THE INVENTION OF THE TAROT: A History of Tarot, from Renaissance Game to Modern Oracle

Everyone knows the tarot is ancient. Everyone is wrong.The seventy-eight cards that promise to read your future began as something far more ordinary, and far stranger: a fifteenth-century Italian card game, painted for dukes, with no fortune-telling anywhere in sight. The Egyptian priests, the lost Book of Thoth, the secret wisdom older than the Bible - every scrap of it was invented, by named people, on datable afternoons. And we can watch them do it.In The Invention of the Tarot, Pratik Puuri follows the cards from a Milanese gaming table to a Paris occultist's desk, from a London magician's temple to the phone screens of a new century - and tells the story of the forgotten woman who drew the most famous deck in the world.The real history, it turns out, is far more enchanting than the myth. Shuffle, and deal.