Few objects have lived two entirely different lives quite like the tarot. To many modern readers, the cards represent a symbolic system, a spiritual companion, or a method of divination. However, historical research provides a surprisingly clear and entirely different account of tarot's beginnings.
Few objects have lived two entirely different, deeply fascinating lives quite like the tarot. To countless modern readers across the globe, the cards represent a complex symbolic system, an intimate spiritual companion, a tool for psychological reflection, or a trusted method of divination. The imagery found on the cards—the Magician, the High Priestess, the Tower, and the Fool—has become deeply ingrained in our collective cultural consciousness. However, dedicated historical research provides a surprisingly clear and entirely different account of tarot's beginnings. The journey of these seventy-eight cards from the tables of Italian nobility to the velvet cloths of modern mystics is a captivating story of how human beings continually reinvent their cultural artifacts.
To truly understand the tarot, we must look at both of its histories: the factual, documented origins grounded in the European Renaissance, and the mythical, esoteric evolution that occurred centuries later. Neither history negates the other; rather, they combine to explain how a simple pastime transformed into a timeless repository of human imagination.
The Historical Reality: A Renaissance Pastime The earliest documented history of tarot contains absolutely no evidence that the cards were originally created as a secret mystical text, a tool for fortune-telling, or an ancient book of hidden wisdom. Instead, they were born as an aristocratic pastime in the vibrant, culturally rich courts of northern Italy.
During the early Renaissance, most likely between the 1430s and 1450s, the first tarot decks began to appear in cities like Milan, Ferrara, and Bologna. Wealthy noble families, such as the Visconti and Sforza dynasties, commissioned highly skilled artists to paint these early luxury decks. These objects were masterpieces of miniature art. Surviving cards from this era, commonly referred to as the Visconti-Sforza decks, are illuminated with brilliant pigments and real gold or silver leaf, featuring portraits of nobility alongside allegorical figures. They were incredibly expensive to produce and were considered high-status items, often given as wedding gifts or created to commemorate important familial alliances.
Crucially, the cards were primarily used for sophisticated trick-taking games, known initially as trionfi (triumphs) and later as tarocchi. The game mechanics were loosely similar to modern games like Bridge or Spades, but with an added layer of complexity. The standard playing card deck of the time already consisted of four suits—swords, batons, coins, and cups—each with numbered cards and court cards. The brilliant invention of the tarot was the addition of a fifth suit: a permanent sequence of twenty-one trump cards, plus a special unnumbered card known as the Fool (or Il Matto).
These twenty-one trumps were illustrated with well-known cultural allegories of the time, such as the Emperor, the Pope, the Wheel of Fortune, Death, and the Last Judgment. These images were not obscure occult symbols to the Renaissance mind; they were a standard visual vocabulary. Many scholars believe the progression of the trumps was inspired by the I Trionfi poems of the renowned Italian poet Petrarch, representing a recognizable hierarchy of earthly and spiritual powers.
This historical conclusion is not a matter of scholarly guesswork. It is robustly supported by surviving decks, civic records, personal letters, payment documents, and contemporary references. In none of these early sources is there a single mention of the cards being used to predict the future or channel divine knowledge. For roughly three hundred years, the tarot was, first and foremost, a widely enjoyed card game that gradually spread from Italy to France, Switzerland, and other parts of Europe.
The Great Transformation: The Birth of Tarot Mythology If the historical record is straightforward and grounded in the practicalities of Renaissance life, the symbolic history is built entirely from legends, esoteric traditions, and the romantic imagination. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, occultists, philosophers, and visionaries began to transform the cards by asking a provocative question: what if these images contained hidden wisdom?
The catalyst for this monumental shift occurred in 1781 in France. A Protestant clergyman and Freemason named Antoine Court de Gébelin published a massive, multi-volume encyclopedia of esoteric history called Le Monde Primitif (The Primeval World). In this work, Court de Gébelin included an essay claiming that the tarot was not a game at all, but rather the preservation of the lost teachings of ancient Egypt. He asserted that the twenty-two trump cards were actually the legendary Book of Thoth, a repository of pure, divine Egyptian magic that had been disguised as a game by ancient priests to ensure its survival through the dark ages.
Court de Gébelin provided zero historical evidence for this claim. He did not read hieroglyphics (which had not yet been deciphered, as the Rosetta Stone would not be discovered until 1799), and his etymology of the word "tarot" was entirely fabricated. Nevertheless, his narrative was incredibly powerful. It captured the imagination of a French society that was increasingly fascinated by antiquities, mysticism, and the occult.
Shortly after Court de Gébelin’s publication, a Parisian seed-merchant and astrologer named Jean-Baptiste Alliette popularized the divinatory use of the cards. Writing under the pseudonym "Etteilla" (his last name spelled backward), he became the first professional tarot reader to reach a wide audience. Etteilla published the first definitive guide to reading tarot cards, assigning specific, rigid meanings to each card, including upright and reversed interpretations. He also designed the first deck specifically intended for esoteric use rather than gameplay. Through Etteilla, the transition from parlor game to fortune-telling device was cemented.
The Occult Revival and the Integration of Esoteric Systems The nineteenth century saw the mythology of the tarot expand even further. Other influential writers proposed elaborate origin stories connecting the cards to the Knights Templar, the lost civilization of Atlantis, the Cathars, or the Romani people. While modern scholarship has definitively found no historical evidence to support these ancient origins, the esoteric community embraced them wholeheartedly.
The most significant figure in this next phase of development was the French occultist Éliphas Lévi. In the mid-1850s, Lévi introduced a profound new layer to tarot mythology by linking the cards directly to the Kabbalah, a tradition of Jewish mysticism. Lévi drew a parallel between the twenty-two major arcana (the trump cards) and the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, as well as the twenty-two paths on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. Furthermore, he connected the four suits of the minor arcana to the four classical elements: wands to fire, cups to water, swords to air, and pentacles (or coins) to earth.
Lévi’s synthesis was revolutionary. He essentially transformed the tarot into a universal key that could unlock all Western esoteric traditions. Alchemy, astrology, Hermeticism, and Kabbalah were now intrinsically woven into the fabric of the cards.
This complex synthesis was later adopted and refined by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a highly influential British occult society founded in the late nineteenth century. The Golden Dawn systematized the esoteric correspondences of the tarot, making it a mandatory subject of study for their initiates. It was within this environment that the most famous tarot deck in the world was born.
In 1909, two former members of the Golden Dawn, Arthur Edward Waite and the artist Pamela Colman Smith, published the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot deck. Waite instructed Smith to illustrate not just the major arcana, but all fifty-six minor cards with evocative, scenic imagery. Until then, most minor arcana cards (like those in the traditional Tarot de Marseille) merely showed arrangements of the suit symbols, much like modern playing cards. Smith’s visionary artwork, infused with Waite’s esoteric symbolism, created a deck that was intuitively readable. The imagery of the Rider-Waite-Smith deck remains the global standard for tarot design today.
The Psychological Turn: Archetypes and Modern Self-Reflection As the twentieth century progressed, the tarot underwent yet another transformation, stepping out of the shadowy realms of the occult and into the light of psychology and self-help. A significant influence in this modern reframing was the analytical psychology of Carl Jung. Although Jung only wrote briefly about the tarot, his concept of "archetypes"—universal, primal symbols and images that derive from the collective unconscious—provided a perfect secular framework for understanding the cards.
Modern practitioners began to view the tarot not as a magical tool for predicting fixed, unavoidable futures, but as a mirror for the mind. In this psychological approach, the Emperor represents authority and structure, not necessarily an actual king or boss; the Tower represents sudden, disruptive change rather than a literal disaster; the Fool represents the universal human experience of taking a leap of faith into the unknown.
Today, tarot is widely utilized as a mechanism for introspection, meditation, and brainstorming. Writers use the cards to overcome creative blocks and develop character arcs. Therapists and counselors occasionally use them as visual prompts to help clients articulate feelings they might otherwise struggle to express. The cards bypass rational, linear thinking and communicate directly with the intuitive, visual centers of the brain. This secular, psychological approach has allowed the tarot to flourish in the twenty-first century, becoming a mainstream tool for wellness and personal growth.
Why Both Histories Are Essential It is tempting to imagine that one of these histories must invalidate the other, but this is a false dichotomy. The fact that the earliest decks were designed for aristocratic games does not prevent later generations from discovering profound new meanings within them.
Historical evidence explains where tarot came from. It grounds the physical object in reality, stripping away the fraudulent claims of eighteenth-century hucksters and honoring the incredible artistry of the Renaissance painters who first brought the Fool, the Magician, and the High Priestess to life. It reminds us that these were real objects, held in real hands, played in the lively taverns and opulent palaces of early modern Europe.
Conversely, symbolic interpretation helps explain why the tarot endured while thousands of other card games faded into total obscurity. The esoteric thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, regardless of their historical inaccuracies, recognized something genuinely powerful in the archetypal imagery of the trumps. By overlaying the cards with Kabbalistic, astrological, and psychological significance, they gave the tarot a profound depth that has allowed it to adapt to the spiritual needs of every subsequent generation.
Before tarot became a mirror for the human imagination, it was simply a remarkable invention of the Renaissance. Yet, its journey from a game of tricks to a tool of transcendence is perhaps more magical than any of the fabricated Egyptian myths. It stands as a testament to humanity's relentless desire to find meaning, structure, and narrative in the randomness of life. The dual history of the tarot proves that a symbol does not need to be ancient to be powerful, and an object does not need to be mystical in its origin to become deeply sacred in its use.
References:
Dummett, M. (1980). The Game of Tarot: From Ferrara to Salt Lake City. Duckworth. https://www.scribd.com/document/434398932/The-Game-of-Tarot
Decker, R., & Dummett, M. (2019). A History of the Occult Tarot. Duckworth Books. https://www.duckworthbooks.co.uk/book/the-history-of-the-occult-tarot/
Decker, R., Depaulis, T., & Dummett, M. (1996). A Wicked Pack of Cards: The Origins of the Occult Tarot. Duckworth.
Court de Gébelin, A. (1781). Le Monde primitif, analysé et comparé avec le monde moderne (Vol. 8).
Etteilla. (1783). Manière de se récréer avec le jeu de cartes nommées tarots.