The History of Tarot: Six Hundred Years of Cards

A Deck of Cards Was Originally a Game

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' became popular, and the structure of the seventy-eight cards we use today was established then.

The seventy-eight cards consist of fifty-six cards in four suits (fourteen each) plus twenty-two trump cards. These trumps were called 'trionfi' in Italian at the time, a term referring to the triumphal processions of Renaissance festivals. Today's 'Major Arcana' is a renamed version of that concept.

One of the oldest surviving decks is the Visconti-Sforza deck, created in Milan in the 1440s. These cards, painted with gold leaf and lapis lazuli pigment, were actually owned by nobility. The crucial 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 Italy's 'Tarocchini' in Bologna are card games that use the same structure.

1781: One Essay Turned a Game into an Oracle

The shift from game to divination came surprisingly late and for a surprisingly simple reason. In 1781, French pastor and scholar Antoine Court de Gébelin published an essay in his book *Le Monde primitif* claiming that tarot was the 'Book of Thoth,' compressing the esoteric wisdom of ancient Egypt.

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. Since no one could read those characters, the argument gained strength without ever being verified.

Later in the same century, Jean-Baptiste Alliette (Étteilla) created the first deck and interpretation system designed specifically for divination. Most of the formats we recognize in tarot reading today were established around this time and during the nineteenth century.

1909: Pictures Changed How We Read

The most widely used format today emerged in London in 1909. Arthur Edward Waite conceived the deck, and Pamela Colman Smith illustrated it, published by Rider & Company. It is known as the Rider-Waite-Smith (RWS) deck, after the three names.

The decisive innovation of this deck was depicting scenes on all fifty-six Minor Arcana cards for the first time. Before that, the numbered cards only repeated suit symbols, and interpretations had to rely on numbers and suits. With pictures, reading the images became possible.

Smith's name was omitted for a long time. The deck was called 'Rider-Waite' for decades, and her seventy-eight illustrations and contributions only found proper recognition much later.

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

The Kabbalah Connection Is a Nineteenth-Century Invention

The correspondence between the twenty-two tarot trumps and the twenty-two 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 derive 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, it remains useful as a language for linking symbols together. It is safer to distinguish between evidence and interpretation.

Literature and Psychology Adopted the Cards

In 1922, T.S. Eliot included 'Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante' in *The Waste Land*, and she spreads '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 Jungian archetypes. Instead of predicting the future, it serves to view present questions from different angles.

1980: What History Clarified

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

Thus, the history of tarot is not a continuous line of ancient mystery but a cultural history built on accumulated misunderstandings. The same applies to reading the thirteenth card as a death omen. This card was originally a trump indicating change and closure; the fearful imagery was layered on by twentieth-century popular culture.

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

Where This Deck Comes From

The seventy-eight cards on this site draw colors and patterns from Korean mother-of-pearl lacquerware (najeonchilgi) and dancheong (traditional decorative painting on wooden buildings). They are illustrations, not made from physical materials. Najeonchilgi is a craft that involves cutting thin shell pieces and inlaying them onto lacquered surfaces; it reached its peak during the Goryeo period and continues today, centered in Tongyeong and Wonju.

Dancheong is the coloring applied to protect and embellish wooden structures. 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 are created with an image generation model, while the composition of scenes and the choice of colors were made by the operator. Even for the same card, in this deck it is reimagined 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 AI (a large language model) based on the traditional symbolism of the cards and the structure of spreads. This is not a method where a human writes each article individually.

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