The numbering system of the Tarot has led to some fine-haired distinctions between different Tarot styles and philosophies.
Originally, in the hand-painted Italian Visconti the Major Arcana were unnumbered, and Tarot wasn't used for divination (but almost certainly still had esoteric purposes as a book of symbols pointing to an oral wisdom tradition).
With the advent of the printing press, the Marseilles deck was made available to the masses, and fortune-telling became a major use of the cards. At this stage the major Arcana (except the Fool) were each assigned Roman numerals. After the "French occult revival" of the mid 19th century, the story of the Tarot's origins as the Egyptian Book of Thoth, as well as its capacity to be mapped onto the Kabbalistic Tree of life became a focal-point of Tarot-centred occultism.
When the Hermetic order of the Golden Dawn formed in England in the late 19th century, the elements were all in place for an explosion of esoteric and Qabalistic Tarot. It was noticed that in order to align the Major Arcana with the 22 Hebrew letters (which already carried astrological symbolism over from certain editions of the Sepher Yetzirah), if we assigned Aleph to 0, the Fool, and proceeded in order, the symbolism mostly matched up. The outlier was Justice, which in the Marseilles order would be given Leo, and Strength, which would receive Libra. This created a sort of analemma in the form of the Tarot - a twist.
Two major approaches were taken to solve this. On the one hand, Waite's Tarot changed the numbers of those trumps - making Justice XI, and Strength VIII (and thus creating a perfect circle out of the Tarot symbols), and on the other, Crowley's Thoth Tarot retained the Marseilles "loop" and attempted to counter-balance it by switching the letter assignments of the Star and the Emperor - ostensibly exchanging the signs "across the Zodiac" from Leo and Libra. This is meant to shape the Tarot into a moebius strip-like figure.
Opinion is divided as to whether this was peerlessly brilliant, or merely the equivalent of making up for a missing left sock by donning a mitten on the right hand. It is ultimately up to the contemplator to explore all these systems and decide for themselves.
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