A History of Tarot: From Renaissance Playing Cards to Modern Divination

Tarot began as a fifteenth-century Italian trick-taking game and only became a divination tool three centuries later. Here's the actual documented lineage.

Before Divination: A Card Game

It surprises a lot of people to learn that tarot is older as a card game than as a fortune-telling tool — by roughly three hundred years. The earliest surviving decks, the hand-painted Visconti-Sforza cards commissioned by the ruling families of Milan around 1440–1450, were built to play tarocchi, a trick-taking game structurally similar to modern bridge or whist. The deck's twenty-two illustrated picture cards — what we now call the Major Arcana — functioned as a permanent suit of trump cards that outranked the four ordinary suits, which is where the term "trump" itself likely originates. There was no divinatory instruction attached to these cards at all; they were luxury game pieces for the Italian nobility, often commissioned as wedding gifts, which is why so many surviving examples are lavishly gilded.

Standardization: The Tarot de Marseille

As the game spread from Italy into France and beyond over the following two centuries, regional variations in the deck's imagery gradually settled into a few dominant patterns. By the seventeenth century, French card makers in Marseille had standardized a woodblock-printed pattern — now known as the Tarot de Marseille — that became the common deck across much of French-speaking Europe. Unlike the fully painted Visconti-Sforza cards, the Marseille deck's Minor Arcana used simple repeated suit symbols (a row of five cups, six swords, and so on) rather than illustrated scenes, a design choice that later readers would treat very differently once divination entered the picture.

The Occult Turn

Tarot's transformation into a divination system is a specific, documentable event, not a gradual folk development. In 1781, the French clergyman and freemason Antoine Court de Gébelin published a widely read essay claiming tarot descended from an ancient Egyptian "Book of Thoth" — a claim with no historical basis (the deck's actual fifteenth-century Italian origin was not seriously reconstructed by scholars until the twentieth century), but one that captured the occult imagination of the era regardless. A few years later, in the 1780s, Jean-Baptiste Alliette — writing under the pen name Etteilla — published the first practical cartomantic instructions for the deck, effectively inventing tarot reading as a discipline. The next major step came from the French occultist Éliphas Lévi, who in the 1850s explicitly linked the twenty-two Major Arcana to the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet and the Qabalistic Tree of Life — a correspondence system this app's own Tree of Life and Hebrew Letters pages still draw on today.

The Golden Dawn and the Rider-Waite-Smith Deck

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, founded in London in 1888, absorbed and systematized Lévi's Qabalistic framework into a full esoteric curriculum. Its most lasting contribution to how the world actually reads tarot arrived in 1909, when the Rider-Waite-Smith deck was published — illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith under the direction of Golden Dawn member A. E. Waite. Smith's genius was giving every single Minor Arcana card, not just the Major Arcana, a fully illustrated narrative scene: the Three of Swords isn't just three sword symbols, it's a heart pierced by three swords under a rain cloud. That single design decision made the deck dramatically more intuitive to read than the symbol-only Marseille pattern, and it's the reason the Rider-Waite-Smith visual language — including the card meanings used throughout this app — became the template nearly every subsequent tarot deck has followed.

Thoth and the Twentieth-Century Explosion

A second influential lineage arrived in 1969 (published posthumously) with the Thoth deck, designed by Aleister Crowley and painted by Lady Frieda Harris over roughly five years. Where Rider-Waite-Smith prioritized narrative accessibility, Thoth leaned further into explicit astrological, Qabalistic, and alchemical correspondence, aimed at readers already versed in ceremonial magic's technical vocabulary. From the mid-twentieth century onward, tarot publishing exploded far beyond these two lineages — by some publishing-industry estimates, thousands of distinct decks are now in print, spanning wildly different art styles and cultural framings, though the overwhelming majority still use Rider-Waite-Smith's card structure and meanings as their starting point.

Tarot Today

The tarot deck used and referenced throughout this app sits squarely in that Rider-Waite-Smith tradition. What's changed most in tarot's most recent chapter isn't the cards themselves but how people frame their use: contemporary tarot writing, workshops, and apps overwhelmingly present the deck as a structured self-reflection and journaling tool rather than a literal predictive instrument — closer to what Etteilla's eighteenth-century readers might have called fortune-telling in spirit, but grounded today in the deck's genuinely rich five-hundred-year documented history rather than the disproven Egyptian-origin story that first popularized it.

Common Historical Myths, Corrected

A few persistent myths are worth clearing up, since they're repeated often enough to feel like established fact. The claim that tarot descends from an ancient Egyptian "Book of Thoth" is not supported by the historical record — it originates specifically with Antoine Court de Gébelin's 1781 essay, written more than three centuries after the deck's actual, well-documented fifteenth-century Italian origin, and no Egyptological or textual evidence has ever substantiated it. A second common claim, that tarot was widely suppressed or banned by the Church as heretical, has little solid documentary support either; what evidence survives suggests tarocchi was treated, when it was regulated at all, more like other card games subject to period gambling restrictions than singled out as a specifically occult threat — that framing is largely a later romanticization. A third myth ties tarot's spread to Romani travelers, sometimes still reflected in the outdated term "gypsy cards" — but since tarot didn't become a divination tool until the 1780s in France, centuries after Romani communities had already been established across Europe, the timeline doesn't support tarot as something introduced to Europe by Romani migration; if anything, cartomancy's association with Romani fortune-tellers is a later cultural pairing, not tarot's actual origin story.

Tarot's Reach Today

Tarot's popularity has grown substantially in the last two decades, particularly among younger adults engaging with it through a self-help and journaling framing rather than a strictly occult one — a shift reflected in the enormous number of tarot-adjacent books, planners, and apps (this one included) now marketed primarily around reflection and mindfulness rather than fortune-telling. Academically, tarot has also found a real, if modest, home within cultural history and art history departments, studied as a genuinely rich artifact of Renaissance game culture and later occult revival movements, distinct from any question of whether its divinatory claims hold up. Both threads — the popular self-reflection use and the academic historical interest — sit comfortably with the deck's actual, well-documented history, in a way the old invented Egyptian-origin story never really needed to.