What is tarot? where the cards came from and what they show

Tarot cards are thought to have started as a card game played by Italian nobles in the fifteenth century. They began to be used for divination in France in the late eighteenth century, and the Waite deck, made in England in the early twentieth century, set the look most decks still follow.

In Japan tarot became widely known during the occult boom of the 1970s. Today it ranges from readings in person to free sites like this one.

A standard deck has 78 cards: 22 Major Arcana and 56 Minor Arcana. The Major Arcana are allegorical pictures from the Fool to the World and speak to the big themes and turning points of life. The Minor Arcana have four suits, wands, cups, swords and coins, each with number cards from one to ten and four court cards, and speak to everyday events.

Reading with the Major Arcana alone gives each card more weight and the answer a clearer outline. Sumifuda Tarot uses these 22 cards. Their meanings are on tarot card meanings.

Tarot is at its best with questions where feelings are involved: sorting out how you feel and where you stand, how a relationship is moving, and which way the near future leans. Love, friendship and work decisions, where no single answer exists, are where it helps most.

Guessing numbers such as exam scores or dates, or questions that need a professional's judgment, such as health or law, are not what tarot is good at.

In Japan, fortune telling is often sorted into three kinds: reading fate from the moment of birth, reading the present from something that happens by chance, and reading from forms such as the lines of the palm or the face. Astrology belongs to the first kind and gives the same result for the same person every time. Tarot belongs to the second. The cards change with every reading, which makes it suited to the flow of a particular moment.

Tarot does not use birth dates by tradition. There is, however, a method that adds up the digits of your birth date to give birth cards, and Sumifuda Tarot uses it as the foundation of every reading. It combines the fate-from-birth approach with the chance of the cards. Find your own on the birth card calculator.