Also called card reading, fortune telling with playing cards, reading the cards
Telling fortunes with an ordinary deck of playing cards, where each suit governs an area of life and each card has a set meaning. It was the most popular form of card reading from the 1700s to the 1900s.
Tonight's moon is read when the page loads.
Take care: Card reading is reflection, not a reason to make major money, health or relationship decisions. Be gentle when reading for others, especially with spades.
Etteilla used the French 32-card piquet deck plus one extra card representing the querent. He gave every card fixed upright and reversed meanings and set out a layout on the table. Reversed meanings, now standard in tarot, owe much to him.
Cheap English fortune books attributed to Dr Flamstead and Mr Patridge gave meanings for each card of an ordinary deck. Robert Place treats the 1770 version, with a fixed meaning for every card, as the start of English cartomancy.
Etteilla went on to publish a tarot method in the 1780s, and tarot later became the main form of card reading in English-speaking countries. It adds 22 trump cards and a fourth court card to the playing-card structure.
Playing cards reached Europe in the fourteenth century, and using them for fortunes followed. Fernando de la Torre described reading love fortunes with cards in fifteenth-century Spain, and Lucas van Leyden painted a woman reading cards around 1508. In 1770 the Paris print seller Jean-Baptiste Alliette, writing as Etteilla, published what is generally called the first practical treatise on card divination, using the 32-card piquet deck with fixed upright and reversed meanings.
In Britain and America, readers used the full 52-card deck, and cheap fortune books spread fixed meanings for each card. From the eighteenth to the twentieth century this was the most common kind of card reading, done at kitchen tables and by professional readers alike. In English-speaking countries tarot has since taken the lead. There is no evidence that the cards predict events, but the suit system offers a quick, structured way to talk through a problem.
Opening a respected book at random and taking the first passage your eye or finger lands on as an answer to your question.
A 36-card picture deck read in combinations, where each card such as the Rider, the Ship or the Key has a short, concrete meaning. It began as a German board game of 1799 and was named after the French fortune teller Marie Anne Lenormand after her death.
Illustrated card decks with no fixed structure, each built around its own theme and guidebook, drawn for guidance or reflection. Unlike tarot's set 78 cards, an oracle deck can have any number of cards and any imagery.
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