Tarot & Cartomancy
Before the Reading: How Tarot Became Tarot
Follow tarot from Renaissance courts and printed games to occult interpretations and the narrative images of Pamela Colman Smith.
Tarot · Fifteenth century to the present
Collection
Tarot & Cartomancy
There is more than one way to read the cards.
A familiar deck of playing cards can become part of a symbolic reading practice. So can a tarot deck, a Lenormand deck, or an oracle deck created around its own particular imagery.
Each has a structure. Each asks you to learn its language.
Explore how these systems work, where their interpretations come from, and how readers connect individual cards into a larger story.
Different decks, different languages
Deck comparison
- Cards
- 52, excluding Jokers
- Structure
- Four suits with thirteen cards each; no separate Major Arcana
- Suits / images
- Hearts, Diamonds, Clubs, Spades
- Court cards
- Jack, Queen, King: three per suit
- Interpretive approach
- Meanings vary by method. Our exercises use the explicitly labeled introductory framework.
Articles & reference guides
Collection glossary
- Correspondence
- For beginners, a correspondence is an asserted relationship between elements of different systems.
Sources and further reading
Each article links to its referenced sources. The playing-card framework is supplied an introductory interpretive framework, not a traditional dictionary.