THE BIRMINGHAM POST

Birmingham, Warwickshire, England

16 July 1942

(page 2)

The Tarot Cards.

Well known in ancient Egypt, where they may have been used by priests to teach doctrine in picture form, and probably of Babylonish origin, tarot cards have long been associated with divination, for which they were much used by gypsies. The name comes from tarrochino, a game first played with these cards in Italy in the fifteenth century that became popular all over Europe. There are four suits of fourteen—wands, cups, swords and discs—and twenty-two trump cards. In Western Europe these became the French piquet pack we use to-day—wands or batons changed to clubs, swords to spades, cups to hearts and discs to diamonds. Each century has produced its own version of the tarots; and now Lady Harris [Frieda Harris], wife of Sir Percy Harris, M.P., has sought to show how the symbols of the ancient tarots have a much higher aspect—the mystic relationship of man to the universe. She is exhibiting her seventy-eight designs at the Berkeley Galleries in Davies Street. Using the original Egyptian symbols; combined with others more scientific and modern in conception, she has expressed the inner meaning of each card in designs that are full of movement—to suggest time—and beautiful in pattern and colour. She hopes these designs will eventually be reproduced as the twentieth-century tarot pack.