A History of Tarot — Six Hundred Years of Cards

The deck began as a game

Tarot did not begin in Egypt, and it did not begin in Atlantis. It began in the courts of northern Italy in the fifteenth century, where a trick-taking game called tarocchi was played in cities such as Milan and Ferrara. The 78-card structure we use today was made then.

The deck held four suits of fourteen cards and twenty-two extra trumps. The trumps were called trionfi — the word for the triumphal processions of Renaissance festivals. What we now call the major arcana is that word, renamed.

One of the oldest surviving decks is the Visconti-Sforza tarot, painted in Milan in the 1440s with gold leaf and lapis lazuli. These were luxury cards owned by nobles, and they were made for play, not for fortune-telling.

Tarot as a game never disappeared. French tarot, Austrian and German Tarock, and Bolognese tarocchini still use the same structure today.

In 1781, one essay turned a game into an oracle

The step from game to divination was late and oddly simple. In 1781 the French pastor and scholar Antoine Court de Gébelin published an essay in Le Monde primitif claiming that tarot was a surviving fragment of ancient Egyptian mystery, a compressed Book of Thoth.

There was no evidence for it, and for a while no way to refute it either: Egyptian hieroglyphs were not deciphered until Champollion in 1822. A claim built on a script nobody could read went unchallenged for decades.

Later in the same century, Jean-Baptiste Alliette, known as Etteilla, produced the first deck and system designed specifically for divination. Most of the reading formats we recognise today were assembled then and in the following century.

In 1909, the pictures changed how the cards are read

The format most people use today appeared in London in 1909. Arthur Edward Waite devised it, Pamela Colman Smith painted it, and Rider & Company published it. It is known by their three names: Rider-Waite-Smith, or RWS.

Its decisive change was illustrating all fifty-six minor arcana with scenes. Before that, number cards repeated a pattern and interpretation leaned on number and suit. With pictures, reading the image itself became possible.

Smith's name was left out for a long time. The deck was sold for decades as the Rider-Waite, and the seventy-eight paintings she made only recently received credit.

It was not unprecedented. The Sola Busca deck of 1491 already gave its minor arcana figures and scenes, and Waite and Smith knew that earlier deck.

The kabbalah link was a nineteenth-century invention

Mapping the twenty-two trumps onto the twenty-two Hebrew letters was popularised by Éliphas Lévi in the mid-nineteenth century. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, founded in 1888, systematised it, and most tarot-kabbalah interpretation descends from that line.

There is no historical basis for it. Nothing in fifteenth-century Italy supports such a correspondence. As a language for linking symbols it remains useful — but it is safer to keep evidence and interpretation apart.

Literature and psychology took the cards elsewhere

In 1922 T. S. Eliot put Madame Sosostris, 'famous clairvoyante', into The Waste Land, dealing from a 'wicked pack of cards'. It is the moment tarot entered literature proper.

In 1969 Italo Calvino made a tarot layout the structure of the narrative itself in The Castle of Crossed Destinies. Lay the cards out and stories assemble; the characters have lost speech and speak only through cards.

In the later twentieth century the cards overlapped with Jung's idea of archetypes and settled into a role as a tool for reflection — not predicting the future, but letting a present question be seen from another angle.

In 1980, historians sorted it out

Michael Dummett, a philosopher and card historian, documented tarot's origins and early records in The Game of Tarot (1980). Since then, the Egyptian origin story has not been treated as fact in scholarship.

So the history of tarot is not an unbroken chain of ancient mystery; it is a cultural history built out of misunderstandings. The same is true of card thirteen. It was a trump about change and ending, and the image of doom was laid over it by twentieth-century popular culture.

Knowing this does not make a reading meaningless. It makes clearer what the cards actually hold. We read the symbols, and we do not claim the cards settle the future.

Where this deck comes from

The seventy-eight cards on this site take their colours and patterns from Korean najeon chilgi and dancheong as visual reference, not as materials. They are paintings. Najeon chilgi is the craft of inlaying thinly cut mother-of-pearl into lacquered surfaces; it flourished in the Goryeo period and continues today around Tongyeong and Wonju.

Dancheong is the painted decoration that protects and dignifies timber buildings. Its five colours — blue, red, yellow, white and black — stood for directions and seasons. The borders and palette of these cards follow that grammar.

The paintings were produced with an image-generation model, and the operator chose the compositions and colours. Even familiar cards are drawn again here in their colours and light — as paintings, not as inlaid objects.

How the writing on this blog is made

Card commentary is written by an AI language model, working from the cards' traditional symbolism and the structure of a spread. It is not written one article at a time by people.

Before publishing, code checks length, paragraph structure, prohibited wording and links. When an error is reported, the operator reviews it and corrects it, checking verifiable details against sources.

Readings and these articles are for entertainment and reflection. They do not replace medical, legal or financial advice. If things feel heavy, please talk to a professional or someone you trust.