There is an interesting invective against cards published in 1550, called “Il Traditor,” which may be translated:
What is the meaning of the female Pope,
The Chariot and the Traitor,
The Wheel, the Fool, the Star, the Sun,
The Moon, and Strength, and Death,
And Hell, and all the rest
Of these strange cards?
Showing that the Egyptian temples had not disclosed their secrets that identified these pictures on the Tarots common in Italy with the cult of Thoth, Mercury, and Nebo.
Painters have transmitted to us pictures of many games of cards, and perhaps one of the earliest is the one ascribed to Van Eyck, of Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, about the year 1493. The early Dutch painters often depicted boors playing cards, and those by Jan Steen, the two Teniers, and others are well known. Hogarth devoted a series of engravings to depicting grotesque figures playing chess, draughts, and cards.
After the fourteenth century, it is easy to learn the important position that Playing Cards reached in Spain, Italy, Germany, France, and England through the works of other painters, miniaturists, and engravers, while books such as “Fortune-Telling,” by Francisco di Milano, published in 1560, or the one by Francisco Marcolini, published in Venice in 1540, prove the hold that the new amusement had taken on the people at that time.
Proclamations against cards followed each other rapidly from State and Church, so histories are filled with the denunciations of the clergy of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries against the old sin that had reappeared under a new form for them to combat. Mercury was as active as ever, and had quite as strong a hold on the affections of the people as he had in the days when St. Paul landed in Italy, close to the Temple of Mercury, and it was quite as hard to overcome his influence as it had been when Christianity first began to overthrow the heathen gods. Perhaps the day may come when those who believe in fate and predestination will confront these preachers with the divine commands to consult the prophets so often mentioned in the Bible, notably when the Rods of the Israelites were marked and laid before the testimony.
CHAPTER XVI
ASIATIC PLAYING CARDS