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why 22?

Throughout the history of Tarot, much speculation has surrounded the question of why the sequence of triumphs numbers twenty‑two. The most influential hypothesis has been the correspondence between the twenty‑two Major Arcana and the twenty‑two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. This theory, first proposed in occult discourse by Antoine Court de Gébelin, expanded by Alphonse Louis Constant, systematised by S. L. MacGregor Mathers, and canonised by Aleister Crowley, has profoundly shaped modern Taromancy. Yet despite its enduring popularity, no historical evidence substantiates a Jewish or Kabbalistic origin for Tarot. Even as recently as last year, this long‑standing assumption has re‑entered the debate through Stav Appel’s Torah in the Tarot.

One must approach the emergence of the twenty‑two system grounded not in retrospective cosmology but in the material culture of play. To do so, we begin with Tarot’s Italian origins as tools for gambling. As Michael Dummett concludes in The Game of Tarot, “whoever invented the pack [of Trionfi] wanted to add, to the regular playing‑card pack, two new elements: one consisting of a single card, the Matto or Fool; the other consisting of a sequence of twenty‑one picture cards.”

As these Trionfi cards travelled and were reproduced, both as courtly artefacts and woodblock prints, their iconography, ordering, and naming continuously evolved, particularly in the Hermit, Star, Moon, Sun and World cards. The fixation of the Marseille pattern has prompted scholars to propose that the tarot, by this stage, was conceived as a coherent sequence of twenty-two images and fifty-six pips; however, the cosmological framework that may have informed this structure cannot be securely reconstructed. It is within this ambiguity that Appel situates his central hypothesis: that Jewish thought entered the Trionfi tradition at a later stage, transforming it into Taraux, a term he suggests derives from Torat (Torah).

Interesting as this proposal may be, it remains unsupported by positive historical or linguistic evidence. From an etymological standpoint, the word Tarocchi is traced back to terms associated with Folly, with no demonstrable link to Hebrew. Naming a card game after its most distinctive feature — in this case the wild card Fool — is a well-attested historical pattern. Moreover, no documentary evidence connects Jewish intellectual, textual, or visual traditions to the formation or restructuring of the triumphs. The only precedent of Hebrew loan words entering Italian or French language at that time are confined to Jewish sociolects, not the general public. In the absence of such evidence, the Torah–Tarot connection remains speculative, however symbolically appealing it may be.

What we do know is that the imagery of Tarot was executed by French engravers who carved their mirrored images onto wood blocks. Through this process, iconography and, by extension, symbolism were fixed and disseminated. Yet we possess very limited information about these artisans or their conceptual frameworks, leaving the so‑called “substantial core” of Tarot symbolism historically elusive.

I believe, the most plausible explanation for the number twenty‑two remains that proposed by Gertrude Moakley. Writing in the mid‑twentieth century, Moakley suggested that Tarot’s structure reflects the logic of dice throws, a hypothesis rooted in the historical context of gaming. According to her theory, the addition of a fourth court card expanded the suit cards to fifty‑six, corresponding to the fifty‑six possible outcomes of a three‑dice throw, while the twenty‑one triumphs mirror the combinations of a two‑dice throw. This also aligns with the Fool as a standalone card, functioning as a kind of null value or ‘no‑throw.’

This argument gains considerable weight from the documentary record. The earliest references to Tarot appear almost exclusively in the context of gambling prohibitions, frequently alongside dice. Dummett describes these sources as “city ordinances banning the playing of various games, particularly dice and cards.” One of the most important early textual references, Robert Steele’s Sermon of 1470 — which also describes the Fool as separated from the hierarchy — explicitly mentions cards, dice, and Trionfi together. In the historical imagination of late medieval Europe, these objects formed an inseparable constellation of chance, play, and moral stigma.

The association between cards and dice is even older. One of the earliest forms of playing cards, Chinese domino tiles, represented the twenty‑one possible combinations of two dice throws. While there is no direct influence from Chinese dominoes to Italian Trionfi, since playing cards reached Europe after passing through several regional transformations, what remains constant across cultures, is the intimate relationship between cards and dice as technologies of chance and gamble.

Neither Appel’s nor Moakley’s theory can be regarded as established historical fact. Appel interprets the dispersement of Jewish communities in Europe as a catalyst for the covert insertion of Torah into Tarot, while Moakley points instead to the numerological elegance prized by game designers and players. Both positions are open to debate. Yet Moakley’s hypothesis rests on a denser network of positive evidence, supported by textual sources and by the demonstrable historical inseparability of cards and dice.

This discussion aims to show how Tarot historiography functions not to diminish its symbolic or divinatory power, but to clarify the boundaries between historical evidence and retrospective projection. The correspondence between the twenty‑two Major Arcana and the Hebrew alphabet may yield powerful results in Taromantic practice; as a historical claim, however, it remains untenable and risks sliding into cultural appropriation. This is especially so when Tarot’s two most credible points of origin, Petrarch’s I Trionfi and the twenty‑one possible outcomes of dice throws, already offer a remarkably rich imaginative and divinatory palette. The history of Tarot, far from impoverishing its magic, invites us to encounter it with greater precision, humility, and wonder.