Tarot

Tarot is a deck of 78 cards, divided into a 22-card Major Arcana of archetypal figures and a 56-card Minor Arcana of four suits — wands, cups, swords, pentacles — each running ace through ten plus four court cards. It originated as a fifteenth-century Italian card game and acquired its divinatory use in eighteenth-century France.

Whatever one thinks of divination, the deck is an unusually well-designed symbolic system, and that is the interesting part. Meaning is generated combinatorially: a card's suit supplies a domain (will, emotion, intellect, material), its number supplies a stage in a progression, its orientation supplies an inversion, and its position in a spread supplies a role — past, obstacle, outcome. A three-card draw is therefore not three lookups but an interaction between them, and the interpretive richness comes from the interaction.

A structural point worth knowing: the numerological reading applies to the Minor Arcana, where the numbers form a genuine progression within each suit. The Major Arcana are numbered as an ordering of the archetypes rather than as a repeated cycle, so importing numeric meanings there is a category error.

As software it is a pleasant modelling problem — a small fixed corpus, several orthogonal dimensions, and a composition rule — and the natural place for a per-day seed, so a reading is a reading rather than an infinite reroll.