Tarot, Money, and Mnemonics: Histories of Card Games Beyond Quantifiable-Outcome Games

This paper examines the historiography of Tarot and playing card games, arguing that the conventional distinction between quantifiable-outcome games and oracle or divinatory uses of Tarot dissolves once one looks for the conceptual building blocks, or ludemes, that historians of card games typically expect to find. Drawing on social constructionist views of games and speech act theory, the author contends that rule-centric formalist histories by scholars such as Dummett, Farley, and Parlett present a simplified, Anglo-European narrative. Instead, the paper foregrounds agency as the medium of games and proposes that cartomancy, trading, and mnemonic practices should be studied as games in their own right.

The historical argument traces playing cards from medieval China during the Tang Dynasty, where they emerged alongside woodblock printing and paper money, through the Mamluk Empire in thirteenth-century Egypt, and onward to Europe via Venice in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century. Along this route the suit systems transformed from three money-based suits to four, and then into the regional variants that eventually produced the modern standard deck and the coin, club, cup, and sword suits still found in Tarot. The paper highlights that card games appear to inherit many of their structural ludemes from paper money, suggesting that the history of playing cards is in significant part a history of money.

The study's scope is primarily historical and conceptual rather than empirical, drawing on a wide body of secondary literature in game studies, anthropology, pragmatics, and card game history. It does not rely on survey data or quantitative sampling. Its central conclusion is that the separation of Tarot into rule-based and oracular practices reflects culturally specific, bourgeois-influenced assumptions, and that a provincialized, agency-centered approach offers a more accurate account of how card practices emerged and relate to one another.