Tarot Psychic Readings

The origins of Tarot are somewhat obscure, the most common theories go to ancient Egypt and Thoth and the connection to the ancient mystery school teachings. There is a common myth that Tarot was brought to Europe by the Gypsies. Some believe that a form of Tarot goes back to ancient China. I believe that all ancient civilizations developed their own systems of divination based on the same symbolism and archetypes.

Tarot as we know it today is a collection of images and symbols from a wide variety of cultures, from the ancient Greeks and Romans to the prehistoric Norse peoples, from the ancient religions of India and Egypt to the medieval courts of Italy and France. The first clear reference that we have to Tarot cards is from a sermon that was collected with many others about 1500 in Italy found in the Steele Manuscript. The sermon is thought to date from about 1450 to 1470 and is a diatribe against games of chance. It gives a detailed description of the Tarot trumps, not only numbering them but naming them as well.

The typical 78-card tarot deck is structured into two distinct parts. The first, called the trump cards, consists of 21 cards without suits, plus a 22nd card, The Fool, which is sometimes given the value of zero (0). The second 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. Among those who use tarot cards for divination purposes, the trumps are usually placed in a group called the major arcana, while the remaining cards in the minor arcana. (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 present-day Anglo-American world, 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, as Michael Dummett points out in Twelve Tarot Games (1980), Tarot games are still widely played.