Tarot
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99 free Tarot trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Tarot began as a card game. The 78-card pack, with its 21 trumps and the Fool, was invented in northern Italy in the mid-15th century and is still played for tricks in France, Austria and Italy today. The fortune-telling deck that most people picture came much later, when a French pastor named Antoine Court de Gébelin decided in 1781 that the cards were a lost Egyptian book, and a Paris seed-seller calling himself Etteilla started selling meanings for them. These 99 questions cover both histories: the Visconti-Sforza decks of Milan, the Tarot of Marseilles, the suits of batons, coins, cups and swords, French Tarot's revival, and the occult line that runs from Gébelin through Éliphas Lévi to the Golden Dawn. The modern decks get their own tier: A. E. Waite and Pamela Colman Smith's 1909 Rider–Waite deck, why Strength and Justice swapped places, Aleister Crowley's Thoth deck painted by Lady Frieda Harris, and what the Fool, the Hanged Man and Death actually show. Every answer is cited to a page we checked, with a short explanation that adds one more detail. Play solo or print it for a games night.
30 of 99 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Each tarot suit has four court cards: king, queen, jack and which other?
Knight
Knight: tarot kept the mounted knight that French playing cards dropped, which is why each of its suits has 14 cards, giving 56 suit cards in a 78-card deck.
Q 02Tarot began as a card game whose trump suit lives on in which modern game?
Bridge
Bridge descends from whist, heir to a 15th-century game that copied tarot's permanent trump suit by naming one ordinary suit as trumps; fortune-telling with the cards began about three centuries later.
Q 03The 'arcana' in tarot's Major and Minor Arcana comes from a Latin word meaning what?
Secrets
Secrets: arcana is the plural of the Latin arcanum, a word alchemists loved; occult writers pinned it on the cards in the 19th century, and people who play tarot as a card game never use it.
Q 04Tarot's trumps take their English name from which 15th-century Italian word?
Trionfi
Trionfi, meaning triumphs, gave English the card-game word trump; the name tarocchi took over only around 1500, after a game played with the ordinary pack borrowed the old name.
Q 05The oldest surviving tarot cards were painted for the Visconti and Sforza families, rulers of which duchy?
Milan
Milan: its dukes had the gilded cards hand-painted for a card game played at court, and only centuries later did tarot pick up its links with fortune-telling and the occult.
Q 06One of tarot's four suits began as which sport's sticks on the Mamluk playing cards Europe copied?
Polo
Polo was unknown to the Europeans who copied the Mamluk sultanate's playing cards in the 1370s, so the suit of polo sticks was redrawn as plain staves, the wands of modern tarot.
Q 07In tarot reading, the suit of wands is linked to which classical element?
Fire
Fire is the element of wands, so readers take a spread full of them to be about energy, ambition and work rather than love or money.
Q 08Which four suits make up the traditional Italian tarot pack?
Batons, coins, cups, swords
Batons, coins, cups, swords: the Latin suits still printed on Italian and Spanish cards, which fortune-telling decks later renamed, turning batons into wands and coins into pentacles.
Q 09Which card, numbered XXI, comes last among tarot's 21 trumps?
The World
The World is trump XXI, yet it is not always the top card: in the tarot games still played in Bologna, the Angel, the Judgement card, outranks it.
Q 10Florence's 97-card Minchiate pack added the four elements and all twelve of which symbols to tarot's trumps?
Zodiac signs
Zodiac signs, the elements and extra virtues almost doubled the trumps, from 21 to 40, and the oversized game lasted about 400 years before dying out in the early 20th century.
Q 11In which James Bond film does the fortune-teller Solitaire read tarot cards for the villain?
Live and Let Die
Live and Let Die cast Jane Seymour as Solitaire, whose gift for reading the cards vanishes once Roger Moore's Bond seduces her.
Q 12Which Surrealist painter created his own 78-card tarot deck, first published in 1984?
Salvador Dalí
Salvador Dalí posed as the Magician himself and cast his wife Gala as the Empress; he is said to have finished the deck on his own after talks to supply cards for a film broke down over his fee.
Q 13Which famous tarot spread did A. E. Waite's guide to the Rider–Waite deck present as an ancient method of divination?
The Celtic Cross
Q 21On the earliest Italian tarot cards, the lantern-carrying Hermit was a figure of what?
Time
Time: the oldest hand-painted cards show an old man with an hourglass, a figure like Saturn, and the glass is said to have been redrawn later as the Hermit's lantern.
Q 22In the Rider–Waite deck, which symbol floats above the Magician's head?
An infinity sign
An infinity sign, which Waite called the sign of life, 'like an endless cord'; in the older Marseilles packs the same curve is only the hat brim of a street conjurer.
Q 23Occultists paired the 22 Major Arcana with the letters of which alphabet?
Hebrew
Hebrew: a French essay of 1781 first matched the cards to its 22 letters, the link that later let occultists graft Kabbalah onto what had been a card game.
The Celtic Cross reached most readers through Waite, who printed it as an ancient Celtic method best suited to one definite question, with the tenth and last card showing what will come.
Q 14The Tarot of Marseilles calls the Tower by a French name meaning what?
House of God
House of God, La Maison Dieu, is an odd title for a scene of ruin: earlier Italian players knew the same card as the Arrow, the Lightning or the House of the Devil.
Q 15In early Italian tarot decks, the Hanged Man, hung by one foot, was known as what?
The Traitor
The Traitor: Renaissance cities shamed traitors they could not catch by painting them hanging upside down on public buildings, and the card is thought to copy those pictures.
Q 16In modern Italian, 'Tarocco' is also the name of a sweet variety of which citrus fruit?
Blood orange
Blood orange: the sweet Tarocco shares its name with the cards, and the game left Italian a verb too, since taroccare, to play a tarot, became slang for faking a watch or a handbag.
Q 17In the Rider–Waite deck, which card shows a naked child riding a white horse?
The Sun
The Sun: the standard Marseilles card shows two children before a wall, but Waite preferred a rarer old design, the lone child on horseback with a banner, which he called the better symbolism.
Q 18The tarot theorist Court de Gébelin welcomed which American into his Paris Masonic lodge, Les Neuf Sœurs?
Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin joined in 1778 and was elected the lodge's master a year later; Court de Gébelin, a keen backer of American independence, was among the brothers who welcomed him.
Q 19Etteilla, the Paris fortune-teller behind an early tarot deck for divination, was the pseudonym of whom?
Jean-Baptiste Alliette
Jean-Baptiste Alliette simply spelled his surname backwards to become Etteilla, then made his living from card readings and published his own fortune-telling deck in 1789.
Q 20In the Rider–Waite deck, which creatures pull the Chariot in place of the usual horses?
Sphinxes
Sphinxes were a 19th-century French occultist's idea: older packs harness horses, and Waite adopted the change for his own deck even though he called it an invention.
Q 24Which is the only unnumbered card in a typical Major Arcana scheme?
The Fool
The Fool has no number on the old packs because in most tarot games it is no trump at all but an 'excuse', played to dodge following suit; occult decks later labelled it 0.
Q 25What is the Fool called in the Tarot of Marseilles?
Le Mat
Le Mat matches the Italian Il Matto, the madman, and early cards show him as one: on the earliest surviving card he wears rags with feathers in his hair, and on the Marseilles card an animal tears at his breeches.
Q 26In the Rider–Waite deck, the Fool walks toward the edge of a precipice with which animal?
A small dog
A small dog bounds along beside him in the Rider–Waite picture; on older packs the animal is no companion but attacks the wanderer from behind and tears his clothes.
Q 27Which Major Arcana card bears the number XIII, long counted unlucky?
Death
Death is trump XIII, and most Tarot of Marseilles packs print the number and the skeleton with his scythe but leave the title off the card altogether.
Q 28In the Rider–Waite Death card, the skeleton carries a black standard bearing what?
A white rose
A white rose: Waite called it the Mystic Rose, a sign of life, so the black banner promises renewal even as Death's horse steps over a fallen king.
Q 29The 'Rider' in the Rider–Waite Tarot's name was the deck's what?
Publisher
Publisher: William Rider & Son got top billing while the artist, Pamela Colman Smith, got no formal credit, which is why many readers now say Rider–Waite–Smith or Smith–Waite instead.
Q 30In the Rider–Waite deck, which card shows Adam and Eve beneath an angel in the Garden of Eden?
The Lovers
The Lovers was redrawn for this deck: older packs show a clothed couple receiving a blessing, and Waite replaced them with a naked pair he likened to Adam and Eve in paradise.