Tarot
78 Cards of Symbol, Story & Divination
A tarot deck gives 78 cards an extraordinary amount of work to do. Kings and queens sit on their thrones, travellers cross unfamiliar landscapes, towers fall, wheels turn and a Fool steps towards the edge of an uncertain path. Between them are celebrations, arguments, losses, choices, ambitions, beginnings and endings. Shuffle the deck and those familiar figures find themselves in different company every time.
None of this began with divination. Tarot first appeared as a European card game, and the occult traditions now so closely associated with it arrived centuries later. The result is something with several lives layered together. Part game, part art form, part symbolic system and, for many people today, a divination tool.
Classification
Form: Cartomancy
Structure: 78 cards
Major Arcana: 22 cards
Minor Arcana: 56 cards
Suits: Wands, Cups, Swords and Pentacles
Common Uses: Divination, reflection, meditation, symbolic interpretation
Before the Cards Told Fortunes
Tarot emerged in 15th-century Europe, particularly northern Italy, where illustrated decks were produced for a family of trick taking card games. Alongside ordinary suited cards were additional trumps depicting figures and ideas such as the Fool, Emperor, Wheel of Fortune and Death. Some surviving decks were lavish commissions for wealthy families, but their elaborate artwork shouldn't disguise what they were. People played with them.
The turn towards divination came later. During the 18th century, writers began developing occult interpretations of tarot and proposing ancient origins that aren't supported by the historical record. Astrology, numerology, ceremonial magic and other esoteric systems were gradually woven through different tarot traditions.
Those later additions changed tarot enormously. They didn't erase the cards' earlier history.
A Deck in Two Halves
A standard modern tarot deck contains 78 cards divided into the Major and Minor Arcana. The 22 Major Arcana are the cards people often recognise even without knowing tarot particularly well. The Fool, Magician, High Priestess, Lovers, Hermit, Death, Tower, Moon and World all belong here.
The other 56 form the Minor Arcana. Four suits, usually Wands, Cups, Swords and Pentacles, each run from Ace through 10 before reaching the Page, Knight, Queen and King. Suit names can change between traditions, but the underlying arrangement remains familiar across a great many modern decks.
Readers often approach the Major Arcana as larger themes, significant experiences or turning points, while the Minor Arcana bring things closer to everyday choices, relationships and circumstances. That's a convention rather than a rule built into the cardboard. Tarot has accumulated plenty of those.
When the Pictures Start Talking
Tarot has a visual vocabulary, but thankfully not a dictionary.
Colour, posture, landscape, plants, animals, weather, celestial bodies and ordinary objects can all become part of an interpretation. Water might draw attention towards emotion or intuition. A sword can suggest conflict in one card and clarity in another. Sometimes the detail that catches attention isn't the great symbolic object in the centre at all. It might be a small animal near someone's feet or a figure looking towards one card and away from another.
Change the artist and those details change too. A familiar card can suddenly feel quite different when its expression, setting or visual emphasis shifts. The underlying card remains recognisable, but another artist has decided what deserves to be noticed.
That's one of the pleasures of opening a new deck. You know the card. Then it does something you weren't expecting.
What Happens After the Shuffle
A reading can be as small as a single card. Add another two and relationships begin forming between the images. Larger spreads might assign positions to challenges, influences, relationships, possibilities or outcomes, giving each card another piece of context to work within.
Patterns start appearing as well. Several Cups might draw attention towards emotional or relational matters. Numbers repeat. Court cards gather together. One suit dominates while another is completely absent. A spread filled with Major Arcana has a rather different presence from one made almost entirely from numbered Minor Arcana.
Reversals add another choice. Some readers interpret an upside down card differently, perhaps as blocked, internalised or altered in expression. Others turn every card upright and never use reversals at all.
There isn't one compulsory way to make 78 cards speak.
Familiar Faces, Different Decks
Tarot has never had a single definitive appearance. The Tarot de Marseille belongs to a family descended from early European traditions, while the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, first published in 1909, became enormously influential in modern tarot.
Pamela Colman Smith's illustrations changed what readers had available to interpret, particularly across the numbered Minor Arcana. Instead of simply showing repeated suit emblems, she created scenes. Five Swords became people, posture, landscape and an interaction that could be read in several directions. Her contribution is still obscured whenever the deck is shortened to “Rider-Waite”, despite how much later tarot imagery owes to her work.
The Thoth Tarot developed another dense symbolic language, drawing extensively from astrology, Qabalah and ceremonial occultism.
And then contemporary tarot rather enthusiastically refused to stop there. Decks now draw upon botanical illustration, mythology, animals, historical art, folklore, fantasy and countless other visual worlds. Sometimes two decks barely look related until their 78-card skeletons are placed beside one another.
Death Isn't Always Death
A few cards have reputations that reach the table before they do.
Death is the obvious example. Within modern tarot practice, it commonly speaks to endings, transition and transformation rather than predicting literal physical death. The Tower can suggest disruption, instability or the collapse of something established without requiring an actual catastrophe. Even the Devil has interpretations extending well beyond its ominous title.
The Fool has a different sort of complication. Usually numbered 0 in modern decks, it can begin the Major Arcana while also sitting slightly outside its sequence. Historically, its numbering and role haven't always been consistent.
Even the names Major Arcana and Minor Arcana belong to tarot's later occult life rather than its earliest years around the card table. Arcana comes from the Latin arcanum, referring to something hidden or secret.
Tarot carries its history in layers, including terminology that can feel ancient simply because it has become familiar.
78 Cards, Plenty of Ways to Read Them
People use tarot for divination, reflection, meditation, storytelling and approaching a question from another direction. Relationships and work certainly make appearances, but so do creative projects, difficult choices, recurring patterns and situations that haven't quite made sense yet.
Reading styles differ just as much. One person might work closely with established meanings and correspondences, while another responds more strongly to imagery and intuition. Some read predictively. Others deliberately don't. Many sit somewhere between several approaches and develop their practice over time.
A deck, a shuffle and something worth asking about are usually enough to begin.
In the Apotheca
Some cards become familiar quickly. Then another deck changes a facial expression, moves something into the background or replaces a familiar symbol entirely, and the same card asks for another look.
Context does much the same thing. The Moon beside the Tower doesn't have quite the same company as the Moon beside the Star. Neither does a card occupying an outcome position behave exactly as it might when it's sitting somewhere labelled challenge.
There are only 78 cards in the standard structure. That sounds surprisingly finite for a system capable of producing so much variation, until they're shuffled. Order changes, neighbours change, positions change, artwork changes, and then a reader brings their own way of interpreting the whole arrangement.
The cards remain familiar. Their conversation doesn't.
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