The tarot has a reputation for being mysterious, mystical, spooky or even a bit scary and dangerous. It has a history of being associated with various different traditions, systems of belief, cultures and practices, for various different reasons. Some of these associations are valid, some are tentative, and some are simply untrue. For a tarot beginner, it’s easy to be confused and overwhelmed by the amount of, often contradictory, information about tarot, its history, how it is used and what it can and/or should be used for. It can also be difficult to see how it is different from other, sometimes similar, systems of cards that can be used in similar ways.
Tarot is a particular system of cards, related to playing cards, which can be used for playing card games, or for doing tarot readings for various purposes. A tarot deck usually has seventy-eight cards, consisting of the minor arcana, which has four suits, each with fourteen cards, and the major arcana, which has twenty-two cards known sometimes known as trumps. There are some variations on this, some decks are majors only, meaning that they only have the twenty-two trump cards. Others have extra cards, perhaps an extra trump card, or an additional suit in the minor arcana. There are also decks which are called tarot, but have a different structure – I’m not going to discuss whether or not these are actually tarot here though.
The minor arcana of the tarot has four suits, and although there are some variations in the way they’re named, they are typically swords, wands, cups and coins. The most common variation is the use of pentacles in place of coins, but some decks swap the suits for something else that fits with the theme of the deck. The standards suits correspond to playing card suits, as follows:
- spades = swords
- clubs = wands
- hearts = cups
- diamonds = coins/pentacles
Each suit includes numbered cards, often called pips, running from Ace or 1 to 10, and four court cards. The court cards are usually Page, Knight, Queen and King, or similarly named groups, often with two pairs of males and females, one pair ranking higher than the other. There are also variations which don’t follow this pattern, such as Knight, Prince, Princess and King. There is even a historic deck that appears to have had three pairs of males and females, adding female knights and ladies in waiting to the standard court cards.
The major arcana consists of twenty-two trump cards, with a fairly standard set of titles and numbering. These are:
- The Magician
- The High Priestess
- The Empress
- The Emperor
- The Hierophant
- The Lovers
- The Chariot
- Justice (sometimes numbered 11)
- The Hermit
- The Wheel of Fortune
- Strength (sometimes numbered 8)
- The Hanged Man
- Death
- Temperance
- The Devil
- The Tower
- The Star
- The Moon
- The Sun
- Judgement
- The World
- The Fool (often numbered 0)
There are variations in numbering as noted above, and some variations in naming, but cards with the same numbers usually represent the same thing across different decks, even if they’re named differently.
Despite its reputation for being mysterious, the tarot is a system of cards, a set of 78 images representing a set of ideas, printed or painted on conveniently sized sheets of card. There are a wide variety of decks available, each with some variation in style, symbolism or interpretation, but all essentially using the same structure.
I’ll be discussing more about the meaning of the cards, their history and the ways they can be used in future posts.
