99 Fun Facts About Tarot

Each tarot suit has four court cards: king, queen, jack and which other?

Knight: tarot kept the mounted knight that French playing cards dropped, which is why each of its suits has 14 cards, giving 56 suit cards in a 78-card deck.

Tarot began as a card game whose trump suit lives on in which modern game?

Bridge descends from whist, heir to a 15th-century game that copied tarot's permanent trump suit by naming one ordinary suit as trumps; fortune-telling with the cards began about three centuries later.

The 'arcana' in tarot's Major and Minor Arcana comes from a Latin word meaning what?

Secrets: arcana is the plural of the Latin arcanum, a word alchemists loved; occult writers pinned it on the cards in the 19th century, and people who play tarot as a card game never use it.

Tarot's trumps take their English name from which 15th-century Italian word?

Trionfi, meaning triumphs, gave English the card-game word trump; the name tarocchi took over only around 1500, after a game played with the ordinary pack borrowed the old name.

The oldest surviving tarot cards were painted for the Visconti and Sforza families, rulers of which duchy?

Milan: its dukes had the gilded cards hand-painted for a card game played at court, and only centuries later did tarot pick up its links with fortune-telling and the occult.

One of tarot's four suits began as which sport's sticks on the Mamluk playing cards Europe copied?

Polo was unknown to the Europeans who copied the Mamluk sultanate's playing cards in the 1370s, so the suit of polo sticks was redrawn as plain staves, the wands of modern tarot.

In tarot reading, the suit of wands is linked to which classical element?

Fire is the element of wands, so readers take a spread full of them to be about energy, ambition and work rather than love or money.

Which four suits make up the traditional Italian tarot pack?

Batons, coins, cups, swords: the Latin suits still printed on Italian and Spanish cards, which fortune-telling decks later renamed, turning batons into wands and coins into pentacles.

Which card, numbered XXI, comes last among tarot's 21 trumps?

The World is trump XXI, yet it is not always the top card: in the tarot games still played in Bologna, the Angel, the Judgement card, outranks it.

Florence's 97-card Minchiate pack added the four elements and all twelve of which symbols to tarot's trumps?

Zodiac signs, the elements and extra virtues almost doubled the trumps, from 21 to 40, and the oversized game lasted about 400 years before dying out in the early 20th century.

In which James Bond film does the fortune-teller Solitaire read tarot cards for the villain?

Live and Let Die cast Jane Seymour as Solitaire, whose gift for reading the cards vanishes once Roger Moore's Bond seduces her.

Which Surrealist painter created his own 78-card tarot deck, first published in 1984?

Salvador Dalí posed as the Magician himself and cast his wife Gala as the Empress; he is said to have finished the deck on his own after talks to supply cards for a film broke down over his fee.

Which famous tarot spread did A. E. Waite's guide to the Rider–Waite deck present as an ancient method of divination?

The Celtic Cross reached most readers through Waite, who printed it as an ancient Celtic method best suited to one definite question, with the tenth and last card showing what will come.

The Tarot of Marseilles calls the Tower by a French name meaning what?

House of God, La Maison Dieu, is an odd title for a scene of ruin: earlier Italian players knew the same card as the Arrow, the Lightning or the House of the Devil.

In early Italian tarot decks, the Hanged Man, hung by one foot, was known as what?

The Traitor: Renaissance cities shamed traitors they could not catch by painting them hanging upside down on public buildings, and the card is thought to copy those pictures.

In modern Italian, 'Tarocco' is also the name of a sweet variety of which citrus fruit?

Blood orange: the sweet Tarocco shares its name with the cards, and the game left Italian a verb too, since taroccare, to play a tarot, became slang for faking a watch or a handbag.

In the Rider–Waite deck, which card shows a naked child riding a white horse?

The Sun: the standard Marseilles card shows two children before a wall, but Waite preferred a rarer old design, the lone child on horseback with a banner, which he called the better symbolism.

The tarot theorist Court de Gébelin welcomed which American into his Paris Masonic lodge, Les Neuf Sœurs?

Benjamin Franklin joined in 1778 and was elected the lodge's master a year later; Court de Gébelin, a keen backer of American independence, was among the brothers who welcomed him.

Etteilla, the Paris fortune-teller behind an early tarot deck for divination, was the pseudonym of whom?

Jean-Baptiste Alliette simply spelled his surname backwards to become Etteilla, then made his living from card readings and published his own fortune-telling deck in 1789.

In the Rider–Waite deck, which creatures pull the Chariot in place of the usual horses?

Sphinxes were a 19th-century French occultist's idea: older packs harness horses, and Waite adopted the change for his own deck even though he called it an invention.

On the earliest Italian tarot cards, the lantern-carrying Hermit was a figure of what?

Time: the oldest hand-painted cards show an old man with an hourglass, a figure like Saturn, and the glass is said to have been redrawn later as the Hermit's lantern.

In the Rider–Waite deck, which symbol floats above the Magician's head?

An infinity sign, which Waite called the sign of life, 'like an endless cord'; in the older Marseilles packs the same curve is only the hat brim of a street conjurer.

Occultists paired the 22 Major Arcana with the letters of which alphabet?

Hebrew: a French essay of 1781 first matched the cards to its 22 letters, the link that later let occultists graft Kabbalah onto what had been a card game.

Which is the only unnumbered card in a typical Major Arcana scheme?

The Fool has no number on the old packs because in most tarot games it is no trump at all but an 'excuse', played to dodge following suit; occult decks later labelled it 0.

What is the Fool called in the Tarot of Marseilles?

Le Mat matches the Italian Il Matto, the madman, and early cards show him as one: on the earliest surviving card he wears rags with feathers in his hair, and on the Marseilles card an animal tears at his breeches.

In the Rider–Waite deck, the Fool walks toward the edge of a precipice with which animal?

A small dog bounds along beside him in the Rider–Waite picture; on older packs the animal is no companion but attacks the wanderer from behind and tears his clothes.

Which Major Arcana card bears the number XIII, long counted unlucky?

Death is trump XIII, and most Tarot of Marseilles packs print the number and the skeleton with his scythe but leave the title off the card altogether.

In the Rider–Waite Death card, the skeleton carries a black standard bearing what?

A white rose: Waite called it the Mystic Rose, a sign of life, so the black banner promises renewal even as Death's horse steps over a fallen king.

The 'Rider' in the Rider–Waite Tarot's name was the deck's what?

Publisher: William Rider & Son got top billing while the artist, Pamela Colman Smith, got no formal credit, which is why many readers now say Rider–Waite–Smith or Smith–Waite instead.

In the Rider–Waite deck, which card shows Adam and Eve beneath an angel in the Garden of Eden?

The Lovers was redrawn for this deck: older packs show a clothed couple receiving a blessing, and Waite replaced them with a naked pair he likened to Adam and Eve in paradise.

Which poet introduced Pamela Colman Smith to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1901?

W. B. Yeats, whose verses she had illustrated, was an active recruiter for the order he had joined in 1890; membership brought her to the notice of A. E. Waite, who later commissioned the deck.

Which two Major Arcana cards did Waite swap to fit the Golden Dawn's astrology?

Strength and Justice traded places as VIII and XI so that the lion card sat with Leo and the scales with Libra; in print Waite would say only that he had 'reasons which satisfy myself'.

In the Rider–Waite deck, the old Papess appears under what name?

The High Priestess no longer wears the old Papess's papal tiara: the Rider–Waite card gives her a horned crown with a globe and a scroll of sacred law in her hands.

What did Pamela Colman Smith add to the numbered suit cards of the Rider–Waite deck?

Full allegorical scenes replaced the plain rows of suit symbols on earlier packs, so a reader can tell a story from the pictures alone; she seems to have taken the idea from the 15th-century Sola Busca deck.

By 2019, roughly how many copies of the Rider–Waite tarot deck were estimated to be in circulation worldwide?

100 million is the figure usually cited, though the deck's true reach is hard to estimate; its boom came late, after an American card company bought the rights and built a new audience for it in the early 1970s.

What was the title of A. E. Waite's 1911 revised guide to the Rider–Waite deck?

The Pictorial Key to the Tarot added plates of every card to his 1909 text, and in it Waite set out to dispose 'once and for all' of the occult schools' reveries about the cards' ancient origin.

What did Ellen Terry call tarot artist Pamela Colman Smith?

Pixie was the actress's pet name for the young illustrator, whom the Lyceum Theatre company took on tour to work on its costumes and sets.

In which country did Pamela Colman Smith's family live from 1889, inspiring her Annancy Stories?

Jamaica: her father took a job with a company extending the island's railway, and she later retold its Anansi the Spider folk tales in two books and to guests at her London studio.

Pamela Colman Smith illustrated the last novel of which Lyceum Theatre colleague in 1911?

Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula, was one of the Lyceum trio who took the young artist on tour to design costumes and sets; his final book, The Lair of the White Worm, came out the year before he died.

Pamela Colman Smith was the first painter shown at New York's 291 gallery, until then devoted to what?

Photography was all the gallery had shown until Alfred Stieglitz hung her paintings of what she saw while listening to music, and the show was a success.

In a tarot reading, who is the 'querent'?

The person asking the question is the querent, from the Latin for 'to seek'; in Waite's method the reader first picks one card, the Significator, to stand for them on the table.

Who painted the Thoth Tarot for its occultist creator?

Lady Frieda Harris spent five years on the paintings, finishing in 1943, yet neither she nor her collaborator lived to see them printed as a deck, which took until the late 1960s.

In a tarot reading, what is a card called when it is dealt upside down?

Reversed cards get a second set of meanings, a practice the 18th-century fortune-teller Etteilla set down: in Waite's guide the Hanged Man upright means sacrifice, reversed selfishness.

On the Rider–Waite Moon card, a dog and a wolf howl while which creature crawls out of the water?

A crayfish creeping towards the land is far older than this deck: 18th-century packs already show it in the water below two towers and the baying animals.

Whose 1850s drawing of the goat-headed Baphomet inspired the Devil card of the Rider–Waite deck?

Éliphas Lévi drew the winged goat for his treatise on high magic; Waite, who had translated that book into English, partly modelled his own horned, bat-winged Devil on it.

Which celebrity card-reader gave her name to a 36-card fortune-telling deck published after her death?

Marie Anne Lenormand's name was put on a pack adapted from a German parlour game, the Game of Hope, in which players raced tokens along the cards with dice.

Who first published the Golden Dawn's tarot text 'Book T' openly, in 1912?

Aleister Crowley slipped the order's confidential tarot paper into his own journal, The Equinox, under the plain title 'A Description of the Cards of the Tarot'.

Which T. S. Eliot poem has the clairvoyante Madame Sosostris read tarot cards?

The Waste Land has her deal from 'a wicked pack of cards', yet Eliot confessed in his notes that he did not know the real tarot and had invented cards to suit himself.

In 1997 which filmmaker completed a reconstructed Tarot of Marseille with Philippe Camoin?

Alejandro Jodorowsky, the director of El Topo, sought out an heir of the Camoin card-printing family in the mid-1990s to rebuild the old pattern, and for years taught tarot for free in Paris cafés.

Despite his name, the Hanged Man of the tarot dangles upside down from which part of his body?

One foot is all that holds him, and his calm face suggests he is there by choice, so readers take the card as self-sacrifice rather than punishment. Only the Sicilian tarot hangs him by the neck.

In which Bond film does Jane Seymour play Solitaire, a tarot reader serving the villain Kananga?

Live and Let Die has Bond stack a pack with nothing but the Lovers card to convince Solitaire that fate means them to be together.

Which rock band's untitled fourth album has inside artwork modelled on the tarot's Hermit card?

Led Zeppelin's painting The Hermit borrows the old man on a mountain top from the Rider–Waite card, and Jimmy Page later played the figure himself in the concert film The Song Remains the Same.

Which court card appears in every suit of a tarot deck but is missing from a standard 52-card pack?

The Knight rides between the Page and the Queen in each tarot suit, making four court cards where a modern pack has three. French-suited playing cards dropped him and kept the queen.

William Rider gave the Rider–Waite Tarot half its name by playing which role in the deck's creation?

Its publisher was the London firm William Rider & Son, which issued the cards for the mystic A. E. Waite, the other half of the name.

In the Tarot of Marseilles, the Death card traditionally lacks which feature of the other trumps?

A title is missing, which earned the trump its nickname, the card with no name. Readers rarely take it literally: it usually marks the close of one chapter of life.

Which Surrealist painter, asked to design a tarot deck for a Bond film, later released his own?

Salvador Dalí asked a fee the film's budget could not meet, so another artist got the job. He kept painting anyway, and his finished deck came out in Spain more than a decade later.

The Lovers card in the Rider–Waite tarot replaced a couple being blessed with which Biblical pair?

Adam and Eve stand in their garden under a watching angel, where older decks showed a couple being blessed by a nobleman or cleric.

In which Disney film does the villain Dr. Facilier give Prince Naveen a tarot reading during a song?

The Princess and the Frog stages the reading as the Randy Newman song Friends on the Other Side, with Facilier doing tricks with his cards while he reads Naveen's money troubles.

Which suit of a standard 52-card pack is the usual match for the tarot's suit of Wands?

Clubs translates basto, the Spanish name for the suit of batons, which suggests Spanish-style cards reached England before the French ones that draw the same suit as a clover leaf.

In the Rider–Waite tarot, which symbol floats above the Magician's head as he raises his wand?

An infinity sign hovers over him and a snake swallowing its own tail forms his belt, a double emblem of eternity.

In the Rider–Waite tarot, the Hermit carries a staff and lifts which object to light his way?

A lantern holding a six-pointed star lights the old man's mountain path, and one tarot writer called it the lamp of truth, there to guide those who do not yet know.

On the Judgement card of the tarot, what does an angel sound as the dead rise from their graves?

A trumpet hung with the flag of St George wakes a man, a woman and a child, a scene borrowed from Christian paintings of the Last Judgment.

Which Rider–Waite tarot card shows a naked child riding a white horse and holding a red flag?

The Sun is among the most positive cards in the deck, read as joy, vitality and success, and sunflowers bloom behind the young rider.

On the Tower card of the tarot, what strikes the building and knocks a large crown from its top?

Lightning matters so much to the image that some old Belgian decks simply named the card La Foudre, the thunderbolt.

Which classical element is tied to Pentacles, the tarot suit of money and possessions?

Earth fits a suit concerned with the body, property and wealth. The Thoth deck gives the same suit a plainer name, Disks.

In tarot, the suit of Cups, once an emblem of the clergy, mainly speaks to which side of life?

Emotions are the business of Cups, so a spread full of them points to matters of the heart, while the other three suits cover the physical, the mental and the creative.

Which heist film series has magicians called the Four Horsemen summoned by tarot cards from the Eye?

Now You See Me treats the cards as calling cards: in the third film, Now You Don't, the scattered Horsemen each receive one, and together the cards point the way to a château.

Which T. S. Eliot poem features Madame Sosostris, a clairvoyant who lays out tarot cards?

The Waste Land lets her cards foretell the rest of the poem, including a drowned sailor who turns up in a later section.

Which founder of analytical psychology is credited with the idea that tarot images are archetypes?

Carl Jung wrote that the pictures on the cards seemed distantly descended from archetypes of transformation, and a later generation of tarot writers drew heavily on his work.

Which Major Arcana card of the tarot shows a winged angel pouring liquid from one cup into another?

Temperance takes its picture from an old emblem of the virtue, in which watering down wine stood for moderation.

Which Major Arcana card, last in the tarot's numbered sequence, shows a dancer ringed by a wreath?

The World closes the sequence with a dancer holding two wands while a man, a lion, an ox and an eagle look on, so readers take it as completion.

Which Rider–Waite tarot card, a robed figure giving a blessing, was the Pope in older decks?

The Hierophant took its Greek name, the rank of the chief priest in the ancient mysteries of Eleusis, from an 18th-century writer who wanted the pack dechristianised.

In the Rider–Waite tarot, which creatures, one black and one white, pull the Chariot?

Sphinxes replaced the horses of older decks because Waite adopted a variation by the French magician Éliphas Lévi, and the driver holds no reins at all.

On the Moon card of the tarot, a wolf and a hound howl while which creature crawls out of the water?

A crayfish stands for what Waite called that which comes up out of the deeps, a nameless urge lower than the savage beast.

On the Rider–Waite Wheel of Fortune card, which Egyptian god rises up the right side of the wheel?

Anubis climbs as the snake-like Typhon sinks down the other side, a picture of luck rising and falling, while the rim spells out the letters T, A, R and O.

Which planet's symbol replaced the imperial eagle on the Empress's shield in the Rider–Waite tarot?

Venus, named for the goddess of love and beauty, suits a card about fertility and abundance, and the same redesign gave the Empress her crown of twelve stars.

Which animal's heads adorn the Emperor's throne in the Rider–Waite tarot, a nod to his zodiac sign?

Rams stand for Aries, ruled by Mars, which readers tie to the Emperor's themes of initiative, leadership and power.

On each Ace in the Rider–Waite tarot, what emerges from a cloud bearing the suit's emblem?

A hand offers the wand, cup, sword or pentacle like a gift from above, which is why readers treat every Ace as a new beginning.

Which Rider–Waite tarot card shows a man lying on the ground with a row of blades in his back?

Ten of Swords looks like the bleakest card in the pack, yet readers often take it as the end of a hard cycle, with hope of a fresh start after the disaster.

What are the tarot's Minor Arcana cards numbered Ace to Ten called, as opposed to the court cards?

Pips, or pip cards, are named for the small suit symbols counted out on each one, a word that also covers the dots on dice and dominoes.

The Latin word arcana, used for the two halves of a tarot deck, originally means what?

Secrets is the literal sense: arcana is the plural of the Latin arcanum, a hidden thing or mystery, and it was once a favourite word of alchemists.

In a tarot reading, the Tower card most often warns of what?

Sudden upheaval is the Tower's message: Waite called it above all a card of unforeseen catastrophe, and it follows straight after the Devil in the sequence.

Writers in the 1850s spread the unfounded theory that which people brought tarot cards to Europe?

The Romani were long cast as the keepers of the cards, yet there is virtually no evidence that they told fortunes with any kind of cards before the 20th century.

The magician Éliphas Lévi matched each Major Arcana card of the tarot to a letter of which alphabet?

Hebrew letters gave Lévi his bridge between the cards and the Kabbalah, a link that turned the pack into what historians of the cards call a prime ingredient in magical lore.

Western Qabalists see the tarot's Major Arcana as the paths joining ten spheres on which diagram?

The Tree of Life has one path for every trump, while the Ace to Ten of each suit are matched to the ten spheres themselves.

The Devil card of the Rider–Waite tarot is partly based on which drawing by Éliphas Lévi?

Baphomet, Lévi's winged goat-horned idol with a torch on its head, lent the card its pose: right arm raised, left arm lowered.

On the Rider–Waite Devil card, which symbol appears upside down on the horned figure's forehead?

A pentagram pointing downwards crowns a squatting figure with bat wings, while two naked, tailed captives, one male and one female, stand chained to the block beneath.

The feminist Motherpeace Tarot, created in 1970s Berkeley, prints its cards in what unusual shape?

Round cards were chosen to echo the Moon, long linked with the Mother Goddess, and decades later the deck inspired a Christian Dior fashion collection.

Whose novel The Castle of Crossed Destinies has mute travellers tell their tales with tarot cards?

Italo Calvino built the book in two halves, each told through a different deck: a painted Renaissance pack first, then the Tarot of Marseilles.

Which sculptor filled the Tarot Garden in Tuscany with giant mosaic figures of the Major Arcana?

Niki de Saint Phalle lived inside her Empress sculpture for several years while she built the garden, which opened to the public in 1998.

Which manga's Stardust Crusaders arc gives fighters powers called Stands, named after tarot cards?

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure names hero Jotaro's Stand, Star Platinum, after the Star card, while later Stands in the same arc are named after Egyptian gods instead.

Which Japanese role-playing series ties every character and summoned being to a tarot Arcana?

Persona 4 has its heroes call up their inner selves by destroying a tarot card, and skill cards in the series are drawn as Major Arcana.

Which HBO drama set in the Dust Bowl opens each episode by diving through a pack of tarot cards?

Carnivàle begins with a deck falling into sand, and the camera plunges into one card after another to find footage of the Great Depression inside.

Which carnival novel by William Lindsay Gresham heads each chapter with a different tarot card?

Nightmare Alley drags its hero Stan down until he is a hobo, staying afloat by giving card readings and selling horoscopes.

Which poker roguelike by solo developer LocalThunk has players spend Tarot cards to alter a deck?

Balatro uses the Major Arcana as one-shot power-ups that can change a playing card's suit, enhance it or destroy it outright.

In the Thoth Tarot, which name replaces Judgement on the trump that once showed the dead rising?

The Aeon pictures the deities Nuit, Hadit, Ra-Hoor-Khuit and Harpocrates where older decks show the Christian Last Judgment.

One Swiss tarot pack replaces the Pope and Popess of older decks with which pair of Roman gods?

Jupiter and Juno supply the JJ in the pack's nickname, 1JJ, while the 1 is nothing grander than a number in a card maker's product line.

Which 15th-century tarot, shown in photos at the British Museum, likely inspired Rider–Waite images?

Sola Busca photographs reached the museum two years before the Rider–Waite artist set to work, and her heart pierced by three blades closely echoes the older card.

Under which pen name did French physician Gérard Encausse write The Tarot of the Bohemians?

Papus took the name from a spirit of medicine listed in an ancient magical text, a neat fit for a working doctor who also founded the modern Martinist Order.