Origins of Tarot Cards and Other Information

Origins of Tarot Cards and Other Information

Tarot Cards: a collection of images and symbols that have come from many different cultures, such as the Ancient Greeks and Romans. However, the main theory is that tarot cards originated in Italy in the fifteenth century as a game played in the medieval courts.

The game consisted of twenty-two trump cards added to a normal deck of cards, and four Queens of each suit. Some of the earliest tarot cards which have existed to this day were called “carte de trionfi” or “cards of the triumphs”. However not long after this, they came to be known as “Tarrochi”. At this time, the cards were nothing more than a game, and it was not until 1781 that they began to be used as a form of Divination.

It was in this year that Antoine Court de Gebelin claimed that they were not simply cards meant for a game and that they contained a hidden meaning that could be used to predict the future.

This is simply one of the theories on the origins of tarot cards, and it needs to be treated with the same level of belief as the others. However, there is no evidence of tarot cards before the ones originating in Medieval Italy.

In a typical deck, there are seventy-eight tarot cards. These are split into two parts: trump cards, which consist of twenty-one cards without a suit, plus The Fool. The second part consists of fifty-six cards which have been divided into four suits of fourteen cards.

For Divination purposes, the trumps are called “Major Arcana”, whilst the others are known as “Minor Arcana”. “Arcana” comes from the Latin word “Arcanum” meaning ‘closed’ or ‘secret’.