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Rider Waite Total Deck and Book Set |
Total and DeckPocket and GuideContains Rider Waite Tarot deck and The Pocket Guide to the Tarot by Gunter Hager. This is the most authoritative deck in existence. Topic: Relationship between tarot and ordinary playing cards Inaccurate: The 52-card deck evolved from the tarot, leaving the Joker as the only remnant of the major arcana. Current Historical Understanding: Playing cards came to Europe from Islam, probably via Muslim Spain, about 50 years before the development of tarot. They appeared quite suddenly in many different European cities between 1375 and 1378. European playing cards were an adaptation of the Islamic Mamluk cards. These early cards had suits of cups, swords, coins, and polo sticks (seen by Europeans as staves), and courts consisting of a king and two male underlings. The tarot adds the Fool, the trumps, and a set of queens to this system. Some time before 1480, the French introduced cards with the now-familiar suits of hearts, clubs, spades, and diamonds. The earlier suits are still preserved in the tarot and in Italian and Spanish playing cards. The Joker originated in the United States around 1857, used as a wild card in poker and as the highest trump in Euchre. It appears to have no direct relationship to the Fool of the tarot.
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