Tarot Cards
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Tarot cards are used today mainly in fortune-telling. A few years ago, tarot cards would have conjured up images of Gypsies, but today the cards are popular among occultists and New Agers in all walks of life.
The modern tarot deck has been traced back to fifteenth century Italy and a trick-taking game called triumphs (tarots in French) . The traditional tarot deck consists of two sets of cards, one (the major arcana) having 22 pictures, such as the Fool, the Devil, Temperance, the Hermit, the Sun, the Lovers, the Juggler, the Hanged Man and Death. The other set has 56 cards (the minor arcana) with kings (or lords), queens (or ladies), knights, and knaves (pages or servants) of sticks (or wands, cudgels or batons) , swords, cups and coins. (Gypsies didn't begin using tarot cards until the twentieth
The oldest playing cards date back to tenth century China, but the four suits of tarot and modern playing cards probably originated with a fourteenth century Muslim deck . According to de Givry, in the modern 52-card deck of ordinary playing cards, sticks or wands = clubs (and announce news); swords = spades (and presage unhappiness and death); cups = hearts (and presage happiness); coins = diamonds (and presage money). The Muslim sticks represented polo sticks, and as Europeans were not yet familiar with polo, they changed the suit of sticks to that of wands, cudgels or batons.
Tarot cards are usually read by a fortune-teller, who, in the past was usually a woman. There has been a strong belief for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years, that one's future is contained in the cards and that the fortune-teller can see what that future is. Centuries of "scientific" training have not diminished the popularity of occult guidance systems such as the tarot, ouija boards, astrology, the I Ching, palmistry, crystal balls, tea leaves, etc.