Many imagine tarot as a very old relic of mystery, but its beginnings were surprisingly humble. The roots of tarot lie in a card game enjoyed among the nobility of fifteenth-century Italy. The cards of that time were not made for divination but, like today's playing cards, for play. The lavishly painted picture cards were called "trionfi," the trumps, and served to decide the course of the game. Tarot only began to bind deeply with divination much later, in the eighteenth century, when scholars and mystics who saw in the cards' symbols the secrets of the cosmos and of humankind added their interpretations.
The tarot deck we know today usually consists of seventy-eight cards. Of these, the twenty-two Major Arcana—beginning with the Fool and ending with the World—symbolize the great story of growth a human passes through over a lifetime. The remaining fifty-six Minor Arcana are divided into four suits—wands, cups, swords, and coins—mirroring more finely the everyday textures of passion, emotion, thought, and material reality. The image on each single card is itself a compressed story, and this language of symbols is the very heart of tarot.
So how does tarot mirror the mind? The secret lies not in any magic of the cards themselves but in the way symbols draw out something within us. When we hold a question and lay out the cards, the mind naturally weaves a story linking its own situation to the randomly placed image before it. Like the "synchronicity" the psychologist Jung described, a symbol revealed by chance can sometimes reflect a truth of the heart that we had not yet seen clearly. Tarot, then, is less a machine that nails down and prophesies the future than a mirror that vividly reveals where your heart is heading now, what it fears, and what it longs for.
It helps to remember this when you read tarot on FortuneLeaf as well. Rather than receiving a single card's symbol as a fixed answer, dwell quietly on how that image connects to your question right now. The same card gives an entirely different resonance when you ask about love versus work, and according to the state of mind of the one who gazes at it. Just as the history of tarot grew from a game into a mirror of the mind, a single reading becomes, in the end, a quiet conversation in which the cards are merely an excuse to meet yourself honestly.
The tarot deck we commonly see today is made up of seventy-eight cards in all: twenty-two Major Arcana that hold the great currents and spiritual themes of life, and fifty-six Minor Arcana that depict the smaller scenes of daily life through four suits—Cups, Wands, Swords, and Pentacles. Intriguingly, these four suits of the Minor Arcana are also the distant ancestors of the playing cards we use (hearts, clubs, spades, and diamonds). Another name worth remembering is the Rider-Waite deck, born in England in 1909 from the conception of Arthur Edward Waite and the brush of the artist Pamela Colman Smith. By painting symbolic scenes even onto the numbered cards so that anyone could read them intuitively from the image, this deck became the most widely used standard of tarot in the world today. That we can draw a story from the picture on a single card is precisely because such a long history of refinement stands behind it.