It will be seen that if each one of the seventy-eight cards belonging to the Tarots be given the meaning assigned to it in the foregoing rules, nearly every emotion, every incident, every characteristic of man is typified, and the combinations are as endless as are the chances of life. As the cards are dealt and fall together, one balances or controls the other, so that when their meaning is deciphered as a whole there is a most interesting picture of ordinary life. The game is played by two persons, one who deals and one who reads the cards, or rather interprets with superior knowledge the meaning of the great Book of Thoth Hermes Trismegistus. It can readily be seen how the game could be taken advantage of by the unscrupulous, who induced credulous persons to believe that the leaves of the book revealed the future. This faith, indeed, was inherited through generations, who received it from Moses and many of the Hebrew prophets, as well as from the priests of the temple of Thoth and those of Mercury; so it is small wonder that the mysterious leaves were regarded with awe, and that their revelations are received with implicit obedience, since the orders of the gods could be transmitted through the rods of Moses and Aaron that became the pip leaves, and the message was exemplified through the emblematic figures on the walls. The pips translated the meaning of the Atouts, without which neither part or volume of the book could be fully understood. Therefore all fortune-telling with packs of Hearts, Diamonds, Spades and Clubs is nonsense, since these cards were invented for games or gambling and have nothing occult or prophetic about them. CHAPTER VIII SOME OLD ITALIAN TAROTS It is practically impossible to bridge the chasm between the abandonment of the actual and open worship of Mercury in his own temples to the transference of his heraldic emblems to the unbound leaves of a book that could be concealed on the persons of his priests, for doubtless the rites of Mercury were practised privately for many years by people who had every motive for concealment; and since there was no law against these secret practices, there is no record of their having been broken, no ordinance concerning games of cards or fortune-telling, and no official record pointing directly to cards under the name now generally given them. What may be recorded concerning the priests of the cult of Mercury remains to be discovered. Nor can we date the period when these same leaves came to be regarded as affording amusement, or from being wholly in the hands of initiated persons and regarded as a vehicle for consulting the wishes of the deities, they fell into the possession of soothsayers or unscrupulous fortune-tellers, who did not hold the interpreting key and made improper uses of the ancient Book of Thoth.