Tarot

Tarot began as a card game. In the early fifteenth century, northern Italian courts added a fifth suit of picture cards, called trionfi (“triumphs”), to ordinary packs with the suits of cups, coins, swords and batons. The earliest known references, from Florence and Ferrara in the 1440s, mention carte da trionfi, and the name tarocchi, from which “tarot” derives, appears around 1500. Players used the triumphs as permanent trumps in trick-taking games.

Some of the finest early packs were hand-painted for the Visconti and Sforza dukes of Milan in the mid-fifteenth century and survive, in part, in museums and libraries. Their trumps show figures familiar to a Christian Renaissance audience: the Emperor and the Pope, virtues such as Justice and Temperance, Death, the Wheel of Fortune, the Last Judgement and the World, together with the Fool. Scholars read them as a sequence drawn from moral allegory, civic processions and triumphal poetry such as Petrarch’s Trionfi.

From Italy the game spread to France, Switzerland and much of central Europe. The standard “Tarot of Marseilles” design became widespread in France and Switzerland, and tarot games are still played today, especially in France, Austria and parts of Italy. For about three centuries the surviving evidence shows the cards used overwhelmingly for play, with no sign of an occult system attached to them.

The turning point came in 1781. In the eighth volume of his work Le Monde primitif, the French Protestant pastor and scholar Antoine Court de Gébelin argued that the tarot was an ancient Egyptian book of wisdom, disguised as a game to preserve it. An essay by the Comte de Mellet in the same volume linked the cards to divination and to the Hebrew alphabet. Neither man offered real evidence, and Egyptian hieroglyphs had not yet been deciphered; after Champollion’s work in the 1820s it became clear that nothing in Egyptian sources supports the idea.

Within a few years the Parisian occultist Jean-Baptiste Alliette, known as Etteilla, published methods for reading the tarot and issued, around 1789, what is usually regarded as the first pack designed specifically for divination. In the nineteenth century Éliphas Lévi connected the twenty-two trumps with the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet and with Kabbalah, and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn built these correspondences into its teaching.

This history has been carefully reconstructed, notably by the philosopher and card-game historian Michael Dummett and his colleagues, who drew on archives, surviving packs and printed sources. Their conclusion, accepted by historians, is that tarot cards were created in fifteenth-century Italy for play and acquired an occult meaning only in late eighteenth-century France. This does not decide what tarot means to the people who use it today, but it shows that claims of ancient Egyptian or secret origin are modern.

Most tarot readers today use packs descended from the Rider–Waite–Smith deck, designed by the occultist Arthur Edward Waite, illustrated by the artist Pamela Colman Smith and published in London in 1909. Smith gave every card, not only the trumps, a pictorial scene, which made the pack easier to read intuitively. Another influential pack, the Thoth Tarot, was painted by Lady Frieda Harris to designs by Aleister Crowley between 1938 and 1943 and published in 1969.

Practitioners use tarot in many ways. Some treat it as divination, believing the cards can reveal hidden influences or likely futures; many others describe it as a tool for reflection, storytelling or psychological insight, often drawing on Carl Jung’s idea of archetypes. Controlled studies have not shown that tarot readings can predict events, and practitioners themselves differ widely in what they claim for it.

Tarot has become part of popular culture, with thousands of designs reflecting art movements, fandoms and cultural traditions, and a strong presence on social media. Meanwhile the original game carries on: in France jeu de tarot is played in clubs and competitions, and Austrian Tarock remains a favourite in cafés. The same cards thus lead two lives, as a game and as a spiritual practice.