By Joshua Dolphin

The format of  Taroscopes is changing. Instead of readings for every month, I’m going to alternate between articles about the tarot in general and the usual twelve “taroscope” readings. This month we’ll look into two different styles of tarot, then the usual format will return in August.

Tarot is known by most people in the west and in many cultures around the world, but fewer people know how and why the tarot came to be as we know it today. The origin of the first tarot deck is a mystery, but most scholars think the art form originated in Italy, then spread to France when the French conquered Milan and Piedmont in 1499. There are several extant decks from that time, the most complete of which are the Visconti-Sforza decks commissioned by the Duke of Milan, Filippo Maria Visconti, and his successor, Francesco Sforza. The oldest type of mass-produced decks are the Tarot de Marseilles, named for the French city where most printing houses were based.

However, most people today don’t think of these decks when they think of the tarot, they think of the kind of decks that became popular in the 1970s during the New Age movement. These include the popular Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot, Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot, and the hundreds of other decks created in the same style.

To differentiate between these two styles of tarot design, writer Yoav Ben-Dov refers to them in terms of two “schools,” the French school and the English school. The French is the older of the two; it includes the many variations of the Tarot de Marseilles, while the English school is the modern style that came from the ideas of several English tarot-creators. We’ll start by taking a look at the English school, then compare it to the French.

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