Tarot

Tarot appeared in fifteenth-century Northern Italy as a card game — tarocchi.

From game to occultism. The cards acquired their occult and diagnostic function by the eighteenth century, when French occultists Antoine Court de Gebelin and Etteilla proclaimed them a repository of Egyptian wisdom.

Golden Dawn and modern decks. Further development is linked to the Order of the Golden Dawn and such figures as Arthur Edward Waite, illustrator Pamela Colman Smith, and Aleister Crowley. Their work gave rise to the most widely used modern decks — the Waite-Smith (1909) and the Thoth (1943).

Deck Structure (78 cards)

22 Major Arcana

Universal archetypes. the Fool, the Magician, the High Priestess, the Tower, the Star, and so on — depict universal archetypal situations and principles.

56 Minor Arcana (4 suits × 14 cards)

Describe more concrete life circumstances through elemental suits:

• Wands — fire, will
• Cups — water, emotions
• Swords — air, intellect
• Pentacles — earth, the material

The Mechanism of the Spread

Jung's synchronicity. The laying of cards is understood as a resonance between random selection and the querent's current context — a mechanism akin to what Jung called synchronicity.

Mirror, not prediction. A card's interpretation is shaped by its position in the spread, the adjacent cards, and the question. This makes Tarot not a predictive automaton, but a mirror: it does not answer — it offers an image that the reader fills with meaning.

Place in Errarium

The closest Western analog of the I Ching. In Errarium, Tarot is classified as a symbolic system with archetypal interpretation. It is the closest Western analogue to the I Ching (#6) in its mechanism: random selection from a fixed set of symbols to describe the quality of a situation.

The difference — visual language. The principal difference lies in the visual, narrative language of the cards versus the abstract binary logic of the hexagrams.