What is Tarot?
Cards have a wide array of use. There are gamblings cards for games like poker, sports cards for trading and there is...tarot.
Tarot is a time-honored tradition of interpreting a pattern of cards randomly drawn from the deck's78 traditional images to gain insight and achieve greater control over issues involving relationships, opportunities, and life changes. Tarot is over 500 years old, with roots that go back to Pagan antiquity, making it a Western repository of ancient wisdom. Interestingly, modern playing cards are a subset Tarot's 78 cards.
The history of Tarot symbols is a study in the Western Mystery Tradition. Legend would have it that Tarot came out of China, India or Egypt. However, modern tarot scholars date Tarot back to 14th Century Italy and France. The Tarot cards have much to tell you. The Tarot pack is set of cards which may be used either for divination, or as a philosophical machine for answering almost any kind of question put to it through a medium or someone familiar with its powerful symbolism.
The images on the Tarot, and the interest in predicting events through symbols, dates back to ancient Egypt and even older civilizations, right across the world. Tarot may have travelled to Europe from the Middle East at the time of the Crusades, in the 12th century. The earliest surviving Tarot deck, however, comes from 14th century Italy, where an Italian nobleman had a deck hand-painted as a present for his daughters' marriage.
The Tarot was originally a deck of 78 cards, divided into 4 suits of 14 cards (the standard ace-10, then page, knight, queen, and king) and 22 un-numbered 'triumphs' or 'trumps'. Over the years, the trumps got numbered 1 to 21, with one card (the fool) remaining un-numbered or sometimes being 0. The 4 suits are commonly called the 'Minor Arcana' and the trump cards are called the 'Major Arcana'. More loosely, any deck of cards designed for 'fortune-telling', divination, meditation, contemplation, or other non-game uses is popularly called a Tarot deck. The most commonly found suits for Tarot decks are cups, swords, wands or staffs (probably originally polo-sticks), and pentacles (originally coins).
