Tarot

It began as a card game. Cards called tarocchi first appear in northern Italy, in Milan and Ferrara, in the 15th century: a set of 21 trump cards and the Fool were added to an ordinary pack of four suits. The first documented decks date from about 1440 to 1450, and the oldest surviving cards are the Visconti-Sforza decks, painted in the middle of the 15th century for the rulers of the Duchy of Milan. In the 15th century the decks were called trionfi; the name tarocchi came later.

Fortune-telling came much later. The earliest evidence of a tarot deck used for divination is an anonymous manuscript of about 1750 that gives meanings for the Tarocco Bolognese. The occult tradition grew in France in the 1780s, with Antoine Court de Gébelin and Jean-Baptiste Alliette (known as Etteilla), who claimed that the cards came from ancient Egypt. That claim is not accepted: the tarot was invented in northern Italy in the mid-15th century, and there is no evidence of significant divinatory use before the late 18th century.

The 78-card deck. Decks made for divination have 78 cards: 22 Major Arcana (the Fool and 21 trumps) and 56 Minor Arcana, four suits of 14 cards (ten numbered cards and four court cards). Suit names vary from deck to deck; batons appear as wands, and coins as pentacles. One of the most common decks used for divination today, the Rider–Waite–Smith, was designed by A. E. Waite, illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith and first published by William Rider & Son of London in December 1909. Smith drew a scene on each Minor Arcana card, where earlier decks, with a few rare exceptions, had simple designs.