A Short History of Tarot, From Card Table to Reading Table

Tarot has a reputation for being ancient and mysterious. The real story is younger, better documented and, in its way, more interesting. For most of its history, tarot was a game. Its use as a tool for reading came later, and its most familiar images were drawn in London a little over a century ago.

Here is a short, sourced account of how a deck of playing cards became the deck people now shuffle at kitchen tables to think about their week.

A game for Italian courts

The first documented tarot decks appear in northern Italy in the 1440s, in cities including Milan, Ferrara, Florence and Bologna. They began with the familiar structure of playing cards, which had reached Europe in the late fourteenth century: four suits of numbered cards plus court cards.

What made these decks new was an extra series of picture cards showing allegorical figures, virtues and scenes. They were called trionfi, or "triumphs," and in play they acted as permanent trumps, able to beat the ordinary suits. The English word "trump" traces back to the same idea. By the early sixteenth century the decks were being called tarocchi, the Italian word from which "tarot" comes.

The game itself was a trick-taking game, a relative of bridge or whist in the broad sense. Tarot card games never disappeared, either. Versions are still played today in France and in other parts of Europe, with no reading of meanings involved.

The Visconti-Sforza cards

The oldest surviving tarot cards are luxury objects. The best known are the Visconti-Sforza cards, hand-painted with gold leaf in Milan around the middle of the fifteenth century for the city's ruling families. Their heraldry points to the Visconti and Sforza dynasties, and the cards are often associated with the workshop of the painter Bonifacio Bembo.

No complete set survives. The cards are now divided among collections: the Morgan Library & Museum in New York holds 35, the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo holds 26, and 13 remain in a private family collection in Bergamo. Looking at them, you can recognize ancestors of cards in modern decks, including figures that later became The Lovers, The Chariot and Death.

Printed decks and a standard pattern

Hand-painted decks were for the wealthy. As printing spread, cheaper woodblock decks made the game available far more widely, and tarot traveled into France and Switzerland. Over time, one design became the standard in much of France. It is now known as the Tarot de Marseille, and its 22 picture cards (21 numbered trumps plus the Fool) and four suits form the structure most later decks follow.

For more than three centuries, the story stays mostly about games. There are scattered earlier hints of cards being given meanings, such as an anonymous manuscript from Bologna, written around 1750, that records simple divinatory meanings for cards in the local deck. But the decisive turn came in Paris.

1781: an Egyptian theory

In 1781, the French scholar Antoine Court de Gébelin published the eighth volume of his sprawling work Le Monde primitif. In it, he argued that the tarot preserved the wisdom of ancient Egypt, distilled by priests from a lost "Book of Thoth" and hidden in plain sight in a card game.

There was no evidence for this, and historians have long rejected it. Court de Gébelin was looking at the Tarot de Marseille, a European design with roots in Renaissance Italy, and reading Egyptian symbolism into it. Still, the idea was enormously influential. It gave the cards a mythology, and that mythology stuck.

Etteilla and the first fortune-telling decks

Among the people who took up the Egyptian theory was Jean-Baptiste Alliette, a Parisian who wrote under the name Etteilla, his surname spelled backward. In the 1780s he published guides to reading the cards and promoted his methods energetically. Toward the end of the decade he produced what is generally described as the first tarot deck made specifically for divination, with redesigned cards that departed from the traditional pattern.

From this point, there were effectively two tarot traditions: the old card game, still played across Europe, and a new practice of reading the cards for meaning.

The nineteenth century: letters and correspondences

In the 1850s, the French writer Éliphas Lévi pushed the occult reading further. In his book Dogme et rituel de la haute magie, published in 1855 and 1856, he linked the 22 picture cards, now usually called the Major Arcana, to the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet. This created a framework in which each card could be connected to a web of other symbols, an approach that shaped much of what followed.

The Golden Dawn

In London, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was established in 1888. It was a secret society devoted to ritual magic and esoteric study, and tarot was part of its teaching, tied to astrology, the Kabbalah and other systems of correspondence.

The Golden Dawn's system also reordered two cards. In the traditional sequence, Justice was the eighth trump and Strength the eleventh. To fit the order's astrological correspondences, the two were swapped, so that Strength became 8 and Justice 11. That change carried into the deck that came next, and it is the order many modern decks, including ours, still use.

Two members of the Golden Dawn are central to the next chapter: the writer Arthur Edward Waite and the artist Pamela Colman Smith.

1909: Pamela Colman Smith's deck

In 1909, Waite commissioned Smith to design a full pack of 78 tarot cards. The deck was published in London that year by the firm of William Rider & Son, accompanied by Waite's guide to the cards.

Waite gave Smith detailed instructions for the Major Arcana. The Minor Arcana were her own design, and that is where her work changed tarot most. In many earlier decks, the numbered cards simply showed an arrangement of suit symbols: five cups, seven swords. Smith gave every card a scene. A figure mourns over spilled cups. Someone carries ten heavy staves. A person walks away from a stack of eight cups under the moon. Those images gave readers something to look at and respond to, which made the deck much easier to learn.

Smith was paid a modest fee and received no royalties. For decades the deck was known as the "Rider-Waite," after its publisher and its writer, and her contribution was barely acknowledged. She died in 1951 without recognition for the work. Today the deck is increasingly called the Rider-Waite-Smith or the Smith-Waite, and her small monogram, tucked into the corner of most of the cards, is easy to spot once you know to look.

After 1909

The twentieth century brought a great many new decks, from occult designs to artists' projects. Most keep the same structure: 22 Major Arcana and 56 Minor Arcana in four suits. A great many also echo, directly or loosely, the scenes Smith drew.

Why the history matters

Knowing where tarot came from doesn't make it less useful. If anything, it makes the cards easier to use well. The meanings aren't an ancient code waiting to be cracked. They are a tradition that people have built up, argued over and reinterpreted for more than five centuries, from Milanese card tables to Parisian bookshops to a flat in London.

That is a good reason to read them with both curiosity and a light touch. The images are rich because many people have looked at them carefully. When you sit with a card, you are joining that long conversation, and your own reading of it counts too.