A short history of tarot

Tarot began as a card game. It appeared in the courts of northern Italy in the fifteenth century, when a suit of picture cards, the trumps, was added to ordinary playing cards, and for roughly three hundred years it was played rather than read. Its use for divination dates from the late eighteenth century, and most of its occult lore from the nineteenth.

Where did tarot come from?

Tarot came from ordinary playing cards, which reached Europe in the late fourteenth century. Records from the 1370s mention them in Italy, Spain, France and the German lands within a few years of one another. Most historians trace them to the Islamic world, and in particular to the Mamluk Sultanate, whose cards used suits of coins, cups, swords and polo sticks, though the exact route into Europe is still debated.

Those early decks had four suits and no trumps. The Italian suits of coins, cups, swords and batons are the ancestors of the Pentacles, Cups, Swords and Wands.

When was tarot invented?

Tarot was invented in northern Italy in the first half of the fifteenth century. The earliest records, from the 1440s, include court accounts from Ferrara, and they call the cards trionfi, “triumphs”. The innovation was a fifth suit of allegorical pictures that outranked the ordinary cards in play. The English word “trump” comes from the same root. Around the early sixteenth century the deck acquired a new Italian name, tarocchi, from which the French tarot derives; why the name changed is not certain.

The first trumps were unnumbered, and their order varied from city to city. Their subjects came from the world of the Renaissance court and church: the Virtues, the Wheel of Fortune, Death, the Last Judgement, the Pope, the Emperor. Some historians link the series to the triumphal processions of the period, and to Petrarch’s poem I Trionfi, but the connection is argued rather than proven.

The Visconti-Sforza cards

The Visconti-Sforza cards are the best-known early tarot. They were painted by hand, with gold leaf, for the ruling families of Milan in the middle of the fifteenth century, and are often attributed, at least in part, to the painter Bonifacio Bembo. Several incomplete sets survive. The most complete is now divided between collections in New York and Bergamo, and it lacks the Devil and the Tower; whether those cards were lost or never painted, nobody knows.

In the game, the Fool was not a trump at all. It was a card that excused its holder from following suit, which is why it stood apart from the numbered sequence, and why it still carries the number zero, or no number, today.

The FoolUnbound potential at the edge of a cliff: a new beginning that could become flight or a fall.

What is the Tarot de Marseille?

The Tarot de Marseille is a standard design of tarot printed in France and neighbouring regions during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Its cards were cut in woodblock and coloured by stencil, with trumps numbered in Roman numerals and titled in French. The pip cards show arrangements of suit symbols rather than scenes. Surviving examples include a Paris deck by Jean Noblet from the middle of the seventeenth century and a Marseille deck by Nicolas Conver dated 1760. The name “Tarot de Marseille” itself became common only in the twentieth century.

Is tarot still played as a game?

Tarot is still played as a game across much of Europe. French tarot is a popular card game in France, Tarock games are played in Austria and neighbouring countries, Hungarian players have their own tarokk, and older forms of the Italian game survive in places such as Bologna and Piedmont. Their decks often use French suits, with trumps showing scenes of daily life or animals.

When did tarot become a tool for divination?

Tarot became a tool for divination in France in the 1780s. In 1781 the scholar Antoine Court de Gébelin, in the eighth volume of his Le Monde primitif, claimed that the trumps preserved the wisdom of ancient Egyptian priests, a lost “Book of Thoth”. He offered no evidence, and could not have had any: Egyptian hieroglyphs were not deciphered until 1822. An essay in the same volume, by the Comte de Mellet, proposed using the cards for divination and first linked the twenty-two trumps to the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet.

The first professional to take up the idea was Etteilla, the pen name of the Parisian Jean-Baptiste Alliette. He published books on reading tarot in the mid-1780s and, around 1789, issued a deck redesigned for divination, whose cards carried short meanings for both the upright and the reversed position.

How did tarot become linked with Kabbalah and astrology?

Tarot’s links with Kabbalah and astrology were built in the nineteenth century, chiefly in France and then in England. The French occultist Éliphas Lévi, in works published in the 1850s, developed the link between the trumps and the Hebrew letters into a full system, and made tarot central to Western occult thought. Writers who followed him, such as Papus and Oswald Wirth, carried the work forward in the 1880s and 1890s.

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, founded in London in 1888, gave that system the form most readers still use. The order assigned each trump a Hebrew letter, a path on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, and a planet, sign or element, and gave the four suits to the four elements: Wands to Fire, Cups to Water, Swords to Air, Pentacles to Earth. To fit its astrological scheme, it also swapped two trumps, placing Strength at eight and Justice at eleven. These correspondences are inventions of the period, not ancient secrets, but they have proved a coherent and lasting framework.

The Rider-Waite-Smith deck

The Rider-Waite-Smith deck, published in London in 1909 by William Rider & Son, is the most influential tarot deck of the modern era. It was designed by A. E. Waite and drawn by Pamela Colman Smith, both members of the Golden Dawn, and follows the order’s correspondences, including the swap of Strength and Justice. Waite’s illustrated guide, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, followed in 1910.

The deck’s great change was in the Minor Arcana. It was the first widely used deck to give every pip card a full illustrated scene, so that a reader could take meaning from the picture rather than from a memorised list. A late fifteenth-century Italian deck, the Sola Busca, had illustrated pips too, and Smith appears to have known it: her Three of Swords, a heart pierced by three blades, closely echoes the Sola Busca card. Smith received little credit in her lifetime, which is why many readers now add her name to the deck’s.

Three of SwordsA storm in the heart: heartbreak, strife and sorrow that will teach.

The Thoth deck and the twentieth century

The Thoth deck, the other great deck of the occult tradition, was designed by Aleister Crowley and painted by Lady Frieda Harris between the late 1930s and the early 1940s. It renames several trumps (Strength becomes Lust, Temperance becomes Art) and draws heavily on astrology and Kabbalah. It was not published as a deck until 1969, after both had died.

The wider revival came in the 1960s and 1970s, when cheap printings and a broad reissue of the Rider-Waite-Smith deck reached a large new public. Readers increasingly treated the cards as a language for reflection, often borrowing Carl Jung’s idea of archetypes, though Jung wrote little about tarot. Most of the thousands of decks made since follow the Rider-Waite-Smith pattern.

Myths about the origins of tarot

Several popular stories about tarot’s origins have no historical support.

• Ancient Egypt. No evidence connects tarot to Egypt. The idea begins with Court de Gébelin in 1781, more than three centuries after the first Italian decks.
• Romani origin. The claim that Romani travellers brought tarot into Europe was popularised by nineteenth-century writers. No source supports it; the records place tarot’s beginnings in Italian courts.
• Secret Kabbalistic authorship. The Hebrew letters were attached to the trumps in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The original images are Christian and courtly allegories of Renaissance Italy.

None of this makes tarot less worth reading. Its meanings are a tradition built by many hands, and a tradition can be studied and tested.

Where the Gilded Garden deck sits

TarotSeeker’s own deck, the Gilded Garden, sits squarely in the line that runs from the Golden Dawn through the Rider-Waite-Smith deck. Its meanings follow the Rider-Waite-Smith tradition and the Golden Dawn correspondences, with Strength at eight and Justice at eleven, while its art is entirely original: the High Priestess is a barn owl on a golden crescent moon, and the Fool is a pale fox at the edge of a cliff.

The High PriestessIntuition, hidden knowledge and the quiet power of what is held back.

The companion’s readings rest on the same inheritance. When it weighs the elements of neighbouring cards, it uses correspondences set down in the 1880s, and it shows those grounds so you can test them. All 78 Gilded Garden cards, with their meanings, are in the Library; The 78 cards: Major and Minor Arcana is the place to start.

Questions readers ask

Where did tarot originate?

Tarot originated in northern Italy in the first half of the fifteenth century, where it was first recorded in the 1440s under the name trionfi. It was a card game: a suit of allegorical trumps added to the four suits of ordinary playing cards, which had reached Europe in the late fourteenth century. Divination came later, in France in the 1780s.

Did tarot come from ancient Egypt?

Tarot did not come from ancient Egypt. The claim was made in 1781 by Antoine Court de Gébelin, who offered no evidence; Egyptian hieroglyphs were not even deciphered until 1822. The earliest tarot cards are fifteenth-century Italian, and their trumps show Christian and courtly allegories such as the Virtues and the Last Judgement.

What is the oldest tarot deck?

The oldest surviving tarot cards are hand-painted Italian cards from the fifteenth century, made for noble families. The best known are the Visconti-Sforza cards, painted for the rulers of Milan around the middle of that century. No complete deck from the period survives, and the cards that remain are scattered among museums and libraries.

Why is it called the Rider-Waite-Smith deck?

The Rider-Waite-Smith deck takes its name from three contributors: the London publisher William Rider & Son, which issued it in 1909; A. E. Waite, who designed it; and Pamela Colman Smith, who drew every card. Many readers now add Smith’s name, long left off, to recognise the artist whose images shaped modern tarot.