Tarot Card Generator

What is in a tarot deck

Seventy eight cards, in two unequal halves.

Fifty six of them are an ordinary pack, more or less. Four suits, wands and cups and swords and pentacles, running from ace to ten, with four court cards apiece instead of the three you know from a modern deck. Twenty two more sit outside all of that: the Fool, the Magician, the Hanged Man, Death, the Tower, the World.

A few of the cards this will hand you:

• Six of Wands
• King of Pentacles
• Three of Swords
• Seven of Cups
• The Hanged Man
• The World

Almost everyone meets these cards as instruments of fortune telling. They were not designed for it, and for the first three hundred and fifty years of their existence nobody used them that way.

Drawing a card

1. Press Generate for a single card.
2. Ask for three for the most common spread, which people read as past, present and future.
3. Type into Contains to pull a suit, or the court cards, or the trumps.
4. Copy to keep the draw.

Where these cards come from

The full seventy eight card deck, checked by hand. The tool picks from that pool in your browser.

It was a card game, and in much of Europe it still is

Tarot was invented in northern Italy in the 1440s, in the courts of Milan and Ferrara. It was called trionfi, and then tarocchi, and it was a card game. Specifically it was a trick-taking game, of the family that contains bridge and whist and hearts, played by aristocrats for amusement.

The oldest surviving decks are the Visconti-Sforza cards, painted for a Milanese duke in the middle of the fifteenth century, and they are extraordinary objects: hand-painted, gold-leafed, made for one family. A little earlier, in the 1420s, a scholar named Marziano da Tortona had designed a deck for the same court in which the special cards were classical gods.

Nobody was telling fortunes. They were playing cards, badly, for money, and complaining about their partners.

And here is the part that surprises people who have only met tarot in a shop with incense in it. The game never stopped. Tarot is played competitively across Europe today. The French play a version, the Italians play theirs, the Austrians have their own. It has clubs and tournaments and a rulebook. Somewhere tonight, four people are playing tarot for points, and would be baffled if you asked them what the Hanged Man means.

Where the word trump comes from

Those twenty two extra cards were not mystical. They had a job.

In an ordinary trick-taking game, one suit is designated to beat the others for that hand, and it is called the trump suit. Tarot's innovation was a fifth suit that is permanently trump. Play a wand, and the lowest of those twenty two cards beats it. Play a higher one and it beats the lower. That is the whole mechanic, and it is why the cards are ranked and numbered.

The Italian name for them was trionfi. Triumphs.

Say it aloud a few times and you can hear where the English word went. Trionfi, triumph, trump. Every time somebody plays a trump card in bridge, or in politics, they are using a word that entered the language through a fifteenth century Italian card game.

Which means the images most heavily loaded with mystical significance today, Death, the Tower, the Wheel of Fortune, were originally there for the same reason the ace of spades is there. Somebody needed a card that beat the other card.

The pastor who invented an ancient Egypt

In 1781, a Protestant pastor and amateur scholar named Antoine Court de Gébelin published a volume of his enormous work on the ancient world, and in it he made a claim about the tarot.

The cards, he wrote, were not an Italian card game at all. They were the last surviving fragment of the sacred Book of Thoth, the wisdom of the Egyptian priesthood, smuggled through the collapse of that civilisation disguised as a game so that it might survive.

He offered no evidence. He said as much himself.

Consider what he could and could not have known. In 1781, nobody on earth could read Egyptian hieroglyphs. The Rosetta Stone had not been found, and would not be deciphered for another forty years. What passed for Egyptian scholarship was largely the inventions of a seventeenth century Jesuit who had confidently translated hieroglyphs that meant nothing of the kind. Court de Gébelin looked at some pictures on some Italian cards, thought they felt Egyptian, and said so in print.

It should have gone nowhere. Instead it went everywhere, because it was a wonderful idea and it arrived at exactly the right moment, in an age that was simultaneously discovering reason and hungry for hidden knowledge that reason could not touch.

Within a decade a Parisian named Jean-Baptiste Alliette had published guides to reading the cards and designed a deck specifically for divination, the first in history. He wrote under the name Etteilla, which is his surname backwards, and he claimed to be transmitting an ancient tradition, for which there is also no evidence.

Everything you have ever seen done with these cards descends from those two men, and from a claim about Egypt that its own author admitted he could not support.

The philosopher who went and checked

For two hundred years the Egyptian story was repeated as fact, because the people repeating it were not historians and the historians were not interested.

Then, in 1980, a man named Michael Dummett published a book called The Game of Tarot.

Dummett was not an occultist and had no stake in any of it. He was a philosopher at Oxford, one of the most formidable of his century, known for his work on logic, language and the philosophy of mathematics. He was also, in his spare time, serious about the history of playing cards.

So he did the thing nobody had done. He went to the archives. He traced the decks, the printers, the court records, the game rules, the dates. He established where the cards came from, when, in what order, and by whose hand, and he showed that the entire mystical genealogy was constructed in France in the 1780s and had no roots before it.

Almost everything reliably known about the history of tarot was collected and set out by Dummett, and it stands. There is a curious symmetry in it. A man who spent his professional life asking how a sentence can be true went and found out whether a story was.

What people actually do with the cards

None of this history tells anybody to stop, and it is worth being clear about that.

Ask people who read tarot regularly what they think is happening, and you get a wide range of answers. Some believe the cards reveal something that exists independently of the reader. Others describe something more modest: that a card is a rich, ambiguous image, that you are asked to say what it means here, in your situation, and that in explaining it to yourself you say things you would not otherwise have said out loud.

On that second account, a tarot spread is a structured prompt. The card does not know anything. It gives you an image and a small obligation to interpret, and the interpretation is entirely yours, and hearing yourself make it can be genuinely clarifying. People use journals and dice and coin flips for the same purpose. Flipping a coin over a hard decision often tells you what you wanted, in the half second before it lands.

Which of those accounts you hold is not something a page about the history of Italian card games is going to settle. But knowing that the Hanged Man began as a card that beat the Ten of Cups does not diminish him. Meanings are made by use. Chess pieces were not carved with strategy in them either.

Questions people ask

Is tarot ancient Egyptian?

No. There is no evidence of any connection, and the claim originates in a single French publication of 1781 whose author acknowledged he had none. The documented origin is fifteenth century northern Italy, and the paper trail is unusually good.

Why are the cards split into two groups?

Because they were two different things. The fifty six suit cards are an ordinary pack. The twenty two others were added as a permanent trump suit for a card game. The names major and minor arcana were applied centuries later by occultists, not by the people who made the deck.

Why do most decks look the same?

Because almost all modern decks descend from one published in London in 1909, illustrated by the artist Pamela Colman Smith. Her innovation was to draw a full scene on every card, including the numbered suit cards, which older decks left as plain arrangements of cups and swords. Those scenes are what most people are actually reading.

What does a reversed card mean?

Whatever the tradition you are following says it means, which varies enormously between traditions. There is no original answer to recover, because in the game the cards had no orientation at all. You would have been looking at the backs.

References

1. Dummett, M. (1980). The Game of Tarot: From Ferrara to Salt Lake City. Duckworth. The foundational documentary history. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1981/02/19/in-the-cards/
2. The World of Playing Cards, history of tarot and playing cards timeline, on Court de Gébelin's 1781 claim and Etteilla's divination manual. https://www.wopc.co.uk/the-history-of-playing-cards/history-of-tarot-and-playing-cards-complete-timeline