Tarot

Tarot appeared in fifteenth-century Northern Italy as a card game — tarocchi. 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. Further development of the system 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).

The deck consists of 78 cards divided into the Major Arcana (22 cards) and the Minor Arcana (56 cards in four suits of 14). The Major Arcana — the Fool, the Magician, the High Priestess, the Tower, the Star, and so on — depict universal archetypal situations and principles. The Minor Arcana describe more concrete life circumstances through elemental suits: Wands (fire, will), Cups (water, emotions), Swords (air, intellect), Pentacles (earth, the material).

The laying of cards is understood as a resonance between random selection and the querent's current psychological or situational context — a mechanism akin to what Jung called synchronicity. A card's interpretation is shaped by its position in the spread, the adjacent cards, and the question posed. This makes Tarot not a predictive automaton but a mirror: it does not answer — it offers an image that the reader fills with meaning.

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 working mechanism: random selection from a fixed set of symbols to describe the quality of a situation. The principal difference lies in the visual, narrative language of the cards versus the abstract binary logic of the hexagrams.