Reading the Cards

Tarot reading is the divinatory interpretation of a deck of tarot cards, in which cards are shuffled, laid out in a pattern called a spread, and read for insight into a situation and its likely course. The tarot deck itself originated in fifteenth-century Italy as equipment for a card game, and for some three centuries carried no occult meaning. Its divinatory and esoteric use is a later development, beginning in late-eighteenth-century France with Antoine Court de Gebelin's claim of an Egyptian origin and the cartomancer known as Etteilla, and elaborated across the nineteenth century by Eliphas Levi and others who linked the cards to the Kabbalah. The influential Rider-Waite-Smith deck of 1909, with its fully illustrated pip cards, shaped most modern practice. Historians Ronald Decker and Michael Dummett have documented this history in detail, distinguishing the game's real early past from the invented ancient pedigree later attached to it.