Where did the Tarot originate from?
Now we have all these modern Tarot decks, but most of them still seem to be based around the RWS Tarot system, so they’re just fresh artwork on the original idea. Other than oracle decks of course they all seem to be unique.
So what is the history of them?
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The answer is northern Italy, mid-1400s.
The earliest references all cluster around the 1440s and 1450s in Venice, Milan, Florence, Urbino. They were for playing a trick-taking card game called tarocchi, though the wealthy families turned it into this whole status thing where they commissioned hand-painted decks with gold leaf and insanely fine detail.
The most famous surviving set is the Visconti-Sforza deck, made around 1450-1451 for the Duke of Milan’s family, painted by an artist named Bonifacio Bembo. 74 of the original 78 cards still exist, split between New York’s Morgan Library, Italy’s Accademia Carrara, and a private collection in Bergamo.
They weren’t even called ‘tarot’ originally. The name was ‘carte da trionfi’, cards of triumph. The word tarocchi doesn’t show up until around 1502 in Brescia and nobody really knows where it came from. One theory is it references the Taro River in northern Italy, which could have powered early paper mills for cardmaking… but that’s speculative. The structure was already basically what we work with now. 21 trumps plus the Fool, 56 suit cards with Cups, Swords, Batons and Coins. The imagery pulled from stuff Renaissance people would have recognized instantly, Christian virtues, classical allegory, courtly hierarchy, memento mori type themes. The trumps probably represented characters from these medieval reenactments of Roman triumphal processions (kind of like parade floats, if that helps picture it).
The bones of the modern 78-card deck are about 575 years old. It’s a well-documented origin story despite all the myth layered on top.
The best intro to tarot’s origins I’ve come across. Helen Farley’s A Cultural History of Tarot covers the early Italian playing cards, how the esoteric associations developed over centuries, all of it.
It’s thorough but still readable, which is rare for this kind of deep-dive. Good luck finding a copy though.
RWS sits at the end of a pretty specific chain of influence, and each link added something the previous one didn’t have.
After the Italian originals, the next major link is the Tarot de Marseille. The earliest surviving Marseille-pattern cards come from Philippe Vachier of Marseilles in 1639, and by the 17th and 18th centuries Marseille had basically become the center for tarot deck manufacturing. Multiple master cardmakers all worked in the Panier district.
That deck cemented the 22 trumps in a specific order, established the suit names (Cups, Coins, Swords, Batons), and gave us the visual shorthand we still recognize. Justice with scales, the Hanged Man by one foot, the Hermit with his lamp, and more.
Then the occultists got involved, and things got creative. In the 1780s writers started claiming tarot had Egyptian origins. Zero evidence for that, but the idea stuck. A French Freemason named Court de Gebelin published a whole analysis connecting the symbolism to ancient Egypt and the Book of Thoth. Jean-Baptiste Alliette (who went by Etteilla) created the first deck specifically designed for divination in 1791. Later Éliphas Lévi tied the 10 numbered cards to the Sephirot in Jewish Kabbalah. A lot of layers got stacked on in a pretty short window of time.
All of this fed directly into the Golden Dawn. Both A. E. Waite and Pamela Colman Smith were members of that Victorian-era occult order in London, and in 1909 Waite commissioned Smith to create the deck.
The big innovation was that Smith designed full pictorial scenes for every single minor arcana card. Before that, pip cards were just repeated suit symbols, two swords for the Two of Swords and nothing else. Smith drew on the Marseille trumps and the 15th century Sola Busca deck for her pip illustrations. The Sola Busca connection deserves a look on its own.
Pamela Colman Smith got paid basically nothing. That’s where I always end up when this topic comes up, so I’ll just start there and work backwards.
She completed all 78 illustrations in six months, April to October 1909. This was a genuinely accomplished artist. She had shows at Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery in New York. She was friends with Bram Stoker and W. B. Yeats. No royalties. No copyright. Struggled financially her whole life. Until pretty recently the deck was just called ‘Rider-Waite’ after the publisher and Waite, completely erasing her contribution. People are finally starting to call it Rider-Waite-Smith or RWS, which… better late than never I guess. Over 100 million copies in circulation now.
Been digging into old records lately. The earliest mention of Tarot-style decks hits around 1440 in Ferrara. Marquis Leonbattista d’Este ordered packs illustrated with gods and virtues, all for trionfi games.
Milan followed quick. Those gold-leaf Visconti decks showed up around 1450, made for the duke’s inner circle, and they still look good even now.
Bologna had records by 1449 too, mostly priests griping about ‘naibi’ cards in sermons. All northern Italian hotspots. Nobility games with tricks and bids. The divination stuff came way later.
And pulling from a Marseille now… it still feels like touching that court vibe, even if the meanings we use got piled on centuries later.
Eliphas Lévi in the 1850s bolted the Hebrew alphabet and the Kabbalistic Tree of Life onto the major arcana. Before him, tarot and Kabbalah had basically nothing to do with each other. Zero connection.
And somehow that one guy’s framework just became the entire backbone of Western esotericism, or at least how most people encounter it now.
Court de Gébelin kicked the whole thing off in 1781. He claimed Tarot came from Egyptian priests who were supposedly hiding ancient wisdom in a deck of cards. It was a complete invention, but it stuck (kind of like that ancient alien stuff people can’t let go of). Before his book, there was zero connection to Egypt or gypsies, just Italian game packs that eventually spread to France by the 1500s as the Tarot de Marseille, printed cheap after Gutenberg made that possible.
And then Etteilla jumped on it, tweaked the decks for fortune-telling by layering in planets and elements. One guy’s fanfic basically rewrote the entire backstory.
The history of Tarot is as messy as its future. Gotta love it.
People in the past lied about it to try and control it. Companies in the future will lie about it to try and control it. I’d focus on your own connection to what you think the cards mean.
What matters most is how you personally connect with the cards. That’s what my mentor always drilled into me.
Tarot started as an Italian card game before it became a divination tool, which is interesting history but honestly beside the point. She was big on pairing it with other practices too, pendulum work especially.
The Golden Dawn, Eliphas Levi, and the Theosophical Society laid a lot of the groundwork for modern tarot’s esoteric connections. The Kabbalistic correspondences especially. Those mappings between the cards and the tree of life are still in use today, which shows how embedded that framework became.
For the deeper history, A Wicked Pack of Cards by Dummett, Decker, and Depaulis traces how tarot evolved from Italian Renaissance card games into the divinatory tool we know. Reminds me of that Umberto Eco line: ‘The real hero is always a hero by mistake.’ Something about that fits.
P. D. Ouspensky’s 1901 work The Symbolism of the Tarot was already circulating in occult circles decades before Crowley even started his Thoth deck, so the lineage runs deeper than it looks.
The Egyptian connection is my favorite part of all this. It’s basically 18th century fanfiction that became canon. Antoine Court de Gebelin published his book in 1781 claiming tarot had links to the Hebrew alphabet and Egyptian mythology, and everyone just ran with it. No fact-checking. No historical evidence. Just ‘Egypt is mysterious and cool so tarot must come from there’ and that was apparently enough.
The real history is way more.. boring. Playing cards evolved from Mamluk cards in 1300s Europe, the trumps developed over centuries, cartomancy emerged organically. But when Waite and Colman-Smith created the RWS deck in the early 1900s they leaned hard into de Gebelin’s Egyptian/Hebrew aesthetic, especially for cards like The High Priestess and The Chariot. So the fanfiction shaped the most iconic deck we have.
Speaking of The High Priestess with all that mysterious Egyptian imagery, I always pair readings where she shows up prominently with mugwort tea to deepen intuition, or blue lotus if you can find it (the Egyptian connection there feels almost too perfect). For Chariot spreads dealing with willpower and direction, strong black tea with cardamom. Keeps the energy grounded and moving forward.
Court de Gébelin’s 1781 deck was the first one actually designed for cartomancy. Largely (and sadly) overlooked but we do have a section for it here.