Tarot

Tarot is not a single deck but a family of traditions that share a common skeleton — seventy-eight cards split into twenty-two major arcana and fifty-six minor arcana — while differing deeply in imagery, history and method of reading. Understanding those differences is the first step to reading the cards with discernment rather than treating every deck as interchangeable.

Each tradition answers the questions of its own era. The Tarot de Marseille grew out of the workshops of European card-makers between the 15th and 18th centuries; the Rider-Waite-Smith was conceived in the early 20th century to make the minor arcana legible through full illustrated scenes; the Thoth deck condensed an entire esoteric system into its images; and the Belline lineage belongs to the history of French cartomancy.

The deck shapes the reading. A Marseille minor arcana, sober and structural, invites a reading built on number, suit and the relationships between cards; a Rider-Waite-Smith minor, illustrated as a scene, invites a more narrative and intuitive reading. Neither is more authentic than the other — they simply belong to different visual languages, and knowing which one you hold changes how you interpret it.

Choosing a deck is therefore less about which is best than about which speaks to you and to the kind of reading you want to practise. Many readers begin with one tradition and later explore others, discovering that each casts a different light on the same questions.

Each deck on this page opens onto its own guide: its history, its origin, and the meaning of its cards, beginning with the twenty-two major arcana that carry the great universal figures of the human experience. Read alongside the glossary, these pages are designed to help you situate the tarot in its cultural history and to read the cards with both knowledge and freedom.