A Brief-ish History of Tarot
Updated: Oct 8
THE QUESTION
Sooner or later, someone getting a reading will ask it. Most of the time, it's the skeptic who sat at your table, ready to prove you crazy, only to get a solid and meaningful reading. They get… curious. "So where did Tarot come from? Ancient Egypt? The Romani travelers? A secret order of magicians?"
I was told a few of these back in the 90s and, yeah, I spent nearly eight years believing my deck of cards was from some "ancient" order of Egyptian monks. But the real story is less woo-woo than some of us folks were led to believe, and honestly, WAY more complex. It involves Chinese paper, the Silk Road, Italian dukes who loved to gamble, a French scholar who fancied himself a psychic, and an eccentric Parisian print seller who became the first celebrity card reader.
That's a lot to pack into an intro, so we're going to take this in order: playing cards first, then Tarot, then fortune-telling. After that, we'll talk about why any of this should matter to you, and why it matters less than certain people on the internet would have you believe.
PLAYING CARDS: THE OLDER SISTER
If cards were a family, then Tarot is definitely the younger sibling. Why? Because playing cards came first, duh. And you can bet that playing cards hold some big sister energy. They are practical, social, a little rough around the edges, and they have seen things. Also, they never do anything the easy way, so of course they took the long way to Europe.
Chinese Cards
The story probably starts in China, which makes sense, since China invented paper and block printing, and you can't have Tarot in pre-modern times without these things. So why do we suspect China of starting all this card reading shit? Our first clue takes us to a Tang dynasty writer, who mentions a princess's family playing a "leaf game" in the 860s. I call this the great-grandparent of Tarot. But was this a deck of cards? Historians argue about whether those leaves were cards or pages of a game book. And if you want to learn Tarot history, you better get used to that phrase, "historians argue." You'll hear it A LOT among card aficionados. The leaf game certainly stuck around in the historical record because by the eleventh century, a few Chinese scholars were still writing about it. Though even they admitted nobody remembered the rules anymore. Which is very Tarot-esque.
Our second clue is a 1294 Chinese legal record that mentions people caught playing with zhi pai, or paper cards, and says printing blocks and the cards were all confiscated. What do those exact cards look like? Who knows. Were there numbers and suits? Not sure. All we know is that it was a card game, and what a lot of us believe is that block-printed paper card games came into the Islamic world somewhere around the 1200s or 1300s, so if we put on our detective hats and trace the origin, the Chinese card games become our number one suspect.
A Journey to the Middle East
Am I trying to convince you that playing cards entered Europe because I believe Chinese cards were all up and down the Silk Road? No… kind of… okay, fine, I am! Look, I could bore you with pieces of disputed evidence, a POSSIBLE Chinese money card discovered near a major oasis on the Silk Road, and arguments about which Chinese card game packed its bag and fled to the Middle East. But this blog wasn’t meant to open a heated historical debate about playing cards. If I were to give you my best guess as an amateur sleuth, it would be that the Chinese money card deck did travel the Silk Road and the trade routes that crisscrossed Asia, most likely tucked in among the porcelain, the spices, and the gunpowder. Unfortunately, nobody left us a shipping receipt.
But the family resemblance is there if you know where to look. I'm not just talking paper cards cut into rectangles. These money cards had four recognizable suits: coins, strings of coins, myriads of strings, and tens of myriads.
One theory is that the Islamic world kept that four-suit structure but reread the symbols. Coins stayed coins. A string of coins, drawn as a long bar, looks a lot like a stick or baton. The character for "ten" looks like a sword hilt. The Chinese character for "myriad," turned upside down, looks a bit (i.e., exactly) like a cup, and the Mamluks (more on them in a second) called their cup suit "myriads." See where I'm going with this?
And somewhere along the way, possibly in Persia or Central Asia, the cards picked up something the Chinese decks never had: court cards, with kings and their deputies.
Alright, about those Mamluks. By the time cards turn up in the Mamluk Sultanate in the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries (regionally, this was Egypt and Syria), they begin to look a lot like the playing cards sitting in your junk drawer. Mamluk cards had four suits: cups, coins, swords, and polo sticks. Their court cards were a king, a deputy, and a second deputy, shown as calligraphy instead of human figures. FYI: if you need a bucket-list trip, a nearly complete hand-painted Mamluk deck from around the fifteenth century survives in the Topkapı Palace Museum in Istanbul, and it's gorgeous.
Eurotripping
Then, in the 1370s, playing cards show up in Europe like the plague… but with less death and worldwide upheaval. How do we know this? Records!
1377: Florence bans a game called naibbe, noting it had only recently arrived.
1377: A Dominican friar, Johannes of Rheinfelden (say that five times fast), describes the new card decks in detail.
1379: A chronicler in Viterbo, Italy, records the arrival of the game of cards, "which in the Saracen language is called nayb."
Fun fact: Na'ib is Arabic for "deputy," the Mamluk court card. Spanish speakers still call playing cards naipes today.
As the cards spread through Europe, the Europeans kept the suits mostly intact. They just had no idea what to do with polo sticks, so those became batons or staves. Italian cards ended up with cups, coins, swords, and batons. If you've ever shuffled a Tarot deck, you already recognize those four suits.
And notice what cards were for. Games! Mostly gambling games, which really pissed off the church and local governments who needed the people's money for taxes. I mean, sure, it's more nuanced than that. They were also concerned about disorder, excessive stakes, idleness, and corrupted morality. Either way, medieval city councils spent a remarkable amount of energy trying to ban them, which also tells you how popular they were.
TAROT: THE PARTY GAME FOR RICH PEOPLE
Around 1440, somebody in northern Italy had a brilliant idea: what if we added a fifth suit of picture cards that trumped everything else? These additional cards were called trionfi, or triumphs. We know this because a Florentine notary, Giusto Giusti, records handing over two personalized decks of them to the warlord Sigismondo Malatesta in 1440, and the Este court accounts in Ferrara mention them in 1442. Soon this new triumph game caught on and started being played throughout the courts of Milan, Ferrara, and Bologna. It was a game of hierarchy and virtues, full of pretty pictures and expensive as hell to commission. The rich people fucking loved it!
The Language of Fancy Pictures
Much to the dismay of my love of all things occult, there were no secrets embedded in the images on those trump cards. They were just the shared picture language of the day. Petrarch had written a famous poem called I Trionfi, which many historians think helped inspire the trumps. Italian cities staged real triumphal processions and had been doing so since the Roman Empire was busy ruling most of Europe. And churches were absolutely covered in the Virtues. So if you were a medieval noble looking at these cards, you would have recognized the images immediately, the same way today you would recognize the Ancient Aliens Guy meme or Kermit Sipping Tea.
One famous deck among the wealthy was the Visconti-Sforza. It was hand-painted with real gold leaf for the dukes of Milan in the mid-1400s. We don't have a complete surviving deck, but there are a few cards scattered among the Morgan Library in New York, the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo, and a private collection, which is a very rich-family way to end up.
A generation later, around the 1490s, a noble in northern Italy commissioned the Sola Busca deck, and it's a goddamn showstopper. It's the oldest Tarot deck that survives with all 78 cards, and it's the earliest known deck to give every single card, numbered suit cards included, its own illustrated scene. And in dramatic medieval fashion, its trumps are packed with figures from Roman legends, while its suit cards show soldiers, heroes, and all sorts of theatrical scenes. The complete deck now lives in the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan. Also, hold onto this one, because it comes back into our story more than four hundred years later.
The Tarot Game Gets Its Name!
By the early 1500s, Italians had started calling the game tarocchi to tell it apart from ordinary cards. It crossed into France and Switzerland, where woodblock printers developed the deck we now call the Tarot de Marseille. Jean Noblet printed one around 1650, Jean Dodal around 1701, and Nicolas Conver in 1760, whose version became the template for a lot of what came after. Who are all those people? Fancy French card-makers. Yeah, that was a real job.
And here's the part that surprises my students: people still play Tarot as a card game. In France, Austria, and parts of Italy, folks sit down for a round of Tarot with zero interest in their future. The audacity! One thing that tickles me, though, is that today in the French Tarot game, the Fool is called l'Excuse, because playing it excuses you from following suit. Honestly, as a Tarot reader, that tracks.
FORTUNE-TELLING WITH CARDS
Now that we know the cards reach Europe in the 1370s and that Tarot shows up around 1440, surely the readings start right away?
Nope. Or at least, not that anyone wrote down. Here we go with another "historians argue."
Let's be fair here. People have used almost anything for divination: dice, bones, birds, randomly opened books, clouds, asparagus. It would be strange if nobody ever flipped a card and asked it a question before the 1700s. But "probably happened" and "we have evidence" are two different animals, and in this blog we only feed the second one. Let's check the paper trail.
Playing cards get there first
Before people were reading playing cards, Europeans already loved Losbücher, literally "books of lots." The practice went like this: create a book that contains oracle meanings, ask fate something, pick a tool that will give you something random, then let that random result send you to a prewritten answer in the book. Dice could do it. A spinning wheel could do it. Numbers could do it.
Then somebody apparently woke up one morning and had an idea. You know what else generates random results really well? Playing cards. Enter Johann Schöffer, who, around 1510, printed a book called Eyn losz buch ausz karten gemacht. What the hell does that translate to? Basically, "A fortune/lot book made from cards." BAM! The woo-woo part of reading cards has officially landed. I say "officially" because it's the earliest known printed fortune-telling book built around cards, and it uses regular playing cards, no Tarot required. Also, I'd personally call this a bibliomancy/cartomancy hybrid since the cards themselves do not hold the meaning. The book does.
By 1540, a Venetian printer named Francesco Marcolino da Forlì expanded on this idea. He published Le Sorti, a fortune-telling book that uses selected playing cards to generate answers to your questions. But here is the catch. Much like the previous version from Schöffer, this isn't an ask-me-a-question-and-I'll-do-a-spread-for-you reading. You pick your question from a list, draw cards, and follow the book to a little three-line verse labeled with the cards you drew. That verse is your answer. The seven of coins doesn't mean anything by itself; it's only the key that opens the right page. Michael Dummett (a leading historian of playing cards) did a lot more than anyone to untangle this history, and he pointed out that almost all evidence for reading cards for their own meanings dates from the 1700s on. So, when people say, "What about Le Sorti?" Dummett would say, "That's bibliomancy, you fool! That's not reading cards!" Actually, I have no idea if he'd have said that. He was probably way nicer.
Tarot gets closer
In 1527, the poet Teofilo Folengo wrote sonnets that assigned Tarot trumps to different people as a way of describing their character. This was a popular parlor game called tarocchi appropriati. And it was hilarious and brutal. Think both flattering and all-out roasting. Is this fortune-telling? I'd say no. Mostly, they're describing a person rather than forecasting events. But you can at least see people getting comfortable assigning meanings to individual cards.
The earliest solid Tarot divination: Bologna, early to mid-1700s
It's about time divination enters the picture! We finally get a manuscript from Bologna discovered by Franco Pratesi that describes short divinatory meanings for cards of the local Tarot deck, along with notes on laying them out. Our first little white key book, although it wasn't little or white. It does, however, give meanings, things like "journey," "betrayal," "married man," and "love," for 35 cards of the local deck, then tells you to deal them into five piles of seven. And that's where it stops. Dammit! It never says what to do with the piles, so the actual reading method is lost. Pratesi dated it before 1750 while Dummett placed it in the first half of the 1700s. You know what's coming: historians argue. Either way, it remains the earliest clearly documented surviving evidence we have of Tarot cards being given divinatory meanings.
Then the first famous card reader uses... playing cards
In 1770, a Parisian print seller named Jean-Baptiste Alliette published a book on reading cards under the name Etteilla, which is Alliette spelled backwards. (Every great card reader needs a magical name, right?) His first system used a 32-card piquet deck, a plain old French playing-card pack with a few extra rules. Tarot came later in his career.
To recap our journey: playing cards show up in a fortune-telling book by the early 1500s and Tarot shows up being read for its own meanings in Bologna sometime in the first half of the 1700s. That's roughly 300 years after Tarot was invented as a game.
ENTER THE OCCULTISTS
Eighteenth Century Occultists
In 1781, a French scholar named Antoine Court de Gébelin saw some friends playing Tarot and had what can only be described as "a moment". In the eighth volume of his giant work Le Monde primitif (props to you if you've read this whole collection), he announced that Tarot was a surviving book of ancient Egyptian wisdom. His claim was that Egyptian priests disguised Tarot as a game so it could survive the ages. The same volume included an essay by the Comte de Mellet, a military guy with an affinity for the occult, that went even further. It called the deck the Book of Thoth, matched the trumps to the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and described using the cards to tell fortunes. AND that makes it our earliest published discussion of how to read Tarot.
Could anyone fact-check him? Not really. Was Wikipedia available? Not yet. Did he have any evidence at all? Nope. And fortunately for him, nobody could read Egyptian hieroglyphs in 1781. When Jean-François Champollion finally cracked them in 1822, it turned out that Egypt had plenty of wisdom and zero Tarot decks. By then, though, the story had legs, and it is still sprinting around mystical circles today.
Etteilla, our backwards-name friend, jumped right on it. Between 1783 and 1785 he published books on Tarot as the Egyptian Book of Thoth, and around 1789 he released his own redesigned deck. It's the first Tarot deck designed specifically for divination. That's a big deal: the first Tarot made for reading is roughly the same age as the United States Constitution.
Nineteenth Century Occultists
The nineteenth century piled on the Egyptian/Kabbalah idea, and in the 1850s, Éliphas Lévi, a French esotericist and ceremonial magician, took de Mellet's Hebrew-letter idea, reworked it, and mapped the trumps onto the Kabbalah. His version became the foundation later occultists built on, and occult Tarot was off and running.
The Romani Myth
Here's the Tarot rumor that pisses me off and I'll add it here since we are in the mid 1800s, when the rumor started taking off. Jean-Alexandre Vaillant, and later Papus in The Tarot of the Bohemians (1889), claimed that the Romani people had brought Tarot into Europe from the East. That one falls apart on the evidence. First, the Romani reached the Balkans by the 1300s, but they aren't recorded in Italy, France, or Spain until the 1410s and 1420s, decades after Florence was already banning card games. Second, the surviving evidence for Tarot's development points to Italian court culture, not to a Romani origin. It is important to recognize that Romani fortune-tellers later became part of European card-reading culture. It is a real history worth honoring. But the claim that they carried Tarot into Europe is just not true.
Why does it make me mad? Because it did real damage. There was serious anti-Romani persecution throughout Europe. Roma had already faced centuries of exclusion, forced assimilation, expulsion, enslavement, and criminalization. What the Tarot myth did was give an existing prejudice a supernatural costume. Romani communities have rich and varied cultures, and there are books you can read dedicated to their history with cards. I recommend Secrets of Romani Fortune-Telling, by Jezmina Von Thiele and Paulina Stevens.
Nineteenth Century Occultists (again)
Back to the occult! The history of modern Tarot can't be discussed without mentioning the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a secret society founded in 1888. It was heavily influenced by both Freemasonry and ceremonial magic, and devoted a sizable chunk of its teachings to Tarot (The Book of T). These are the people who expanded the Tarot cards into astrology, the elements, and even more Kabbalah, forming it into one big magical system. People in and around it changed everything:
1909: Arthur Edward Waite and the artist Pamela Colman Smith, called Pixie by her friends, published the Rider-Waite-Smith deck. Smith illustrated all 78 cards, including full scenes on the numbered suit cards, which in most decks had been simple suit symbols. We already know she wasn't the first to do that, but she did breathe life into it. In 1907, the family that owned the Sola Busca deck gave black-and-white photographs of all 78 cards to the British Museum, and Smith may very well have studied them. A handful of her cards echo the Sola Busca closely, the Three of Swords being the one people point to most. Most of her minor arcana, though, has no Sola Busca equivalent and came from her own imagination. Why should you care? Because most modern decks descend from her work. More importantly, she was paid a flat fee and went without much credit for decades, which is why I ALWAYS say her name.
1938 to 1943: Aleister Crowley and the artist Lady Frieda Harris (magic name, Jesus Chutney… best magic name ever) created the Thoth deck. This is a fantastic story of a drug-fueled madman and the woman who had to translate his thoughts into art and deal with his eccentricities. The Thoth deck wasn't published until 1969, after both of them had died, but it is a beautiful deck that deserves its place at the table.
From there, the twentieth century added psychology, Jungian archetypes, Arthurian styles, and feminist decks like Motherpeace in 1981, and eventually the glorious flood of thousands of indie decks you can buy today.
WHY YOU SHOULD KNOW THIS
You can read Tarot beautifully without knowing a single date in this blog. You don't need to know any of this, actually. Plenty of people do amazing readings never questioning the origin of the cards. But here's why I think it's worth your time.
I believe that objects gather a kind of life through use and relationship. If you see the world that way too, then Tarot's long history of hands matters. Gamblers, dukes, printers, card makers, scholars with wild theories, occultists, artists like Pamela Colman Smith, and every coffee table reader since have all handled these cards and added something to them. Your deck has ancestors. It's worth knowing their names.
WHY YOU DON'T NEED TO KNOW SHIT
The Egypt story was always an attempt to borrow authority from age, as if a practice only counts if it's thousands of years old. But Tarot divination has a documented history of nearly three hundred years. That's a real tradition by any reasonable measure. And while it's worth knowing to keep that tradition alive, it's not necessary.
There's no unbroken line of initiates you have to join, no secret lineage card you need to show at the door. That was never true, and the history proves it. The cards have always belonged to whoever picked them up and found them useful.
Here's how I like to hold all of this. There's what the documents show. There's what's plausible but still unproven. There's what we simply don't know. And then there is what is ours and ours alone: our relationship to the cards. A good reader can live comfortably in all four.
Sources
• Playing card, Wikipedia and Card game, Wikipedia (leaf game, 868; Ouyang Xiu)
• Mamluk playing cards, Wikipedia (suits, court titles, Topkapı deck, naipes)
• Italian Playing Cards, The World of Playing Cards and Pratesi on the 1377 Florence ban, Tarot History Forum (Florence, Viterbo)
• Trionfi (cards), Wikipedia and Early Trionfi notes, trionfi.com (Giusti 1440, Ferrara 1442, tarocchi 1505)
• Cartomancy from Lot-Books to Etteilla (Folengo)
• Playing card suit, Wikipedia and Ganjifa, Wikipedia (Chinese money suits as ancestors of the Mamluk suits)
Comments