Tradition
Tarot
A 78-card deck originating as a fifteenth-century Italian card game and adopted in the late eighteenth century as a divinatory and esoteric instrument. Now used across virtually every Western esoteric current and widely outside any tradition.
The tarot is a deck of seventy-eight cards used today as a divinatory, meditative, and esoteric instrument. The deck is structured into two parts: a Major Arcana of twenty-two trumps, numbered from The Fool (0) to The World (XXI); and a Minor Arcana of fifty-six cards in four suits — Wands, Cups, Swords, and Pentacles — each running Ace through Ten with four court cards.
Tarot is not in itself a religion or an order. It is a tool that has been adopted in turn by every significant Western esoteric current of the last two and a half centuries — the eighteenth-century French illuminist circles, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Thelema, modern Wicca and traditional witchcraft, chaos magick — and it is also used widely by people unaffiliated with any of those traditions, principally as a focus for self-reflection.
