Reading Room · Fortune-Telling Methods · Method
How do ordinary playing cards tell fortunes?
Cartomancy is divination with ordinary playing cards. A querent poses a question, the cards are drawn or laid out, and each card carries a meaning the reader interprets. Its recorded history runs from late medieval card play to 18th- and 19th-century fortune-telling manuals.
Facts checked on against 11 sources, 6 of them museum, university, archive, library, government or primary texts.
Key facts
Every line comes from a source listed at the bottom of the page. The small numbers point to it.
| 1377 | The earliest confirmed European reference to playing cards appears in a Latin manuscript from a Swiss monastery, attributed to a German monk named Johannes.12 |
|---|---|
| 1423 | St Bernardino of Siena preached against games and playing cards in Italy, urging sinners to repent and burn them.3 |
| 1540 | Francesco Marcolino published what is described as the first known divination manual for cards that uses standard playing cards.2 |
| 1729 | Dr. Flamstead's and Mr. Patridge's New Fortune-Book is believed to be the oldest English book with instructions on fortune-telling with cards.4 |
| 1800 | The New Gipsey Fan, published in London by David Kerr, gives fortunes from standard playing cards laid out in nine-card rows.5 |
| 1843 | Marie Anne Lenormand's memoirs were published, claiming she read cards for Napoleon and French elites.2 |
| 1909 | Grand Orient's A Manual of Cartomancy appeared in London in a fourth edition, with a section on the English method of fortune-telling by cards.6 |
What a cartomancy reading involves
Cartomancy is divination with standard playing cards. The querent presents a question to the cards, makes a pull, and the reader interprets the card or cards drawn, with each standard card given a certain meaning.7
Printed packs for fortune-telling often add the reading to the card itself. In many such packs the fortune is printed beneath an allegorical picture of the outcome, and the Rameses Fortune Telling Cards c.1910 print interpretations at the top and foot of each playing card.4
Ball's and Grand Orient's systems
Ball's Elemental Divination: A Dice Oracle codifies the interpretation of the playing card deck in his own system. He calls the 52-card deck the Magician's Journey, set against the Tarot's 21 major arcana known as the Fool's Journey.8
In Ball's system each number has a mythic role such as Hunter, Lover, Dancer, or Noble, and the suits stand for kinds of action named Promise, Gambit, Folly, and Triumph. Ball states that the cards are gender neutral and are never read as reversed.8
The 1909 Grand Orient manual describes the instruments of divination as simple aids that help bring on clairvoyance and put the seer into a subjective or interior state, and it warns that forcing the oracles for a favourable answer makes the whole operation void.69
Printed manuals and their makers
Etteilla's 1770 book presented cartomancy as an entertainment that relieves boredom and encourages reflection on questions such as marriage or romance. He also said it carried less financial risk than gambling and warned that outcomes depend on chance. He coined the term cartonomancie, which became cartomancy.410
Olney Richmond's 1893 The Mystic Test Book is described as the foundation of the later Cardology movement, and in 1888 his Order of the Magi in Chicago linked playing cards to astrology, numerology and Atlantean symbolism.2
What the tradition holds
How practitioners describe it, in their terms. Described, not endorsed.
Grand Orient's manual says its methods are offered at their own value, without any specific claim made for them, and that the Wheel of Destiny is partly numerical, partly astrological, and wholly magical, as J. Holt Schooling wrote.6
Jacy Nova, an intuitive astrologer, described cartomancy as a favourite pastime of royals in European courts centuries ago, and said playing cards are more black and white than tarot cards, which she described as having more of a magical quality.7
What the evidence shows
What historians, scientists and controlled tests have found.
Early card play is recorded in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Carlisle wrote that card games were being played in Spain by 1371 and in France and Switzerland by 1377, and that mass production of paper around 1400 with woodcut printing led to inexpensive decks.11
Historians report that divination with cards appears in sixteenth-century Spanish writings. Pedro Ciruelo's Reprobación de las supersticiones y hechicerías (1538) refers to fortune-telling with dice, playing cards or handwritten slips, and Martin de Azpilcueta listed divining through the luck of playing cards among sins in 1556.410
Mary K. Greer's survey of pre-1900 pictures of cartomancers found fewer than a dozen that showed male readers, and Ross Caldwell reported professional cartomancers in seventeenth-century Spain using multi-card layouts with positional meanings.10
Mary K. Greer has shown that the earliest forerunner of the Lenormand cards is a 1796 book in English.4
Worked out from the evidence
Not stated outright by any one source. It is worked out from the sources cited.
- Cartomancy grew out of a card game tradition rather than from a separate ritual object, so its reading rules were added to ordinary decks in print over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.34
- Accounts disagree on how far back card fortune-telling reaches: some writers place it with the earliest playing cards, while others date its printed rules to the late eighteenth century.85
Not yet confirmed
- How did oral reading practices among Romani and folk readers shape the printed rules that appeared later?
- Which early sixteenth-century Spanish and Italian readers used standard decks, and how did their layouts differ from later systems?
Sources
Museums, universities, archives and primary texts first. Every fact is paraphrased and nothing is copied; Wikipedia is never cited.
- playingcarddecks.com: The History of Playing Cards: The Evolution of the Modern Deck – PlayingCardDecks.com. Read on · Reference
- wopc.co.uk: History of Tarot and Playing Cards: Timeline & Origins — The World of Playing Cards. Read on · Reference
- wopc.co.uk: The History of Playing Cards — Early History of Playing Cards: The Origins of Playing Cards — The World of Playing Cards. Read on · Reference
- wopc.co.uk: Cartomancy, Oracle and Divination Cards — Cartomancy, Fortune Telling and Divination Cards — The World of Playing Cards. Read on · Reference
- blogs.libraries.indiana.edu: The Fore-Readable Future: Divination in the Library. Read on · University
- Internet Archive: A Manual Of Cartomancy, Fortune Telling And Occult Divination Including Cagliostro's Mystic Alphabet Of The Magi By Grand Orient 1909. Read on · Primary text
- westportlibrary.libguides.com: Tarot and Cartomancy: About. Read on · Library
- libraryjournal.com: | Library Journal. Read on · Peer-reviewed journal
- archive.org: Full text of "A Manual Of Cartomancy, Fortune Telling And Occult Divination Including Cagliostro's Mystic Alphabet Of The Magi By Grand Orient 1909". Read on · Primary text
- marykgreer.com: Origins of Cartomancy (Playing Card Divination) | Mary K. Greer's Tarot Blog. Read on · Reference
- blog.lib.uiowa.edu: Students investigate: a brief history of cards – Main Library Gallery news. Read on · University