Excerpt from Card Fortune Telling: A Lucid Treatise Dealing With All the Popular and More Abstruse MethodsIt 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.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.