It started as a game
Many people imagine tarot as an ancient, secret book of wisdom. The real story is more down to earth, and in some ways more interesting. Tarot began as a deck of playing cards used for a game in Renaissance Italy.
Ordinary playing cards reached Europe in the late 1300s, probably through trade with the Islamic world. Those decks had four suits, much like the cards we still use. In the first half of the 1400s, someone in northern Italy had a new idea: add a fifth set of picture cards that could beat the normal suits. These extra cards were called trionfi, which means "triumphs". That is where our word "trumps" comes from.
The game was a trick-taking game, a bit like bridge or whist. Players laid down cards in turns, and the highest card won the trick. The trump cards outranked everything else.
The first decks
The oldest tarot cards that survive were hand-painted for wealthy families in Milan and nearby cities in the mid-1400s. The best known are linked to the Visconti and Sforza families, who ruled Milan. These cards were luxury objects, decorated with gold leaf and painted by skilled artists. No complete deck from this period survives, but many individual cards are kept in museums and libraries.
The trump cards showed figures that people of the time would recognise from art, religion and public parades: an emperor, a pope, love, death, the wheel of fortune, the sun and moon, and the last judgement. These images were part of everyday Christian and courtly culture. They were not secret symbols.
By the early 1500s the Italian name tarocchi was in use. Nobody knows for certain where the word came from. In French it became tarot.
Printed decks and the Tarot of Marseille
When woodblock printing made cards cheaper, tarot spread across Europe. In France and Switzerland, card makers produced a style of deck now called the Tarot de Marseille. Its design was settled by the 1600s and 1700s. It has 78 cards:
- 22 trumps, later called the Major Arcana, with pictures and numbers.
- 56 suit cards, later called the Minor Arcana, in four suits: cups, coins, swords and batons. Each suit has ten number cards and four court cards (page, knight, queen and king).
In this style of deck, the number cards show simple patterns of suit symbols, like ordinary playing cards. There are no scenes on the "five of cups", just five cups.
Tarot card games are still played today, especially in France, Austria and parts of Italy and Switzerland. Many of these game decks use different pictures from reading decks.
From game to reading: the 1700s
There are scattered hints of people using cards to tell fortunes earlier, but the clear turning point came in France in the late 1700s.
In 1781, a scholar named Antoine Court de Gebelin published a volume of his large work Le Monde primitif. In it, he claimed that tarot was a hidden book of ancient Egyptian wisdom, disguised as a game to keep it safe. He offered no real evidence. Egyptian hieroglyphs had not yet been decoded, so nobody could check his idea at the time. When they were decoded in the 1820s, nothing linked them to tarot.
Even so, the Egyptian story caught people's imagination. Soon after, a Paris card reader who wrote under the name Etteilla published guides to reading tarot and, around 1789, a deck designed especially for fortune telling. This is often described as the first tarot deck made for reading rather than play.
Occult tarot in the 1800s
In the 1800s, French writers on magic took the idea further. The most influential was Eliphas Levi, who linked the 22 trumps to the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet and to the Kabbalah (a Jewish mystical tradition). Again, there is no sign that the original Italian card makers had any of this in mind. But Levi's links became a central part of how many people read tarot.
In late 1800s England, a group called the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn built a detailed system of links between tarot, astrology, the elements and the Kabbalah. Its members included several people who later shaped modern tarot.
The Rider-Waite-Smith deck
In 1909, two former Golden Dawn members created the deck that most people now picture when they think of tarot. The writer Arthur Edward Waite designed the ideas, and the artist Pamela Colman Smith drew the cards. It was published in London and is usually called the Rider-Waite-Smith deck.
Its big change was in the Minor Arcana. Instead of plain patterns of symbols, Smith drew a small scene on every card. The Five of Cups shows a figure in a cloak mourning over spilled cups. The Three of Swords shows a heart pierced by three blades. These scenes made the cards much easier to read without memorising long lists. Smith was probably inspired in part by the Sola Busca tarot, a rare Italian deck from the late 1400s that also had pictures on its number cards.
Waite also swapped the positions of two trumps, Strength and Justice, so that Strength became number 8 and Justice number 11. He did this to fit Golden Dawn ideas about astrology. Many modern decks follow his order, while decks in the Marseille style keep the older one.
For many years Smith received little credit. Today her name is usually included, and her art is widely admired.
Tarot in the 20th and 21st centuries
Through the 1900s, tarot moved from small circles of occult students to mainstream culture. Other influential decks appeared, such as the Thoth deck designed by Aleister Crowley and painted by Lady Frieda Harris. From the 1960s onwards, tarot books and decks became widely available, and writers began to frame the cards in psychological terms, as a mirror for self-reflection rather than a fortune-telling device.
Today there are thousands of decks, in every style you can imagine. Most still follow the 78-card structure and the Rider-Waite-Smith approach to images.
What history does and does not tell us
- It tells us that tarot is a European creation from the 1400s, that reading tarot developed in the 1700s, and that most "traditional" meanings were written in the 1800s and 1900s.
- It does not support claims that tarot came from ancient Egypt, from travelling Roma people, or from a single secret source.
- It does not tell us whether tarot can predict anything. That is a separate question, and there is no good scientific evidence that it can.
None of this makes tarot less worth exploring. Knowing the history can actually help. When you see that card meanings were shaped by real people over centuries, you can feel free to read the pictures in your own way, with the traditional meanings as a guide rather than a rule.
Try it yourself
A good way to start is a single daily card, which lets you get to know one image at a time. When you are ready for more, a three-card spread shows how cards work together. Our reports explain both the traditional meaning and the picture on each card.