The Origins of Tarot

Tarot's real history is more interesting than the myths. It began not as a mystical oracle but as a card game in Renaissance Italy — and only became a tool for divination centuries later.

A 15th-century card game

The first tarot decks appeared in northern Italy in the mid-1400s, where they were used to play a trick-taking game known as tarocchi. The trumps we now call the Major Arcana were simply the game's highest cards. Among the earliest surviving examples are the hand-painted Visconti-Sforza decks made for the ruling families of Milan.

Spread across Europe

The game travelled through Italy into France and beyond, and printed woodcut decks made it far more affordable. In France, a standardised pattern emerged that became the Tarot de Marseille — for centuries the archetypal tarot.

Divination came later

Using tarot to tell fortunes is a relatively modern practice. It gained traction in late-18th-century France, when writers such as Antoine Court de Gébelin (1781) attached esoteric — and historically unfounded — meanings to the cards, and Jean-Baptiste Alliette ("Etteilla") popularised decks designed specifically for divination. The occult tradition then flourished in the 19th and 20th centuries, culminating in the Rider-Waite-Smith deck (1909).