This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
A tarot deck entry records a specific, named seventy eight card deck built on the traditional major and minor arcana structure, its creator or publishing house, its year of publication and what documented tradition or artistic lineage it draws on, distinct from an individual tarot card, which the atlas records under its own separate entry. Ronald Decker's history of the occult tarot traces how an ordinary fifteenth century card game was reinterpreted from the eighteenth century onward as a vehicle for esoteric and divinatory meaning, the documented root every modern tarot deck ultimately grows from.
An entry records a deck's documented publication history, its creator's stated intent, and how closely its structure and imagery follow or depart from the standard seventy eight card arcana, since decks vary genuinely in how far they keep to that inherited structure versus reworking it.
Where a deck's imagery draws explicitly on an existing religious or cultural tradition, an entry records that borrowing honestly, including any documented concern practitioners of that tradition have raised, rather than presenting the deck's own marketing description as a neutral account.
An entry also records what a deck itself claims about its own origin or lineage, distinct from what independent publication history actually shows, since Decker's own research documents several widely repeated deck origin stories that the surviving publication record does not support.