Divinatory, esoteric and occult tarot

Tarotology is the theoretical basis for the reading of Tarot cards, a subset of cartomancy, which is the practice of using cards to gain insight into the past, present or future by posing a question to the cards. The reasoning behind this practice ranges from believing the result is guided by a spiritual force, to belief that the cards are instruments used to tap either into a collective unconscious or into the subject's own creative, brainstorming subconscious.

Tarot cards were originally used in games and are still used for that purpose in many parts of Europe.

Tarotology is considered pseudoscience, and the readings made from the cards have not been proved to constitute scientific evidence for the making of predictions about future events.

The main article on Tarot gives full details of the history of Tarot cards as game-playing cards.

One of the earliest reference to Tarot triumphs, and probably the first reference to Tarot as the devil's picture book, is given by a Dominican preacher in a fiery sermon against the evils of the devil's instrument. References to the Tarot as a social plague continue throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, but there are no indication that the cards were used for anything but games anywhere other than in Bologna. As Dummett (1980: 96) notes, "...it was only in the 1780s, when the practice of fortune-telling with regular playing cards had been well established for at least two decades, that anyone began to use the Tarot pack for cartomancy."

The belief in the divinatory meaning of the cards is closely associated with a belief in their occult properties: a commonly held belief in the 18th century propagated by prominent Protestant clerics and freemasons. One of them was Court De Gébelin (see below).

From its humble uptake as an instrument of prophecy in France, the Tarot went on to become a thing of hermeneutic, magical, mystical,semiotic, and even psychological properties. It was used by Romani people when telling fortunes, as a Jungian psychological apparatus capable of tapping into “absolute knowledge in the unconscious,” a tool for archetypal analysis, and even a tool for facilitating the Jungian process of Individuation.

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Wikipedia