Yes, there are references to the trumps being used as moral education, since early versions included ranks from beggars to kings to the pope, lists of virtues, scholastic subjects, or the cosmic spheres.
As for early divination with cards, this may be WAY more than anyone asked for (and it doesn't include how-to about techniques), but I thought it was interesting stuff. I tried to snip where I could.
Edited to directly quote a bit less. From Huson's
Mystical Origins of the Tarot, pgs 46-52:
A 14th century (fictional) poem includes a character who lays out cards to find the enemies of Charlemagne.
A German oracle book to accompany a deck of cards was written in the 1480s. These books were popular with educated 15th century Germans. "Lot-books" such as these in the 15th and 16th century, both German and Italian, often included illustrations of Fortune's Wheel. Cards or dice would tell you which royal character you'd drawn, and answers would be in the passage associated with each.
An Italian poet created a special tarot deck in 1475 with his own suits and trumps and had verses to go with each.
"These verses essentially assigned meanings to each card -- a significant leap toward using the cards as oracles, but we don't find our first definite mention of anyone using standard Italian tarocchi trumps by themselves for anything like sortilege until 1527." That's when yet another poet wrote a set of sonnets based on the 22 trumps that would
"describe the character of the person to whom they'd been dealt."
Mystical Origins said:
"The meanings assigned to the cards are all fairly obvious, face-value ones: Justice means justice, and the Lovers, or Love, as the card was called then, means love, and so on. The Tower is referred to as**Foco**(fire), and Judgment is called the Angel, both recognized name variants of the time. However, the important fact for us is that the cards are referred to as**sortes*, "destinies" or otherwise "lots," and used to form character sketches.
Folengo's use of the cards to devise sonnets began something of a craze among sixteenth-century Italian aristocracy for a game the came to be known as Tarocchi appriopriati (Appropriated Tarots). Here trump cards were selected by one player and presented to another, who would interpret them thematically by a process of idea association to create verses about himself or herself, about another person, or most popularly, to praise certain well-known ladies around the court."
The suit cards enter the picture in 1540, when a book published in Venice described how to use the Coin suit to draw cards and answer a set of fifty question with the oracular verses they signified.
Mystical Origins said:
By the mid-eighteenth century, the famous rake Giacomo Casanova was reporting in his diary of 1765 that his Russian peasant mistress resorted to reading playing cards every day, but we don't know whether or not these cards were tarots. Fairly conclusive, however, to the question of whether or not tarocchi had a tradition of divinatory usage prior to the late eighteenth century is the 1989 discovery of a manuscript in the library of the University of Bologna. Announced by Franco Pratesi, an expert on the early Florentine cards and tarocchi, and subsequently dated to some time prior to 1750, the manuscript gives a list of cartomantic interpretations for thirty-five Bolognese tarocchi cards along with a rudimentary method of laying them out.
And that brings us to Etteilla, who says he learned of telling fortunes w/ French suited cards in the 1750s, but thought the methods nothing better than the type of sortilege based upon books, so he devised his own methods...
ETA: So really, the whole "looking up the meanings in the book" arguments just point to the origins cartomancy has with sortilege and bibliomancy.
And edited again to add: Playing cards were well enough known by the 1370s that there were bans against them due to gambling. (pg 1) I'd wager that in private homes and gambling houses, divination of some basic sort was going on even then.
