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The twenty-two trump cards of the tarot pack, designed for a trick-taking game.
Also known as: Tarot cards, Cards with roman numerals and pictures
A fixed sequence of allegorical trumps that outrank every suit. They were invented for a card game in fifteenth-century Italy and used for nothing else for three hundred years; divinatory reading is a French practice beginning in the 1780s.
Twenty-two allegorical cards, conventionally numbered with Roman numerals, that form a fifth sequence outranking the four suits of a tarot pack.
Devised in northern Italy in the first half of the fifteenth century as the trump suit of a trick-taking game, which is still played in parts of Europe. Nothing in the surviving fifteenth- to seventeenth-century material treats them as divinatory.
Northern Italy · from c. 1440
Divinatory use begins in France in the 1780s, and the Egyptian and kabbalistic origins asserted for the sequence at that time and since are not supported by the historical record.
This is a chronology, not a verdict on the practice: cartomancy is a real tradition two and a half centuries old. What it is not is the original purpose of the cards.
The imagery a modern reader recognises is largely that of one 1909 deck, illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith, whose scenic number cards were an innovation. Most later decks are variations on it rather than on any older source.
from 1909
Tall cards each carrying a full-height illustrated scene, a Roman numeral across the top and a title across the foot.