What is tarot? A plain guide to the cards and tarot readings

What is tarot, in plain words?

Tarot is a deck of 78 cards, each showing its own image: a person, an object or a scene. The deck has two parts: 22 Major Arcana cards about life’s big themes, and 56 Minor Arcana cards about everyday matters, feelings and relationships. “Arcana” is Latin for secrets, a name the cards picked up during the 19th-century fascination with the occult.

People use the deck in different ways today. Some use it for divination: they ask a question, lay the cards out in a pattern and read their meanings. Others treat the cards as prompts for reflection, letting an image help them name a feeling, notice options or see something they had overlooked. And in France, Austria and a few other countries, people still simply play tarot as a card game, one that goes back centuries.

Where tarot cards came from

Tarot is often said to come from ancient Egypt, but the historical record tells a different story.

• 15th century, Italy. The earliest known decks appeared at the courts of northern Italy in the mid-1400s. They were called “cards of triumphs”: an extra row of trump cards with allegorical figures was added to the ordinary suits. The most famous surviving examples are the lavish Visconti–Sforza decks painted for the dukes of Milan. Later the game came to be called tarocchi, which gave us “tarot”.
• 16th–17th centuries. The game spread across Europe. The “Tarot de Marseille” pattern, probably born in Milan, became the standard in France and was printed for centuries.
• 1781. The French scholar Antoine Court de Gébelin declared that tarot held the coded wisdom of Egyptian priests. He had no evidence, but the idea stuck and still turns up in popular writing.
• 1780s. The occultist Etteilla (Jean-Baptiste Alliette) published books on reading tarot and then a deck designed specifically for divination. From then on, tarot was firmly linked with fortune telling.
• 19th century. The French occultist Éliphas Lévi matched the 22 Major Arcana to the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and English occultists developed his ideas at the end of the century.
• 1909. The Rider–Waite deck was published in London: Arthur Edward Waite set out its concept and the artist Pamela Colman Smith drew all 78 cards, inventing many of the Minor Arcana scenes herself. Its key innovation was giving the Minor Arcana full scenes, where earlier decks usually showed just the right number of symbols. It became the most popular deck in the world, and most modern decks build on its imagery.
• 20th century to today. Between 1938 and 1943 Aleister Crowley and the artist Frieda Harris created the Thoth deck, published in 1969. Today there are thousands of decks, from classic to highly original, but most keep the same 78-card structure.

How many cards are in a tarot deck?

A standard tarot deck has 78 cards.

The Major Arcana: 22 cards, numbered 0 to 21, from the Fool, who begins the journey, to the World, who completes it. In between come the Magician, the High Priestess, the Empress, the Lovers, the Chariot, the Hermit, the Wheel of Fortune, Death, the Tower, the Star and others. They are often read as “the Fool’s journey”, the story of a person growing up.

The Minor Arcana: 56 cards in four suits of 14: an Ace and cards Two to Ten, plus four court cards (Page, Knight, Queen and King).

The Minor Arcana are not the ancestors of ordinary playing cards but their relatives: tarot was created by adding trumps to an existing four-suit pack. Cups correspond to hearts, Pentacles to diamonds, Swords to spades and Wands to clubs. Tarot has one more court card per suit; the familiar playing-card deck has no Knight, only the jack, queen and king.

Every card is described in detail in our tarot card meanings: what it shows and what it means upright and reversed, in love and at work.

Types of tarot decks

• Tarot de Marseille. The historical pattern of the 17th and 18th centuries. Its Minor Arcana show only the right number of symbols, with no scenes, which makes them harder to read.
• Rider–Waite. The classic beginner’s deck: all 78 cards have scenes that hint at their meaning. This deck, in its original 1909 edition, is the one used on our site.
• Thoth tarot. Aleister Crowley’s deck, dense with astrological and kabbalistic symbolism. Like the Rider–Waite, the Thoth deck has 78 cards. Some cards are renamed: Strength, for instance, becomes Lust.
• Modern decks. Thousands of contemporary decks featuring cats, flowers or myths, usually keeping the same structure and meanings.

Oracle cards and Lenormand cards are a different thing. An oracle deck is a free-form set of cards whose number and meanings are invented by its author. A Lenormand deck has 36 simple images (House, Ship, Dog) and its own reading technique. Neither is tarot, though they’re often confused with it.

What is a tarot reading?

A tarot reading is the process of drawing cards and interpreting them in answer to a question. Every reading follows the same basic steps.

1. The question. The person asking decides what they want to understand. Open questions about yourself work best. For more, see our guide to tarot questions to ask.
2. Shuffling. The deck is mixed so that the order of the cards is random.
3. The spread. Cards are laid out in a pattern where each place has a meaning: the past, an obstacle, advice, an outcome. The simplest spreads use one or three cards; the best-known detailed one, the Celtic Cross, uses ten.
4. Interpretation. Each card is read in its position, then all the cards are woven into one story.

You can read with a physical deck or online. In an online reading, a random number generator chooses the cards, and the meanings are the same. For a step-by-step introduction, see how to read tarot cards.

Is tarot real? How tarot works

The honest answer: there is no scientific evidence that tarot cards predict the future. Research hasn’t found any predictive power in tarot readings, and the “hits” people remember are well explained by general wording and by the way we recognise our own lives in an image.

So why is tarot so popular? Because it works somewhere else: in the mind of the person reading. A card’s picture becomes a mirror. Looking at the Five of Cups, with its spilled cups, someone remembers their own loss and suddenly notices that two cups are still standing. The card didn’t know their story; they saw in it something they had been thinking about for a while. Psychologists compare this to projective techniques, where an image helps people express what is hard to name directly.

A sensible way to approach tarot, then:

• Tarot can help you step back from a situation, name your feelings, notice options you hadn’t considered and approach a decision more calmly.
• Tarot can’t predict specific events, diagnose an illness, tell you the outcome of a court case or pick a winning lottery ticket.
• The decisions are always yours. Take questions about health, money and the law to a professional, and keep the cards for reflection.

Are tarot cards evil or dangerous?

It’s a common question (along with whether tarot is witchcraft), and the answer depends on your beliefs. Many Christian churches and Islamic scholars view divination negatively and consider it incompatible with faith. If that matters to you, it’s more honest to talk to your own spiritual adviser than to look for an answer in the cards. We respect whatever you decide.

Reading tarot involves no spells: it means laying out printed cards and interpreting their images, although some religious traditions treat every form of divination in the same way. The cards themselves are printed paper. No card, not even Death or the Devil, attracts misfortune or carries evil within it. The real risks of tarot lie elsewhere:

• Dependence on readings. If you can’t make even small decisions without the cards, tarot has stopped helping and started feeding anxiety.
• Scams. “Readers” who charge to lift a “curse” or frighten clients with a terrible spread are profiting from fear. A genuine reading never asks you to pay to be rescued from disaster.
• Replacing real help. The cards don’t replace a doctor or a therapist. If you’re having a really hard time, talk to someone you trust or call a support line.

Common myths about tarot

• “Your first deck must be a gift.” A superstition, not a rule. A deck you buy works just as well.
• “Only psychics can read tarot.” Anyone can: the meanings are written down in books and online, and the rest is practice.
• “You can’t read tarot for yourself.” You can, and for many people that’s how they first get to know the cards.
• “The Death card predicts death.” It speaks of a chapter ending and space for something new, not of dying.
• “Tarot comes from ancient Egypt.” An appealing 18th-century legend. The evidence points to 15th-century Italy.

Frequently asked questions