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.