Tarot History

Tarot was born in the first half of the 15th century in northern Italy as, purely and simply, a card game — with nothing to do with divination. Its core innovation was adding a group of "trump" cards (trionfi, "triumphs") to the existing four-suit deck of cups, swords, wands, and coins — the concept that would become the English "trump." A complete tarot deck comprises 78 cards: 56 suit cards (kings, queens, knights, and pages across four suits, fourteen to each) plus 21 pictorial trumps and one Fool (matto, the wild card).

The earliest written records of tarot cluster between the 1440s and 1450s, spread across four cities: Venice, Milan, Florence, and Urbino. On September 16, 1440, the Florentine notary Giusto Giusti's ledger first called the game trionfi; Ferrara documents from 1442 likewise record carte da trionfi.

The oldest surviving tarot cards all come from the mid-15th-century Milanese court workshop of Bonifacio Bembo: the Visconti cards at Yale's Beinecke Library (69 surviving), the Visconti-Sforza cards shared between New York's Morgan Library and the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo, and the Brambilla cards at Milan's Pinacoteca di Brera. These exquisite hand-painted decks were bespoke luxuries for aristocrats — not popular entertainment.

The Italian Wars of 1494–1522 carried tarot into France and Switzerland. In 1534, Rabelais left the earliest French literary mention of tarot in Gargantua and Pantagruel. By the 17th century the game was wildly popular — a 1622 record shows it even outselling chess.

In 1639, the deck of Philippe Vachier became the earliest known "Marseille-type" tarot. Thereafter the decks of the Parisian craftsman Jean Noblet (c. 1659–1681; 73 cards survive, held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France) established the Marseille pattern's graphic tradition. Notably, the name "Tarot de Marseille" was actually coined by 19th-century scholars and occultists — the International Playing-Card Society notes the pattern first flourished in Lyon, not Marseille.

In the early 18th century, French legislation drove the standardization of many patterns. Florence developed the Minchiate (expanded to 97 cards) and Bologna the Tarocchino (reduced to 62), among other regional variants — but the standard 78-card structure remained the mainstream.

Note: the name "Tarot de Marseille" was coined by 19th-century scholars and occultists; the pattern first flourished in Lyon, France — not Marseille (International Playing-Card Society).

Tarot's link with the occult began in 1781, when the French scholar Antoine Court de Gébelin published "Du Jeu des Tarots" in volume eight of Le Monde primitif, claiming the tarot was ancient Egyptian priests' hiding place for the wisdom of the Book of Thoth. The claim had no historical basis — at the time no one could even read Egyptian hieroglyphs (Champollion's decipherment awaited 1822). In the same volume, Comte de Mellet's essay matched the 22 Majors to the 22 Hebrew letters, linking tarot to the Kabbalah for the first time.

The one who truly put tarot divination into practice was Jean-Baptiste Alliette (under the anagram Etteilla, 1738–1791). Between 1783 and 1785 he published Manière de se récréer avec le jeu de cartes nommées tarots — history's first dedicated tarot-divination manual. In 1788 he founded the "Société des Interprètes du Livre de Thot," and around 1789 published the first deck designed expressly for divination. The earliest evidence of tarot divination is in fact an anonymous manuscript of c. 1750 recording Bolognese tarot divinatory meanings — slightly predating Gébelin's Egyptian theory. The more accurate account: tarot divination appeared sporadically in the mid-to-late 18th century and was systematized for the mass public in 1780s Paris.

Éliphas Lévi (born Alphonse Louis Constant, 1810–1875) was the pivotal figure who integrated tarot into a system of magic. In Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, published in volumes in 1854 and 1856, he first explicitly established correspondences between the Major Arcana and the Kabbalah, the four elements, and the Hebrew letters — mapping the Magician to Aleph and the Popess to Beth. Lévi's thought deeply influenced the later Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and Aleister Crowley.

In 1886, A. E. Waite translated Lévi's works into English, formally bringing tarot to Britain. The next year (1887), the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was founded in London, opening its first formal temple (Isis-Urania) in 1888. The order's curriculum covered the Kabbalah, astrology, alchemy, and tarot divination. Waite joined in 1891; in 1901 Pamela Colman Smith was introduced to the order by W. B. Yeats — the two members who would together create modern tarot's most influential deck.

In December 1909, the Rider–Waite Tarot (also called Waite–Smith or Rider–Waite–Smith, RWS for short) was published by London's William Rider & Son. Designed by A. E. Waite (1857–1942) and illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith (1878–1951), both members of the Golden Dawn, the deck changed tarot forever.

RWS's revolution was giving all 78 cards full pictorial scenes — previously, divinatory tarots typically illustrated only the 22 Majors, the Minors carrying simple suit symbols. The innovation let users read meanings intuitively from the imagery, dramatically lowering the barrier to entry. Waite published the companion manual The Key to the Tarot in 1909, expanded in 1911 into the fuller The Pictorial Key to the Tarot.

RWS became the template of modern tarot — for over a century the vast majority of tarot designs have drawn deeply upon it. An estimated one hundred million copies of the RWS and its derivatives circulate worldwide, published in more than 20 countries, still the most widely used tarot system today.

Another highly influential deck is the Thoth Tarot, conceived by Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) and painted by Lady Frieda Harris (1877–1962). The two completed the 78 paintings between 1938 and 1943 — planned for six months, it took five years. Crowley's companion book The Book of Thoth appeared in March 1944 (200 signed copies), but the deck itself was never printed in either's lifetime. The earliest Thoth printing came in 1968 (Sangreal, USA); commercial publication was arranged by the O.T.O. in 1969, with Llewellyn's color edition following in 1972–73.

Tarot's mass-market arrival in America began with Stuart R. Kaplan, who founded U.S. Games Systems in 1968 and secured the Rider–Waite publishing rights in 1971 — the starting point of American tarot publishing. Kaplan went on to author the multi-volume Encyclopedia of Tarot and other references, driving tarot's spread across the English-speaking world.

The New Age movement of the 1970s repositioned tarot from occult instrument to a medium of "self-exploration and healing," carrying it into mainstream culture. Thus was fixed the contemporary triad of mainstream esoteric tarot systems: the Marseille pattern, Rider–Waite, and Thoth.

Academic consensus on tarot's history is clear: tarot originated in 15th-century Italy as a pure card game; before the 18th century there is no reliable evidence of divinatory use. The popular claims of an "Egyptian origin," the "Book of Thoth," or a "Gypsy transmission" are constructions of occultists from the late 18th century onward.

Michael Dummett (1925–2011), Oxford professor of logic, founded the academic study of tarot. His 1980 The Game of Tarot: From Ferrara to Salt Lake City established the 15th-century Italian origin and laid the foundation of all subsequent research on tarot games. Dummett put it sharply: tarot has been "the object of the most successful propaganda operation ever mounted… a false history and a false reading of the cards was fabricated by the occultists and accepted by almost everyone."

The Encyclopaedia Britannica's summary is the most succinct: "Tarot cards were first used as a card game, acquired occult meanings in the 18th century, and are now widely used in divination." Three sentences covering five centuries — from the pastime of Italian courts to a cultural symbol popular across the globe.