The History of Tarot: Six Hundred Years of Cards

A Deck of Cards Was Originally a Game

Tarot did not first appear in Egypt or Atlantis. It emerged in the courts of northern Italy in the fifteenth century. In cities like Milan and Ferrara, a card game called 'tarocchi' was popular, and the structure of the 78-card deck we use today was established then.

The 78 cards consist of 14 cards in each of four suits (56 cards) plus 22 trump cards. These trumps were called 'trionfi' in Italian at the time, a word that referred to the triumphal processions of Renaissance festivals. Today's 'Major Arcana' is a renamed version of that term.

One of the oldest surviving decks is the Visconti-Sforza deck, made in Milan in the 1440s. These cards, painted with gold leaf and lapis lazuli pigment, were actually owned by nobility. The key point is that these cards were for play, not divination.

Tarot as a game is still alive today. France's 'Jeu de Tarot,' Austria and Germany's 'Tarock,' and Bologna's 'Tarocchini' are card games that use the same structure.

In 1781, an Essay Turned a Game into an Oracle

The shift from game to divination happened later and more simply than you might expect. In 1781, a French pastor and scholar named Antoine Court de Gébelin published an essay in his book *Le Monde primitif* claiming that tarot was the 'Book of Thoth,' a compendium of ancient Egyptian esoteric wisdom.

There was no evidence for this claim. But it was also hard to refute. Egyptian hieroglyphs were not deciphered until Champollion's work in 1822. So an argument based on an unreadable script gained strength for a long time without being tested.

By the end of the same century, Jean-Baptiste Alliette (known as Etteilla) created the first deck and interpretive system designed specifically for divination. Most of the formats we recognize in tarot reading today were established around this time and in the nineteenth century.

In 1909, Pictures Changed How You Read

The most widely used format today appeared in London in 1909. Arthur Edward Waite conceived the design, and Pamela Colman Smith illustrated it, for the Rider publishing house. It is known as the Rider-Waite-Smith (RWS) deck, after the three names.

The decisive change in this deck was the inclusion of scenes on the 56 Minor Arcana cards for the first time. Before this, number cards only repeated suit symbols, and interpretation had to rely on numbers and suits. With images, reading by looking at the pictures became possible.

Smith's name was omitted for a long time. For decades, the deck was called only 'Rider-Waite,' and her 78 illustrations and contribution only found their proper place much later.

This was not entirely new. The Sola Busca deck, created in 1491, had already included figures and scenes on the Minor Arcana, and Waite and Smith were aware of that precedent.

The Connection to Kabbalah Is a Nineteenth-Century Invention

The correspondence between the 22 Major Arcana cards and the 22 Hebrew letters was popularized by Éliphas Lévi in the mid-nineteenth century. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, founded in 1888, systematized this, and most modern tarot-Kabbalah interpretations come from this lineage.

There is no historical basis for this. No records from fifteenth-century Italy, where the cards were created, support such a correspondence. However, as a language for connecting symbols, it remains useful. It is safer to keep the distinction between evidence and interpretation clear.

Literature and Psychology Took the Cards Further

In 1922, T.S. Eliot included 'Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante' in *The Waste Land*, and she lays out 'a wicked pack of cards.' This was a moment when tarot became a full-fledged literary subject.

In 1969, Italo Calvino used tarot arrangements as the very structure of narrative in *The Castle of Crossed Destinies*. Laying out cards creates different stories, and the characters, having lost their speech, converse only through the cards.

In the late twentieth century, tarot became a tool for self-reflection, overlapping with Jung's concept of archetypes. Instead of predicting the future, it serves to view your current questions from another angle.

In 1980, History Was Set Straight

The philosopher and card scholar Michael Dummett, in his 1980 book *The Game of Tarot*, systematically documented tarot's origins and early records. After this book, the Egyptian origin theory is no longer treated as fact in academic circles.

So the history of tarot is not a lineage of ancient mysteries but a cultural history built on accumulated misunderstandings. The same applies to reading the 13th card as a death omen. This card was originally a trump indicating change and closure, and its frightening image was added by twentieth-century popular culture.

Knowing this does not make reading meaningless. On the contrary, it clarifies what the cards contain. On this blog, we read symbols, but we do not claim that the cards determine the future.

Where This Deck Comes From

The 78 cards on this site draw colors and patterns from Korean mother-of-pearl lacquerware (najeonchilgi) and traditional dancheong painting. They are illustrations, not made from physical materials. Najeonchilgi is a craft in which thin pieces of abalone shell are inlaid into lacquered surfaces; it reached its peak during the Goryeo period and continues today, centered in Tongyeong and Wonju.

Dancheong is the coloring applied to wooden buildings for protection and ornamentation. The five colors—blue, red, yellow, white, and black—were used as symbols of directions and seasons. The patterns and colors on the card borders follow that grammar.

The images were created with an image generation model, and the composition of scenes and choice of colors were made by the operator. Even for the same card, this deck reimagines it with the colors and light of mother-of-pearl and dancheong. They are pictures, not physical objects made from those materials.

How This Blog's Articles Are Written

Card interpretations are written by an AI (a large language model) based on the traditional symbols and layout structures of the cards. This is not a process of a human writing each article individually.

Before publication, code checks length, paragraph structure, forbidden words, and links. If you report an error, the operator verifies and corrects it, and cross-checks any verifiable information.

Readings and this blog's articles are for entertainment and self-reflection. They do not replace professional judgment in medicine, law, or investment. If you are struggling emotionally, we encourage you to talk to a professional or someone you trust.