Rock Neptune

A giant mechanized minotaur walking around Toulouse.        

The Practice of the Tibetan Kapala,

There are 78 cards in a Tarot deck: 22 Major Arcana or Trump cards and 56 Minor Arcana (arcana[singular arcanum]=secrets, mysteries). The Minor Arcana are subdivided into four suits: the Wands or Staves, the Cups, the Swords, and the Pentacles or Coins. 

Tarot was developed in Milan and Bologna during the Italian Renaissance around 1430. The oldest artist we know of to have painted a set of Tarocchi cards is Bonifatio Bembo. 

The Tarot deck was the first one for which Trump cards were defined. They were used for centuries as a parlor game without any significance beyond a simple game of cards. 

The first evidence of Tarot being used as a tool for divination is 1781. At this time, they began to be used for esoteric interpretation through their symbolism. The nineteenth century in general saw a huge upsurge of interest in the classical occult. 

The two most famous decks that defined all Tarot decks that would follow are the Rider Waite Smith deck and the Thoth deck. Both of these decks were designed by former leaders of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Aleister Crowley designed the Thoth deck. The Rider Waite Smith deck was illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith from the instructions of academic and mystic A. E. Waite and were published by the Rider Company, hence the name of the deck. Rider Waite was published in 1910. Thoth, however, wasn’t published until 1969. By then, both artists who had worked on Thoth had died. 

The present worldwide expansion of Tarot interpretation began in the western world during the 1970′s. 

Today there are over one thousand different versions of Tarot of which many hundreds are currently available on the market. 

Knowledge of the four elements: Fire, Water, Air, and Earth, together with their association with the four suits: Wands, Cups, Swords, and Pentacles, represents a key feature of modern tarot interpretation. 

Four Archangels appear in the Major Arcana: Temperance/Michael, Devil/Uriel, Judgement/Gabriel and the Lovers/Raphael.