A tarot deck has 78 cards. Played as a game it is older than tarot
reading; read as an oracle it is a deck of pictures to talk about, and
this page is about the second use.
The deck
- Major Arcana
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22 cards, from 0 The Fool to 21 The World: the big archetypes and
turning points of a life.
- Minor Arcana
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56 cards in four suits, Wands, Cups, Swords and Pentacles, each
running Ace to Ten.
- Court cards
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Page, Knight, Queen and King in each suit, often read as people or
ways of acting.
A reading is a spread: cards drawn into set positions, where each
position asks its own question. The Celtic Cross used
here has ten cards, six laid in a cross and four in a column beside it,
and the last card is usually read as the likely outcome. Position names
vary a little between authors.
Most modern readers treat the cards as prompts for reflection, a way to
look at a question from angles you had not tried, rather than as a
prediction of fixed events.
A short history
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1440sThe earliest known tarot decks are painted for noble families in
northern Italy, such as the Visconti-Sforza decks of Milan, for a
trick-taking game called trionfi, later
tarocchi.
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1781Antoine Court de Gébelin claims the tarot preserves ancient
Egyptian wisdom. There is no evidence for it, but the idea
sticks.
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Mid 1780sEtteilla (Jean-Baptiste Alliette) publishes the first deck designed
for divination.
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Late 1800sThe Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn ties the cards to astrology,
the Kabbalah and the elements.
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1909The Rider-Waite-Smith deck appears in London: designed by Arthur
Edward Waite and painted by Pamela Colman Smith, with a scene on
every card, including the numbered suit cards.
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1910Waite’s Pictorial Key to the Tarot describes the
ten-card “Ancient Celtic Method of Divination”, now
known as the Celtic Cross.
Sources
Card meanings in this app are adapted from Mark McElroy’s
A Guide to Tarot Card Meanings. The deck is Rider-Waite-Smith,
illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith (1909).
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