Tarot Decks

In many parts of the world, tarot cards are usually seen either as a means of divination or as a psychological tool for accessing the unconscious. Tarot cards, when shuffled as a deck and laid out in one of a variety of patterns, are often believed to show a person's thoughts and desires, to show events that have taken place in a person's past or that are presently happening, to answer a question, or to reveal possible future events.

Each card in the tarot deck has a variety of symbolic meanings that have evolved over the years. Many custom or themed tarot decks exist, especially in the United States, which have even more specific symbolism. Also, in divination, the astrological attributions of the coat, or pip, cards can be used as general indicators of timing in the year, based on the Octavian calendar. Court cards (kings, queens, pages, and knights) can signify different people in a tarot reading, with each suit's "nature" providing hints about that person's attitudes and physical and emotional characteristics.

Some schools of occult thought or symbolic study, such as the Freemasons and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, consider the tarot to function as a textbook and mnemonic device for those groups' teachings ( This is especially true of certain decks like Aleister Crowley's Thoth tarot ). This may be one root of the word arcana being used to describe the two sections of the tarot deck; arcana is the plural form of the Latin word arcanum, meaning "closed" or "secret."