Where Did Tarot Come From? A Brief History from the Fifteenth Century to Today
Tarot isn't an ancient Egyptian secret—it's a card game from Renaissance Italy. From aristocratic entertainment to esoteric tool, here's an honest, no-nonsense history of tarot.
Origins: A Card Game in the Italian Courts
The earliest solid records of tarot cards date back to around 1440 in northern Italy—specifically, the noble courts of Milan and Ferrara. Back then, it was a card game called tarocchi—yes, a game, not divination. The surviving Visconti-Sforza decks, hand-painted with gold leaf, were luxury items commissioned for ducal weddings.
The Esoteric Turn: Eighteenth-Century France
The divinatory use didn't appear until eighteenth-century France. In 1781, Antoine Court de Gébelin claimed tarot was a surviving relic of the ancient Egyptian Book of Thoth—a claim with zero historical support, yet it ignited Europe's imagination. Soon after, a Parisian fortune-teller named Etteilla designed the first tarot deck specifically for divination.
The Golden Dawn and the Birth of the Rider-Waite Deck
1909 was the pivotal year for modern tarot: A. E. Waite, a member of the British esoteric order the Golden Dawn, collaborated with artist Pamela Colman Smith to publish the Rider-Waite Tarot—the first deck to feature full scenic illustrations on all 56 Minor Arcana cards. The vast majority of tarot decks you see today (including the one used on this site) are Rider-Waite descendants.
From Esoterica to Pop Culture
In the late twentieth century, tarot entered mainstream culture with the New Age movement, and psychological perspectives—like Jung's archetype theory—gave it a second interpretive framework. Today's AI tarot puts this six-hundred-year-old symbolic system into everyone's hands.
Tarot's history teaches us this: its power doesn't come from the supernatural, but from a symbolic language refined over centuries into something remarkably elegant.