Exploring the Alphabetic Tarot

The Tarot has entertained card lovers for centuries. Yet while its symbolic content has been traced to a variety of influences-such as social hierarchy, the Virtues, Biblical and classical allusions, astrology and perhaps even alchemy-these do not explain why the Tarot's designers settled upon these specific images, or why they arranged these images in a particular sequence. Could the trumps also have been influenced by the Hebrew alphabet, as esotericists have long claimed?