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I personally would love to know more about Tarot spreads.

I've only used the basic 3 card spread and the celtic cross. I know there are many, many more spreads but I can't seem to find information on any of them.

I thought that the origins of Tarot, the way we know it today, were from the gypsies, around the 1600s or so. They started it after picking it up from the Italians in the 1500s. The Italians used the Tarot cards much like we use a deck of cards today, playing things like Rummy and Solitaire with the cards. If I remember correctly, the four suits of the Tarot (pentacles, staves, wands and cups) also coincide with the four suits of the modern card deck (hearts, spades, clubs and diamonds, not in that order). Again, according to my memory from a bit of research I did a long time ago, the gypsies started playing these games too while in Italy, and when they traveled to other parts of Europe, the people there mistakenly thought that the were using these tools to divine the future. Not against making a buck, the gypsies started using their playing cards to divine the future for coins, and that's when it came to the attention of the secret Occult societies. It has since evolved into what we know it as today.

Again, that's just what I remember from a presentation I did on it a long time ago. I've probably forgotten more than I remember, and there's no guarantee that any of this is right (yay for doing projects the day before their due, although, in my defense, I did not use Wikipedia once!). ^_^