The Tarot is a deck of cards used for divination and fortune telling. It consists of four suits and twenty-two face cards, with the Major Arcana depicting universal themes. The Tarot was originally used as trump cards in trick games and became popular for predicting fortunes in the late 18th century. There are now hundreds of different Tarot decks with various uses beyond fortune telling.
The Tarot is a deck of cards now commonly used in “clairvoyance,” or divination. Fortune telling by cards is called fortune telling. The deck consists of four suits numbered like a normal deck of playing cards and twenty-two face cards numbered from one to twenty-two (in some decks, from zero to twenty-one).
The cards appeared around the same time as the now universal 52-card deck, and it’s a matter of dispute which came first. The Tarot deck has fourteen cards per suit, against thirteen for playing cards; the ‘court cards’ of the Tarot include a page together with the knight (rogue), the queen and the king.
The twenty-two picture cards, now called the Major Arcana (suited cards are Minor Arcana), were originally permanent trump cards. That is, in a trick game, any picture card would have a trick on a suit card. They illustrate themes from universal stories; the Fool is a young man who carelessly sets off on a journey with a backpack over his shoulder. He is often depicted without looking where he is going, and about to walk off the edge of a cliff, while a small dog barks at his heels in warning. Other cards depict concepts rather than people: the wheel of fortune is fate or karma, and the figure of Judgment is justice in all its forms.
Suits have direct analogies to standard playing cards: swords are spades, cups are hearts, pentacles (coins, discs) are diamonds, and wands (staves) are clubs.
The use of the Tarot as an instrument for predicting fortunes is a fairly recent invention, dating back to the end of the eighteenth century. The most familiar deck is the so-called Rider-Waite deck. The designs were by Arthur Waite, a member of the Order of the Golden Dawn occult society, in collaboration with artist Pamela Colman Smith, hence the deck is sometimes called the Waite-Smith deck. It was first published by the Rider Company in 1909.
There are now hundreds of different Tarot decks. Decks that downplay or remove Christian symbolism are increasingly popular, and some feminist decks significantly downplay the dominant male roles found in traditional decks. Some decks have discarded the suit system altogether and are structured around different themes, such as animals in a Native American-inspired deck.
The uses of Tarot cards are varied. They can of course be used in a traditional prediction layout. But they can also be used as inspiration cards, affirmation tools, or for self-discovery and intuition building.
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