Tarot History: From Italian Card Games to Western Esotericism

Six hundred years of documented history, and not a single piece of evidence for ancient Egyptian origins.

The real history of tarot is more interesting than the mythology. Forget the stories about Egyptian priests, Kabbalistic secrets, or Gypsy fortune-tellers carrying the cards across Europe. Tarot was invented in northern Italy in the 15th century as a card game. It wasn't used for divination until the late 18th century. The occult associations that now define tarot were layered on by French and English esotericists over the course of about a hundred years.

The actual documentary record is clear, thanks to decades of work by historians like Michael Dummett (1925–2011), whose The Game of Tarot (1980) remains the most rigorous scholarly study of the subject. What follows is the history that the evidence supports — not the history the cards would like you to believe.

1450: The Italian invention

The earliest tarot decks were created in the duchies of Milan, Ferrara, and Bologna between approximately 1440 and 1450. These were luxury items — hand-painted on heavy card stock, commissioned by wealthy families like the Visconti and Sforza of Milan. The Visconti-Sforza deck, fragments of which survive in libraries and museums around the world, dates to approximately 1440–1450 and is the oldest substantially complete tarot deck in existence.

These early decks were used for a trick-taking card game called tarocchi (the French later called it jeu de tarot; the German, Tarock). The game used a standard 56-card deck (four suits of 14 cards each) plus 22 trump cards — the Major Arcana. The trumps functioned as the highest-ranking cards, with The Fool serving as an "excuse" that could be played instead of following suit.

There is no evidence — none — that these early decks were used for divination, meditation, or any spiritual purpose. They were playing cards. Beautiful, expensive playing cards, but playing cards nonetheless.

1500–1700: The game spreads, the images evolve

Over the next two centuries, the game of tarocchi spread across Europe. Printed (rather than hand-painted) decks made the cards affordable. Regional variations developed. In France, the Marseille pattern became the standard — the Tarot de Marseille, which still influences modern decks, emerged in the 17th century. The Marseille deck standardized the 78-card structure and established the iconography that most subsequent decks would follow.

The images on the trump cards evolved during this period. The Hanged Man, Death, and The Tower appeared in their recognizable forms. Court card structures stabilized (King, Queen, Knight, Knave/Page in French and Italian decks). The iconography drew from medieval Christian art, Renaissance allegory, and the visual vocabulary of European Carnival traditions — not from esoteric traditions like Kabbalah, Hermeticism, or astrology. Those connections were made later.

Throughout this period, tarot remained a game. It was played in parlors across France, Italy, Switzerland, and Germany. Some regional variants are still played today — Tarock remains popular in Austria, and French tarot is still played competitively.

1781: The Egyptian myth is born

The transformation of tarot from card game to divination tool began with a single publication: Antoine Court de Gébelin's Monde Primitif, volume 8, published in 1781. Court de Gébelin was a Protestant pastor and Freemason with a passion for speculative history. In an essay titled "Du Jeu des Tarots," he claimed — without any evidence — that the tarot contained the wisdom of ancient Egypt, encoded in pictographic form by Egyptian priests and carried to Europe by Roma (Gypsy) travelers.

Every element of this claim was fabricated. There is no Egyptian connection to tarot. The Roma people did not carry tarot from Egypt (they arrived in Europe from India, and there's no evidence they used tarot before the 19th century). The Hebrew letter correspondences that Court de Gébelin proposed had no historical basis.

But the story was compelling. It arrived at the right historical moment — the late 18th century was obsessed with Egyptology, with secret wisdom traditions, and with alternatives to institutional religion. The Egyptian origin myth gave tarot an aura of ancient mystery that the card game had never possessed.

1785: Etteilla creates tarot divination

The first person to actually use tarot for divination — and to publish a guide on how to do it — was Jean-Baptiste Alliette (1738–1791), who wrote under the name Etteilla. In 1785, he published Manière de se récréer avec le jeu de cartes nommées Tarots ("How to Entertain Yourself with the Deck of Cards Called Tarots"). This was the first book of tarot divination, and Etteilla designed his own deck specifically for fortune-telling, with modified imagery and card meanings.

Etteilla was a wig-maker and seedsman by profession, self-educated and passionate. His system assigned specific divinatory meanings to each card, upright and reversed. He reordered the Major Arcana to fit his narrative of creation, moving The Fool to the end and repositioning several other cards. His influence on modern tarot is less visible than Waite's or Lévi's, but his innovation — reading tarot as an oracle rather than playing it as a game — was the foundational shift.

1850s–1900: Lévi, Papus, and the occult tarot

The next major figure was Alphonse-Louis Constant, who wrote under the name Éliphas Lévi. In Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie (1854–1856), Lévi connected tarot to Kabbalah, astrology, and Hermetic philosophy. He was the first to systematically map the 22 Major Arcana to the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, creating a correspondence system that the Golden Dawn would later refine and that modern tarot still references.

Lévi's connections were based on intellectual resonance rather than historical evidence — he believed the correspondences revealed an underlying universal system, not that they represented a documented lineage. But his work transformed tarot from a fortune-telling curiosity into a serious (or at least serious-seeming) esoteric system.

Other French occultists followed. Gérard Encausse, writing as Papus, published Le Tarot des Bohémiens ("The Tarot of the Gypsies") in 1889. Jean-Baptiste Pitois, writing as Paul Christian, coined the terms "Major Arcana" and "Minor Arcana" in Histoire de la magie (1870). The vocabulary of modern tarot was being assembled, piece by piece.

1888–1909: The Golden Dawn and the Rider-Waite-Smith deck

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, founded in London in 1888, synthesized French occultism, Kabbalah, astrology, and tarot into a unified system. The Order's members included A.E. Waite, Aleister Crowley, Pamela Colman Smith, and Arthur Machen — figures who would go on to create the two most influential decks of the 20th century.

In 1909, Waite and Smith published the Rider-Waite-Smith deck through William Rider & Son. Smith's illustrated pips — full scenes on every numbered card — were revolutionary. (For the full story of this deck, see our Rider-Waite-Smith article.) In 1944 (published fully in 1969), Crowley and Lady Frieda Harris published the Thoth deck, which reworked the symbolism along Crowley's Thelemic principles.

1960s–present: The American popularization

Tarot's move into mainstream American culture was driven by a handful of popular books. Eden Gray's The Tarot (1960) and Mastering the Tarot (1971) sold millions of copies and introduced simplified keyword-based readings to the mass market. Rachel Pollack's Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom (1980) brought psychological depth to card interpretation. Mary K. Greer's Tarot for Your Self (1984) made journaling and self-exploration central to tarot practice.

The internet accelerated tarot's spread. Online deck shops, tarot apps, social media communities, and digital reading platforms made the cards accessible globally. There are now thousands of published tarot decks, most based on the Rider-Waite-Smith template, ranging from faithful reproductions to themed decks (feminist, queer, botanical, literary, pop culture).

The history matters because it separates what tarot is from what people claim it was. The cards aren't an ancient Egyptian oracle or a direct transmission of Kabbalistic wisdom. They're a 15th-century Italian card game that was reinterpreted by 18th-century French occultists, codified by a 19th-century English secret society, and popularized by 20th-century American authors. That history is rich enough without the mythology.

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