History of the Tarot: From 15th-Century Italian Cards to Divination

← Back to Major topics

Before the tarot: the arrival of playing cards

Playing cards reached Europe in the second half of the 14th century, probably through the Mediterranean world. At first they were painted by hand and reserved for wealthy circles. The packs had four suits, as our modern decks do: the so-called Latin suits (wands, cups, swords, coins) are those of Italy and Spain, and they are the ones found in the tarot.

The tarot emerged when a supplementary series of allegorical figures that “triumph” over the other cards was added to these four suits. In Italian these cards are called trionfi, “triumphs” (the same idea as the English trump; the French word atout, by contrast, comes from the phrase “à tout”). The tarot was therefore first a court parlour game, in which tricks were won with these triumphs.

Northern Italy, 15th century: the game of trionfi

The earliest documents date from the 1440s. A text from the court of Florence, in 1440, mentions two decks of “triumph” cards handed to Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta. In the same decade, traces of them turn up in Milan, Ferrara and Bologna. A humanist, Martiano da Tortona, also describes a deck of painted figure cards made for the Duke of Milan, Filippo Maria Visconti, around 1418–1425; it is lost.

The oldest surviving decks are the Visconti-Sforza tarots, painted in Milan in the mid-15th century for the families who ruled the duchy. The cards are largely preserved in three collections: the Accademia Carrara and the Colleoni collection in Bergamo, and the Morgan Library in New York. Their precise dating varies between specialists (from 1442–1447 to around 1460), and they are attributed to the workshop of the painter Bonifacio Bembo. The cards are sumptuous: gold backgrounds, figures in court dress.

The word tarocchi appears only somewhat later (around 1502 in Brescia) to designate these games; its origin is uncertain. In the 16th century the game spread to France, Switzerland and eastern Europe. It remained first and foremost a game: this is still the case with the French tarot, played by four or five players, and with several regional games across Europe.

The Marseille model

In France, the design became fixed in a model now called the Tarot de Marseille. The oldest surviving decks of this type are by Jean Noblet (Paris, around 1650; one complete set is known at the Bibliothèque nationale de France) and Jean Dodal (Lyon, early 18th century). Philippe Vachier produced a deck in Marseille in 1639, the earliest made in that city according to the available syntheses. In 1760, Nicolas Conver, in Marseille, engraved a deck that became famous.

It must be stressed: for all these makers, the tarot was a card game. No certain document shows that it was used to foretell the future before the end of the 18th century.

The tarot as a game, yesterday and today

This is often forgotten: the tarot has never stopped being a game. In France, tarot is played with a pack of 78 cards, by three, four or five players, counting the points of the “bouts” (the Petit, the 21 and the Excuse). The game has evolved: around 1900 the “tarot nouveau” appeared, whose cards are illustrated with scenes from everyday life and whose figures are double-headed, designed for play rather than symbolic reading. In Italy several regional variants are still played, notably in Bologna and Piedmont. In Austria, Hungary and central Europe, people play Tarock.

This continuity of the game tradition has one consequence: the tarot images were not first conceived as a secret book, but as figures easy to recognise around a table — familiar characters of medieval society (the Pope, the Emperor, the Lovers, the Hermit) and moral allegories (Justice, Temperance, Strength). Reading them today as symbols remains legitimate, provided one knows that this reading was added later.

1781: the invention of an Egyptian past

The turning point came in Paris in 1781. Antoine Court de Gébelin, a Protestant scholar and Freemason, published in volume VIII of his vast work Le Monde primitif a chapter on the tarot game. He asserted, without proof, that the cards were a very ancient Egyptian book, the Book of Thoth, which priests had disguised as a game in order to save their knowledge. He also suggested that the word tarot came from Egyptian. This was a construct of its time, fed by fascination with Egypt (hieroglyphs would not be deciphered until 1822, by Champollion). No Egyptian card or document supports this idea.

Jean-Baptiste Alliette, a Parisian who called himself Etteilla (his name read backwards), seized the idea. He had already published in 1770 a treatise on divination using an ordinary 32-card pack. In the 1780s he published books on the tarot and proposed, around 1789, the first deck designed for divination, whose order and images were changed. The exact date of his manual varies between sources (1783 or 1785).

The tarot, until then a game, thus became an instrument of cartomancy and occult speculation.

19th century: the tarot of the occultists

In the 19th century, the French occultist Éliphas Lévi (real name Alphonse-Louis Constant) linked the 22 major arcana to the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet and to the Kabbalah, in his works of the 1850s. In 1863, Paul Christian popularised the words “arcana” and “lames” (“blades”, i.e. cards) in this context. In 1889, Papus published Le Tarot des Bohémiens, and Oswald Wirth published his own tarot. English and French initiatory orders, including the Golden Dawn, founded in 1888, integrated the tarot into a system of correspondences (astrology, elements, Hebrew letters).

These associations (tarot, Kabbalah, astrology) are occult constructions, interesting to those who study them, but they do not reflect the original history of the game.

1909 and after: Rider-Waite-Smith, Thoth and the contemporary tarot

In December 1909, the house of William Rider & Son published in London a deck designed by Arthur Edward Waite, a member of the Golden Dawn, and illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith. For the first time, all the number cards are illustrated with scenes. This innovation made it the easiest deck to interpret for beginners, and it became the model for tens of thousands of variants. The American publisher U.S. Games Systems distributed it from 1971 on, just as the New Age movement took an interest in the tarot.

Aleister Crowley and the painter Lady Frieda Harris, for their part, designed the Thoth tarot, painted in the late 1930s and early 1940s; Crowley published his Book of Thoth in 1944, but the deck was not printed until 1969, after his death. Meanwhile, in France, players switched to the “tarot nouveau” around 1900, leaving the Marseille model mainly for divinatory use. The 20th century also saw the emergence of psychological readings of the tarot, which regard it as a mirror of the person, notably after Carl Gustav Jung's work on archetypes.

What historians take away

Common idea	What we know
The tarot comes from Egypt	No evidence; a hypothesis put forward in 1781 by Court de Gébelin.
The tarot was created by Bohemians	A 19th-century idea, with no historical basis.
The tarot has always been used for divination	Born as a game in the 1440s; divinatory use is attested only at the end of the 18th century.
The 22 major arcana are linked to the Kabbalah	A comparison made by Éliphas Lévi in the 19th century.
The Marseille tarot is the oldest	The Italian decks of the 15th century are older; the Marseille is a French model of the 17th century.

The British historian Michael Dummett established, in work published from the 1980s onwards, that the tarot is above all an Italian game of the 15th century. This takes nothing away from the value the tarot holds today as a support for reflection and symbolism. To choose a deck, see Marseille or Rider-Waite-Smith. For the place of the tarot among other practices, see the history of divination.

Frequently asked questions

Also read

The meanings mentioned belong to tradition and symbolism. They are neither promises of results nor medical advice. Back to Major topics.