What a tarot deck is

Tarot began as a card game. Decks with an extra suit of picture cards, called trionfi (triumphs) and later tarocchi, were painted for the courts of northern Italy in the fifteenth century; some of the oldest surviving cards were made for the Visconti and Sforza families of Milan. People played trick-taking games with them, and in parts of Europe they still do.

The idea that tarot hides secret wisdom arrived much later. In 1781 the French scholar Antoine Court de Gébelin claimed the cards preserved an ancient Egyptian book. There was no evidence for it, but the story caught on, and within a decade a Parisian known as Etteilla was publishing decks made for fortune-telling. Nineteenth-century occultists in France and England built tarot into larger systems of astrology, Kabbalah, and ritual.

The deck most people picture today was published in London in 1909: the Rider–Waite–Smith deck, designed by the occultist Arthur Edward Waite and drawn by the artist Pamela Colman Smith. Smith gave every card, including the numbered minor cards, a scene with people in it. That choice is why modern tarot is read as a set of pictures and stories, not just symbols.

A tarot deck has 78 cards. Twenty-two are the Major Arcana, the trumps, numbered 0 (The Fool) to XXI (The World). They carry the big themes: love, death, judgment, luck, the self. The other fifty-six are the Minor Arcana: four suits of fourteen cards, Ace through Ten plus four court cards. They are closer to ordinary life: work, money, arguments, moods, friendships.

Decks disagree about small things. The oldest pattern, the Tarot de Marseille, numbers Justice VIII and Strength XI; Waite swapped them to fit his astrological scheme. The Pretty Parasites guide follows the older order (and calls Strength Fortitude); the site deals in Rider–Waite names so you can always find a card.

The Pretty Parasites Tarot gives every card an organism: a parasite, parasitoid, or something living by another creature’s means. The Lovers are blood flukes that spend years paired inside a human vein. The Two of Wands is a desert shrub that photosynthesizes and taps its neighbors’ roots. The organism is not decoration. It is a way of reading: every card describes an arrangement that benefits someone and costs someone, and your job is to see both.

None of this predicts the future. Tarot is a set of images and a vocabulary for thinking about your situation. Its power, such as it is, comes from what you notice when you look.