To shuffle a deck of tarot is to hold something far older than you might think, and far younger than the legends claim. The history of tarot is not a straight line from an ancient temple to your kitchen table. It is a stranger, richer story: a Renaissance card game that drifted, over three centuries, into the hands of dreamers who saw something sacred in the pictures. The cards came first. The meaning came later. That order matters, and once you understand it, the whole deck reads differently.
So where did tarot come from? Not from the pyramids, and not from the road. Tarot began in the courts of northern Italy in the 1400s, as a game played for pleasure. The mystical tarot we recognise today, with its keys and correspondences and quiet sense of fate, was layered on top much later, by writers and esotericists who reimagined an old pack of cards as a book of wisdom. This is the true history, told honestly, and it is far more beautiful than the myth. Pour something warm, and let us follow the cards back to their beginning.
The True Beginning: A Renaissance Card Game
The earliest tarot cards were not made for divination. They were made for play. In the first half of the 15th century, in the wealthy duchies of northern Italy, an existing four-suit deck (cups, coins, swords and batons, much like ordinary playing cards) was expanded with a parade of allegorical picture cards. These additions were called trionfi, meaning triumphs, and the new deck became known as carte da trionfi, the cards of triumphs. The earliest known written reference to trionfi cards dates to 16 September 1440, recorded by a Florentine notary.
Those triumph cards are the ancestors of what we now call the Major Arcana. They were trumps in the literal sense: a special suit that outranked the others in a trick-taking game. Over the following century the name drifted from trionfi to tarocchi in Italian, and later to tarot in French. For roughly three hundred years, that is what tarot was: a sophisticated card game enjoyed across Italy, France and beyond, with no settled tradition of fortune-telling attached to it at all.
The Visconti-Sforza Decks: The Oldest Tarot We Can Touch
The most famous survivors from this era are the Visconti-Sforza decks, a group of luxurious hand-painted packs commissioned by the ruling families of Milan around the middle of the 15th century. They are widely regarded as among the oldest surviving tarot cards in the world. Many were produced in or around the workshop of the painter Bonifacio Bembo, gilded and detailed like miniature Renaissance paintings, because they were objects of status as much as instruments of a game.
These cards are not relics of a secret order. They are aristocratic treasures, and you can still see them today. Surviving cards from the most complete set are divided between the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo, a private collection, and the Morgan Library and Museum in New York. When you look at a modern deck, you are looking at the great-great-grandchildren of these courtly Italian cards.
It is worth pausing on what these decks were for. They carried the same four suits a modern reader still recognises, cups, coins, swords and batons, plus a set of trump images: figures such as the Emperor, the Wheel of Fortune, Death and the Star, painted in gold leaf and rich pigment. To a 15th-century player these were the high cards of a game, beautiful but functional, shuffled and dealt rather than laid out in spreads. The imagery drew on the everyday symbolism of the age, allegories of virtue, fortune and the cosmos that any educated person of the time would have read at a glance. The cards spoke a visual language, but it was the shared language of Renaissance art, not a hidden code. That distinction is the whole point of the early history: the pictures were always meaningful, but they were not yet meant to tell your fortune.
The 18th-Century Reinvention: Tarot Becomes Mystical
For about three centuries, then, tarot was a game. The shift came in 1781, in Paris, with a French scholar named Antoine Court de Gebelin. In a volume of his sprawling encyclopaedia Le Monde Primitif, he announced that tarot was no ordinary pack of cards at all, but a survival of ancient Egyptian wisdom: the lost Book of Thoth, smuggled into Europe in the disguise of a game. He offered no evidence. Egyptian hieroglyphs had not even been deciphered yet. But the idea was intoxicating, and it stuck.
Close behind him came a Parisian occultist who wrote under the name Etteilla (Jean-Baptiste Alliette). From the 1780s he built a whole practice around reading the cards, publishing interpretation guides and producing a tarot designed specifically for divination. He is often described as the first professional tarot reader known to history. With de Gebelin and Etteilla, the cards crossed a threshold: in a single generation, a game became an oracle. If you are curious how those divinatory meanings settled onto individual cards, our guide to the Major Arcana meanings traces that thread forward.
The Occult Turn: Eliphas Levi and the Kabbalah
The next great layer was added in the mid-19th century by the French writer Eliphas Levi (born Alphonse Louis Constant). In his influential work Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, published in the 1850s, Levi linked tarot to the Kabbalah, the mystical tradition of Jewish thought. He matched the 22 trump cards to the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet and to the paths of the Tree of Life.
It is worth being honest here: this connection was Levi's own creation, not an inherited secret, though he presented it as ancient truth. Yet its influence was enormous. By weaving tarot into a wider esoteric framework, Levi transformed it from a curiosity into a serious system of symbolic correspondence. Almost every mystical reading of tarot since has passed through the door he opened. This is the moment the cards stopped being merely pictures and started being understood as a map.
The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn
Levi's ideas flowed into the most important esoteric society of the era: the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, founded in London in 1888. The Golden Dawn took the loose threads of de Gebelin, Etteilla and Levi and wove them into a complete, internally consistent system. Each card was assigned astrological, elemental and Kabbalistic correspondences, all taught as part of the order's initiatory curriculum.
This matters because the two people who would create the most famous tarot deck in the world were both members of the Golden Dawn. The modern intuitive reading of tarot, the sense that every card sits within a web of meaning, is largely the Golden Dawn's inheritance, refined and made visible in the deck we are about to meet. By the close of the 19th century, then, four layers had settled onto the cards: the Renaissance game, the Egyptian legend, the Kabbalistic framework, and the structured occult system. None had erased the one before. Tarot had simply gathered meaning, the way an old house gathers rooms.
1909: The Rider-Waite-Smith Deck Changes Everything
In 1909, in London, the scholar and Golden Dawn member Arthur Edward Waite commissioned an artist and fellow member, Pamela Colman Smith, to illustrate a new tarot. The result, first published by William Rider and Son, became the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, and it quietly rewrote how the world reads tarot.
Its great innovation was the Minor Arcana. In nearly every earlier deck, the numbered pip cards were plain arrangements of suit symbols, like the number cards in an ordinary pack. Smith, working from Waite's notes for the trumps and largely her own intuition for the pips, illustrated all 56 Minor Arcana cards with full narrative scenes: a figure turning away from spilled cups, a sleepless mind sitting up in bed, a labourer surveying his work. This was the first widely published deck to give every single card a complete picture to read. It is no exaggeration to say that the way most people read tarot today, by reading the image, begins with her brush. Smith's contribution is so central that we devoted a whole piece to Pamela Colman Smith alone. Her scenes are why our guides to cards like The Fool and The Magician can speak so much through imagery, and why the rest of the Minor Arcana rewards close looking.
Retiring the Myths: Egypt and the Romani
Two romantic stories still cling to tarot, and both deserve a gentle, factual retirement. The first is the Egyptian origin, born with Court de Gebelin. There is simply no evidence that tarot came from ancient Egypt; the claim predates any ability to even read Egyptian writing. Remarkably, one of the people most responsible for the modern mystical deck said so plainly. In The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1911), A. E. Waite wrote: “We have now seen that there is no particle of evidence for the Egyptian origin of Tarot cards.” He was equally blunt about the cards' age, concluding: “I end, therefore, the history of this subject by repeating that it has no history prior to the fourteenth century, when the first rumours were heard concerning cards.”
The second myth credits the Romani people with bringing tarot to Europe. This too does not hold up: tarot appears in Italian records as a courtly game well before any documented link between the Romani and these particular cards, and serious historians of playing cards, such as the scholar Michael Dummett, traced the deck's true origin firmly to 15th-century Italy. Letting these legends go costs us nothing. The honest history, of artists and scholars and a Renaissance card table, is the more wondrous tale.
How Tarot Reached You
From the Visconti courts to a London studio in 1909, tarot travelled five centuries to arrive in your hands. The Rider-Waite-Smith deck spread across the English-speaking world, was reissued for new generations, and became the template from which countless modern decks now grow. The 20th century brought tarot out of secret orders and into bookshops, kitchen tables and bedside drawers, where it sits today: not a fortune-telling machine, but a mirror, a prompt, a quiet language of images for thinking about your own life.
Traditionally, readers have treated the cards as a way to listen inward, and that is how we hold them too. Knowing the real history of tarot does not dim the magic. It deepens it. Every time you lay out a spread, you join a line of players, dreamers and artists stretching back six hundred years. If you would like to learn to read with that history in your hands, our tarot course begins right where this story leaves off, teaching you the cards one by one, in their own quiet language.
Keep Exploring
- Pamela Colman Smith, the artist behind the cards
- how to read tarot cards
- tarot and astrology
- the free Tarot Path course
Frequently asked questions
Tarot originated in northern Italy in the first half of the 15th century, not in ancient Egypt. It began as an expanded four-suit playing-card deck with added allegorical “triumph” cards, known as carte da trionfi, and was used to play a trick-taking game. The oldest surviving examples are the hand-painted Visconti-Sforza decks made in and around Milan around the mid-1400s.
The documented history of tarot reaches back to the early-to-mid 15th century, roughly six hundred years. The earliest written reference to trionfi cards dates to 1440. There is no reliable evidence of tarot existing before the 1400s, a point A. E. Waite himself made plainly in 1911.
No. The Egyptian origin story was invented in 1781 by the French scholar Antoine Court de Gebelin, who claimed with no evidence that tarot preserved a lost Egyptian Book of Thoth. Egyptian writing had not even been deciphered at the time. Historians trace tarot firmly to 15th-century Italy.
Tarot was used purely as a game for roughly three centuries. Its reinvention as a tool for divination began in 1780s Paris, with Court de Gebelin's Egyptian theory and the occultist Etteilla, who is often called the first professional tarot reader. The mystical system most readers use today was later refined by Eliphas Levi and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.
The Rider-Waite-Smith deck is a tarot deck first published in London in 1909, conceived by A. E. Waite and illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith, with the companion book The Pictorial Key to the Tarot following in 1911. It was the first widely published deck to give all 78 cards, including the numbered Minor Arcana, full illustrated scenes, which is why it became the template for modern tarot reading.
No. The belief that the Romani brought tarot to Europe is a myth. Tarot appears in Italian court records as a card game before any documented connection between the Romani and these cards. Card-history scholars such as Michael Dummett place tarot's origin firmly in Renaissance Italy.
Tarot is a metaphysical practice, and its divinatory use is a matter of tradition and personal meaning rather than proven fact. Many readers treat the cards as a mirror for reflection and intuition rather than a literal forecast. Tarot is not a substitute for professional medical, legal or financial advice.
