Tarot explained: 78 cards, history, and reading as a mirror

A card game that became a mirror

Tarot was not born mystical. It was born a game. Long before it was laid on a dark table to answer questions about love or money, tarot was a parlor card game played by the Italian aristocracy of the fifteenth century. That is the first thing to put on the table, because it changes everything that follows: the object has a datable, documented history, and that history does not begin in Egypt.

A full deck holds 78 cards today. That is the reference format, shared by the Tarot de Marseille and the Rider-Waite-Smith alike. Across those 78 cards run two very different families, and to grasp that split is already to grasp the heart of how tarot works. But before the mechanics, the history, because it clears up most of the misunderstandings right away.

The earliest tarots turn up in northern Italy in the middle of the fifteenth century, in the courts of Milan, Ferrara, and Florence. People there played tarocchi, a trick-taking game close in spirit to whist or bridge: suits, court figures, and a run of master cards, the “triumphs”. The Visconti-Sforza deck, painted around 1450, is the oldest surviving tarot. There is no trace, at that point, of any divinatory use: it was a courtly pastime, refined and expensive.

The historian and philosopher Michael Dummett, in The Game of Tarot (1980), pinned down this lineage with a rigor that remains the reference. His decisive contribution is twofold: he proves that the game was invented in fifteenth-century Italy, and he shows that any occult or divinatory reading is unknown before the eighteenth century. Tarot lived three centuries as a pure game before anyone credited it with the slightest power, and that fact is worth keeping in mind.

The shift happens in France, at the close of the eighteenth century. In 1781, the pastor and scholar Antoine Court de Gébelin publishes the eighth volume of his Monde primitif and argues there that tarot cards hold a secret wisdom out of ancient Egypt. The thesis is seductive and flatly false: no document backs it up, and Dummett took it apart point by point. But it set off a fashion. In its wake, a Parisian cartomancer, Jean-Baptiste Alliette, who signed himself “Etteilla” (his name reversed), designed between 1783 and 1789 the first deck built for divination and fixed a meaning to each card. Divinatory tarot was born there, in the Paris of the fading Enlightenment, not in some ancient temple.

This recent origin takes nothing away from the value of the tool. It places it differently. If the divinatory meaning was added in the eighteenth century, then it is a cultural creation, a grammar of images. And a grammar of images reads like a mirror: it reflects what you bring to it, it helps you think. A mirror, never a verdict: this whole article fits inside that one line, and the entire tarot guide carries it through in its own way.

What is the difference between the Major and Minor Arcana?

Let us come back to the structure of the 78 cards, because it is the road map for everything else.

The 22 Major Arcana form the symbolic backbone of the deck. Numbered I to XXI, with The Fool traveling without a number, they carry names that point to the great themes of a life: The Magician, The Empress, The Lovers, The Wheel of Fortune, Temperance, The Moon, The Sun, The World. These are broad, almost mythological figures. You read them as the climate of a situation, what is really at stake in it. When a Major card turns up, tradition holds that it flags an important, shaping theme. They deserve to be told one at a time: that is what the guide to the 22 Major Arcana does, walking through them as the larger story they tell, from The Magician to The World.

The 56 Minor Arcana, for their part, feel more like an ordinary deck of cards. They split into four suits (wands, cups, swords, and pentacles), each with ten numbered cards and four court figures (page, knight, queen, king). Each suit carries its own tone, inherited from tradition: wands for action and drive, cups for feelings and bonds, swords for thought and conflict, pentacles for the concrete, the body, the material. The Minors drop down into the detail of daily life where the Majors set the overall weather; the guide to the 56 Minor Arcana shows how to read them without learning a thing by heart.

This split is not just decoration: it shapes the reading. A spread crowded with Majors tells of a moment of upheaval; a spread where Minors dominate speaks of the ordinary, the day-to-day adjustments. Tarot explained honestly always starts there: with the grammar of the 78 cards, not with recipes.

A word on the famous “negative cards”. Death (which the Marseille deck leaves unnamed), The Tower, and The Devil frighten anyone who has never opened a deck. In serious reading, arcanum XIII almost always points to a necessary ending and a transformation, not to a death. The Devil asks about attachments and dependencies. The Tower stands for a collapse that frees you. Not one of them is an ill omen: they are images of movement. To read tarot as a catalog of disasters is to mistake the picture for the threat.

Tarot de Marseille or Rider-Waite-Smith: which one should you choose?

Two great families of decks dominate Western practice. They do not say the same thing in the same way, and learning to tell them apart saves you a lot of beginner’s confusion.

The Tarot de Marseille is the historical European standard. Its name comes from the city where its designs were printed and circulated most durably, but its roots run wider: the pattern shows up in the work of cardmaker Jean Noblet in Paris around 1650, of Pierre Madenié in Dijon in 1709, and then in the deck of Nicolas Conver, engraved in Marseille in 1760, which would become the template for most modern Tarots de Marseille. Its distinctive trait: the 56 Minor Arcana are not illustrated with scenes. The five of cups, for instance, simply shows five cups arranged geometrically, as on a classic deck of cards. Reading here leans on number, sequence, and the way forms and colors move from card to card. It is a more austere, more mathematical system, which many seasoned readers prefer for exactly that reason.

The Rider-Waite-Smith is more recent and works on another logic. It was published in London in 1909 by William Rider & Son, from a design by the occultist Arthur Edward Waite and drawings by the artist Pamela Colman Smith. Its innovation is precisely what won it worldwide success: Smith illustrated all 56 Minor Arcana with figurative scenes, with characters and situations, where the Marseille deck made do with repeated motifs. The five of cups becomes a grieving figure, draped in black, gazing at three spilled cups without noticing the two still standing behind him. The picture tells its own story of loss and of what is left. This staging makes the deck far easier to read for a beginner: you read a scene before you know a meaning.

This deck often goes by the initials RWS, and present-day usage gladly adds Smith’s name, long left out, to those of Rider and Waite, in fairness to her work. Waite paired the deck with a manual, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1911), which is still a first-hand source on what the designer intended.

So which one? The honest answer is: the one whose images speak to you. The Marseille appeals to readers who love geometric rigor and the continental tradition; the RWS, to those who want a story right away. Neither is “truer”. They are two dialects of one language. Plenty of people end up owning both and switching between them depending on the mood of the question.

Reading a spread as a mirror, never as a verdict

Here I reach the heart of where I stand, because this is where the line falls between a clear-eyed practice and a costly superstition. A tarot spread puts a situation into images so you can look at it differently: a mirror you hold up to yourself, never a verdict you have to live with.

The logic runs like this. When you ask a question and lay out cards, you summon no occult force. You hand yourself a prop: archetypes that push you to put words to what was hazy, to name a fear, to weigh an option you had been dodging. The psychologist Bertram Forer showed in 1949, in a now-famous experiment, just how readily a slightly vague statement finds an echo in everyone: he handed all his students the same personality sketch, stitched from one-size-fits-all lines, and every one of them saw themselves in it, rating its accuracy at 4.3 out of 5. The lesson holds for tarot. A card “speaks” because it is open enough to hold your situation, and that is exactly what makes it a good mirror, as long as you know it.

Knowing this does not drain tarot of its interest; it sharpens it. The mirror is useful when you use it to reflect, dangerous when you take it for a window onto the future. Read as a verdict, “the card says I am going to leave him”, it becomes an excuse not to think, a way of handing your decision to a piece of cardboard. Read as a mirror, “this card speaks to me of an ending I dread, so what exactly is it that I dread?”, it hands the reins back to you instead of taking them away.

It is also a question of ethics. To tell someone they have an illness, a breakup, or a death coming, based on cards, is not only baseless but harmful: you plant a fear on top of nothing. A responsible reading never shuts the door on the future; it opens it. It turns “here is what is going to happen” into “here is what you can act on”. This simple rule, describing dynamics rather than handing down future facts, is what separates a contemplative practice from a con.

It is in this spirit that Alejandro Jodorowsky and Marianne Costa, in The Way of Tarot (2009), come at the Tarot de Marseille not as an oracle but as a tool for self-knowledge, a psychological language. You can argue with their readings, but the stance underneath is the right one: tarot works on the person who consults it, it dictates nothing to them.

A three-card spread, explained

To make all this concrete, here is the most approachable spread, the one I suggest you begin with: three cards.

It often comes packaged as “past, present, future”. I much prefer a reading that boxes nothing in: situation, obstacle, opening. The first card describes where you stand; the second, what is stuck or what is standing in the way; the third, a possible direction, an angle to work from. Notice the shift: the third card is not “what will happen” but “what you can turn toward”. The difference is exactly the one between mirror and verdict.

Take an example. You ask about a stalled work project. First card, the Eight of Pentacles: patient work, learning, the craft you keep refining. Second card, the Seven of Swords: a snag around loyalty or clarity, something half-said, maybe a shortage of frankness, with others or with yourself. Third card, The Star: hope, a sense of rightness coming back, the idea that if you set things straight the project can breathe again.

A verdict reading would say: “your project will work out thanks to a stroke of luck.” A mirror reading says something else: “you know this project asks for craft and steadiness (Eight of Pentacles), but something is short on transparency and is holding you back (Seven of Swords); the opening is to clear the air, to come back to an honest intention, and the momentum will return (The Star).” The second reading tells you nothing in advance. It puts you back in front of your own facts. That is all a spread should do, and it is already plenty.

A single card follows the same logic, more lightly: not “what is going to happen to me today”, but “a theme to keep in mind, a question to carry with me”. This little ritual has its own dedicated guide, the card of the day, and it is the best school there is: it teaches the cards through familiarity, no cramming. If you do not have a deck yet, the Nohemia app draws one for you each morning, with its reading.

Should you read the cards reversed?

Sooner or later a card comes out upside down, and the question lands: should you take it into account? The schools disagree, which is worth knowing before you start to fret. Many Tarot de Marseille readers do not read reversals: the old arcana were never built for it, and these readers would rather shade a card’s meaning by its neighbors than by its orientation. On the Rider-Waite-Smith side, where the scenes are drawn in a fixed direction, reading a card reversed is more common and belongs to the method.

When you do choose to read reversals, an upside-down card does not turn into its opposite, and certainly not into its “negative” version. Tradition reads in it instead an energy held back, turned inward, in excess, or still taking shape: The Sun reversed does not say “misfortune”, it asks you to look at a joy that struggles to come out, a light kept to yourself. It is a shade of intensity and direction, not a flipped verdict.

My advice, if you are just starting: begin without reversals. Learn first to hear each card upright, in its give-and-take with the others. You can add the reversed reading later, the day it brings you a subtlety rather than a worry. A reversed card is still a mirror, just tilted another way.

Cross-connections

Tarot is not a language on its own. It talks with other symbolic systems, which light up the same themes from another angle.

With astrology, the correspondences are old and rich. Several traditions tie each Major card to a planet, a sign, or an element: The Emperor to Aries, The Moon to the sign of Pisces, The Wheel of Fortune to Jupiter. These bridges are not fixed rules (they vary from one school to another), but they let you set a spread ringing against a birth chart or a transit underway. A card that keeps coming back can echo a planet active in your sky.

With numerology, the link is almost built in, since the arcana are numbered. A card’s value opens an extra layer of reading: the cards numbered 1 speak of beginnings, those numbered 5 of crisis and movement, those numbered 10 of completion and the tip into a new cycle. Adding up the numbers of a spread to pull out a “synthesis card” is a common practice that extends the reading without forcing it.

These correspondences do not change what the mirror is. They enrich it the way several translations enrich a single text. They read best not as dogmas, but as ways of letting one and the same theme ring across parallel languages.