How Many Cards Are There in a Tarot Deck?
Since the dawn of time, human beings — even when they spend their days working — have loved to enjoy themselves. We are playful by nature and can have fun with nothing more than a few plain pebbles.
Over time, we have therefore invented all sorts of games to entertain ourselves at will.
Card games have certainly been, and still are, among the most popular — be it War, Belote or Rummy — though tarot tops the bill.
What’s more, tarot has even gone beyond the stage of being a mere game. But how many cards are there in the Tarot of Marseille?
An Overview of a Tarot Deck
The name tarot refers to several very specific card games, because these various cards have quite distinctive features. Indeed, you cannot play tarot with the plain, ordinary cards of a standard deck. It is played only with official tarot cards.
Created and popularised in Europe in the 15th century, tarot cards would soon take on a mystical and esoteric dimension three centuries later, when they began to be used by fortune-tellers and soothsayers to predict the future for curious passers-by.
Great figures throughout history have also been tempted or intrigued by tarot cards, such as François Rabelais, Gargantua, Leonardo da Vinci and even Sigmund Freud.
The game of tarot, like every card game, has its own very specific rules. And, to make things a little more complicated, there are several kinds of tarot decks.
So you can find, for example, the Italian tarot, the Tarot of the Angels or the Tarot of Besançon. But the most popular tarot decks, the ones most used in the art of divination known as tarot reading, are the Rider–Waite tarot and the Tarot of Marseille.
The Number of Cards in the Divinatory Tarot
The cards of a tarot deck are of paramount importance. They are larger than those found in an ordinary deck of cards, and 22 of them are illustrated with powerful, symbolic figures that come close to being genuine works of art.
Depending on the various tarot decks, their number can of course vary, but they all include at least these essential cards known as the trumps.
Among these trump cards, we find the card called the Fool, or the Excuse — one of the most important in the tarot deck, as it acts as a kind of joker.
More generally, each tarot deck contains ten cards, from the ace to the number 10, and 4 court cards, which are:
- the Jack,
- the Knight,
- the Queen
- and the King.
They all belong to what is called a suit. And there are 4 suits within a single deck.
In the tarot we are interested in here, the one from Marseille, the arcana — that is, the cards — number 78. Among these 78 cards, we find 56 Minor Arcana and, quite logically, 22 Major Arcana.
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