The History of Tarot

Tarot did not begin as a way to see the future. It began as a card game, played by the nobility of northern Italy in the 1440s, in the courts of Milan and Ferrara. The game was called trionfi, later tarocchi, and it worked like a trick-taking game such as bridge: a fifth suit of trump cards, the trionfi, could beat any card in the four ordinary suits. Those trump cards are what became the major arcana, the same twenty-two cards our major vs minor arcana guide walks through today.

The earliest surviving decks are hand-painted, not printed, because they were commissioned as luxury objects for a single wealthy household rather than mass-produced for sale. The Visconti-Sforza decks, made for the ruling families of Milan in the mid-15th century, are the oldest tarot cards that still exist. There was no fortune-telling attached to any of it. It was a game for people who could afford gold leaf on their playing cards.

This is the part most people skip past: tarot was played purely as a game, with no occult or divinatory meaning at all, for roughly three hundred years. From the 1440s until the late 1700s, across Italy, France, and beyond, tarocchi and its regional variants were trick-taking games like any other deck of cards. No historical record from this long stretch treats the cards as symbolic, prophetic, or esoteric in any way.

That gap matters, because it means the occult reputation tarot carries today is a much later invention grafted onto an older game, not something the cards were designed for.

In 1781, a French Protestant pastor and scholar named Antoine Court de Gébelin published an essay on tarot in his sprawling work Le Monde primitif. He claimed the cards were a disguised copy of the Book of Thoth, a lost work of ancient Egyptian wisdom, smuggled to Rome and then secretly carried by the papacy to Avignon before surfacing in France as a mere card game.

He offered no evidence for any of this, because there was none to offer. Egyptian hieroglyphs would not be deciphered for another four decades, so Court de Gébelin was inventing an Egyptian source for symbols he could not actually read. The dates do not line up either: tarot appears in Italian court records three centuries before any documented link to Egypt could plausibly exist. Historians today treat the claim as an 18th-century fabrication, not a rediscovered truth. It is worth saying plainly: the Egyptian origin of tarot is a myth, invented by one writer for one book, two hundred years after the cards were already an old game. That does not make the tarot tradition that grew from it fake or unworthy of anyone who practices it today. It means the tradition's real story, an Italian card game reinterpreted by 18th-century French occultists, is more interesting than the myth it replaced.

Court de Gébelin's essay found an eager reader in Jean-Baptiste Alliette, a Parisian print-seller and grain merchant who wrote and read cards under the reversed pen name Etteilla. Where Court de Gébelin theorized, Etteilla built a business. In 1789 he published the first deck ever designed from the ground up for cartomancy, rather than an existing game deck pressed into new service, complete with keywords and divinatory spreads printed on the cards themselves.

Etteilla is a reasonable candidate for tarot's first professional reader: he taught the method, sold his own deck, and made his living at it, folding Court de Gébelin's Egyptian claims into his own system along the way. Between them, a scholar's unproven theory and a tradesman's practical deck, tarot's divinatory identity was born in the space of a single decade.

The next major addition came from the French occultist Éliphas Lévi, who in the 1850s wove tarot together with Kabbalah, the Hebrew alphabet, and his own system of ceremonial magic. Lévi was not working from any older tradition connecting the two; he was building one. But his synthesis was influential enough to shape everything that followed, including the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the secret society that trained both A. E. Waite and Aleister Crowley.

By the time tarot reached the deck most readers use today, it was carrying three separate, much later inventions stacked on top of a 15th-century card game: an Egyptian myth, a cartomancy method, and a Kabbalistic overlay. The planetary and zodiac correspondences that came out of this Golden Dawn synthesis are their own story, covered in our astrology and tarot guide.

The Rider-Waite-Smith deck, published in London in 1909, is the single most influential tarot deck of the modern era. A. E. Waite, a Golden Dawn member, directed the project and wrote the accompanying book. Pamela Colman Smith, a working artist and fellow Golden Dawn initiate, illustrated all seventy-eight cards.

Her contribution was the deck's real innovation. Earlier decks, including the Marseille tradition, illustrated only the twenty-two major arcana with full scenes; the numbered minor cards were simple patterns of cups or swords, read by count rather than picture. Smith gave every minor card, not just the majors, a complete narrative scene, largely her own invention rather than Waite's dictation. That is why a modern reader can look at the Five of Cups and read a story of grief at a glance. Nearly every deck published since has followed her template, whether or not it credits her for it, which is why our guide to choosing your first deck still points beginners toward a Rider-Waite-Smith-based deck as the easiest on-ramp.

For most of the 20th century, the deck she illustrated carried someone else's name. The original 1909 packaging and Waite's guidebook named the publisher and the art director; Smith went largely uncredited on the object she had drawn card by card. She was paid a flat fee, received no royalties as the deck became the best-selling tarot in the world, and died in 1951 with her possessions auctioned off to cover her debts.

That is starting to be corrected. U.S. Games' 2009 centennial edition put her name first, as the Smith-Waite deck, and a growing body of scholarship and reissues now use Rider-Waite-Smith or Smith-Waite rather than the old shorthand. It is a fitting story for a site built on the idea that every card has a paper trail: the trail on this particular deck led back to an artist who had been quietly written out of her own work, and the record is finally catching up to her.