Before going into detail about the essence of Tarot, let us say a thing or two about the epistemology of Tarot and what actually the word “Tarot” means. Some believe that the word Tarot contains two old Egyptian words: “Tar” meaning “Path” and “ro”, “ros” or “rog” meaning “Royal”. Hence,according to them Tarot is translated as Royal Path.

The readers who are interested in the formal factography, history or the illustrated documentation of Tarot will find a lot of information in the excellent book The Encyclopedia of Tarot by Stuart R. Kaplan.

Some other sources believe that Tarot actually means essence, principle or law. In the more magical approach, Tarot is understood as a collection of magical formulas in a pictorial form that contain the secrets of time.

If we remember what Jung had to say about the Tarot images as:

“descended from the archetypes of transformation”,

(more info on the relation between Jung’s analytical psychology and Tarot you can find here), as well as if we recall the fact that the achetypal world or Olam Atziluth in Kabbalah knows no time or space, we will understand the reasons behind the magical definition of Tarot above.

Whatever the definition of Tarot really is, we should never forget that, for us, it is above all an instrument for self-development. We know that it is able to reach behind the domain of words and conscious concepts. One of the greatest humanist ever, the French author Eliphas Levi said the following on the subject:

The Tarot is a monumental and singular work, simple and strong as the architecture of the pyramids and, in consequence, as durable; it is a book which is the sum of all the sciences and whose infinite permutations are capable of solving all problems; a book which informs by making one think; it is perhaps the greatest masterpiece of the human mind, and certainly one of the most beautiful things handed down by Antiquity.

This is an excerpt from his book:

The Book of Splendours: The Inner Mysteries of Qabalism

As for the origin of Tarot, the oldest known images of the Major Arcana Cards are from 1392.

The earliest deck is to be found in the middle of 15th century. It is the so called Visconti Sforza deck, designed for a narrow circle of Italian noble families of the time.

Visconti Sforza

However, the origin of the cards is probably much, much older. Some believe that they’ve been known in ancient Egypt, but on the level of the psyche, they must have been there, in the unconscious depths of the human souls, for the eternity.

When discussing Tarot, we cannot but talk about one other area which is very closely connected to it. We are talking here about the ancient mystical system of Kabbalah. Kabbalah and the Kabbalistic tradition are quite complex and difficult for understanding, but very important for taking hold of the real meaning of the Tarot Cards. While the orthodox Kabballists know only 10 Sephirot, and for the attributes of the paths on the Tree of Life recognize only the Hebrew alphabet letters, the modern tradition knows and uses 11 Sephirot (Daath included). Moreover, it employs zodiac signs, planetary signs, and Cosmic elements, and for the Path attributes besides the letters it associates also the Tarot Cards.

The mystical seeker should never forget, when looking at the Tarot Symbolysm, that each of the symbols has bivalent meaning. Insisting on one or the other of the contradictory attributes inherent to the symbol simply is a sign of a spiritually immature and biased individual, who has not been able to free themselves from the prejudices and incompetence.

Going back to the original subject of what Tarot is, we should now put forward the trivial fact that a Tarot deck is a collection of 78 cards. 52 of them remind us of the ordinary deck of playing cards. Adding to these 52 cards the 4 Princesses, we obtain the Minor Arcana subset. The remaining 22 cards are not to be seen in the ordinary decks. Those are the Major arcana, trumps cards, or houses. The minor arcana are further to be divided into two groups: 16 Court cards and 40 minor cards.

In conclusion, I hope we have been able to demonstrate that Tarot is no trivial subject at all. It certainly is not just a tool for divination and fortune telling. It is much more than that, and as we have hopefully seen, it has strong links to Kabbalah, magic, self discovery, psychology and spirituality in general.