The divination medium itself goes waaaay back. Shamans, or as we call them, shamen, throughout history have thrown various objects and studied their arrangements, thus helping primitive mankind to organize his daily life.

As eons passed, certain mystics, and their like, would take to illustrating key runic formations directly onto stone tablets or bones. These were no doubt easier to haul around than the previously used sacks filled with their many diverse and sometimes smelly objects. A stroke of lucky brilliance hit some uncelebrated quasi-Neolithic seeker of truth when he came up with the idea of etching the diagrams onto small, thin wooden slats with a sharpened piece of antler, but…in his excitement he accidentally knocked them all into a nearby boiling hot spring. Getting them out was no simple matter and by then the soggy, saggy blobs of pulp hardly resembled themselves from before and beating them with a rock only seemed to make them worse.

The useless, rattling, huge, and by now, unrecognizable sheets would be abandoned, only to be seized upon and treasured by the village women. A thriving paper industry would result.

Someone else tried red clay as a medium in the manufacturing of tarot cards during a later epoch. However these “Tarot Carddas,” as they were known, tended to break easily and so their popularity lasted only for a short while. A thriving pottery industry would result.

Well anyway, cards of one type or another have been used in the art of divination for a couple thousand years, at least. The earliest acknowledged evidence of this being in ancient Egypt, although they may go back even further than that. Little is known of individual decks, or specific methods employed in their use. Not much help so far, huh?

The modern Tarot began it’s evolution during one of the many plagues, both viral and spiritual, which were, well…plaguing medieval Europe during those most badly illuminated, and yet rarely unexciting of times.

You can bet that the clergy made it interesting at best for those trusted with the tarot as it grew through this period. It finally became the deck we use today around the fourteenth century. Oh yeah, and just one other thing...none of them were funny!