The Tarot
A 15th-century Italian card game that was turned to fortune-telling only 350 years later.
78 cards in two parts.
The Major Arcana: 22 trump cards, numbered 0 (the Fool) through XXI (the World), for the large forces and turning points of a life.
The Minor Arcana: 56 cards in four suits - Wands (fire), Cups (water), Swords (air) and Pentacles (earth). Each suit runs Ace through Ten, then four court cards: Page, Knight, Queen and King.
Four-suit playing cards reached Europe from the Islamic world in the late 1300s. The tarot itself appeared in northern Italy in the 1430s and 1440s as carte da trionfi, 'cards of the triumphs' - luxury decks hand-painted for courts such as the Visconti and Sforza of Milan. To the ordinary four suits it added a fifth run of allegorical trump cards and the Fool.
For roughly three centuries the tarot was simply a trick-taking game, played as tarocchi, tarot or tarock across Italy, France, Switzerland, Germany and Austria. Versions of that game are still played today.
Divinatory use begins in Paris in the 1780s. Antoine Court de Gebelin proposed, without evidence, that the cards preserved ancient Egyptian wisdom; soon after, the reader known as Etteilla published the first system for reading them. In the 1800s Eliphas Levi tied the 22 trumps to the Hebrew alphabet and Kabbalah, and the woodcut 'Tarot de Marseille' pattern became the standard template.
In 1909 the Rider-Waite-Smith deck - written by A. E. Waite, drawn by Pamela Colman Smith, and shaped by the symbolism of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn - gave every card a full pictorial scene, including the numbered suit cards. It became the dominant English-language deck and the model for most decks made since, including the interpretations used here.
The upright and reversed meanings here follow the mainstream Rider-Waite-Smith reading tradition. A reversed card is treated as the same force blocked, turned inward, or overexpressed - not simply as its opposite.
