The History of Tarot: A Deck of Six Hundred Years

A Deck Originally Meant for Play

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

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

One of the oldest surviving decks is the Visconti-Sforza deck, created in Milan in the 1440s. Painted with gold leaf and lapis lazuli pigment, these were cards actually owned by nobility. Crucially, they were made for play, not for divination.

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

1781: A Single Essay Turns a Game into an Oracle

The shift from game to divination came surprisingly late and for a surprisingly simple reason. In 1781, Antoine Court de Gébelin, a French pastor and scholar, published an essay in his book *Le Monde primitif* claiming that tarot was the 'Book of Thoth,' a compressed repository 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. An argument based on a script no one could read gained strength for a long time without being tested.

Later in the same century, Jean-Baptiste Alliette (known as Etteilla) created the first deck and interpretive system explicitly designed for fortune-telling. Most of the formats we recognize in tarot reading today were established during this period and the nineteenth century.

1909: The Pictures Change How You Read

The most widely used format today emerged 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 innovation of this deck was the inclusion of scenes on all 56 Minor Arcana cards for the first time. Previously, the numbered cards only repeated suit symbols, and interpretation had to rely on numbers and suits. With pictures, reading the images 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 contributions only found their proper recognition much later.

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

The Kabbalistic Connection Is a Nineteenth-Century Invention

The correspondence between the 22 Major Arcana 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 contemporary tarot-Kabbalah interpretations trace back to this lineage.

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

Literature and Psychology Adopt the Cards

In 1922, T.S. Eliot included the 'famous clairvoyante, Madame Sosostris' in *The Waste Land*, and she deals a 'wicked pack of cards.' This marked tarot's full entry into literature.

In 1969, Italo Calvino used tarot arrangements as the very structure of narrative in *The Castle of Crossed Destinies*. Laying out cards generates 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 present questions from a different angle.

1980: What the Historian Settled

The philosopher and card scholar Michael Dummett, in his 1980 book *The Game of Tarot*, systematically documented the origins and early records of tarot from primary sources. After this work, the Egyptian origin theory ceased to be treated as fact in academic circles.

Thus, the history of tarot is not a lineage of ancient mysteries but a cultural history built on accumulated misunderstandings. The same applies to reading card thirteen as a death omen. This card was originally a trump signifying change and conclusion; the frightening imagery was added by twentieth-century popular culture.

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

Where This Deck Comes From

The 78 cards on this site draw their colors and patterns from Korean nacre (mother-of-pearl) inlay and dancheong (traditional decorative painting on wooden buildings). These are illustrations, not physical objects made from real materials. Nacre inlay involves cutting thin pieces of shell and embedding them into lacquered surfaces; it reached its peak during the Goryeo dynasty and continues today, centered in Tongyeong and Wonju.

Dancheong is the coloring applied to protect and adorn wooden structures. The five colors—blue, red, yellow, white, and black—were used as symbols of directions and seasons. The border patterns and colors of the cards follow that grammar.

The images are generated with an image model, while the composition of scenes and the 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 illustrations, 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 arrangement structures of the cards. This is not a process of individual human authorship.

Before publication, code checks length, paragraph structure, prohibited words, and links. When errors are reported, the operator verifies and corrects them, and cross-checks any verifiable information.

Readings and the articles on this blog are intended 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.