Tarot cards have been around for a long time. Like normal playing cards, they are arranged into suits and, sometimes, numbers. So-called trifoni playing cards – precursors of tarot cards – have been around since at least the fifteenth century in Italy. Tarrocchini, a trick-taking game not unlike whist, was popular at the time and spread to Austria and France with variations in the decks that were used. Some people who conduct tarot readings, rather than using them for games, claim that cards have been used for the purposes of divination – the supernatural quest for knowledge – since the time of the ancient Egyptians or the Western Zhou period in China. However, such practices seem to be unrelated to the sort of tarot cards used today. In Europe, tarot reading for divination only took off from the eighteenth century onwards. Antoine Court de Gébelin, a French clergyman, first published a work on tarot and its history in 1781.