Tarot: definition

Tarot is at once a card game and a symbolic system made up of arcana, used for ludic, cultural, pedagogical or interpretive ends throughout its history.

It is simultaneously a historical object, born as a game in northern Italy around the fifteenth century, an iconographic system of great richness and a symbolic language reinterpreted by many traditions.

Its richness comes precisely from that plurality of uses and layers of meaning: ludic in its origin, it was later read in a divinatory, esoteric, psychological and symbolic key.

It is classically composed of 78 cards: 22 major arcana, which form a symbolic series, and 56 minor arcana, spread across four suits associated with the four elements.

In Tarot Nova, tarot is approached as a structured, demanding and deeply symbolic language, rather than as an instrument of mechanical prediction or a purely decorative object.

Understanding tarot therefore means not reducing it to a single one of its facets: its interest lies precisely at the crossroads of history, image, symbol and interpretive practice.

Through its long history and its extraordinary plasticity, tarot has been a parlour game, a divinatory instrument, a support for meditation and a tool for introspection; understanding it in its full breadth means accepting that no single one of those facets exhausts what these seventy-eight cards can offer.