A Brief History of Tarot

Tarot has an origin story that surprises most people: it began as a card game. Not as a mystical tool, not as a system of divination, not as a psychological framework, as a game, played in northern Italian courts in the mid-15th century. The journey from there to here is one of the stranger cultural transformations in Western history.

The earliest decks

The first tarot decks appeared in northern Italy around 1440, in the courts of Milan and Ferrara. These early decks, known as tarocchi, were luxury objects, hand-painted for aristocratic patrons. The Visconti-Sforza deck, commissioned around 1450, is among the earliest surviving examples and is still referenced by tarot scholars today.

These decks were used to play a trick-taking card game called tarocchi, a game still played in parts of Italy and France. The trump cards, what we now call the Major Arcana, were simply the highest-value cards in the game, not carriers of symbolic meaning.

The shift toward divination

The use of tarot cards for divination appears to have emerged gradually in the 18th century. By the 1780s, French occultists had begun to associate the cards with ancient Egyptian wisdom, Kabbalah, and Hermetic philosophy, connections that were largely invented but proved remarkably durable.

Antoine Court de Gébelin, a French Freemason, published an influential essay in 1781 claiming the cards were a remnant of ancient Egyptian wisdom. Despite being largely fabricated, this interpretation gave tarot a mystique that shaped its development for the next two centuries.

The occult revival

In the late 19th century, secret societies, particularly the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in Britain, took tarot seriously as a system of esoteric knowledge. Members including Arthur Edward Waite, Aleister Crowley, and Pamela Colman Smith studied and worked with the cards extensively.

It was this milieu that produced the Rider-Waite-Smith deck in 1909, the most influential tarot deck ever created. Waite's vision and Smith's illustrations synthesised centuries of symbolism into a single coherent visual language, and made tarot dramatically more accessible.

Tarot in the 20th century

For much of the early 20th century, tarot remained primarily within occult circles. It was the counterculture movements of the 1960s and 70s that brought it into mainstream Western culture. The publication of Eden Gray's "The Complete Guide to the Tarot" in 1970 made the cards accessible to a mass audience for the first time.

The 1980s and 90s saw an explosion of new decks, Thoth, Osho Zen, Morgan-Greer, and hundreds of others, each reinterpreting the Rider-Waite framework through different lenses. Tarot began to separate from its explicitly occult associations and became a broader tool for self-reflection and personal inquiry.

Tarot today

Contemporary tarot is a remarkably diverse practice. It's used by people with traditional spiritual beliefs and by committed rationalists. By therapists as a reflective tool and by artists as a creative framework. By those who believe in its mystical dimensions and by those who treat it as structured randomness.

The psychological interpretation, influenced by Jungian concepts of archetypes and the unconscious, has become particularly influential. From this perspective, the cards work not by accessing supernatural knowledge but by activating the pattern-recognition capacity of the human mind. You see what you need to see, and that seeing is the point.

What unites all these approaches is the cards themselves: 78 images, each carrying centuries of accumulated meaning, each capable of reflecting something true about a human situation. That's what makes tarot endure.

Tarot began as a game and became a mirror. The game is long forgotten. The mirror remains.