The Tarot Wizard - What are Tarot Cards Anyway?

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The Tarot Wizard

What are Tarot Cards?

A Brief History

No one knows the 'true' origin of the Tarot. The most common myth is that it was brought to Europe by the Gypsies. But this myth come from the fact that very early occultists who used the Tarot fancied that it came from Egypt. They were as wrong about that as they were about the homeland of the Gypsies. In fact, the Tarot came to Europe about the same time as any other form of playing card, in the early/mid 1300's. It is most closely related to the 'Mamluk' deck of the Islamic world, which had suits cups, coins, swords, and polo-sticks.

The Tarot was originally used for a game called 'tarocchi' in Italy, which is sort of a distant cousin to Bridge. Tarocchi is still played in some parts of the world, not usually with the same decks the 'fortune tellers' use. The game was quite popular for a time among the royalty in Italy, and sometimes a duke would commission an artist to create a particularly special deck. Some of the earliest surviving Tarot decks come from this source. Plainer decks existed, but were not well made enough, or well thought-of enough, to survive the intervening 600 years.

The Tarot was first associated with the occult by Antoine Court de Gebelin, a relatively obscure Parisian mason who wrote about the deck in 1781. He also invented a lot of the standard myths about the Tarot which were later popularised by others (it comes from ancient Egypt, the Major Arcana is related to the Kabalah, it communicates with the future, etc.). The first big populariser of the deck was a contemporary of de Gebelin, called Etteilla, who published the first 'revised and corrected' Tarot deck for divination. The fad was caught up by Eliphas Levi, Oswald Wirth, and Papus, among others. From Papus, the Tarot caught on with some English mystics, such as S.L. Mathers (whose mistranslation of Levi brought us the suit of pentacles), A.E. Waite, and A. Crowley. The Tarot received a lot of attention from these folks, and they created a fairly large body of writing on the use of Tarot. For the most part they thought that divination was a 'lower' use of the cards, that ideally it should be used to put you in touch with eternal verities, usually in conjunction with whatever magical order they happened to be involved with. But of course, divination was the most popular use for the cards.

In the present-day Anglo-American world, the Tarot is usually seen either as a means of divination, a method of meditation or, in a more modern view, as a psychological tool for accessing the unconscious. Tarot cards have been used for hundreds of years to reveal hidden truths about the person receiving the card reading.

Speculation aside, we don't know, and perhaps will never know, what the original Tarot cards looked like. Nor do we know where they came from or who created them. We don't even know how many were contained in a deck. It has frustrated Tarot experts and inspired countless origin theories. However they came to be, the images of Tarot, like all true symbols, resound spontaneous self-expressions from the psyche's deepest springs; and for that reason they hold up magic mirrors to whatever reactions we bring them. Like all authentic artistic creations, Tarots are ultimately a mystery and will remain so.

Whatever their origin, there doesn't seem to be any argument that after being introduced to Western Europe in the 14th or 15th century, their use has spread, and today they can be found all over the world.

The Deck

Tarot card decks come in many varieties, (one encyclopedia lists 70 major varieties of tarot card decks), ranging from traditional to modern, from European to Native American, from masculine to feminine, from sport themed to the nearly plain. Most of the Tarot decks on the market today were created this century, with most of those created in the last 20 years.

The typical 78-card tarot deck is structured into two distinct parts. The first, called the Trump cards, consists of 21 cards without suits, plus a 22nd card, The Fool, which is sometimes given the value of zero (0). (The Joker of 'standard' card decks is not related to the Fool of Tarot. The Joker was invented as a wild card for the game "Euchre" in the 1800's, in a part of the world where the Tarot was virtually or totally unknown.) The second part consists of 56 cards divided into four suits of 14 cards each. The traditional Italian suits are Swords, Batons, Coins and Cups. In modern tarot decks, the Batons suit is commonly called Wands, Rods or Staves, while the Coins suit is often called Pentacles or Disks. The trumps are usually called Major Arcana, while the other cards are known as the Minor Arcana. (Arcana is the plural form of the Latin word arcanum, meaning "closed" or "secret".)

The 14 cards in each suit consist of an Ace, nine cards numbered 2 through 10, and four court cards (not dissimilar from the structure of 52-card bridge/poker playing card decks, except that bridge/poker playing card decks have three court cards rather than four). The four court cards (or face cards) of the tarot deck traditionally consist of the King, the Queen, the Knight and the Page (or Knave). In bridge/poker decks, the court cards typically consist of the King, the Queen and the Jack. The Jack corresponds to the tarot deck's Page.

Each of the 78 cards in the deck represent a particular human trait, situation or emotion. This trait is usually represented by the brightly colored picture on the card's face. Although the cards of the Major Arcana have dark and often threatening names such as "The Devil" or "Death," the Tarot is really all about your personal interpretation of the cards and their meanings. Despite the names, no card in the Tarot actually means death or demonic possession.

The Reading

Readers of tarot cards lay the cards out in special combinations called spreads. In these spreads, it becomes possible for the reader to see a detailed, pictorial representation of the situation for which their client has come to them. In a traditional 10-card spread called the Celtic Cross, a reader can look at the positions of the cards and determine what past actions have contributed to or caused the situation, the current events in the client's life, and what direction the clients life is going at the time of the reading.

The decision to use a particular deck of Tarot cards or which system in reading the cards is entirely a matter of the personal preference of the reader. In other words, two readers can read the same spread of cards and come up with entirely different interpretations of those cards. Trained Tarot card readers will say that the tarot can only provide a static "photograph" of a situation, that "free will" cannot be predicted and that our own choices and actions determine our future-not the cards.

What Does It All Mean?

The truth is, nothing on Earth can predict the future. We are all in fact the masters of our own fate, making decisions based on the best information available at the time. While the Tarot can be a revealing and entertaining form of meditation, the client should keep in mind at all times that all Tarot readers, including The Tarot Wizard, are professional performers, and that the readings given are for entertainment purposes only.

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