The history of tarot
Tarot began in northern Italy in the 1440s as carte da trionfi, a card game played by the nobility, and only became a tool for divination and reflection roughly three hundred years later in France. The deck you use today, with its familiar imagery on every card, is younger still: it dates to 1909.
Where did tarot cards come from?
Tarot came from Italy, where it started as a game, not a practice. Around 1440, courts in Milan, Ferrara, and Bologna added a fifth suit of 22 illustrated trump cards to the four ordinary suits already used for card games across Europe. The result, carte da trionfi, "cards of triumphs", was a trick-taking game much like bridge, and the trumps outranked the regular suits the way a trump card still does in games today. Wealthy families commissioned hand-painted decks as luxury objects; the Visconti-Sforza deck, made for the ruling family of Milan, is the oldest to survive in any complete form. By the late 1400s the game had a name, tarocchi, and had spread to France, where "tarocchi" became "tarot". For roughly three centuries, no one used these cards to answer a question about their life. They were for play.
When did people start using tarot for divination?
People started reading tarot for meaning in the 1780s, in Paris, once a scholar convinced them the cards held secrets they had never actually held. Antoine Court de Gébelin, writing in 1781, claimed the deck was a surviving fragment of the Book of Thoth, coded Egyptian wisdom smuggled to Europe by Romani travelers. No evidence supports this; Egyptian hieroglyphs would not even be deciphered until decades later. But the story caught the imagination of the age. A card reader working under the name Etteilla ran with it, and by 1791 had published the first deck designed from the ground up for cartomancy, complete with keyword meanings and instructions for laying out a spread. The game had become a practice, built on a myth about its own past that tarot still has not fully shaken off.
How did the occult revival change tarot?
The 19th-century occult revival gave tarot a symbolic system to sit inside, linking each card to astrology, numerology, and the Hebrew alphabet rather than leaving it as a standalone fortune-telling tool. The French magician Éliphas Lévi argued in the 1850s that the 22 trumps corresponded to the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet and to the paths of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, tying tarot to a much older mystical tradition it had never actually belonged to. Decades later, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a British esoteric society active from 1888, built a whole training curriculum around that correspondence. Its members treated tarot as a compressed symbolic language, one where the major arcana mapped a spiritual journey rather than just naming 22 stronger cards in a game. That reframing is the direct ancestor of how tarot gets taught today.
Where does the modern tarot deck come from?
The modern tarot deck comes from a single 1909 project: the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith under the direction of Golden Dawn member Arthur Edward Waite. Earlier decks had richly painted trumps but left the numbered minor arcana as plain, repeated suit symbols, four cups drawn four times over. Smith gave every one of the 78 cards its own small scene: a person, a setting, a moment. That single decision made the minor arcana legible without memorizing a table of keywords, and it is why the deck sold well enough to become the template nearly every deck in the card library still follows, whatever its own artistic style. Waite gave the deck its structure; Smith, working from her own instincts as an illustrator and largely uncredited in her lifetime, gave it the images people actually remember.
What does this history mean for how you read tarot now?
It means the cards were never a fixed oracle handed down from antiquity, they were built, revised, and reinterpreted by real people across five centuries, which is exactly why they work as well as they do for reflection. A game becomes a set of pictures; the pictures become a language for naming what is already on your mind. Reading a card today is closer to the practice Etteilla and the Golden Dawn shaped than to anything genuinely ancient, and that is fine: the value was never in false age, it is in how well 78 images can hold a question you are working through. If you want to put that history to use, the learn hub has guides for reading your first spread with exactly the deck Smith and Waite gave the world.
Frequently asked questions
Is tarot originally an ancient Egyptian system?
No. That idea comes from Antoine Court de Gébelin, an 18th-century French scholar who speculated tarot preserved lost Egyptian wisdom. No evidence supports the claim, but it stuck, and tarot still carries an Egyptian mystique it never earned historically.
Who invented the tarot deck?
No single person did. The deck grew out of ordinary 15th-century Italian card games, and its structure was shaped over centuries by unnamed card makers, then by writers like Etteilla and artists like Pamela Colman Smith. Tarot is closer to a folk tradition than an invention.
What is the oldest surviving tarot deck?
The Visconti-Sforza deck, hand painted for a Milanese ducal family in the mid-1400s, is the earliest tarot deck to survive in any complete form. Several of its cards are now scattered across museum and library collections in Italy and the United States.
Why is the Rider-Waite-Smith deck still the standard?
It was the first widely printed deck to give all 78 cards, not just the trumps, a fully illustrated scene. That made the minor arcana readable at a glance, and nearly every modern deck still borrows its visual grammar.
Did fortune tellers use tarot before the 1700s?
No. For roughly its first three centuries tarot was a trick-taking game played across Italy and France, similar in spirit to bridge. Divinatory use only appears in the historical record from the 1780s onward.