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The tarot is a deck of seventy-eight cards in two parts: twenty-two trumps, called the Major Arcana, and four suits of fourteen cards each, called the Minor Arcana. The Majors run from the Fool and the Magician through named allegorical figures, the Empress, the Hierophant, Death, the Tower, the World; the Minors, like an ordinary playing pack, run ace to ten with four court cards in each of the suits of wands, cups, swords and pentacles.

Decks of this shape are documented in fifteenth-century northern Italy, where they were made for a trick-taking game called tarocchi. Their use for divination and self-knowledge is a later development.

The tarot's esoteric career begins in late-eighteenth-century France, with Antoine Court de Gebelin's claim that the cards preserved ancient Egyptian wisdom, a claim without historical support, and the cartomancer Etteilla's divinatory decks. In the nineteenth century Eliphas Levi linked the twenty-two trumps to the twenty-two Hebrew letters and the paths of the Kabbalistic Tree, and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn built an elaborate system of astrological and elemental correspondences that shaped the influential Rider-Waite-Smith (1909) and Thoth decks.

The atlas describes both the documented history and the esoteric tradition, keeping the two apart: the deck's origin as a card game is well attested, while its supposed ancient and Egyptian roots are a modern invention.

The cards divide into the Major Arcana, read as a sequence of archetypal stages sometimes called the Fool's journey, and the Minor Arcana, whose four suits carry the elemental and everyday dimension of a reading. A reading deals cards into a spread, whose positions give each card a role. The atlas treats the individual cards, the suits and the spreads in their own categories, and the tarot page here as the overview of the whole system.