Tarot

What it is

A deck of 78 cards in two parts.

The Major Arcana — 22 trump cards running from the Fool to the World, each a distinct allegorical image: the Magician, the High Priestess, the Empress, the Emperor, the Hierophant, the Lovers, the Chariot, Strength, the Hermit, the Wheel of Fortune, Justice, the Hanged Man, Death, Temperance, the Devil, the Tower, the Star, the Moon, the Sun, Judgement.

The Minor Arcana — 56 cards in four suits (wands, cups, swords, pentacles or coins), each running ace to ten plus four court cards. This is an ordinary playing-card structure with one extra court card per suit.

Where it came from

The documented history is clear, well evidenced, and completely different from the story usually told.

Playing cards reached Europe from the Islamic world in the 1370s — the Mamluk deck, with suits of cups, coins, swords and polo sticks, is the direct ancestor of European suits.

Tarot appears in northern Italy in the 1440s, as carte da trionfi, "cards of triumphs". The earliest surviving examples are luxury hand-painted decks made for the Visconti and Sforza families of Milan. The addition was a fifth suit of unnumbered trumps that could beat the others.

It was made for a game. Tarocchi is a trick-taking game in which the trumps do what trumps do. It is still played: French Tarot is one of the most popular card games in France, and Königrufen is played in Austria. Millions of people play tarot without any thought of divination, because that is what the cards are for.

No divinatory use is documented for about three hundred years. This is not an argument from silence about an obscure object — cards were common, regulated, taxed, and written about. The divinatory tradition simply is not there.

It begins in the 1780s in France. Antoine Court de Gébelin, a Protestant pastor and scholar, included an essay in his Le Monde primitif (1781) claiming that tarot was a survival of an ancient Egyptian sacred book — the Book of Thoth — smuggled through the centuries by gypsies. He offered no evidence and had none. Egyptian hieroglyphs would not be deciphered until Champollion in 1822, so nobody in 1781 could read a word of Egyptian. The claim was pure invention presented as scholarship.

It was commercially successful. Etteilla — Jean-Baptiste Alliette — began selling cartomancy readings and, in 1789, the first deck designed specifically for divination.

Éliphas Lévi made the next decisive move in the 1850s, linking the 22 trumps to the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet and thus to the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. This correspondence is now so embedded that it is often assumed to be ancient. Lévi invented it. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn systematised his scheme in the 1890s, and every modern esoteric deck descends from that synthesis.

How it is practised

Cards are shuffled, cut and laid in a spread — a fixed arrangement in which each position carries a meaning. The three-card past–present–future and the ten-card Celtic Cross are the most common; the Celtic Cross was popularised by A.E. Waite in 1910 and is not Celtic.

Reading combines the card's own significations, its position, whether it appears reversed, and its relationship to surrounding cards.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the origin story is decisively false and that this is not a matter of scholarly opinion. The Egyptian claim was made up by a named man in a datable book for reasons that can be reconstructed, and every element of the documented history contradicts it.

We can say the esoteric system is a genuine tradition, just a much younger one than advertised. The Kabbalistic correspondences are Lévi's, the astrological attributions are the Golden Dawn's, and the illustrated minor arcana that made intuitive reading possible date from 1909. That is a hundred and fifty years of development by serious practitioners — a real tradition, and not an ancient one.

We can say there is no evidence of predictive validity, and that the mechanisms described under what divination is — pattern-finding, general statements accepted as specific, selective memory — account for the experience of accuracy without anything further.

We can also say something in its favour that most sceptical accounts skip. Seventy-eight images covering the range of human situations — loss, ambition, deception, endurance, sudden reversal, waiting — laid out in a structure that forces you to relate them to your own circumstances, is a reasonable device for prompting reflection. It works the way a well-chosen question works. Whether the cards need to know anything for that to happen is the question the tradition has never had to answer, and increasingly does not claim to.

Further reading

• Michael Dummett, The Game of Tarot (1980) — the definitive history, by a philosopher who also happened to be the world authority on card games.
• Ronald Decker, Thierry Depaulis and Michael Dummett, A Wicked Pack of Cards (1996) — on the eighteenth-century invention of the occult tarot.