The History of Tarot

Tarot has existed for over six hundred years, but it has not always been what it is today. The cards that modern readers use for divination, self-reflection, and spiritual growth began their life as a card game played by Italian aristocrats. The transformation from parlor entertainment to esoteric tool happened gradually, driven by a series of occultists, scholars, and artists who saw in the cards something their original creators never intended.

Understanding tarot’s history deepens your relationship with the cards. It reveals that much of what we consider ancient tradition is, in fact, surprisingly modern, and that the meanings we work with today are the result of centuries of reinterpretation, cultural exchange, and creative reimagination.

Origins: Playing Cards in Medieval Europe

Playing cards arrived in Europe in the late 14th century, most likely through trade routes from the Islamic world. By the 1370s, they were widespread enough that multiple European cities had issued bans against card games, a reliable sign of popularity.

The earliest tarot cards appeared in northern Italy during the first half of the 15th century. Known as carte da trionfi, or “cards of triumphs,” they were created as an addition to the existing four-suit playing card deck. The trionfi were a set of illustrated trump cards, typically 22 in number, that were added to the standard 56-card pack to create a new game.

The oldest surviving tarot cards are the Visconti-Sforza decks, commissioned by the ruling families of Milan around the 1440s and 1450s. These are lavishly hand-painted works of art, gilded with gold leaf, featuring imagery drawn from Christian symbolism, classical mythology, and the courtly culture of the Italian Renaissance. They were luxury objects, not mystical tools.

The game played with these cards, which eventually became known as tarocchi, was a trick-taking game similar to modern bridge. The trump cards, which included figures like The Fool, The Pope, The Emperor, and Death, outranked the suited cards. Players collected tricks, and the triumph cards served as a permanent trump suit. There was nothing divinatory about the original use. The imagery was symbolic in the same way that all Renaissance art was symbolic: rich with cultural meaning but not intended as a tool for reading the future.

The game spread from Italy to France, where it became known as tarot, the name that stuck. Throughout the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries, tarot was played across Europe as a popular card game. In some regions, particularly in continental Europe, it is still played as a game today.

From Game to Divination

The shift from game to divination tool began in the 18th century, primarily in France. The pivotal figure was Antoine Court de Gebelin, a French clergyman and Freemason who published a series of essays in the 1780s claiming that the tarot was of ancient Egyptian origin.

Court de Gebelin argued that the Major Arcana images encoded the secret wisdom of the Egyptian god Thoth and that the cards were the surviving remnants of the legendary Book of Thoth. He proposed that Romani travelers, who he incorrectly believed came from Egypt, had carried the cards to Europe, preserving esoteric knowledge that would otherwise have been lost.

Nearly all of Court de Gebelin’s claims were historically wrong. Tarot did not come from Egypt. The cards were created in Renaissance Italy. Romani people did not originate in Egypt. The Book of Thoth, as he described it, did not exist. But his theories were enormously influential. They captured the imagination of the French occult community and set in motion a tradition of esoteric tarot interpretation that would grow for the next two centuries.

Shortly after Court de Gebelin’s publications, a French occultist known as Etteilla became the first known person to use tarot cards specifically for divination. Etteilla, born Jean-Baptiste Alliette, published the first tarot divination guide in 1785 and created the first deck designed explicitly for fortune-telling rather than gaming. He assigned divinatory meanings to each card and developed a system of card spreads for readings.

In the mid-19th century, the French occultist Eliphas Levi deepened the esoteric foundations of tarot by connecting the 22 Major Arcana cards to the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet and, through that connection, to the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. Levi did not create a tarot deck, but his theoretical framework became foundational for virtually all Western occult tarot traditions that followed. His work linked tarot permanently to the broader tradition of Western esotericism, including Hermeticism, alchemy, and ceremonial magic.

The Golden Dawn and Modern Tarot

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a secret society founded in London in 1888, was perhaps the single most influential force in shaping modern tarot as we know it. The Golden Dawn drew together ceremonial magic, Kabbalah, astrology, alchemy, and tarot into an integrated initiatory system. Members studied tarot as part of their grade work, and the Order developed detailed correspondences between the cards and other esoteric systems.

Several Golden Dawn members went on to create tarot decks that would define the modern tradition. Arthur Edward Waite, a scholar and mystic within the Order, collaborated with artist Pamela Colman Smith to produce what is now known as the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, published in 1909. Aleister Crowley, another Golden Dawn initiate who went on to found his own magical order, worked with artist Lady Frieda Harris to create the Thoth Tarot, completed in the 1940s and published in 1969.

The Golden Dawn’s most lasting contribution was systematizing the correspondences between tarot cards and other symbolic systems. The astrological, elemental, and Kabbalistic associations that modern readers take for granted, such as The Emperor corresponding to Aries or the suit of Cups corresponding to the element of Water, largely trace back to Golden Dawn teachings. These correspondences transformed tarot from a set of cards with individual meanings into an interconnected symbolic map of the universe.

The Rider-Waite-Smith Revolution

Of all the tarot decks created in the past six centuries, the Rider-Waite-Smith, published by the Rider Company in London in 1909, has had the greatest impact. This deck fundamentally changed how people interact with tarot cards.

Before the RWS deck, the Minor Arcana cards in most tarot decks were pip cards, showing simple arrangements of suit symbols. The Five of Swords would depict five swords arranged in a pattern, similar to how a Five of Spades in a standard playing card deck shows five spades. Readers had to rely on memorized meanings or numerological associations to interpret these cards because the images themselves offered little narrative content.

Arthur Edward Waite’s key innovation was instructing Pamela Colman Smith to create fully illustrated scenes for all 78 cards, including every pip card in the Minor Arcana. The Five of Swords in the RWS deck shows a figure gathering swords while two other figures walk away in defeat. The Three of Cups shows three women dancing together in celebration. Each card tells a visual story.

This change was revolutionary because it made tarot intuitively accessible. A reader could look at the image on any card and immediately begin interpreting the scene, drawing meaning from the figures, their postures, the landscape, and the symbolic details. The visual narrative approach opened tarot to a vastly wider audience and made self-study possible in a way it had never been before.

Pamela Colman Smith’s contribution to tarot history cannot be overstated. Although she was credited only as “the artist” for decades and received a flat fee rather than royalties, her imagery defined the visual language of modern tarot. The vast majority of tarot decks published today are either direct derivatives of her illustrations or are influenced by her approach of fully illustrated Minor Arcana scenes.

Tarot in the 20th and 21st Century

The mid-20th century saw tarot move from the margins of occult practice into broader cultural awareness. The counterculture movements of the 1960s and 1970s, with their interest in alternative spirituality, Eastern philosophy, and expanded consciousness, created a receptive audience for tarot. The cards fit naturally alongside astrology, meditation, the I Ching, and other tools that the counterculture embraced.

The New Age movement of the 1980s and 1990s further expanded tarot’s reach. During this period, tarot began to be framed less as fortune-telling and more as a tool for personal growth, psychological self-exploration, and spiritual development. Writers like Mary K. Greer, Rachel Pollack, and others published influential works that approached tarot through the lenses of Jungian psychology, feminist spirituality, and myth. This reframing made tarot respectable in circles that might have dismissed it as superstition.

The proliferation of new deck designs accelerated dramatically in the late 20th century. Where once there were a handful of decks available, the market expanded to include hundreds and eventually thousands of unique tarot decks, each reinterpreting the 78-card structure through different artistic styles, cultural perspectives, and thematic lenses. Decks emerged representing diverse traditions, identities, and aesthetics, from minimalist geometric designs to decks centered on specific mythologies, from queer-inclusive imagery to decks rooted in African, Asian, and Indigenous spiritual traditions.

The digital age has transformed tarot once again. Online communities, social media, and YouTube have created a global conversation about tarot that transcends geographic and cultural boundaries. Readers share spreads, techniques, and interpretations with audiences of thousands or millions. Tarot apps bring the practice to smartphones, allowing people to engage with the cards without owning a physical deck. Digital platforms have also democratized tarot education, making high-quality instruction available to anyone with an internet connection.

Today, tarot exists simultaneously as a card game still played in parts of Europe, a tool for psychological reflection and personal development, a spiritual practice, an art form, a component of professional counseling and coaching, and a thriving online content category. It has proven remarkably adaptable, absorbing new cultural influences and interpretive frameworks while retaining the 78-card structure that has persisted since the Renaissance.

The history of tarot is not a straight line from ancient wisdom to modern practice. It is a story of reinvention, of creative misunderstanding producing genuine insight, of a system flexible enough to carry whatever meaning each generation brings to it. The cards on your table today are connected to 15th-century Italian aristocrats, 18th-century French mystics, Victorian secret societies, countercultural seekers, and a global digital community, all at once.

Frequently Asked Questions

Were tarot cards really used for divination in ancient Egypt?

No. This is a myth that originated with Antoine Court de Gebelin in the 1780s and has persisted in popular culture ever since. Tarot cards were created in 15th-century Italy as a card game. There is no evidence linking them to ancient Egypt, the Book of Thoth, or any pre-medieval civilization. The Egyptian origin story was compelling but entirely fabricated. Modern historians and tarot scholars universally agree on the Italian gaming origins of tarot.

Who was Pamela Colman Smith?

Pamela Colman Smith was the British artist who illustrated the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot deck, published in 1909. She was a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and created the artwork under the direction of Arthur Edward Waite. Despite creating what became the most influential and widely reproduced tarot deck in history, she received little recognition or financial compensation during her lifetime. She was paid a flat fee for the illustrations and received no royalties from sales. She died in relative obscurity in 1951. In recent years, there has been a significant effort within the tarot community to restore her name to the deck’s title and recognize her as the creative force behind the imagery that defines modern tarot.

Is there a “correct” or “original” way to read tarot?

No single method can claim to be the original or correct way to read tarot, because the cards were not designed for divination in the first place. The earliest tarot card games had no divinatory component. Every system of tarot interpretation that exists today was developed after the fact, layered onto a structure that was originally created for entertainment. This is not a weakness. It means that tarot is an inherently open system. The Golden Dawn correspondences, Jungian psychological readings, intuitive approaches, and countless other methods are all valid frameworks that different traditions have developed over time. The best approach is whichever one produces meaningful and useful readings for you.

Before you buy your first deck, it is worth understanding the difference between tarot and oracle cards — two tools that look similar but work on very different principles.