Q 01/05

Each tarot suit has four court cards: king, queen, jack and which other?

A) Knight

B) Bishop

C) Duke

D) Herald

Answer · why

A) 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-car...

Q 02/05

Tarot began as a card game whose trump suit lives on in which modern game?

A) Poker

B) Bridge

C) Rummy

D) Cribbage

Answer · why

B) 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-tellin...

Q 03/05

The 'arcana' in tarot's Major and Minor Arcana comes from a Latin word meaning what?

A) Journeys

B) Pictures

C) Secrets

D) Fates

Answer · why

C) 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...

Q 04/05

Tarot's trumps take their English name from which 15th-century Italian word?

A) Arcani

B) Tarocchi

C) Trappola

D) Trionfi

Answer · why

D) 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 ...

Q 05/05

The oldest surviving tarot cards were painted for the Visconti and Sforza families, rulers of which duchy?

A) Milan

B) Ferrara

C) Florence

D) Savoy

Answer · why

A) 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-...