Tarot did not begin as a fortune telling system. It began as a card game, played for money and amusement by wealthy Italians in the fifteenth century, and it stayed a game for roughly three hundred years before anyone recorded using it for divination. That fact is well documented rather than controversial among historians.
None of this makes tarot less meaningful. The symbolic depth readers find in the cards is real, and it was built deliberately over centuries by artists, occultists, and writers who each added a layer. Knowing which layer came from where actually improves your reading, because you stop treating every detail as ancient and start noticing which choices were made and why.
This is a plain account of where the cards came from, how the meanings developed, which popular origin stories do not hold up, and what changed in the modern era.
Before Tarot: Playing Cards Arrive in Europe
Playing cards reached Europe in the late fourteenth century, most likely through trade contact with the Islamic world, where a suited deck known as Mamluk cards was already in use. Those decks had four suits, numbered cards, and court figures, which is recognisably the structure of a modern deck of playing cards.
Cards spread quickly. By the 1370s and 1380s, city records across Europe mention card games, and in several cases mention banning them, which is usually the clearest evidence that something has become popular.
The suits shifted as they travelled. Cups, coins, swords, and polo sticks became cups, coins, swords, and batons in Italy and Spain, and later hearts, diamonds, spades, and clubs in France. The tarot suits readers use today are the older Italian set.
The Fifteenth Century: Trionfi and the First Tarot Decks
In northern Italy during the 1440s, someone added a fifth group of cards to the standard four suited deck. These extra cards were trumps, and the game was called trionfi, meaning triumphs. The word tarocchi appears later, in the early sixteenth century, and eventually gives us tarot.
The trump sequence is the ancestor of the major arcana. Its subjects, including the Fool, the Emperor, the Wheel, Death, the Star, and the World, were drawn from familiar medieval and Renaissance imagery: triumphal processions, moral allegories, and the ordered cosmos as it was understood at the time. They were not secret. A fifteenth century Italian would have recognised most of these figures instantly.
The surviving decks from this period, commissioned by aristocratic families in Milan and Ferrara, are hand painted, gilded, and clearly luxury objects. Several are incomplete, with cards lost over five centuries, and the exact original order of the trumps varied by region, which is a useful reminder that even the sequence readers treat as fixed was once local convention.
The Fool, incidentally, was an excuse card in the game rather than a numbered trump. That gameplay role sits behind the card's odd position in modern decks, sometimes numbered zero and sometimes unnumbered. Our page on the Fool covers how that ambiguity became part of its meaning.
Three Centuries as a Game
From the 1400s to the late 1700s, tarot was primarily played, not read. Tarot games spread from Italy into France, Switzerland, Germany, and central Europe, developing regional rules and regional decks. The most influential of these was the Tarot de Marseille pattern, standardised by French and Swiss card makers, which fixed a version of the imagery that later occultists would inherit.
Several tarot games are still played competitively today, particularly in France and parts of central Europe. Those players are continuing an unbroken tradition considerably older than divinatory tarot.
Cartomancy, meaning divination with cards, did exist during this period, but it was mostly done with ordinary playing cards. The link between tarot specifically and fortune telling comes later, from identifiable individuals.
The Occult Turn: 1781 Onwards
In 1781, the French writer Antoine Court de Gebelin published an essay claiming that tarot preserved the wisdom of ancient Egypt, that the name derived from Egyptian words, and that the images encoded a lost priestly doctrine. He had no evidence, Egyptian hieroglyphs were not yet deciphered, and the claims were later shown to be inventions. The essay was enormously influential anyway.
Shortly after, a Parisian fortune teller working under the name Etteilla produced the first deck designed for divination, along with the first published system of card meanings, upright and reversed. Whatever one thinks of the Egyptian theory, this is the practical beginning of tarot reading as we know it.
The nineteenth century added the rest of the scaffolding. Eliphas Levi connected the twenty two trumps to the twenty two letters of the Hebrew alphabet and to kabbalistic ideas. Later writers linked the cards to astrology and the four classical elements. By the end of the century, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn had assembled these threads into a detailed correspondence system taught to its members.
This is the layer most modern readers actually use. When a book tells you a suit corresponds to an element or a card corresponds to a planet, that association is roughly a hundred and fifty years old, not ancient.
1909: The Deck That Changed Everything
In 1909, Arthur Edward Waite, a member of the Golden Dawn, commissioned the artist Pamela Colman Smith to illustrate a new deck, published by Rider in London. Its innovation was simple and decisive: Smith drew full narrative scenes on all fifty six minor arcana cards, rather than the repeated suit symbols used in older decks.
That one change made tarot learnable by ordinary people. Instead of memorising what five cups means, you could look at a figure turned away from spilled cups and read grief directly from the picture. Nearly every popular deck published since follows this approach, and most beginner books describe Smith's scenes rather than any older imagery.
Smith received a flat fee and little credit during her lifetime, and her contribution went underacknowledged for decades. Modern scholarship has corrected this, and the deck is now widely credited to both of them.
Cards such as the Lovers and the High Priestess show the shift clearly, since Waite deliberately altered both from earlier Marseille versions to fit his symbolic framework. What most readers now treat as the standard meaning of those cards is a 1909 editorial decision.
Myths Worth Retiring
Tarot came from ancient Egypt. No. This originates with an unevidenced 1781 essay, written before hieroglyphs could be read.
Tarot came from the Romani people. No. This nineteenth century claim conflated a marginalised ethnic group with fortune telling, and no historical evidence supports it. It persists mainly through stereotype.
Tarot is a suppressed medieval mystical text. No. The earliest decks were commissioned for aristocratic card games and were not remotely secret.
You must be gifted a deck. A twentieth century folk custom, not a rule, and it kept plenty of people from starting.
The major arcana always had this order. Regional variation was the norm for centuries. Standardisation came later.
Retiring these does no damage to tarot. It relocates the value from a false pedigree to an accurate one, which is a genuinely rich three hundred year layering of art, philosophy, and interpretation.
From the Twentieth Century to Now
The 1960s and 1970s brought tarot into wide popular use, and publishing expanded rapidly. The Thoth deck, created by Aleister Crowley with artist Lady Frieda Harris and published in 1969, offered a dense alternative symbolic system. Independent artists then began producing decks in every conceivable style.
The most significant recent change is who writes the meanings. For most of tarot's history, interpretation flowed from a small number of published authorities. Today it develops in journals, communities, courses, and comment threads, with thousands of readers testing and adapting meanings in practice.
That is arguably closer to how the tradition actually worked all along, since each generation added its own layer while claiming to have found something ancient. Reading tarot today means standing at the end of a long chain of revision, and that is a reasonable thing to know when you shuffle. If you are just beginning, our beginner walkthrough picks up exactly where this history leaves off.