echoed back to his native France, further showcasing the complex cultural networks of any set of cards. Through his food and canning factory, he began distributing the standardized card game to soldiers along with their rations. To this day, his legacy lies in the beloved Lotería, or “Mexican Bingo.”
His version, which set the standard for future variations, featured a standard 54-card deck and various “tablas,” or boards, containing 16 of the 54 cards in a 4×4 grid. One person, the cantor, would then call out each card, sometimes stating the name of the card and other times using a phrase or riddle. Whoever completes the pre-determined pattern on their board first shouts “lotería!” and wins.
Curiously, in 1923, the same year Borges’s “El truco” was published, Don Clemente Jacques also created a standardized Mexican version of the Spanish playing cards through his “Gallo” brand, where one key difference was that the knave among the court cards was now exclusively female. Just a few years later, in the 1930s, the Catholic Church created a liturgical Lotería meant to teach about sacred objects. This more educational and allegorical use can tie back to the philosophical meanings of the trump cards as virtues and life lessons in Europe.
Esoteric Tarot
Let’s return across the Atlantic, but this time to London in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with the secret society, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Here, members studied esoteric philosophy for enlightenment through the four elements, astrology, tarot, geomancy, alchemy, Hermetic Qabalah, and more. Like Etteilla before this, it is the intersection of these many practices and philosophies that added further richness to the possible hidden messages and newfound usages of the cards. While the order did not last long—with it being founded in 1887 and dissolved in 1903—it did serve as the base training for creators of two of the most common styles of tarot decks for divination: the Rider–Waite–Smith Tarot (1909) and Thoth Tarot (1944).
Those two decks, along with the Tarot of Marseille, are the three most popular styles that continue to inspire numerous specialized decks to this day. Both the Tarot of Marseille and the Thoth Tarot maintain suit-specific pip cards that are not illustrated with characters and mirror the Italian-style playing cards—with some exceptions in the Thoth deck, drawing likely inspiration from both the Italian and Spanish styles, as while some swords are curved and most wands are ceremonial batons, some batons appear more knob-like and some swords are straight. On the other hand, the RWS combines the illustrated nature of the Sola Busca Tarot in both its pip and trump cards, tied to the Spanish-style playing cards, as the wands are knobby and all the swords are straight. All three styles can be used for divination and deeper esoteric personal development when paired with occult teachings.
Each new deck and usage brings with it culture, identity, and personality. Whether these “cardboard talismans” were used to trick one’s opponents in a game or as tools to converse with our inner selves, each card style and artistic flair tells its own story. Be they the regional characteristics of past decks or the modern novelty decks inspired by celebrities, generational quirks, or cats, they all offer us a meditation on our self “re-creation,” to borrow from Etteilla’s famed title. While different in form and function, these cards—whether used in truco, tarot, or lotería—share a common history. Together, they speak to one of Borges’s repeated themes: the cyclicality of time and the diversity in unity. His poem may have been about truco, but just as the poem itself evokes medieval Iberian figures, so too can the cards speak to neighboring traditions of tarot, lotería, or other games and the ability to read into the cards more than just a clever hand.
Veronica Menaldi is an independent scholar and vice president of the Societas Magica. Previously she served as an assistant professor at the University of Mississippi. She is the author of Love Magic and Control in Premodern Iberian Literature. You can visit Veronica’s YouTube Channel or follow her on Instagram or TikTok.
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