What is tarot?

TAROT

Tarot is a deck of 78 cards. It was born in fifteenth-century Italy as a deck for playing games, and from the end of the eighteenth century it began to be used for divination as well. Today it is best known as a deck for reading the cards.

The 78 cards divide into 22 picture cards called the "major arcana" and 56 cards much like ordinary playing cards, called the "minor arcana."

How the deck is made up

The major arcana (22 cards)

These are the cards that each have their own name and picture: the Fool, the Magician, the Empress, Death, the Sun and so on. They are numbered from the Fool at 0 to the World at 21. When people talk about "tarot" in a reading, they usually mean these 22 cards.

"Arcana" is Latin for "secrets." The terms major and minor arcana spread in nineteenth-century France. In Italy, where the cards began, the picture cards were called trionfi, "triumphs," that is, trumps.

The minor arcana (56 cards)

There are four suits. Each suit has number cards from 1 to 10 and four court cards (Page, Knight, Queen and King), making 14 cards per suit.

Suit	What it shows	In ordinary playing cards
Wands	Rods, staffs	Clubs
Cups	Cups	Hearts
Swords	Swords	Spades
Pentacles	Coins (originally money)	Diamonds

Compared with ordinary playing cards, tarot has one more court card in each suit (the Knight) and the 22 trumps. This site does not use the minor arcana.

The best-known decks

Tarot designs vary by period and by country. Three names come up most often.

The Tarot of Marseille: cards made in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France by many woodblock printers working from much the same pattern. It is the name of a style, not of one artist's deck.
The Rider–Waite–Smith tarot: a deck published in London in 1909. A. E. Waite designed it and Pamela Colman Smith drew the pictures. Most decks sold today in the English-speaking world and in Japan are based on its images.
The Thoth tarot: a deck designed by Aleister Crowley and painted by Frieda Harris between 1938 and 1943. It was published in 1969, after both had died.

Marseille and Rider–Waite–Smith compared

Both have 78 cards. The biggest difference is whether the minor arcana number cards have pictures.

	Tarot of Marseille	Rider–Waite–Smith
Time and place	France, 17th–18th century	London, 1909
How it was made	Woodblock prints colored through stencils in a few colors such as red, blue and yellow	Pen drawings with watercolor-like coloring
Minor arcana number cards	Only the symbols, e.g. seven cups in a pattern	All 56 cards show people and scenes
Cards 8 and 11	8 is Justice, 11 is Strength	8 is Strength, 11 is Justice
Purpose	Made for games, later also used for divination	Made for divination from the start

Cards 8 and 11 were swapped at the end of the nineteenth century by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in London, to fit the cards to the order of the zodiac signs. The Rider–Waite–Smith deck follows that order.

How this site uses tarot

This site uses only the 22 major arcana. Its order is the same as the Rider–Waite–Smith deck: 8 is Strength and 11 is Justice.

When you draw a card, a short story appears that pairs the card with a color. The upright and reversed words and the stories on each card page are written for this site. The traditional meanings are explained separately on the page for each major arcana card.

Draw a card