Tarot
The major arcana, plainly described. No reading is offered and none is implied — these are the conventional meanings, listed.
Where the deck comes from
Tarot begins as a fifteenth-century Italian card game, tarocchi, played with a standard four-suit pack plus a fifth suit of trumps. For roughly three hundred years it is a game and nothing else, and it is still played as one across much of Europe.
Divinatory use is documented from the late eighteenth century in France, where Antoine Court de Gébelin proposed an Egyptian origin for the deck that has no evidence behind it whatsoever and has proved impossible to kill. The occult associations everyone now knows were largely systematised by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in the 1890s, and reached the public through the Rider–Waite–Smith deck of 1909, illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith.