The seventy-eight, in brief.
A standard tarot deck has seventy-eight cards in two parts: twenty-two Major Arcana and fifty-six Minor Arcana. The Majors are the named archetypes — The Fool, The Magician, The High Priestess, and so on — numbered 0 through 21. They are the symbolic backbone of the deck, the cards that name large categories of human experience: agency, attention, threshold, integration, rupture, return. The Minors are the four suits — Wands, Cups, Swords, Pentacles — each containing fourteen cards (ace through ten plus four court cards: page, knight, queen, king). The Minors articulate the textures of ordinary life that the Majors gather into themes.
A short history.
The tarot deck originated in fifteenth-century northern Italy as a playing-card set — the trionfi — used for trick-taking games at the Visconti and Sforza courts of Milan. The earliest surviving illustrated deck (the Visconti-Sforza, c. 1450) was a painted luxury object commissioned for the duke, not a divinatory tool. The cards moved into divinatory use slowly across the following centuries — first in eighteenth-century France (Etteilla; the Court de Gébelin essays), then through the Hermetic occult revival of late nineteenth-century Britain (the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, of which A. E. Waite was a member), and finally into the modern reading practice that the Rider-Waite-Smith deck of 1909 helped establish.
The deck arrived in India in the twentieth century via the channels of any European print object — first as a curiosity in English-language bookshops in Calcutta and Bombay, then through the postcolonial New Age channels of the 1970s and 80s, then with full velocity through the internet from the 1990s onward. There is no indigenous Indian tarot tradition — the system is European in origin and was not part of any pre-modern Indian divinatory practice. The Indian contribution to contemporary tarot reading is something different: not the historical deck but a contemplative framework (atma-vichara) within which the deck can be used for self-inquiry rather than fortune-telling. That framework is what the Antardarshan Method articulates.
How to read a card page.
Every individual card page on this site follows the same structure. At the top: quick meaning — a one-paragraph orientation to what the card names. Then: the iconography, in detail — the figures, the objects, the colours, the position of the body, the items in the four corners. Then: upright reading — what the card tends to surface when it appears in standard orientation. Then: reversed reading — what the card surfaces when laid upside-down (we read reversals as attenuations, exaggerations, or shadows of the upright, not as discrete second meanings). Then: the card across life contexts — work, relationship, decision, shadow. Then: journaling prompts — three to five questions the reader can sit with privately. Then: a card-specific FAQ — the questions we are most often asked about that card.
The card pages are not meant as “the answer” for a reader who has drawn the card. They are meant as the reference that a reader can consult while building her own interpretive practice. The card pages will frequently disagree with predictive-tarot internet posts about the same card; the disagreement is by design.
A few cards to start with.
If you are new to the deck, begin with The Fool (0) — the card that opens the Major Arcana sequence and names the contemplative posture of attentive willingness. Then The Magician (I) on agency-as-discipline. Then The High Priestess (II) on inward knowing. Then The Hermit (IX) on considered solitude. Then The Tower (XVI) — the card that most often comes up in difficult readings, and which is most often badly read in predictive frames. Reading the same five cards across multiple readings, and noticing how their reading shifts with position and adjacent cards, is the fastest way into the actual practice.
A note on “meaning”.
The card pages name what each card tends to surface. They do not name what each card means in any given reading. The position of the card in a spread, the cards adjacent to it, and the specific question on the table all modulate what the card surfaces. A card’s “meaning,” in the trained sense, is not a fixed label but a working sentence the reader composes for the moment. The pages give you the vocabulary; the sentence is yours to write.