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Sabio Tarot · History and curiosities

By Sabio Tarot

Why does a tarot deck usually have 78 cards?

Lay out four groups of 14 cards, a row of 21 trumps and the Fool. The total is 56 + 21 + 1 = 78. The arithmetic is simple, but it comes with a historical warning: it describes the structure that became familiar, not a law followed by every deck in every period.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art explains that each of the four Italian suits had ten numbered cards and four court cards: King, Queen, Knight and Page. The 21 pictorial trumps appeared alongside the Fool. Today, that map helps you check whether a deck, book and spread are working with the same structure.

Counting the suited cards

Cups, Swords, Wands and Coins are the four Italian suits described by the Met. Each contains cards from Ace to Ten and four court cards. Four times fourteen makes 56. One practical exercise is to sort your deck by suit and check two things: do the numbered cards show only repeated suit symbols or a complete scene, and what are the court cards called?

The answers matter when you study. A manual based on Rider–Waite–Smith scenes may describe a person or landscape absent from a Marseille numbered card. Both decks can contain 78 cards without looking the same.

It is also easy to confuse tarot with a standard 52-card deck simply because both have four suits. Their ranks and the presence of trumps change the set. The Met notes that early European suits were not uniform: the number of suits, emblems and figures varied by place and time. We should not imagine a single European deck from which all others descended unchanged.

Twenty-one trumps and the Fool

The 21 trumps form a series of images that, in present-day decks, often bear names such as Empress, Chariot and World. The Fool completes the group now commonly called the “22 Major Arcana”. “Arcana” belongs to a later esoteric vocabulary. To explain the fifteenth-century game, “trumps” is more precise, as the Met uses it.

Counting the Fool separately from the 21 trumps makes historical sense because its role in play was not simply that of another trump. In a contemporary reading, it can be included among the Major Arcana and may be numbered or unnumbered. “22 Major Arcana” and “21 trumps plus the Fool” therefore count the same cards for different purposes, without claiming that they followed identical rules in a game.

Were there always 78?

We cannot answer “yes” without erasing evidence that complicates the story. The Met describes a surviving Visconti deck with as many as six court cards per suit and three additional theological virtues. The museum does not decide whether this set was an exception or an earlier phase before more familiar decks became standard.

Survival raises a different problem from design. If a museum holds 69 cards from a set, that does not show that it was made as a 69-card deck. Some cards may have been lost or moved to another collection. Distinguish “number of surviving cards” from “original number of cards” and from a “reconstructed typical structure”.

By contrast, a modern deck advertised as a complete 78-card tarot allows a simple check before you buy: four suits of 14, 21 trumps and the Fool. If it offers only 22 cards, it may be an intentional Major Arcana edition; if it adds extra cards, read what role the publisher gives them.

Use the structure without turning it into dogma

The number is a navigation tool. It helps you find a card in a book and know which part of the deck you are practising. On its own, it determines no card's meaning and does not prove that two 78-card decks share scenes or methods.

If you are starting out, spend a week with four cards: one numbered card from each suit. Describe their images before consulting meanings, then read your system's explanation. This small exercise will show how structure organises the material while interpretation requires observation of a specific edition.

Explore the difference between groups in Major and Minor Arcana and the game's history in tarot before divination.

What the count cannot explain

The calculation 4 × 14 + 21 + 1 describes an architecture. It does not explain why a card is drawn in a particular way or how every variant of the game was played. Two decks can satisfy exactly that sum while placing some trumps in a different order. One deck may retain the suits but change the court figures; another may illustrate every numbered card. Arithmetic gives you an index, not a finished interpretation.

There is also a separate count for a surviving deck versus a complete one. If 69 cards from an old set have been preserved, “69” describes its known state of preservation, not necessarily its original design. Determining the initial count would require examining documents, correspondences and missing cards. The Visconti sets studied by the Met show why we should not replace that work with a modern number memorised by rote.

We can expect greater clarity from a contemporary edition. If it is advertised as a “complete 78-card tarot”, its contents should make clear what is included. Add up each suit and compare the total with the box. Two alternative cards for one position, or additional cards, are not automatically mistakes: the publisher may offer variants. Read how they are meant to be used and decide before shuffling whether to include them in your spread.

A compatibility test for book and deck

Open a manual's contents and choose four places: the Fool, Justice, Five of Cups and Queen of Swords. Find those cards in your deck. Check the name, number, illustration and court title. If you can identify all four, the shared map may be useful. If the book says “Arcanum VIII” without a name and your card VIII depicts a different figure, note the correspondence so you do not study the wrong chapter.

This test shows why a box of 78 cards does not make a manual “universal”. A book can teach a general method while its visual observations belong to a particular edition. Treat each kind of information according to its scope: the count may be shared, the scene may not, and the meaning depends on the system and question.

For someone who has only the 22 Major Arcana cards, the reasoning works in reverse. Their deck is not lower in “quality”, but it lacks 56 positions used by a complete-deck book. They can practise the Major Arcana chapters and will need a full deck when they want to follow exercises about suits and court cards. The count indicates teaching coverage, not the personal value of a reading.

Sources consulted