The tarot was borne in the Italian Renaissance, not as a divinatory tool for occultists, but more as an aristocratic card game – something to wile away the hours of the prototypical idle feudal family. Tarot evolved into an oracle after a plethora of generations, most likely in Marseilles, and this was also about the time that the motifs and structure of the 78-card deck was standardized, with official card names and numbers for the trump cards.

While historians have determined that the characters in the trump part of the deck were derived from popular imagery of the 13th Century called trionfi, meaning “triumphs,” and were enhancements to already-popular playing card decks, an array of trumps that is remarkably similar to our contemporary “Rider-Waite Deck” existed in the 15th Century, and to that we must look for an astrological pillar.

In this article, I will offer up new insights into the astrological, or more specifically the astro-numerical, impetus of the tarot. This is based on the presentation I developed in February of 2020, which was then put on hiatus as the pandemic chaos took hold, and I couldn’t do things in public. So, here it is three years later, online! Are you excited yet? On the edge of your seat? Pi-curious?? This is for you, then.

• astrology
• Tarot
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