The real history of tarot

How to read the labels Historical what the old sources say. Later tradition what later writers added. Modern modern practice and my own notes.

Tarot has a reputation as something ancient and mysterious. Its real history is more surprising and, I think, more interesting. Tarot began as a card game played by Italian nobles in the fifteenth century. It became a tool for divination only about three hundred years later, when French writers invented a grand ancient origin for it. Then, in 1909, a London artist named Pamela Colman Smith drew the deck most English speakers learn with today.

Honest history makes the symbols more interesting, not less. Here is the timeline, with labels to show what is documented and what is later belief:

• Historical What surviving cards and documents show.
• Later tradition What occult writers added from the eighteenth century on.
• Modern How tarot is used today.

Before tarot: playing cards arrive in Europe

Historical Playing cards reached Europe in the late 1370s. They appear in several cities within a few years of each other, often in rules banning or regulating card games, which tells us they spread fast. The cards most likely came through trade with the Islamic world, where the Mamluk sultanate of Egypt used a deck with four suits of cups, coins, swords and polo sticks. That is the only real link between tarot and Egypt, and it is about ordinary playing cards in the Middle Ages, not ancient wisdom.

European decks kept four suits with numbered cards and court cards. In Italy and Spain the suits stayed close to the originals: cups, coins, swords and batons. You can still see them in the tarot suits of Cups, Pentacles, Swords and Wands.

Game cards in fifteenth-century Italy

Historical Tarot appeared in northern Italy in the first half of the fifteenth century, when someone added a fifth suit of picture cards to the ordinary pack. These extra cards were called trionfi, triumphs, and they acted as permanent trumps in a trick-taking game. The deck was known as carte da trionfi, triumph cards. One of the earliest records is from the court of Ferrara in 1442. The word tarocchi came later, in the early sixteenth century.

The oldest surviving cards were luxury objects. The Visconti-Sforza decks were hand-painted and gilded for the ruling families of Milan in the middle of the fifteenth century, and many are attributed to the workshop of Bonifacio Bembo. Their cards are now spread among collections including the Morgan Library in New York and the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo. How those painted cards became the images we know is a story in itself, and I tell it on the tarot art history page.

The trumps were not secret symbols. They showed figures any Renaissance viewer would recognize: the Pope, the Emperor, Love, Death, the virtues of Justice, Strength and Temperance, the Wheel of Fortune, the Sun and Moon. It was the moral and visual language of the time, much like the imagery in church paintings and festival processions.

No fixed order at first

Historical The earliest painted trumps carried no numbers or names. Players simply knew the order. And the order was not the same everywhere. The historian Michael Dummett showed that early Italian decks fall into three regional families, linked to Milan, to Ferrara, and to Florence and Bologna, each ranking the trumps a little differently. In one family the virtues sit together; in another, Justice comes near the very top, just below the World. The sequence most readers learn now is only one of these, fixed much later by printed French decks.

This matters for readers because it shows that the “journey” of the Major Arcana is something later readers found in the cards, not a plan written into them from the start. That does not make the journey less useful. It just means it is an interpretation, and you are free to read it your own way.

Printing and the Tarot de Marseille

Historical Over the next two centuries the game spread to France, Switzerland and beyond, and printed decks made it cheaper. Regional patterns developed. What English speakers now call the Tarot de Marseille took shape in France across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries rather than in a single year. Well-known examples include the deck of Jean Noblet in Paris around 1650, Jean Dodal in Lyon in the early eighteenth century, and Nicolas Conver in Marseille in 1760.

In these decks the trumps are numbered and named, and the order becomes the one many readers know. The numbered suit cards, the pips, show only a pattern of cups, coins, swords or batons, with no scene. That is why reading a Marseille deck feels different from reading a modern illustrated deck: the minor cards ask you to read numbers and suits, not pictures. The Minor Arcana guide explains the difference.

The game, meanwhile, never went away. Versions of tarot are still played in France, and related tarock games in Austria, Hungary and their neighbors.

The occult turn: 1781 and the Egypt myth

Later tradition In 1781, the French scholar Antoine Court de Gébelin published the eighth volume of his huge work Le Monde primitif. In it he claimed that the tarot trumps preserved the wisdom of ancient Egypt, a book of the god Thoth hidden in a card game. He said he saw it the first time he looked at the cards. The same volume included an essay by the Comte de Mellet that linked the 22 trumps to the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet.

There was no evidence for any of it. Egyptian hieroglyphs could not even be read at the time; Champollion deciphered them only in the 1820s. But the story was romantic and it stuck.

Soon after, a Paris card reader who called himself Etteilla (his name, Alliette, spelled backwards) began publishing books on reading tarot, and around 1789 he released one of the first decks designed specifically for divination. Fortune-telling with ordinary playing cards already existed. What was new was tarot as a sacred book.

The nineteenth century: Lévi and the Golden Dawn

Later tradition In the 1850s the French occultist Éliphas Lévi took de Mellet’s idea further. In Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie (1854 to 1856) he tied each trump to a Hebrew letter and to the Kabbalah, making tarot a key to a whole system of magic. His work shaped almost every occult writer who came after him.

In 1888 the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was founded in London. Its members built tarot into a large system of correspondences: each card was linked to a Hebrew letter, a path on the Tree of Life, an element, a planet or a zodiac sign. That work is why many modern decks print Hebrew letters, astrology or Tree of Life references. The Golden Dawn also swapped the places of Strength and Justice in the trump order, which is why Strength is VIII and Justice XI in the deck most English speakers use. The numerology and elements guide explains those layers.

Those layers can enrich study. They are optional for a clear beginner reading.

1909: Waite and Smith

Historical Two former Golden Dawn members made the deck that still dominates English-language reading. Arthur Edward Waite, a writer on mysticism, designed it, and Pamela Colman Smith, an artist and illustrator, drew all 78 cards. It was published in London by William Rider and Son in 1909, and Waite’s guidebook The Pictorial Key to the Tarot followed in its illustrated form in 1910.

The big change was the Minor Arcana. Instead of a pattern of coins or cups, Smith gave every numbered card a full scene: a figure mourning spilled cups, a craftsman at his bench, a man watching ships. This made the cards far easier for beginners to read, because the picture tells you what the card is about. Smith likely knew the Sola Busca deck, an Italian deck from around 1490 with illustrated pips, which the British Museum had photographed in 1907; several of her designs echo it.

Smith was paid a flat fee and was barely credited for decades. Today most readers call the deck the Rider-Waite-Smith to give her the credit she earned.

The twentieth century: Thoth, guidebooks and new decks

Historical Aleister Crowley and the artist Lady Frieda Harris created the Thoth deck between 1938 and 1943. It was first published as a full deck in 1969, decades after the art was painted.

Modern In the mid-twentieth century, accessible guidebooks moved tarot out of occult circles. Eden Gray’s Tarot Revealed (1960) made Rider-Waite-Smith style reading approachable for a wide audience, and her A Complete Guide to the Tarot (1970) includes an epilogue called “The Fool’s Journey,” a way of reading the Major Arcana as a life story that many teachers later adapted.

From the 1970s on, new decks widened the themes, cultures and audiences of tarot. Motherpeace, for example, was self-published in 1981 with a feminist vision of the cards. Many later decks center specific cultures and traditions. When a deck draws on a living tradition, it is worth learning from that tradition’s own voices.

Tarot today

Modern Today tarot is a living craft with thousands of decks. People use it for divination, journaling, creative prompts, therapy-style reflection and conversation. Popular culture keeps reinventing it: new art styles, inclusive courts, apps and community ethics discussions.

What matters for a modern reader is the honest timeline: game first, esoteric reading later. You can love the symbols without needing them to be older than the paper they were printed on.

A short timeline

Why the real history matters

Knowing the history protects you from people who sell certainty. If someone says their method is ancient Egyptian, you know that story began in 1781. If someone says only initiates can read, you know tarot was a game for most of its life.

It also makes the cards richer. When you look at the Pope or the Wheel of Fortune, you are looking at the same images a Milanese noble saw over cards and wine nearly six hundred years ago. That is a real lineage, and it does not need to be invented. The true story is old enough, strange enough and beautiful enough on its own.

For the myths that grew from this history, read 11 tarot myths. To start reading, go back to the tarot guide.