Tarot
A deck of 78 cards that began as a card game in fifteenth-century Italy and became a tool of divination later.
Also: tarocchi, tarock, tarot deck, Rider-Waite
The first tarot cards were made in northern Italy in the mid-1400s for a trick-taking game called tarocchi, and the game is still played in France, Austria and Italy. The suit cards and the 22 trumps, such as the Fool and the Tower, carried no fortune-telling role at first. Occult use grew from the 1780s, when the French writer Antoine Court de Gebelin claimed an Egyptian origin that historians reject. Etteilla made the first tarot designed for readings. The Rider-Waite-Smith deck of 1909 set the picture style most readers use today. Readers say a spread is a prompt for reflection or a message about the future. Psychologists point to projection and the habit of finding meaning in chance.