Games - Tarot

	Games - Tarot

The Tarot is a set of 78 cards with allegorical representations used for divination, that first appeared in Medieval times. A typical Tarot deck consists of:

the major arcana, consisting of 21 trump cards and the Fool card;
the minor arcana consisting of 56 cards:
* ten cards numbered from Ace to 10 in four different suits; traditionally batons (wands), cups, swords and coins (pentacles) (40 cards in total); and
* four court cards, page, knight, queen and king in the same four suits (4 per suit, thus 16 court cards in total).

Origins

Many Hermetic traditions, such as the Order of the Golden Dawn, have made claims that the Tarot system was derived from ancient mystery religions as a visually encoded framework of the archetypical concepts seminal to the journey of enlightenment. (They would be quick to point out that in a qabalistic analysis, Tarot is equivalent to Rota (Wheel) or Tora (Law), where "Wheel" could perhaps suggest the Buddhist Wheel of Dharma, where dharma itself can be loosely translated as "Law".) A number of scholars of the western Hermetic or Magical traditions have made such claims of the Tarot having ancient roots and lessons. Look to the works of Robert Fludd or Albertus Magnus for deeper inspections. Another school of thought believes that the Roma people, travelling through many cultures, picked up this pictorial wisdom, and being inventive by nature, created a form of divination (and perhaps of card games) from it. The idea is that they understood and kept the knowledge of the mystery-lessons of the picture-cards in private, while in public they used the cards for profit through divination and card games.

The earliest extant specimens of Tarot decks are of North Italian origin and date to the early to mid-15th century. These were called carte da trionfi
or "cards of the triumphs". Soon afterwards, the cards were used for the games called Tarocchi. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the cards became popular in occult studies, initiated by occultists such as Etteilla and Antoine Court de Gebelin.

The Tarot Deck

The typical 78-card tarot deck is structured into two distinct parts. The first, called the Major Arcana, consists of 21 cards without suits typically referred to as "trumps", plus a 22nd card, The Fool. The second, called the Minor Arcana, consists of 56 cards divided into four suits of 14 cards each. The traditional Italian suits are Swords, Batons, Coins and Cups. In modern tarot decks, the Batons suit is commonly called Wands, Rods or Staves, while the Coins suit is often called Pentacles or Disks. (Arcana is the plural form of the Latin word arcanum, meaning "closed" or "secret".)

The 14 cards in each suit consist of an Ace, nine cards numbered 2 through 10, and four court cards (not dissimilar from the structure of 52-card bridge/poker playing card decks, except that bridge/poker playing card decks have three court cards rather than four).

The four court cards (or face cards) of the tarot deck traditionally consist of the King, the Queen, the Knight and the Page (or Knave). In bridge/poker decks, the court cards typically consist of the King, the Queen and the Jack. The Jack corresponds to the tarot deck's Page.

In the Western world today, the Tarot is usually seen either as a means of divination, the practice of ascertaining information from supernatural or other sources, or, in a more modern view, as a psychological tool for accessing the unconscious. However, early references such as a sermon refer only to the use of the cards for game-playing and gambling; and in some European countries such as France, Italy, Switzerland, Austria and Germany, Tarot is still a widely played game.

The relationship between Tarot cards and playing cards is well documented. Playing cards appeared quite suddenly in Christian Europe during the period 1375-1380, following several decades of use in Islamic Spain: see playing card history for discussion of its origins. Early European sources describe a deck with typically 52 cards, like a modern deck with no jokers . The 78-card Tarot resulted from merging 21 Trumps and the Fool into an early 56-card variant (14 cards per suit).

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Tarot ]

Games - Tarot

Origins

The Tarot Deck

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