Tarot History

Tarot originated in the first half of the fifteenth century in northern Italy — most likely Milan, Ferrara, or Bologna — where it was created as a deck for a trick-taking game called 'trionfi' (triumphs). The earliest surviving references date from the 1440s. The cards were commissioned by noble families such as the Visconti and Sforza of Milan, and the earliest extant decks — the Visconti-Sforza, Cary-Yale, and Brambilla — are hand-painted luxury objects now held by the Morgan Library, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and the Pinacoteca di Brera. Crucially, these early tarot cards had no divinatory or occult purpose. The imagery drew on a shared Renaissance visual vocabulary: Christian iconography, the four cardinal virtues, medieval cosmology, and the 'triumphs' procession popularized by Petrarch's poem 'I Trionfi'. The standard structure of 56 suited cards plus 22 trumps settled by the end of the fifteenth century.

The transformation began in 1781, when the French pastor and Freemason Antoine Court de Gébelin published an essay claiming tarot was a surviving 'Book of Thoth' from ancient Egypt, carried to Europe by the Romani people. This theory is now thoroughly disproven — no historical link to Egypt exists — but it ignited the occult interpretation of tarot. Jean-Baptiste Alliette, known as Etteilla, became the first professional tarot diviner and in 1789 designed the first deck made specifically for fortune-telling. In the nineteenth century, Éliphas Lévi linked the 22 trumps to the 22 Hebrew letters and the Kabbalistic Tree of Life — a correspondence he largely constructed himself, though it became the foundation of nearly all subsequent Western occult tarot. Papus (Gérard Encausse) systematized this framework in 'Le Tarot des Bohémiens' (1889), and Oswald Wirth illustrated a 22-card occult deck the same year.

The Marseille tradition — a standardized woodcut style crystallized in France by Jean Noblet (c.1650), Jean Dodal (c.1701), and Nicolas Conver (1760) — became the reference deck for two centuries. Its small cards show only suit symbols, and Justice is numbered VIII while Strength is XI. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, founded in London in 1888, wove together Kabbalah, astrology, and tarot into an elaborate correspondence system. Two of its members produced the most influential decks of the twentieth century. In 1909, A.E. Waite commissioned Pamela Colman Smith to draw the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, whose revolutionary innovation was to illustrate every Minor Arcana with a scene. Waite also swapped Strength to VIII and Justice to XI. Smith received a single small fee and no royalties, and her name was omitted from the box for decades; the term 'Rider-Waite-Smith' restores her credit. Aleister Crowley and Lady Frieda Harris painted the Thoth Tarot between 1938 and 1943, though it was not published until 1969. It renames several trumps — Strength becomes 'Lust', Justice 'Adjustment', Temperance 'Art', Judgement 'The Aeon' — and layers Kabbalistic, astrological, and Thelemic symbolism at high density.

Modern tarot scholarship, anchored by philosopher Michael Dummett's 'The Game of Tarot' (1980) and the collaborative 'A Wicked Pack of Cards' (1996), establishes that the trump imagery is a Renaissance product, not an Egyptian or Kabbalistic inheritance. Scholars such as Ronald Decker and Robert M. Place have nonetheless argued that Renaissance humanists may have woven Neoplatonic and Hermetic symbolism into the images. The two layers need not conflict. The documented history of the cards is one thing; the symbolic system built upon them after 1781 is another, and that system has become an inseparable part of how tarot is read today. This page reports both, distinguishing fact from tradition.