The History of Tarot: From Card Game to Divination

Tarot began in northern Italy in the first half of the 1400s as a deck for a card game, with an extra suit of picture cards that worked as trumps. Its use for fortune telling is only documented from the late 18th century, when French writers recast it as a book of ancient wisdom.

Almost everything else people say about tarot’s origins came later. The Egyptian priests, the wandering Romani fortune tellers and the “thousands of years” all belong to stories told about the cards long after they were invented. The real history is better documented, and in some ways stranger.

This guide follows the cards from Renaissance courts to the deck most people read with today, drawn by Pamela Colman Smith and published in 1909. It sticks to what historians can show, and it says plainly where the evidence runs out. The standard scholarship here is Michael Dummett’s The Game of Tarot (1980) and A Wicked Pack of Cards (1996) by Ronald Decker, Thierry Depaulis and Michael Dummett.

Jump to a section:

• Tarot history timeline
• Before tarot: playing cards reach Europe
• Tarot as a card game
• The occult revival: Egypt, Etteilla and Lévi
• The Golden Dawn and the Rider-Waite-Smith deck
• The Thoth Tarot and the 20th century
• Tarot history myths
• How the suits connect to ordinary playing cards
• Why the history matters when you read
• Frequently asked questions

Tarot History Timeline

Dates before 1700 are often approximate, because they rest on account books, letters and cards that can only be dated by style. Where historians hedge, so does this table.

Date	What happened
Late 1370s	Playing cards reach Europe, most likely from the Mamluk world of Egypt and Syria. Records from 1377 treat them as new.
By the 1440s	The earliest surviving records of trionfi (“triumphs”), cards for a trick-taking game with an extra suit of trumps, in the courts of northern Italy.
Mid-1400s	Hand-painted luxury decks are made for the Visconti and Sforza families of Milan. Several survive in part.
Late 1400s	The Sola Busca deck illustrates every numbered card with a scene, which almost no other early deck does.
Early 1500s	The word tarocchi appears, apparently to tell the game apart from other games with trumps.
1500s to 1700s	The game spreads to France, Switzerland and beyond. The Tarot de Marseille pattern becomes standard (Jean Noblet around 1650, Jean Dodal around 1701, Nicolas Conver in 1760).
1781	Antoine Court de Gébelin, in volume 8 of Le Monde primitif, claims tarot is an ancient Egyptian book. An essay by the Comte de Mellet in the same volume links the trumps to Hebrew letters.
Late 1780s	Etteilla (Jean-Baptiste Alliette) publishes the first deck designed for cartomancy.
1822	Champollion deciphers hieroglyphs. Nothing in Egyptian writing supports the tarot theory.
1850s	Éliphas Lévi ties the 22 trumps to the 22 Hebrew letters and the Kabbalah.
1888	The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn is founded in London.
1909	Rider & Son publish the deck designed under A. E. Waite and drawn by Pamela Colman Smith.
1910	Waite’s The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, illustrated with Smith’s cards.
1938 to 1943	Lady Frieda Harris paints the Thoth Tarot to Aleister Crowley’s design.
1969	The Thoth Tarot is published as a deck, after both its makers had died.
1971	U.S. Games Systems begins publishing the Rider-Waite deck, putting it in bookshops across the United States.

Before Tarot: Playing Cards Reach Europe

Tarot is younger than ordinary playing cards, so its story starts with them. Cards seem to have arrived in Europe in the late 1370s. In 1377 the city of Florence passed a measure dealing with a new game called naibbe, and in the same year a Dominican friar, John of Rheinfelden, described card games in a Latin treatise. Both treat cards as a novelty.

The most likely source is the Mamluk Sultanate, which ruled Egypt and Syria. A near-complete Mamluk pack from the 15th century survives in the Topkapı Palace Museum in Istanbul. It has four suits: cups, coins, swords and polo sticks. Each suit has ten numbered cards and three court cards, and the courts show names and patterns rather than people.

Europeans kept the structure and changed the details. Polo meant little in Italy, so the polo sticks became batons or staves. The courts became human figures: a king and two male officers below him. The Spanish word for cards, naipes, and the Italian naibi probably come from the Arabic nā’ib, a deputy, which was the title of one of the Mamluk court cards.

So by around 1400, Italians already had packs with four suits of cups, coins, swords and batons. Those are the four suits you still find in tarot, under the names Cups, Pentacles, Swords and Wands. Tarot was built on top of that pack.

Tarot as a Card Game

Trionfi: the extra suit

Some time in the first half of the 15th century, someone in northern Italy added a fifth suit of picture cards to the ordinary pack. These cards beat any card of the other suits, so a player could win a trick with one. They were called trionfi, “triumphs”. The English word “trump” comes from the same root.

The earliest surviving records date from the 1440s, in northern Italian cities such as Ferrara and Florence. They mention cards being bought, painted or given as gifts. Nobody knows who first had the idea or exactly where, and nobody knows its exact date.

The pictures drew on familiar images of the time: the virtues, the planets, rulers, Death, Love and the Wheel of Fortune that preachers and painters used constantly. To players, they were a ranking order. A card showing the Sun beat one showing the Moon, much as a king beats a queen.

Early Italian decks print no numbers on the trumps. Players learned the order by heart, and it differed from city to city. Dummett sorted the surviving orders into three regional families. The number of trumps seems to have settled at 21, plus a separate card, the Fool, giving the 22 cards now called the Major Arcana. Florence went its own way with minchiate, a larger variant of 97 cards with extra trumps for the virtues, the elements and the signs of the zodiac.

The trumps had different names then. The Magician was the Bagatto, a street performer or trickster. The High Priestess and The Hierophant were the Popess and the Pope. The Lovers was simply Love. The figure later called The Hanged Man is often listed as the Traitor in early Italian sources.

The Visconti-Sforza cards

The oldest tarot cards that survive are hand-painted luxury decks made in the mid-15th century for the ruling families of Milan. Filippo Maria Visconti was Duke of Milan until 1447. Francesco Sforza married his daughter, Bianca Maria, and became duke in 1450. The cards carry their family emblems, gold leaf and fine costume detail.

Several such decks survive, and none is complete. The best-known set is split between the Morgan Library in New York and collections in Bergamo, and four of its cards are missing, including The Devil and The Tower.

The Sola Busca deck

The Sola Busca deck, from the late 15th century, is usually described as the oldest complete tarot pack that survives, and it’s unusual. Its trumps show figures from ancient history and legend rather than the standard subjects. More importantly for later readers, it illustrates every numbered card with a scene. Most early decks simply show the right number of cups, coins, swords or batons.

That detail mattered four centuries later. Pamela Colman Smith seems to have known the Sola Busca designs, which the British Museum had in photographs from the early 1900s. Her Three of Swords, a heart pierced by three swords, closely echoes the Sola Busca card.

From trionfi to tarocchi

“Trionfi” became a general word for trump games, so a new name appeared for this one. The word tarocchi is first found in the early 16th century. Where it comes from is unknown. The French form, tarot, is the one that reached English.

The Tarot de Marseille and a game still played

The game spread north and west, probably helped by the French occupation of Milan from 1499. It took root in France and Switzerland, and later in Austria, Germany and much of central Europe.

By the 17th and 18th centuries one design had become standard in France and Switzerland: the pattern now called the Tarot de Marseille. Jean Noblet’s deck from around 1650 in Paris, Jean Dodal’s from around 1701 in Lyon and Nicolas Conver’s from 1760 in Marseille are the famous surviving examples. These decks number the trumps in Roman numerals and give them French names. The Tower is La Maison Dieu. Card XIII, Death, usually carries no name at all.

In the Marseille order, Justice is VIII and Strength is XI.

Tarot card games never died out. French tarot is widely played in France today, with three “oudlers” (the 1, the 21 and the Fool, called the Excuse) that help decide the score. Austrians play Tarock, and versions survive in parts of Italy. Most of these game packs use French suits and trumps showing everyday scenes, not the Marseille pictures.

For about 350 years, then, tarot was a game. Nothing from that period shows the cards in regular use for divination. Historians point to a few earlier scraps, such as a Bolognese note from around 1750 listing meanings for some cards, but fortune telling with tarot only becomes clearly documented in the 1780s.

The Occult Revival: Egypt, Etteilla and Lévi

Court de Gébelin and the Egyptian idea

In 1781 Antoine Court de Gébelin, a French Protestant pastor and scholar, published volume 8 of his vast work Le Monde primitif. In it he claimed the tarot was the surviving Book of Thoth, the wisdom of ancient Egyptian priests, hidden in a game so that it would pass down the centuries unnoticed. He derived “tarot” from supposed Egyptian words meaning “royal road”.

The same volume printed an essay by the Comte de Mellet. It linked the 22 trumps to the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet and sketched a way of telling fortunes with the cards.

None of it had evidence behind it. Nobody could read hieroglyphs in 1781. Once Jean-François Champollion deciphered them in 1822, Egyptian texts became readable, and nothing in them mentions tarot or anything like it. The idea had already caught on, though, and it never fully went away.

Etteilla: the first fortune-telling deck

Jean-Baptiste Alliette, who wrote as Etteilla (his surname backwards), was a Parisian who made his living from cartomancy. He had already published a method of fortune telling with an ordinary piquet pack. After Court de Gébelin he turned to tarot, publishing books on it from the 1780s, and in the late 1780s he issued the first deck designed specifically for divination.

Etteilla rearranged the cards and printed meanings on them, upright and reversed. Many of the divinatory meanings that passed into later books, and the habit of reading cards differently upside down, run back through this French cartomancy tradition.

Éliphas Lévi and the Kabbalah

The next big step came in the 1850s. Éliphas Lévi, the pen name of the French writer Alphonse-Louis Constant, set out a magical system in Dogme et rituel de la haute magie. He developed the Hebrew-letter link into a full scheme: the 22 trumps matched the 22 Hebrew letters and the paths of the Kabbalah’s Tree of Life.

Lévi placed The Fool near the end of the sequence, between the trumps numbered 20 and 21. Later English occultists moved it to the start. Readers still argue about where the Fool belongs.

The Golden Dawn and the Rider-Waite-Smith Deck

A complete system of correspondences

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was founded in London in 1888. It was a small magical society, and tarot sat at the centre of its teaching. Members learned a dense web of links: each Major to a Hebrew letter and a planet, sign or element, each suit to an element, and each numbered card from 2 to 10 to a ten-degree slice of the zodiac.

The Golden Dawn also made a change that still shows in most decks. To make the Majors follow the order of the zodiac, with Leo before Libra, it swapped Strength (Leo) and Justice (Libra). Strength became 8 and Justice 11. If you want the details, the zodiac tarot cards guide sets out every link.

Waite and Smith

Arthur Edward Waite and Pamela Colman Smith were both members. Waite was a prolific writer on mysticism and magic. Smith was an artist, illustrator and stage designer, born in London in 1878 to American parents.

In 1909 the London publisher William Rider & Son issued a new 78-card deck, designed under Waite’s direction and drawn by Smith. It kept the Golden Dawn numbering, with Strength at 8. Waite’s guide to the cards followed, and the illustrated version, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, is dated 1910.

The big change was in the Minor Arcana. Instead of eight cups or five coins in a row, Smith drew a scene on every one of the 40 numbered cards. That idea had almost no precedent beyond the Sola Busca. It’s why a beginner can look at the Five of Cups or the Three of Swords and get a feel for the meaning without a book.

How much of each design came from Waite and how much from Smith isn’t fully known. It’s widely thought that Waite specified the Majors closely and left Smith more freedom with the Minors. She signed many cards with her small monogram. For decades the deck was called the “Rider-Waite” and her name was left off, which is why many readers now say Rider-Waite-Smith or Smith-Waite. Smith died in 1951, having received little credit for the work in her lifetime.

The Thoth Tarot and the 20th Century

The other great occult deck of the century came from Aleister Crowley, another former member of the Golden Dawn. Crowley designed it and Lady Frieda Harris painted it, between 1938 and 1943. Crowley’s The Book of Thoth, explaining the system, came out in 1944.

The deck itself wasn’t published until 1969, after both Crowley and Harris had died. It renames several cards: Strength becomes Lust, Temperance becomes Art and Judgement becomes the Aeon. Its suits use Disks rather than Pentacles, and its court cards are Knight, Queen, Prince and Princess.

In the English-speaking world, though, the Rider-Waite-Smith deck won. From 1971 U.S. Games Systems published it widely in the United States, and it became the deck most English-language books were written around. Most modern decks, including many that look nothing like it, still follow its structure: scenes on the pips, Strength at 8, and Waite’s titles for the cards.

Tarot History Myths

“Tarot comes from ancient Egypt”

No. This idea starts with Court de Gébelin in 1781, and he had no evidence for it. The earliest tarot cards are Italian, from the 15th century, and they show Christian and classical subjects of that time. Egyptian writing, once it could be read, says nothing about tarot. Plenty of decks use Egyptian imagery today, and that’s an artistic choice, not a record of origins.

“Tarot was brought to Europe by the Romani”

There’s no evidence for this either. Romani groups are recorded in western Europe from the early 15th century, but playing cards were already there by the 1370s, and tarot developed in Italian courts. The link was proposed by 19th-century French writers, and the occultist Papus spread it in Le Tarot des Bohémiens (1889). Fortune telling with cards later became associated with Romani people in popular imagination, but that doesn’t make them the source of tarot.

“Tarot is thousands of years old”

The evidence puts tarot in the first half of the 15th century, and divinatory tarot in the late 18th. That makes the game around 580 years old and the reading tradition about 240.

“The Church banned tarot”

What’s documented is more ordinary. City authorities across Europe regulated or banned card games and gambling from the 14th century onwards, Florence’s 1377 measure among them. Preachers attacked cards and dice, and Bernardino of Siena is famous for sermons that led to bonfires of cards and other “vanities”. A late 15th-century sermon condemns the trumps by name, alongside dice.

What isn’t documented is a Church-wide ban on tarot as such. Many of these rules targeted gambling in general, and tarot was played openly at court. Today the Catholic Church rejects divination of all kinds, which is a separate matter from the history of the game.

How the Suits Connect to Ordinary Playing Cards

Tarot and an ordinary pack of cards are cousins. Both descend from the Italian four-suit pack of the late 1300s. Italian and Spanish cards kept the old suit signs, while France developed hearts, diamonds, clubs and spades in the second half of the 15th century.

Tarot suit (Rider-Waite-Smith)	Older Italian and Spanish suit	Usual French and English match
Wands	Batons (bastoni, bastos)	Clubs
Cups	Cups (coppe, copas)	Hearts
Swords	Swords (spade, espadas)	Spades
Pentacles	Coins (denari, oros)	Diamonds

The matches in the right-hand column are a convention used by readers of ordinary cards, not a historical descent. The English names give part of the game away, though. “Spades” almost certainly comes from the Italian and Spanish words for swords, and “clubs” translates the batons.

“Pentacles” is an occult-revival name. Older tarot decks show coins, and the Thoth deck calls the suit Disks.

The court cards differ too. Tarot has four per suit: King, Queen, Knight and Page. The French pack dropped the knight and kept King, Queen and Jack. Traditional Italian and Spanish packs went the other way and kept King, Knight and Jack, with no Queen. The guide to the tarot court cards covers how those 16 cards are read.

What about the Joker? It isn’t a straight descendant of The Fool. The Joker appeared in American packs in the 19th century, as an extra trump for the game of euchre. They look alike, but no documented line runs from one to the other.

Why the History Matters When You Read

The meanings most people use today don’t come from ancient Egypt or from the Renaissance players who invented the game. They come mainly from the French cartomancers of the late 1700s, the Golden Dawn’s system, Waite’s book and, above all, Smith’s pictures. When a card page here says the Three of Swords means heartbreak, that reading leans on Golden Dawn teaching, which called the card the Lord of Sorrow, and on Smith’s picture of a pierced heart.

That’s fine. A tradition doesn’t need to be ancient to be rich. Smith’s scenes give each card a small story you can step into, and that is a large part of why tarot works as a tool for reflection. Several practical things follow from the history:

• Numbering differs by deck. If your deck puts Justice at 8, it comes from the Marseille line. Neither order is wrong. The Fool’s Journey guide shows how the story reads both ways.
• Reversals are a convention. Upside-down meanings come from the cartomancy tradition. Many readers use them and many don’t, and both are legitimate choices.
• The Minors read through their pictures. On Marseille-style decks, the pips show only symbols, so readers lean on number and suit. The Minor Arcana guide covers both ways in.
• The Majors carry the occult layer. The links to letters, planets and signs were added in the 18th and 19th centuries. They’re useful if you enjoy them, and optional if you don’t.

Knowing the history means that when you say “this card traditionally means”, you know which tradition you mean. The Major Arcana guide and the list of all 78 card meanings both follow the Rider-Waite-Smith tradition described here.

Draw a Card from Smith’s Deck

The cards below are the Rider-Waite-Smith designs, the deck Smith drew in 1909. Draw one and read it the way the 20th century taught us: look at the picture first, then check the meaning.

If the card you drew is a Minor, notice how much the scene tells you before you read a word. That’s Smith’s contribution at work. For a fuller reading, try the three-card spread, or learn the basics in how to read tarot cards.

Frequently Asked Questions