Tarot History

The history of tarot cards begins not with mystery schools, ancient priests, or hidden wisdom lineages, but with a card game played at the courts of northern Italian nobles in the early fifteenth century. This origin is not a diminishment; the path from game piece to profound divinatory and psychological tool is itself a fascinating story of how symbols accumulate meaning when human beings invest them with sustained attention over generations.

Understanding tarot’s actual history allows practitioners to hold the tradition with greater confidence and clarity, knowing which elements descend from documented practice, which are meaningful modern constructions, and which are well-intentioned myths that have been corrected by scholarship.

History and origins

The earliest confirmed tarot decks were created in northern Italy between approximately 1420 and 1450. The most significant surviving examples are the Visconti-Sforza decks, painted for the ruling families of Milan and containing all the trump card figures that have persisted into modern tarot. These decks were luxury objects, hand-painted and sometimes illuminated in gold, made for aristocratic patrons and not for popular use. The game they were made for, called tarocchi (or tarot in French), added a special set of numbered trump cards to the existing four-suit playing card deck, creating a game of higher strategic complexity.

Regular playing cards had arrived in Europe from the Islamic world by the mid-fourteenth century, descending ultimately from Mamluk Egyptian card decks with suits of Cups, Coins, Swords, and Polo Sticks. European versions adapted the suits to local symbolism, and the Polo Sticks became Batons or Wands. The figures on the tarot trumps drew on medieval allegorical traditions: figures like the Wheel of Fortune, Death, the Pope, the Emperor, and the female personifications of virtues had long circulated in sermons, woodcuts, public pageants, and manuscript illuminations.

The game of tarocchi spread through Italy and later into France, Germany, and Switzerland, where regional variations developed. The Tarot de Marseille, which crystallized into a recognizable standard form by the seventeenth century in France and the southern Low Countries, became the dominant template for centuries of European tarot decks.

The invention of the occult tarot

The decisive transformation of tarot from game to esoteric tool took place in France in the late eighteenth century. The key figure is Antoine Court de Gebelin, an amateur antiquarian and Freemason who in 1781 published an essay arguing that tarot was not a game but an ancient Egyptian document, a hidden book of wisdom smuggled into Europe by the Gypsies (Romani people) from the secret libraries of the pharaohs. This claim was wholly fabricated; de Gebelin’s argument rested on no documentary or archaeological evidence whatsoever, and Egyptology as a discipline did not yet exist to challenge it. Nevertheless, the idea ignited the imagination of French esotericists and card readers alike.

Within years, a Parisian barber who went by the name Etteilla had created the first deck explicitly designed for divination and established himself as a professional cartomancer. Etteilla modified the card imagery and meanings considerably, published the first guidebooks devoted to tarot fortune-telling, and trained students to read cards for paying clients. His work established the commercial model of tarot reading that persists today.

The next major development came through Eliphas Levi, the nineteenth-century French occultist who in 1854 identified tarot’s twenty-two trump cards with the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. This connection — which Levi presented confidently but which also lacks ancient precedent — fused tarot permanently with the tradition of Western Kabbalah and opened the door to the elaborate esoteric synthesis that followed.

The Golden Dawn and the modern synthesis

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, founded in London in 1888, systematized Levi’s hints into a complete esoteric framework for tarot. Golden Dawn members, who included figures such as Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, William Wynn Westcott, Aleister Crowley, and later Arthur Edward Waite and Pamela Colman Smith, mapped the seventy-eight cards onto Hebrew letters, astrological signs and planets, the paths of the Tree of Life, classical elements, and numerological principles. Their work was presented as ancient knowledge, but it was largely a late Victorian synthesis built from diverse sources and scholarly creativity.

The Golden Dawn’s tarot curriculum remained largely secret until the early twentieth century. Arthur Edward Waite, working with Pamela Colman Smith, published the Rider-Waite-Smith deck in 1909 with much of the Golden Dawn system embedded in its imagery, though Waite deliberately obscured some correspondences and altered others. Aleister Crowley, who left the Golden Dawn in acrimony, later designed the Thoth tarot with Lady Frieda Harris, which encodes Crowley’s own Thelemic system and offers a different but equally elaborate esoteric interpretation.

Tarot in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries

Throughout the early to mid-twentieth century, tarot remained primarily in occult circles and among professional fortune-tellers. The counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s brought tarot to a far wider audience, particularly in the United States and Britain. Authors like Eden Gray wrote accessible guidebooks that reached general readers, and new decks proliferated. By the 1980s and 1990s, tarot had entered bookshops, and the number of available decks had grown from a handful to hundreds.

Contemporary tarot has expanded dramatically in both diversity and purpose. Practitioners today work with decks representing dozens of artistic styles, cultural frameworks, and thematic focuses. The understanding of tarot as a psychological tool for self-reflection, rather than primarily as a fortune-telling device, has become widespread following the influence of writers like Rachel Pollack, whose Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom (1980) reframed tarot as a map of inner experience. Jungian and depth psychological approaches to tarot have flourished alongside traditional divinatory practice.

Tarot scholarship has also matured, with historians such as Michael Dummett and Ronald Decker producing rigorous academic work that carefully distinguishes documented history from invented mythology. This scholarship does not diminish the power of tarot practice; it simply locates that power where it genuinely lives, in the symbols, the practice, and the sustained human engagement with them, rather than in an ancient origin that never existed.

In myth and popular culture

The invented mythology of tarot’s ancient origin, particularly the Egyptian myth, has been one of the most productive fictions in the history of Western esotericism. Antoine Court de Gebelin’s 1781 claim that tarot was a surviving fragment of the Book of Thoth, smuggled into Europe by the Romani people, provided esotericists with a narrative of hidden wisdom and ancient preservation that proved irresistible. Despite being thoroughly refuted by scholarship from Isaac Casaubon’s methods onward, the Egyptian myth persisted because it served important psychological and cultural functions: it anchored a practice in impressive antiquity and gave practitioners a sense of participating in unbroken lineage.

The identification of the Fool with the holy fool or the wandering initiate, of the Hanged Man with Odin’s self-sacrifice on Yggdrasil, and of the Death card with mythological figures of transformation appears consistently in twentieth-century interpretations of the major arcana. Joseph Campbell’s work on the hero’s journey, published in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), provided a mythological framework that subsequent tarot writers applied extensively, particularly in describing the Fool’s Journey through the major arcana as a universal initiatory narrative. This Campbellian overlay, while not historically part of tarot’s development, has become part of how many contemporary practitioners understand and teach the deck.

Tarot has appeared prominently in popular culture throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Ian Fleming’s Live and Let Die (1954) features a villain who uses tarot for divination, including the death card as an ominous prediction, establishing the sinister tarot reader as a James Bond trope. The James Bond film version (1973) gave Jane Seymour her first major role as the tarot reader Solitaire. Tarot imagery appears in the album art and songs of numerous musical artists: the Rider-Waite-Smith imagery in particular has been referenced by performers including Beyonce, Led Zeppelin (whose 1971 album Led Zeppelin IV features band members as tarot archetypes in its inner sleeve art), and many others.

Myths and facts

The history of tarot is better documented than many practitioners realize, and several persistent myths are worth addressing directly.

• Tarot did not originate in ancient Egypt. The claim was invented by Antoine Court de Gebelin in 1781 without documentary or archaeological support. Egyptian writing was not even deciphered until the Rosetta Stone was translated in the early nineteenth century, decades after de Gebelin wrote. The Egyptian origin theory is historically impossible to sustain.
• Tarot was not brought to Europe by the Romani people. Romani people did not arrive in Western Europe until the early fifteenth century, roughly the same time as the earliest Italian tarot decks, and the historical record shows no connection between Romani migration and tarot’s development. The association is a piece of romantic mythology that has additionally served to attach Romani identity to fortune-telling in ways that have perpetuated harmful stereotypes.
• Tarot was not used for divination from the beginning. The earliest documented tarot decks were game cards, and the historical record shows no evidence of divinatory use before the late eighteenth century. The divinatory tradition is roughly 250 years old, not ancient.
• The Rider-Waite-Smith deck is not the original or traditional tarot. It is a 1909 revision that made specific interpretive choices, including illustrating all seventy-eight cards with narrative scenes rather than purely symbolic pip cards. The Tarot de Marseille and its antecedents represent a centuries-older tradition that many practitioners and scholars consider more historically central.
• The number 78 was not chosen for any esoteric reason. Tarot’s card count developed historically from the addition of a twenty-two-card trump sequence to a standard fifty-six-card suit deck. The number reflects historical accident rather than sacred numerology, though subsequent esoteric traditions have found meaningful correspondences for it after the fact.