Dating from over 2000 BC in ancient Babylon, the Divine Feminine is equal in strength, passion, magic, wit, power and joy to the Divine Masculine. In the last two thousand years the god has existed without the goddess yet the images of the feminine and masculine that come from that region bring forth perceptions that are at once age-old and incredibly modern to our times reflecting a contemporary worldview that does not restrict the experience of femininity to the male-defined other, and vice-versa. Witness the absence of a Queen in early European decks.
Cards base their symbols in many different forms throughout China gradually evolving from knucklebones through dice and dominoes. It was probable that in the perfect sequence there were 9 pieces of 5 suits – bags, money, batons or bows, swords, and a fifth undefined, and therefore dismissed, mark. This suggests that Europeans, who knew nothing whatever about them, would settle on four instead of five suits.
Playing cards were probably adapted from the game of chess, first found in Hindostan, in about 450 A.D. The arrival of playing cards in Europe from India and China can be dated to the late Middle Ages. Despite regional variations in naming of the four suits, their popularity for games, for telling fortunes, even for teaching children their numbers, has endured. The basic divisions into court and other cards have lasted as well. In cards from the East, the pack number and shape of cards varied from Europe as did the number of suits. Indian and Persian packs consisted of eight and ten suits.
In 1377, Brother Johannes von Rheinfelden, a Dominican friar, described variant packs containing queens, or two kings and two queens each with their 'marschalli', or packs containing five or six kings each (i.e. 5 or 6 suits) with 'marschalli', or even four kings, four queens making packs of up to 60. A century Germany had no trumps, and their composition was basically similar to Moorish decks with different suits systems using hunting or hunted animals. Deers, hounds, falcons and nooses were sometimes extended to a fifth suit featuring shields. group of patterns, referred to as hunting decks, from 15th
The popularity of cards was not always thus. Accounts through the centuries refer to cards as an invention of the devil, with kings and court cards symbolizing idols and false gods. There are innumerable references, usually from church and state, across millennia, banning or at least discouraging the playing of cards, and not surprisingly a bit of heraldic hypocrisy is never far away.
A series of engraved copper plates from Italy dated around 1470 are thought to be the source of European cards. These fifty cards are divided into five groups of 10 cards. The five groups portray Positions in Life, Muses, Sciences, Virtues and Planets or the Creation of the World. The five suits are also referred to as Trumps, Scepters, Cups, Pentacles and Swords barely remarkable similarity to the Tarot.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century a set of forty numeral cards of four suits was produced in Germany. The scenes painted on the cards depicted the history of the four “great” continents – Africa, Asia, Europe and America. Australia would be added later with the introduction in the 21st century of Estate Playing Cards.
