Tarot

Tarot is a seventy-eight-card pack: twenty-two trumps, or Major Arcana, and fifty-six suit cards. It can be used for play, divination, meditation and symbolic study. In Golden Dawn ceremonial magic, the trumps were tied to the Hebrew alphabet and the paths of the Hermetic Qabalistic Tree of Life, while the suits and numbered cards were read through the elements, astrology and the sefirot within the tree.

Tarot cards first appear in fifteenth-century northern Italy as a trick-taking game, not as the remains of an Egyptian mystery school. Occult tarot began much later. Court de Gébelin proposed an Egyptian origin in 1781, Etteilla developed a divinatory pack, Éliphas Lévi joined the trumps to Kabbalah, and the Golden Dawn built an elaborate system of correspondences. The Waite–Smith and Thoth decks grew from that inheritance, each changing how tarot was pictured and read.