A history of tarot

A card game first, 1440s Italy

Tarot begins as trionfi — a trick-taking game played in the courts of northern Italy in the 15th century, structurally related to the games that eventually produced bridge. The oldest surviving cards are hand-painted decks commissioned for the Visconti and Sforza families of Milan, not mass-printed items. No complete deck from this period survives intact: the best-documented set, held across the Morgan Library, the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo, and a Milan collection, totals 74 known cards out of an original 78.

There was no divination attached to any of this. For roughly three centuries, tarot was simply a game.

A fully illustrated deck, decades before Waite

Around 1491, a deck known today as the Sola Busca — held by the Metropolitan Museum — did something no earlier tarot had: it gave every one of the 56 Minor Arcana cards its own illustrated scene, not just a repeated pattern of cups or swords. That idea would resurface more than four centuries later as the defining feature of the Rider-Waite-Smith deck.

The name "Marseille" is a trade label, not a birthplace

The graphic pattern known as Tarot de Marseille is a French printing tradition, not a single artist's design. Its earliest documented example — a deck by Jean Noblet, held by the Bibliothèque nationale de France — was made in Paris in the second half of the 1600s. Marseille only became associated with the style later, as the city grew into a major printing and export center for it. Treat "Marseille tarot" as a family of related historical decks, not one fixed original.

The Egypt myth, 1781

In 1781, French clergyman and scholar Antoine Court de Gébelin published a widely read essay claiming tarot encoded the lost wisdom of ancient Egyptian priests. It was a guess dressed up as scholarship — no archaeological or textual evidence has ever supported it, and mainstream card history places tarot's origin firmly in 15th-century Italy. But the story was compelling, and it gave tarot a mystical pedigree it never had a game. Everything that follows in this history happens partly in that essay's shadow.

Jean-Baptiste Alliette, writing under the pen name Etteilla, took the Egypt idea and ran further with it. In the late 1700s he published the first deck explicitly designed for divination rather than play, complete with his own card order, his own imagery, and his own printed upright and reversed meanings. He called it the Livre de Thot — Book of Thoth — a title that would cause confusion more than a century later, when Aleister Crowley used the same name for an entirely different, unrelated deck.

The French occultists build a system

Through the 19th century, occultists Éliphas Lévi and Papus (Gérard Encausse) layered tarot into an increasingly elaborate esoteric framework — connecting the cards to Kabbalah, Hebrew letters, and broader occult correspondences. Neither invented a new deck outright; they built interpretive systems on top of the existing Marseille pattern, treating the cards as a vehicle for ideas that had little to do with their original use as a game.

The Golden Dawn, and the deck most of the world reads today

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, active in England from the late 19th century, formalized a dense correspondence system linking tarot to astrology, Kabbalah, and the four classical elements. Its influence on modern tarot is hard to overstate: A.E. Waite, a Golden Dawn member, used that training as the foundation for a new deck, commissioning artist Pamela Colman Smith to illustrate all 78 cards — including a fully illustrated scene for every Minor Arcana card, echoing what the Sola Busca had done four centuries earlier. Published in 1909, the Rider-Waite-Smith deck became the reference point most later tarot — including the card meanings on this site — is built on.

Aleister Crowley, also a former Golden Dawn member, took a different path. Working with artist Lady Frieda Harris from 1938 to 1943, he built the Thoth deck as a deliberately separate esoteric system layering his own Thelemic philosophy over astrology and Kabbalah — renaming several cards outright (Strength becomes Lust, Judgement becomes The Aeon) rather than simply reskinning Waite's version. The accompanying book was published in 1944; the cards themselves weren't printed until 1969, after both creators had died.

After 1909: an explosion of authored decks

Once Waite and Smith proved a fully illustrated deck could work, the 20th and 21st centuries produced hundreds of authored variations — decks like Motherpeace, Haindl, and Wildwood that build their own visual language and, often, their own interpretive rules rather than simply reskinning Rider-Waite-Smith. There is no complete, agreed-upon global count of how many tarot decks exist; a single specialist encyclopedia has catalogued more than a thousand.