Tarot, Runes & Number

This section gathers the symbol sets that function as closed alphabets of meaning, fixed collections in which every member has a defined sense and the members combine to say more. It holds the seventy-eight cards of the tarot and their four suits, the runes of the Germanic futharks, the numbers of numerology and their positions, the sixty-four hexagrams and eight trigrams of the I Ching, and the figures of sacred geometry.

Each of these is at once a set of symbols and, for many users, a method: the tarot dealt into a spread, the runes cast, the hexagram obtained by counting yarrow stalks or coins, the birth name reduced to a number.

The ages of these systems differ sharply, and the entries say so. The runes are attested in inscriptions from the second century CE; the I Ching's core is older still. The tarot, by contrast, begins as a fifteenth-century Italian card game and acquires its esoteric meanings only from the late eighteenth century onward, while much of modern numerology is a nineteenth- and twentieth-century construction on a Pythagorean base.

Grouping them together reflects how they are used rather than a claim of common origin. Divinatory method as such, how a question is put and an answer read, is treated more fully under Divination Systems, with which this section overlaps.