Tarot is the most recognisable divination practice in the world and one of the least standardised. There is no governing body, no canonical set of meanings, and no agreement between the major deck traditions about what the eighth trump is called.
None of this is a defect. It follows from where the cards came from and what happened to them afterwards.
Where Tarot Comes From
Tarot began in northern Italy in the middle of the fifteenth century as a card game. The earliest documented reference is from 1440 in Florence, where a notary recorded a gift of two decks described as playing cards with triumphs.
The structure follows from the description. Ordinary playing cards had reached Europe in the 1370s. Tarot is those cards plus a sequence of trumps, which beat the suits in a trick-taking game still played today in France, Bologna and elsewhere. The famous hand painted Visconti-Sforza decks were Milanese court commissions, made as luxury objects for a game.
The word arrived later. Fifteenth century Italians said trionfi. Tarocchi appears around 1502, and the French tarot comes from it.
The Egyptian Story Is a Fabrication, and It Has a Date
Cards were being read for divination before the occultists arrived. The earliest known set of divinatory meanings for tarot is an anonymous manuscript of about 1750 for the Bolognese deck.
What arrived in 1781 was the theory. Antoine Court de Gébelin published an essay claiming the tarot was a surviving Egyptian priestly book, and an essay by the Comte de Mellet in the same volume tied the 22 trumps to the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet and called the deck the Book of Thoth. There is no documentary, archaeological or art historical support for any of it. Court de Gébelin was writing four decades before hieroglyphs were deciphered, so nobody involved was in a position to check.
The story stuck because Jean-Baptiste Alliette, who published as Etteilla, turned it into a working method. His 1770 manual taught divination with a 32 card piquet deck. Between 1783 and 1785 he published the first method for divination by tarot specifically, and in 1789 a deck designed for it.
Several things every modern reader does are his: laying cards in positions with fixed meanings, letting a card be modified by its neighbours, assigning each suit a subject area, using a card to stand for the person asking, and treating a reversed card as carrying a different meaning.
What Is in the Deck
A tarot deck is 78 cards in two parts.
- Twenty-two trumps: the Fool plus twenty-one numbered cards. Occult and divinatory writing calls these the Major Arcana, a label attached long after the cards were made.
- Fifty-six suit cards, the Minor Arcana: four suits of fourteen, Ace through Ten plus four court cards.
- The courts are usually King, Queen, Knight and Page, though the Thoth deck renames them Knight, Queen, Prince and Princess.
Suit names vary by tradition. Older Italian and French decks use Batons, Cups, Swords and Coins. The Rider Waite Smith deck uses Wands, Cups, Swords and Pentacles. The Thoth deck uses Disks for the fourth suit. A reader saying “the Ten of Disks” and a reader saying “the Ten of Pentacles” are usually pointing at the same card and not always at the same meaning.
Tarot De Marseille
Marseille is a family of woodblock printed decks rather than one deck, made in France from the seventeenth century onwards. The oldest surviving example with the recognisable imagery is a Paris deck by Jean Noblet from around 1650, and the pattern most people mean was set by Nicolas Conver in 1760. What is sold today as the standard Marseille is largely a 1930 commercial codification of Conver by Paul Marteau for Grimaud.
The important feature is what the numbered cards look like. They carry no scene. The Five of Cups is five cups, arranged. A Marseille reader works from the number, the suit, the position, and the relationships between neighbouring cards, which is a different interpretive act from reading a picture.
Rider Waite Smith
Arthur Edward Waite commissioned the artist Pamela Colman Smith, and William Rider and Son published the deck in London in 1909 or 1910. Deck historians date the first edition to December 1909, and the Victoria and Albert Museum records it as 1910.
Both Waite and Smith were members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which taught tarot divination, and the deck carries the order’s correspondences. Its historic contribution is the illustrated pip: every one of the 56 minor cards has a full scene. Once the pictures carry the meaning, the deck teaches itself, which is why it became the standard beginner deck and the reference point for most modern writing.
It also renumbered two trumps. Strength is the eighth card and Justice the eleventh, reversing the older order, because the Golden Dawn’s zodiac sequence needs Leo before Libra. Smith went uncredited in the popular name for decades, and Rider Waite Smith is now the standard correction.
Thoth
Aleister Crowley specified and Lady Frieda Harris painted the Thoth deck between 1938 and 1943, a job intended to take six months. Both were dead before it was published commercially, which happened in the late 1960s. Sources give 1968, 1969 and about 1972, so the safe statement is more than twenty years after Crowley died.
It departs from the Rider Waite Smith deck in ways which matter at the table. The Magician is the Magus, the High Priestess is the Priestess, Strength is Lust, Justice is Adjustment, Temperance is Art and Judgement is the Aeon. Crowley kept the older numbering and rearranged the zodiac assignments instead, so Thoth and Rider Waite Smith disagree about which card carries which number AND about which card carries which sign.
Spreads
A spread is a layout where each position carries a meaning. Positional reading is Etteilla’s, and everything since is a variation on it.
The Celtic Cross is the best known ten card layout, and its history is worth knowing. It first appears in print in Waite’s own book of 1910, titled an ancient Celtic method of divination, described as having been used privately in England, Scotland and Ireland for many years. There is no evidence of it being ancient, and none of it being Celtic. We have Waite’s word and nothing else, which is an interesting position for a man who was scathing about the Egyptian story.
The three card spread has no documented origin at all. Nobody knows who first laid three cards out and assigned them past, present and future, and anybody claiming otherwise is guessing.
Position meanings drift. Even in the Celtic Cross, the ten positions vary between teachers, so a card in position five has no universal meaning.
Reversals
A reversed card is one drawn upside down. Etteilla formalised the practice, and his printed cards carried one keyword at the top and a different one at the bottom.
Plenty of readers use no reversals, and it is a considered position rather than a shortcut. Many Marseille pip cards are close to symmetrical, so there is nothing to read. Older practice modifies a card by its neighbours instead, through elemental relationships. Crowley thought each card already held enough range.
Where reversals are used, the theories are incompatible rather than variant. A reversed card might mean the opposite of the upright meaning, or the same quality blocked, or the same quality in excess, or a delay in timing. Same card, same position, four schools, four readings.
Reading Styles
Two broad lineages run through modern practice and most readers draw on both.
Cartomantic: descended from fortune telling with cards. Meanings are concrete, a card is modified by its neighbours, and the reading answers a question about events.
Esoteric: descended from the Paris occultists and the Golden Dawn. Cards are keyed to a correspondence system of Hebrew letters, planets, signs and elements, and the reading is often about a condition rather than an event.
Across both, a reader works predictively, reflectively, intuitively, or in a strictly structured way. A structured reader treats departure from recorded meanings as an error. An intuitive reader treats the image as a prompt and the book as a starting reference. Those are different methods and they produce different sessions.
Why Two Readers Read the Same Card Differently
Every reason below is structural. None of them is one reader being worse than the other.
- The same card is not the same card. The eighth trump is Justice in a Marseille deck and Strength in a Rider Waite Smith deck.
- Illustrated pips against unillustrated ones are two different interpretive acts on one nominal card.
- The recorded corpora disagree. Etteilla, Waite, the Golden Dawn, Crowley and modern reflective writing are distinct bodies of meaning and there is no canon.
- Reversals or not, and if so, which of four incompatible theories.
- Position meanings are not fixed, even inside a named spread.
- Correspondences differ. The suit given to Fire in one system is given to Air in another.
- Reading from recorded meanings and reading from the image are different methods with different outputs.
- Some readers apply card to card rules and some read each card standing alone.
Taken together these say something useful about what tarot is. It is a group of related interpretive traditions rather than one decodable system, and a reading is produced jointly by the deck, the tradition, the method and the reader.
Before Booking a Tarot Reading
Ask which deck they work with and which tradition of meanings they follow. Ask whether they use reversals. Ask whether the session is predictive or reflective, because those are different purchases.
The general version of those questions, with what a clear answer sounds like, is in the 11 questions worth asking before a reading.
A reader who answers all three in a sentence each has told you more about the session ahead than any profile will.