Tarot Reading

Tarot reading is the divinatory interpretation of a deck of tarot cards, in which cards are shuffled, laid out in a pattern called a spread, and read for insight into a situation and its likely course. The tarot deck itself originated in fifteenth-century Italy as equipment for a card game, and for some three centuries carried no occult meaning. Its divinatory and esoteric use is a later development, beginning in late-eighteenth-century France with Antoine Court de Gebelin's claim of an Egyptian origin and the cartomancer known as Etteilla, and elaborated across the nineteenth century by Eliphas Levi and others who linked the cards to the Kabbalah. The influential Rider-Waite-Smith deck of 1909, with its fully illustrated pip cards, shaped most modern practice. Historians Ronald Decker and Michael Dummett have documented this history in detail, distinguishing the game's real early past from the invented ancient pedigree later attached to it.

The tarot deck existed as a set of playing cards for a trick taking game called tarocchi in fifteenth century Italy for roughly three hundred years before anyone used it to tell fortunes, and the earliest surviving decks, commissioned by noble families, show no sign of the esoteric symbolism later readers found in them. The turn to divination is usually dated to eighteenth century France, associated with the writer and occultist known as Etteilla, who was the first to publish a systematic method of cartomancy specifically for the tarot and to design a deck meant for divination rather than play. The claim, popular in the same period, that the cards preserved ancient Egyptian wisdom smuggled into Europe by the Roma people has no historical support and is now understood by scholars as a romantic invention of the period rather than a real transmission; the cards' actual imagery draws on late medieval and Renaissance Christian and allegorical iconography, not Egyptian sources.

The most influential modern deck, published in 1909 by Arthur Edward Waite and illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith, both members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, added fully illustrated scenes to the previously abstract numbered minor arcana cards and fixed much of the symbolic vocabulary readers still use today, an innovation less than a century old set beside a game five centuries old.