The Origins & History of Tarot

Published 31 July 2026 · Updated 2 August 2026 · Reviewed by the Olivia Rivera

The true story of tarot is, we think, rather more satisfying than the legend. There is no lost temple, no papyrus smuggled out of Egypt, no unbroken chain of initiates. Tarot began as an ordinary — if beautifully made — card game in the courts of Renaissance Italy, and it stayed a game for some three hundred years before anyone thought to read the future in it. Understanding that sequence is the single most useful thing a modern reader can know, because it tells you what the images actually are: a Christian and classical picture-world from fifteenth-century Milan, later reinterpreted as an oracle. What follows is the documented history, with the famous myths set beside the facts.

A fifteenth-century card game

Playing cards themselves reached Europe from the Islamic world in the late fourteenth century, arriving via trade routes into Italy and Spain around the 1370s. Tarot proper appears a couple of generations later. In the first half of the fifteenth century, courts in northern Italy — Milan, Ferrara, Bologna — added a fifth suit of illustrated trionfi, or triumphs, to the ordinary four-suit pack. These extra cards outranked the rest and gave the game its structure: a trick-taking game in which the trumps always beat the numbered suits. The game was known as trionfi and later as tarocchi, from which the French tarot derives.

Among the earliest surviving decks are the hand-painted Visconti-Sforza tarot cards, commissioned for the ruling Visconti and Sforza families of Milan around the 1440s and 1450s. These were luxury objects, gilded and painted by hand, not mass-market items — closer to a wedding portrait than to a pack you would shuffle nightly. The imagery on the trumps was thoroughly of its time and place: a Pope and a Popess, an Emperor and Empress, the cardinal virtues, Death, the Devil, the Wheel of Fortune, the Sun and Moon. To a fifteenth-century Milanese eye these were familiar allegories from sermons, carnival processions and moralising art, not secret hieroglyphs.

Spread across Europe — as a game

For its first three centuries tarot travelled the way any popular pastime does: through players, printers and soldiers. Hand-painting gave way to cheap woodcut and stencil production, which put the game within reach of ordinary households and carried it out of Italy into Switzerland, France, Germany and beyond. Regional patterns emerged, and in France a standardised design crystallised that became the Tarot de Marseille — for centuries the archetypal pack.

Crucially, people were playing with these cards, not consulting them. Tarot card games remain alive today: French Tarot and Italian Tarocchini are still played competitively, using packs whose ancestry runs straight back to the Renaissance. As the standard reference on the subject, the history of tarot, makes plain, the divinatory tradition is a late branch grafted onto a much older gaming trunk. The historian Michael Dummett, who did more than anyone to document this, put the correction bluntly: "The tarot pack was invented for gaming, and for some three centuries was used for no other purpose."

The eighteenth-century occult reinvention

The turn towards fortune-telling has a surprisingly precise starting point. In 1781 the French clergyman and scholar Antoine Court de Gébelin published a volume of his sprawling encyclopaedia Le Monde primitif containing an essay on the tarot. Seeing a pack for the first time at a social gathering, he became convinced on the spot that the images were not a game at all but the survival of an ancient Egyptian sacred book — the fabled Book of Thoth — smuggled through the centuries by initiated priests and disguised as playing cards. He read Egyptian symbolism into every trump and even proposed that the word tarot came from Egyptian roots meaning "royal road."

None of this was true, and it is worth being clear about why. Court de Gébelin was writing more than four decades before Jean-François Champollion deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs using the Rosetta Stone in 1822. He could not read a single Egyptian word; his "translations" were guesswork dressed as scholarship. There is no Egyptian tarot, no Book of Thoth in card form, and no evidence of the cards outside fifteenth-century Europe. Yet his romance was irresistible, and it lodged in the popular imagination so firmly that people still repeat it today. Contemporary reference works are unambiguous: Britannica's entry on tarot traces the cards to fifteenth-century Italy and treats the Egyptian derivation as a later, unfounded attribution.

Court de Gébelin's contemporary Jean-Baptiste Alliette, who published under the reversed pen-name Etteilla, turned the theory into a business. In the 1780s and 1790s he issued the first decks and printed guides designed specifically for cartomancy, complete with keyword meanings and instructions for laying out spreads. He is, in a real sense, the inventor of tarot reading as we recognise it — an eighteenth-century entrepreneur, not an ancient sage.

Lévi, the Kabbalah link and the Golden Dawn

The nineteenth century wove tarot into a grander occult tapestry. The French magus Éliphas Lévi (Alphonse-Louis Constant) 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. It was an elegant, influential idea — and an entirely retrospective one. The Milanese card-makers of the 1440s knew nothing of it; the correspondence is an interpretive scheme laid over the cards four centuries after they were made, not a clue to their origin.

Lévi's synthesis was inherited by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the influential English magical society founded in 1888. Its members refined a detailed system of astrological, elemental and Kabbalistic attributions for every card, and produced their own decks for members' use. This is the immediate ancestor of nearly every "meaning" you will find in a modern guidebook. When you read that a card "corresponds" to a planet or a Hebrew letter, you are reading the Golden Dawn, not the Renaissance.

Waite–Smith (1909) and the modern boom

The deck that shaped the twentieth century came out of that same Golden Dawn milieu. In 1909 the scholar and mystic A. E. Waite collaborated with the artist Pamela Colman Smith — a gifted illustrator whose contribution went under-credited for generations — to produce a pack published in London by William Rider & Son. Its true innovation was to give every one of the 56 minor cards a full scenic illustration: a figure walking away from eight cups, a heart pierced by three swords, a beggar in the snow beneath five pentacles. Earlier packs, the Marseille included, showed the minors as plain arrangements of suit symbols. Smith's storytelling pictures made the whole deck legible to beginners and turned it into the template for the modern era. We tell that story in full in our history of the Rider-Waite-Smith deck.

From there the trajectory is familiar: a mid-century revival, an explosion of independent decks from the 1970s onward, and today a thriving global culture of readers who value tarot as a tool for reflection, narrative and self-examination. Knowing the real history takes nothing away from that. If anything it deepens it — the images are a genuine five-hundred-year-old conversation between the medieval, the Renaissance and the modern imagination.

Myths vs facts

• Myth: Tarot comes from ancient Egypt. Fact: it was invented in fifteenth-century Italy. The Egyptian story dates only to 1781 and was written by a man who could not read hieroglyphs. See our myths debunked page.
• Myth: Tarot was always a mystical divination tool. Fact: it was a card game for roughly three centuries; fortune-telling begins in the 1780s.
• Myth: The Major Arcana encode secret ancient wisdom. Fact: they were trump cards drawn from ordinary medieval and Christian allegory — Death, the Devil, the Wheel of Fortune, the virtues.
• Myth: The Hebrew/Kabbalah correspondences prove a Jewish or Egyptian origin. Fact: those links were added by Éliphas Lévi in the 1850s, an overlay some four hundred years after the cards appeared.
• Myth: "Gypsies" (Romani people) brought tarot to Europe. Fact: there is no evidence for this; it is a nineteenth-century assumption, and the cards predate any such claim.

Reader FAQs

So is tarot "fake" if it started as a game?

Not at all — it simply means its value lies in what the images do for a reader now, not in a false ancient pedigree. A five-hundred-year-old picture language is a remarkable thing to think with, whatever it was first used for.

What is the oldest surviving tarot deck?

The hand-painted Visconti-Sforza cards of mid-fifteenth-century Milan are among the oldest that survive, though only in incomplete sets scattered across museums and libraries. No single complete early pack has come down to us intact.

Why do so many people still believe the Egyptian origin?

Because it is a wonderful story, and because it was repeated by influential occult writers for over two centuries before careful historians such as Michael Dummett documented the real timeline. Romance travels faster than footnotes.

Where does the Tarot de Marseille fit in?

It is the standardised French gaming pattern that dominated for centuries and became the reference point for later esoteric decks. We cover it fully in the Tarot de Marseille.

Do I need to learn all the Kabbalah and astrology to read tarot?

No. Those systems are optional nineteenth-century overlays. Many excellent readers work purely from the imagery. Our beginner's guide starts you off without any of it.

Which deck should a beginner start with?

Most people begin with a Waite–Smith style deck because its scenic minors are easy to read. If you prefer the older, symbol-based tradition, a Marseille deck rewards patience. Compare the two approaches in our house style.