Paper tools for broken hearts

March 4, 2024 3:34 AM

"In this sense, the understanding of cartomancy that the authorities had was the direct opposite of how it often worked in practice: far from ‘sowing discord in social relations, and mistrust within families’ as one journalist put it, cartomancy aimed to mend broken relations by reconnecting each card to its wider system of meanings. ... What this meant for clients in practical terms was rarely articulated by cartomancers."

Pooley, William G. "Paper tools for broken hearts: fortune-telling with cards in France, c. 1803–1937." French History 37, no. 4 (2023): 379-400.

posted by cupcakeninja (4 comments total)

Cartomancy with a pack of everyday playing cards is used within hoodoo and rootwork. Starr Casas, a hoodoo practitioner, wrote a pretty good book about it. It definitely makes an ordinary deck of cards a lot more interesting!
posted by Kitteh at 4:13 AM on March 4 [6 favorites]

This helps explain Balatro's hold on me.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 8:54 AM on March 4 [1 favorite]

This was really interesting--thanks!

His comments about the suits reveal what kinds of cards Madame Lambert was using: the standard fifty-two card deck, with three face cards, an Ace, and numbers two through ten in each of the four suits of diamonds, hearts, clubs and spades. There is nothing to suggest that she was using a more complex fortune-telling deck, or Tarot.

FWIW there's also nothing to suggest she wasn't! Here's the complete source for the case, and it doesn't add anything beyond the fact her deck was using French suits. However, at least by 1862--14 years before this case--I see one source for the rules of the game of Tarot saying "Some games of Tarot, above all in Switzerland, have the suits of ordinary cards: spades, clubs, hearts, and diamonds"--just like modern French Tarot à jouer.

Originating in Renaissance Italy, Tarot was designed as a card game, and it was only in the late eighteenth century, when relatively few people in France still played games of Tarot, that it came to be associated with fortune-telling.

I wonder what the evidence is that relatively few people in France still played Tarot as a card game in the late 18th C., but I suspect it includes an inference from the fact that in 1668 games of Tarot are just listed without comment and by 1828 a key source lists them among 'foreign games.' And, like, that's a reasonable point, but I'd also note that those rules continued to be reprinted in 1840, 1853, and probably other times--like, if it wasn't actually being played, it might have been reasonable to drop the whole section--and those 1862 rules don't bother to claim the game is foreign at all.

Anyway, it's still played, e.g. as a free and paid iOS app. Pagat and that same YouTube channel have guides to other variants too ('pagat' is actually a Tarot term itself).
posted by Wobbuffet at 10:04 AM on March 4 [2 favorites]

Ok, they can tell fortunes with cards, but can they imitate Irving or play on the Spanish guitar?
posted by dannyboybell at 2:51 PM on March 4