The Mystery Around the Deck of Cards

 

• "The Deck of Cards" is a recitation song that was popularized in the fields of both country and popular music first during the late 1940s. This song, which relates the tale of a young American soldier arrested and charged with playing cards during a church service, first became a hit in the U.S. in 1948 by country musician T. Texas Tyler. Though Tyler wrote the spoken-word piece, the earliest known reference is to be found in an account/common-place book belonging to Mary Bacon, a British farmer's wife, dated 20 April 1762. The story of the soldier can be found in full in Mary Bacon's World. A farmer's wife in eighteenth-century Hampshire, published by Threshold Press (2010). The folk story was later recorded in a 19th-century British publication entitled The Soldier's Almanack, Bible And Prayer Book.

The most common theory is that the 52 cards represent 52 weeks in a year. The four colors represent the four seasons. The 13 cards in a suit represent the thirteen weeks in each season, Four suits times 13 cards in a suite equals 52. ... In many decks, the queen of clubs holds a flower.

And here are some things about your deck of cards you might not have noticed:

• The jack of spades, the jack of hearts, and the king of diamonds are drawn in profile. You can see one eye
• The rest of the picture cards are shown with their faces toward us and we see two eyes.
• The king of hearts is typically shown with a sword behind his head, and the one eyed king of diamonds has an ax behind his head. They’re nicknamed the suicide kings.
• The queen of spades usually holds a scepter and is known as the black lady. It is the only queen facing left.

History. The English pattern pack originated in Britain which was importing French playing cards from Rouen and Antwerp by 1480. The earliest cards of the English pattern date to around 1516. But Britain only started manufacturing its own cards towards the end of the 16th century, when card production began in London.

• Origin and spread

• Playing cards first appeared in Europe in the 1370s, probably in Italy or Spain and certainly as imports or possessions of merchants from the Islamic Mamlūk dynasty centred in Egypt. Like their originals, the first European cards were hand-painted, making them luxury goods for the rich. 

It is said that each of the suits on a deck of cards in a card game represents the four major pillars of the economy in the Middle Ages: Hearts represented the Church, Spades represented the military, Clubs represented agriculture, and Diamonds represented the merchant class.

History of the Playing Cards – Source: Wikipedia

Early History
Playing cards were invented in Ancient China. They were found in China as early as the 9th Century during the Tang Dynasty (618–907). The first reference to the card game in world history dates no later than the 9th Century, when the Collection of Miscellanea at Duyang, written by Tang Dynasty writer Su E, described Princess Tongchang (daughter of Emperor Yizong of Tang) playing the “leaf game” in 868 with members of the Wei clan (the family of the princess’ husband). The Song Dynasty (960-1279) scholar Ouyang Xiu (1007–1072) asserted that playing cards and card games existed at least since the mid-Tang Dynasty and associated their invention with the simultaneous development of using sheets or pages instead of paper rolls as a writing medium. The first known book on cards called Yezi Gexi was allegedly written by a Tang-era woman, and was commented on by Chinese writers of subsequent dynasties.

• During the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), characters from popular novels such as the Water Margin were widely featured on the faces of playing cards. By the 11th century playing cards could be found throughout the Asian continent.

The numbers and values in a deck of cards are very similar to the weeks and months of a modern calendar. Is this just a coincidence, or was this relationship intended? A complete deck of playing cards contains four suits, two primary colors, and thirteen values ranging from the Ace to the King. Usually, it contains two Jokers.

Lurking within these colors, suits, and values is an astonishing, but entirely coincidental, relationship to our modern calendar. Some of the proposed “alignments” between cards and the calendar are:

• Two colors representing night and day
• Four suits representing the four seasons
• Twelve court cards representing the 12 months
• Thirteen values representing the 13 lunar cycles in a year
• 52 cards representing 52 weeks in a year

Perhaps the most interesting coincidence is that if you add up all of the values in a deck, using the Aces as one, and the Jacks, Queens and Kings as eleven, twelve and thirteen respectively, you arrive at a total of 364. Adding the first Joker as another one gets you to 365 – the same number as there are days in a year – and adding the second Joker gets you to 366, so we even have leap years covered!

The modern deck of cards wasn’t designed with these relationships in mind. They’re merely a coincidence due to the numbers involved. It all adds up to a lot of fun.

In a standard deck, there are 220 (4×(1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9+10)) spots on the pip cards and if it is assumed that the face cards have 11, 12 and 13 spots respectively, the total is 364. A single joker counting as one spot, however, would make 365.

There have been atheists, sceptics, doubters and critics along the way. Some say that the joker was a king’s court jester who was conveniently added later to make the number up to 365, and still later another joker was added to solve or represent the leap year. Others believe that only the Queen holds a flower in her hand (I.e. 2 flowers opposite each other on a single card) only in the Clubs (or Flowers as they are also known) in some decks of cards that were produced in later years, hence making the total of 366.

Some believe that the Vietnam and Gulf Wars had spurned its own decks of cards with various other configurations or representations of numbers and picture cards in a standard card pack.

The endings in at least three narrations are different. One has it that he knows the story is true because he knew that soldier. Another one says that he knows the story us true because he himself was the soldier, while another narrator does not attribute it to anyone.