Tarot Card Meanings

Tarot did not begin as fortune telling. The first tarot cards appeared in northern Italy in the middle of the 1400s, hand painted for noble families as a trick taking game called carte da trionfi, the cards of triumph. For nearly three centuries they were simply a game.

The turn toward divination came much later. An anonymous manuscript from around 1750 records the first card meanings, and in 1780s Paris the scholar Antoine Court de Gébelin and the cartomancer known as Etteilla began reading the cards for insight, weaving in claims of ancient Egyptian wisdom that history has never supported. The romance stuck, even where the history did not.

The deck most of the world pictures today, and the one you draw from above, is the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, published in London in 1909. It was designed by the occultist Arthur Edward Waite and illustrated by the artist Pamela Colman Smith, whose name was left off the deck for most of a century. Her vivid, story rich pictures, even on the humble number cards, are why this is the deck most people learn on. The images here are her original 1909 artwork, now in the public domain.

We read the cards the way they are best used: as a mirror. A card does not fix your future. It gives the moment a shape you can look at honestly, and the choice always stays yours.

Begin with a clear question, something open rather than a simple yes or no. Each card is read both for its own meaning and for where it falls, such as where you are now, what is shaping it, and what helps you move.

The cards are a mirror, not a verdict. A difficult card like the Tower or Death almost never means catastrophe; it points to change, release and the chance to meet it consciously. The value of a reading is the honest reflection it invites.