Stuart Kaplan is the author of "The Encyclopedia of Tarot" which I used as a major point of reference for this article. Kaplan later went on to found the U.S. Games Systems Inc. This company publishes the Rider-Waite deck and many others. Ask about their "Tarot and Cartomancy Catalog".

The Tarot:

The Tarot is most commonly viewed as a tool for divination. A traditional Tarot reading involves deck of Tarot cards, a seeker - someone who is looking for answers to personal questions - and a reader - someone who knows how to interpret the cards. After the seeker has shuffled and cut the deck, the reader lays out the chosen cards in a pattern called a spread. Each position in the spread has a meaning, and each card has a meaning as well. The reader combines these two meanings to shed light on the seeker's question.

Another not so traditional tarot reading doesn't involve the seeker touching the cards at all. The connection between the cards and their owner (the reader) is the psychic connection. The owner is the only one to handle them, and usually stores them in a wood box or a silk cloth. Mrs. Smith was of the second sort. Her psychic ability, remember she channels, is the strength for her readings, so in the less traditional manner she is the only one who handles the cards.

The Deck:

Tarot cards are believed by some to contain the total knowledge of the entire world as preserved in the sacred and supreme symbolic book of the Rosicrucian movement and other secret societies such as the Knights Templar and the Freemasons.

Visconti-Sforza
No one is exactly sure when the first tarot deck was created. The oldest deck in existence today is a Visconti-Sforza deck. In the 15th century, The Visconti-Sforza decks were hand painted to commemorate the marriage of Bianca Maria Visconti to Francesco Sforza. Some even had gold inlay. The crests of the families are were used on the cards, and is how they were identified.

The Order of the Golden Dawn
In England, MacGregor Mathers published a small book on tarot fortune-telling in 1888 called The Tarot, Its Occult Signification, Use in Fortune-Telling, and Method of Play. Mathers was connected with the Societas Rosicruciana in Angila, and in 1888 he helped to found the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which counted among it's members Aleister Crowley, the poet William Butler Yeats, and Arthur Edward Waite.

The Crowley Deck

Aleister Crowley

Arthur Edward Waite

Aleister Crowley did a lot of work tying the tarot to the occult. Working with Freida Harris, Crowley went on to produce the Thoth Tarot. Aleister also founded Ordo Templi Orientis. His belief was that not all of the books of ancient Egypt were destroyed, but that one lived on as a deck of cards. His deck is based on the book of Thoth (ancient god of Egypt).

The Rider-Waite Deck
A. E. Waite (1857-1942), after breaking away from the Golden Dawn, worked with artist Pamela Coleman Smith. They produced one of the most popular decks of this century, originally published by Rider & Sons.

The deck this article will focus on was designed by Rider-Waite. The actual deck used in The Beast Within is at this point unknown, but we believe it to be an unauthorized version of the Rider-Waite.

The Illustrations:

The original back designs of Italian tarot cards are patterns of red or blue stars, lozenges with stars, wavy lines with dots repeating ermine spots and diagonal patterns. French tarot packs contain a variety of back designs including patterns of hexagons enclosing suns, mottled colors, lozenges enclosing crosses or suns, ermine spots, repeating stars and a tarotee design of crisscrossing lines. The back of Mrs. Smith's cards in GK2 was an occult symbol of the pentangle.

The front of each card is a different illustration. There are 78 cards and they are divided into two types: the Major Arcana, also known as the Trump cards, and the Minor Arcana.

There are 22 Major Arcana cards, and they are:
The Fool, The Magician, The High Priestess, The Hierophant, The Empress, The Emperor, The Lovers, The Chariot, Justice, The Hermit, The Wheel of Fortune, Strength, The Hanged Man, Death, Temperance, The Devil, The Falling Tower, The Star, The Moon, The Sun, Judgement, The World.

The 56 Minor Arcana are further subdivided into four suits. Most commonly they are swords, staves or batons, cups, and coins. Each suit has a king, a queen, a knight, a page, and an ace through 10. It is easy to see how the current playing cards (in the US) stemmed from the Minor Arcana, the difference being that the regular playing card deck has 52 cards. The knight and the page have been combined into the Jack in each suit. Also the suits are Hearts, Diamonds, Spades, and Clubs.

Joan Bunning has a website devoted to the tarot. There you will find an on-line tutorial course in tarot readings. You will also find the illustrations and the interpretations of the Raider-Waite tarot deck.

Magician from the Visconti-Sforza Deck

Each deck is very different in its representations of the cards. Along with the three decks mentioned above there are at least 100 other out of print decks, 100 popular decks, and now many new theme type decks are available. As an example we have chosen to compare the Magician from many different decks. The Magician is the card Jane Jensen chose to represent Gabriel.

There were two readings one for Gabriel and one for Grace. You can see Mrs. Smith and Grace during the readings or see Mrs. Smith's interpretations.

In researching this article we discovered many fan tarot decks like the one for the TV show "American Gothic". We decided to create the first Gabriel Knight Fan Tarot deck. Go check it out, and please consider making your own contribution.