Tarot card reading

Tarot card reading is a form of cartomancy whereby practitioners use tarot cards to purportedly gain insight into the past, present or future. The process typically begins with formulation of a question, followed by drawing and interpreting cards to uncover meaning. A traditional tarot deck consists of 78 cards, which can be split into two groups, the Major Arcana and Minor Arcana. French-suited playing cards can also be used; as can any card system with suits assigned to identifiable elements (e.g., air, earth, fire, water).

The first written references to tarot packs occurred between 1440 and 1450 in northern Italy, for example in Milan and Ferrara, when additional cards with allegorical illustrations were added to the common four-suit pack. These new packs were called carte da trionfi, triumph packs, and the additional cards were simply known as trionfi, which became "trumps" in English.

One of the earliest references to tarot triumphs appears around c. 1450–1470 mentioned by a Dominican preacher in a sermon condemning dice, playing cards and 'triumphs'. References to the tarot as a social plague or as exempt from the bans that affected other games continued throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, but there are no indications that the cards were used for anything but games. As philosopher and tarot historian Michael Dummett noted, "it was only in the 1780s, when the practice of fortune-telling with regular playing cards had been well established for at least two decades, that anyone began to use the tarot pack for cartomancy."

Claims by the early French occultists that tarot cards had esoteric links to ancient Egypt, the Kabbalah, Indic Tantra, or the I Ching have been frequently repeated by authors on card divination. However, scholarly research reveals that there is no evidence of any significant use of tarot cards for divination until the late 18th century as it was believed to be invented in Italy in the early 15th century. In fact, historians have described western views of the Tarot pack as "the subject of the most successful propaganda campaign ever launched... An entire false history and false interpretation of the Tarot pack was concocted by the occultists; and it is all but universally believed".

The belief in the divinatory meaning of the cards is closely associated to the notion of their occult properties, a view commonly held in early modern Europe propagated by prominent Protestant Christian clerics and Freemasons.

From its uptake as an instrument of divination in 18th-century France, the tarot went on to be used in hermeneutic, magical, mystical, semiotic, and psychological practices. It was used by Romani people while telling fortunes, as a Jungian psychological apparatus for tapping into "absolute knowledge in the unconscious", a tool for archetypal analysis, and even for facilitating the Jungian process of individuation.

Many involved in occult and divinatory practices attempt to trace the tarot to ancient Egypt, divine hermetic wisdom, and the mysteries of Isis.

The first was Antoine Court de Gébelin, a French clergyman, who wrote that after seeing a group of women playing cards he had the idea that tarot was not merely a game of cards but was in fact of ancient Egyptian origin, of mystical Qabalistic import, and of deep divine significance. Court de Gébelin published a dissertation on the origins of the symbolism in the tarot in volume VIII of the work Le Monde primitif in 1781. He believed that the tarot represented ancient Egyptian Theology, including Isis, Osiris, and Typhon. For example, he thought the card he knew as the Papesse and known in occult circles today as the High Priestess represented Isis. He also related four tarot cards to the four Christian Cardinal virtues: Temperance, Justice, Strength and Prudence. He related The Tower to a Greek fable about avarice.