Card Fortune Telling - A Lucid Treatise Dealing With All the Popular and More Abstruse Methods #251730

It is a very curious fact that there should be four suits in a pack of cards, although as already shown these balance nicely with the four Estates: Priests or Rulers, Warriors or Fighting Men, Merchants or Artisans, and the Tillers of the Soil or common people. An early Eastern form of the game of Chess was a four-players variation, each alternate player partnering his vis-d-vis, just the same as in modern Bridge or Whist. The two partners in this form of Chess used pieces of a similar colour — two using red pieces, the other pair using white or black! Then from the East, dating from about the same period, we have the four suits of the Tarocchi cards, again two red and two black. All this points Clearly to a common Eastern origin for Chess and Cards, and the probability seems to be that card playing or Divination has been derived from Chess. It is worth noting that there is an Obscure form of Chess in which the pieces are all off the board at first, as are the cards in the hands of a player; they are placed on the board or table one at a time, as the player's turn comes round, and they are not active till they are thus displayed — just as in card games.