What are tarrot cards?

Question

idk what they are so plzzzzzzzzz tell me

Answer 1

they are used by some people to tell fortunes.

Answer 2

Well, in English speaking countries most people think of them only as an occult object or fortune teller's tool. In fact, tarot is a pack of playing cards!

Playing cards arrived in Europe via the Islamic world in the mid 14th century. These early cards, known as the Malmuk cards had the same structure as our regular playing cards today, that is, four regular suits, each with 10 pip cards and three court cards. The original suit signs were cups, coins, swords, and polo sticks. Polo was an unknown game in Europe at the time, so these became batons. These suits are now known as the Latin suits and all Europe used them - though they are now only used by Latin countries. The court cards were a King, a Rider, and a Footman. All male court cards are still used in Latin suits, as well as the German and Swiss packs.

The Queen makes her first appearance in a Milanese pack that features six courts in each suit, a male and a female of each rank. Two of the extra courts were dropped and for a time the 56 card pack was standard in the region. It was to this pack that an extra suit of picture cards was added in the mid 15th century. They were commissioned by Duke Filipo Visconti as part of the celebrations for his daughter, Bianca Visconti's marraige into the Sforza family. They took as their theme a traditional Christian triumph procession. Hence they were called trionfi, meaning triumphs, and from which we get our word trump - it was the invention of tarot that marked the invention of trumps in card games!

The game of tarot quickly spread and diversified and was at one time the most popular form of card game throughout continental Europe!

In the early 18th century, German playing card makers began to produce French suited packs with new trumps featuring arbitrary trump designs. The French suits were much cheaper to produce, requiring only stencils rather than carved wood block and the new trumps allowed card makers to show off their skills in a time of great competition. These cards are now used for most of the games, with France being the last to adopt them in the early 20th century.

Toward the end of the 18th century, occultist and resident of Paris, Antoine Court de Gabelin wrote an article on tarot cards for his Encyclopaedia, The Primitive World. He declared that the cards were the codified wisdom of ancient Egyptian priests, essentially a series of hieroglyphs that were much in vogue at the time. He offered no evidence for his theory but it became a popular myth. For about a century, the occult tarot and divination with the cards was only known in France, it was not until members of the Golden Dawn, who based much of their occult beliefs on the cards, began to import them, publish translations of the French texts, and redesign them specifically for occult practice, that the myth reached the English speaking world.

Today, English speakers continue to know the cards for their occult myths and, of course, the fortune telling. However, Europe continues to play an impressive range of card games with them. France, Austria, and Hungary maintain particularly strong tarot game tradition as does Bologna in Italy, where they play a particular good form of the game called Ottocento.

The games are largely what we call point-trick games. That means that like whist, bridge, and spades, players win cards in tricks. Unlike those games, different cards carry different point values, so that it is not the number of tricks you take that wins the game but the number of card points you win in them.

There are a small number of players trying to promote the games to English speakers. For rules:

http://www.tarocchino.com

http://www.trionfi.com

For the cards used:

http://www.tarobearslair.com

http://www.playingcardsales.com

Answer 3

tarot cards are special cards that are believed to tell your future. You can have any psychic, gypsy, or fortuneteller read your future with. Each card has a picture with a certain name that means something like go fortune, evils ahead, marriage, anything