About the Tarot

This deck of playing cards has been used since at least the mid-15th century for various card games such as Tarocchini across Europe. Over time, tarot cards evolved into a family of games, spreading to most of Europe from their Italian roots.

Working on the Hanged Man

In the late 18th century, French occultists made claims about the history and meaning of tarot cards, leading to the emergence of custom decks used in divination via tarot card reading and cartomancy. Today, there are two distinct types of tarot packs: those used for card games and those used for divination.

Like common playing cards, tarot cards have four suits that vary by region. Each suit has 14 cards, including ten pip cards numbered from one (or Ace) to ten, and four face cards (King, Queen, Knight, and Jack/Knave/Page). The tarot also has a separate 21-card trump suit and a single card known as the Fool. Depending on the game, the Fool may act as the top trump or may be played to avoid following suit. Tarot cards are still used throughout much of Europe to play conventional card games.

While early French occultists claimed that tarot cards had esoteric links to ancient Egypt, the Kabbalah, Indic Tantra, or the I Ching, scholarly research has established that tarot cards were invented in northern Italy in the mid-15th century. There is no historical evidence of any significant use of tarot cards for divination until the late 18th century.

In the occult tradition, tarot cards are referred to as 'arcana,' with the Fool and 21 trumps being termed the Major Arcana and the suit cards the Minor Arcana. The tarot cards, then known as tarocchi, first appeared in Ferrara and Milan in northern Italy, with a Fool and 21 trumps (then called trionfi) being added to the standard Italian pack of four suits: wands, coins, cups, and swords. Scholarship has established that the early European cards were probably based on the Egyptian Mamluk deck, which was invented in or before the 14th century following the invention of paper from Asia into Western Europe. By the late 1300s, Europeans were producing their own cards, with the earliest patterns being based on the Mamluk deck but with variations to the suit symbols and court cards.