How is Tarot related to other forms of divination?
The best evidence indicates that fortune-telling with playing cards began quite early, and was adapted to existing systems of divination, such as those used with another popular gambling tool, dice. As cards replaced dice as the game of choice amongst players of jeux de hasard (games of chance), one sees how cards would also come to replace dice as the divinational tool of choice. Indeed, playing cards and dice were seen by 16th- and 17th-century clergy as divinational tools, even in their application for games, since the chance part of the equation implied a divine involvement or an attempt by the gambler to rely upon or invoke this involvement. Fortuna was, after all, a pagan deity. After the occultist adoption of Tarot, some specific similarities between Tarot and astrology were introduced, particularly in the way some systems of Tarot divination are performed. Also, given a certain creativity in the formulation of layouts, Tarot can be made to simulate the superficial structures of
