The origins of the tarot have been lost in the mists of time. Most scholars have guessed that its origins were in China, Egypt or India. In Mystical Origins of the Tarot, Paul Huson has expertly tracked each symbols of the Minor Arcana to roots in ancient Persia and the Major Arcana Trump card images to the medieval world of mystery, miracle, and morality plays. A number of tarot historians have questioned the use of the tarot as a divination tool prior to the eighteenh century. But the author demonstrates that the symbolic meanings of the Major Arcana were evident from the time they were first employed in the mid-fifteenth century in the popular divination practice of sortilege. He alson reveals how the identities of the court cards in the Minor Arcana were derived from a blend of pagan and medieval sources that strongly influenced their interpretation in tarot divination.
Mystical Origins of the Tarot provides a detailed account of the original historical source for each card and how the card's divinatory meanings evolved from these symbols. Huson also provides concise and practical card-reading methods designed by the cartomancers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and reveals the origins of the card interpretations promoted by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and A.E. Waite.