If you do a search on Google for ‘Tarot reading for beginners’ you’ll get 77,100,000 listings to look through. I trudged my way through the top 10 listings — it was an agonising way to spend an hour! 

Maybe I’ve just become too critical and cynical in my old age, but I struggled to keep my temper as I looked at the rubbish some people were trying to pass off as worthwhile information. Here’s a sample of the ‘guidance’ offered from the top ten sites Google recommended for beginners. 

• “The cards act as a portal through to the other side, so keeping them away from other people may be a good way of preventing people from accidentally ‘touching’ you through the cards and passing along possibly toxic energy.” 
• “Gypsies and the Egyptians used the Tarot primarily for divination.” 
• “The ideas expressed in the major arcana cards are not taught in our culture so we have lost touch with them and we have no foundation for them.” 
• “The Suit of Pentacles is often thought to come to the Tarot from the playing card suit of Diamonds.” 

None of the information shown in those bullet points is correct!

Out of those top ten websites, two of them provided useful information, a couple were irrelevant, and the rest were decidedly worthless. It’s no wonder that people get confused when starting their big adventure into Tarot reading! And don’t get me started on some of the stuff I found on YouTube! 

I’ve decided to post some basic information to redress the balance of some of the wacko sites on the Internet. The first of these articles is: Why does tarot have 78 cards? To answer this, we have to take a brief history lesson…

Ordinary playing cards developed first entered Europe from the Islamic world around 1375. These packs had 4 suits of ten numbered cards and they contained 3 Court Cards. The four suits were Coins, Cups, Swords, and Polo Sticks. It is thought that the Duke of Milan wanted a variation on the standard playing card deck that he had been using. Around the year 1441, he asked his artist Bonifacio Bembo to create an extension of this game. Bembo decided to incorporate trump cards into the game and these 22 cards are now known as the Major Arcana. He also included the fourth court card (the Queens) into the Minor Arcana. 

The game of polo was very important in the Islamic culture, but it was not known in Europe when the cards arrived, so the suit of Polo sticks eventually became known as the suit of Staves or Batons.A. E. Waite then changed the suit of Coins to Pentacles, and the transformation of the modern Tarot deck was complete. 

Tarot images have evolved considerably over the last few centuries. Most of the images from the past are recognisable when laid out next to the newer versions, but at the same time, much has changed regarding the underlying nature of the cards. 

Knowing the history of the cards can tell us a lot about the original intention of each image, and understanding the evolution of the cards shows us how the current interpretations came about. 

To summarise all this — the answer to my original question about why Tarot has 78 cards is because 22 Major Arcana (trump cards) were combined with 56 Minor Arcana (standard playing cards) to make 78 Tarot cards in a deck!