Origin, practice, and what a reading actually does
Tarot is pronounced tah-ROH, with a silent T. The word likely derives from the Italian tarocchi, the name for the trump cards in a game played across northern Italy since the mid-fifteenth century. Before it became a tool for divination, tarot was a card game—and a popular one.
The earliest known tarot decks date to the 1440s in Milan, Ferrara, and Bologna. These were hand-painted luxury objects commissioned by noble families, not fortune-telling devices. The Visconti-Sforza deck, painted for the Duke of Milan, is the oldest surviving set. The standard structure—78 cards split into 22 Major Arcana and 56 Minor Arcana—was established by the early sixteenth century and has remained essentially unchanged.
Tarot's association with divination began in the late eighteenth century, when French occultists like Antoine Court de Gébelin proposed that the cards encoded ancient Egyptian wisdom. They didn't—that was entirely made up—but the idea stuck, and within a few decades tarot had been fully adopted by esoteric traditions across Europe. The Rider-Waite-Smith deck, published in 1909, made tarot accessible to a mass audience for the first time by illustrating every card with symbolic imagery, not just the trumps.
A standard tarot deck contains 78 cards. The 22 Major Arcana represent archetypal life passages—The Fool's journey from innocence through experience to integration. The 56 Minor Arcana are divided into four suits (Wands, Cups, Swords, Pentacles), each running from Ace through Ten plus four court cards (Page, Knight, Queen, King). The suits correspond roughly to the classical elements: fire, water, air, and earth.
A tarot reading is structured around a spread—a specific arrangement of cards where each position carries a defined meaning. A simple three-card spread might represent past, present, and future. A Celtic Cross uses ten cards to examine a situation from every angle. The reader interprets each card in context: what it means in that position, how it relates to the cards around it, and what pattern emerges from the whole layout.
Cards can appear upright or reversed (upside-down), which modifies their meaning. A reversed card doesn't mean the opposite of the upright meaning—it usually indicates that the energy of the card is blocked, internalized, or working in a subtler way.
Tarot does not predict a fixed future. It reads the energies present now and the trajectories they suggest. A good reading tells you what you're working with, not what will happen to you. The value is in the clarity—seeing your situation mapped out in symbolic language often reveals what you already knew but hadn't been able to articulate.
Whether you approach tarot as a spiritual practice, a psychological tool, or simply a framework for structured reflection, the mechanism is the same: the cards give you a language for the things that are hard to say plainly.
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