Tarot is defined as one of a set of figured playing cards used in Italy as early as the fourteenth century; also a game played with such cards in which 22 Tarots (the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet), all being trumps, and called the “Major Arcana,” are added to a set of 56 cards of usual Italian suits called the “Minor Arcana.” … It will surprise many Masons who have never heard of that wonderful pack of playing cards, so-called because the four letters involved, written in a circle, that it may be interpreted ‘“Rota Tora Orat Taro,” or “The Wheel of the Law Speaks By or Through the Tarot.” The illuminated illustrations on these cards embody practically all of the well known Masonic symbols, either plainly depicted or cleverly dissimulated. It is a fact that the mysteries of Freemasonry are so indissolubly connected with those of the Tarot that students familiar with both are undecided as to which derives the most from the other. … For five centuries or more the Tarots were used to preserve the essentials of a “secret doctrine.” They form a symbolic alphabet of the ancient wisdom.
[“A Pack of Cards Inseparably Connected With Freemasonry,” The Sandusky Masonic Bulletin, Vol. XVII, №3, Sandusky, Ohio, November, 1936, 46.]