OF THE TAROT AND WHAT IS ALL THIS "SACRED FEMININE" SUPPOSEDLY INSIDE IT? -

Well it turns out that the idea of "Pentagrams" or "Pentacles" is just another mistake in translation made by someone name S. Mathers at the turn of the last century or so. He and Arthur Waite designed the Tarot most commonly used today (The Rider Waite Tarot). They mistranslated the word Eliphas Levi used for "coin" into "Pentacle" and it stuck. Had nothing to do with Solomon's star, sacred feminine and so on.

(This image of the "one of Pentacles" is from the Marseilles Tarot which is far older than the deck Brown referred to, like 200 years or so older! No star, no pentagram, no goddess...)

http://esoterism.com/reference/tarot.html

9. What is the history of the Tarot?No-one knows the 'true' origin of the Tarot. The most common myth is that it was brought to Europe by the Gypsies - but this myth come from the fact that very early occultists who used the Tarot fancied that it came from Egypt. They were as wrong about that as they were about the homeland of the Gypsies.In fact, the Tarot came to Europe about the same time as any other form of playing card, in the early/mid 1300's. It is most closely related to the 'Mamluk' deck of the Islamic world, which had suits cups, coins, swords, and polo-sticks. The Tarot was originally used for a game called 'tarocchi' in Italy, which is sort of a distant cousin to Bridge. Tarocchi is still played in some parts of the world, not usually with the same decks the 'fortune tellers' use. The game was quite popular for a time among the royalty in Italy, and sometimes a duke would commission an artist to create a really nice deck. Some of the earliest surviving Tarot decks come from this source. Plainer decks existed, but were not well made enough, or well thought-of enough, to survive the intervening 600 years. The Joker of 'standard' card decks is _not_ related to the Fool of Tarot. The Joker was invented as a wild card for Euchre in the 1800's, in a part of the world where the Tarot was virtually or totally unknown.The Tarot was first associated with the occult by Antoine Court de Gebelin, a relatively obscure Parisian mason who wrote about the deck in 1781. He invented a lot of the standard myths about the Tarot which were later popularized by others (it comes from ancient Egypt, the Major Arcana isrelated to the Kabalah, etc.). The first big popularizer of the deck was a contemporary of de Gebelin, called Etteilla, who published the first 'revised and corrected' Tarot deck for divination. The fad was caught up by Eliphas Levi, Oswald Wirth, and Papus, among others. From Papus, the Tarot caught on with some English mystics, such as S.L. Mathers (whose mistranslationof Levi brought us the suit of pentacles), A.E. Waite, and A. Crowley. The Tarot received a lot of attention from these folks, and they created a fairlylarge body of writing on the use of Tarot. For the most part they thought thatdivination was a 'lower' use of the cards, that ideally it should be used toput you in touch with eternal verities, usually in conjunction with whatevermagickal order they happened to be involved with. But of course, divinationwas the most popular use for the cards.Most of the Tarot decks on the market were created this century, most of those in the last 20 years.