A "Brief" History of Tarot

From Renaissance card games to the 78 cards we know today

Tarot has a reputation for being ancient, mysterious, and possibly handed down through the centuries by secret societies who apparently had excellent taste in illustrated cardstock.

The real history is a little less dramatic.

And honestly? I think it’s more interesting.

Tarot didn’t begin as a mystical system for predicting the future. It began as a card game. Over hundreds of years, those cards traveled across Europe, changed alongside the cultures using them, attracted the attention of occultists and artists, and eventually became the incredibly diverse divination and self-reflection tool we recognize today.

So how exactly did we get from Renaissance Italian nobles playing cards to someone sitting at their kitchen table asking whether they should text their ex?

It’s been a journey.

Before Tarot: Playing Cards Arrive in Europe

Tarot doesn’t appear out of nowhere.

Playing cards were already circulating through Europe by the late 14th century, having arrived through trade and cultural exchange with the Islamic world. One important predecessor was the Mamluk card tradition, whose decks included suits such as cups, coins, swords, and polo sticks.

If some of those sound suspiciously familiar to tarot readers, you’re paying attention.

European card makers adapted playing cards to their own cultures, and different regions developed different suit systems.

By the early 1400s, card games were already well established across parts of Europe.

Tarot was about to join them.

15th Century: The First Tarot Decks

The earliest surviving tarot cards come from northern Italy in the 1400s.

And they weren’t originally called tarot.

These elaborate decks were often referred to as carte da trionfi—cards with triumphs. In addition to the regular suited cards, the decks included a series of special illustrated trump cards.

Some of the most famous surviving examples are the Visconti-Sforza tarot cards, commissioned for wealthy Milanese families during the 15th century.

These weren’t mass-produced decks you could grab from a Renaissance bookstore checkout aisle. They were luxury objects, individually painted and decorated with materials such as gold leaf.

Many of the figures we’d recognize today were already there: the Fool, Death, the Wheel of Fortune, the Emperor, the Empress and others.

But here’s the important part:

They were playing cards.

There is no convincing historical evidence that these earliest tarot decks were created as a secret mystical book, an ancient Egyptian teaching system, or a tool for fortune-telling.

Those stories came later.

Much later.

16th–17th Centuries: Let’s Play Tarocchi

As the cards spread beyond the Italian courts, tarot developed into a family of trick-taking games.

The word tarocchi appeared in Italy during the early 1500s, and related names—including tarot in France—eventually followed.

Different regions developed their own decks and rules, and tarot games became particularly popular in parts of France, Italy, Switzerland, Austria and Central Europe.

And here’s something that surprises a lot of modern tarot users:

People still play tarot card games today.

In parts of Europe, if you tell someone you’re getting out the tarot cards, they may be expecting a card game rather than a glimpse into their romantic future.

For several centuries, that’s primarily what tarot was.

Then the 1700s happened.

And things got considerably more mystical.

18th Century: Tarot Gets an Ancient Backstory

In 1781, French writer and clergyman Antoine Court de Gébelin published an influential theory about tarot.

He believed the cards contained ancient Egyptian wisdom.

They didn’t.

There was no historical evidence for this claim, but that didn’t stop the idea from becoming enormously influential.

Court de Gébelin connected tarot imagery with Egyptian religion and ancient esoteric knowledge, helping establish the idea that tarot wasn’t merely a card game—it was the surviving fragment of some much older spiritual tradition.

Not long afterward, Jean-Baptiste Alliette, better known by the reversed version of his surname, Etteilla, took things considerably further.

Etteilla became one of the first people known to practice tarot divination professionally. He published methods for reading the cards, assigned divinatory meanings to them, and eventually produced a deck specifically intended for occult use.

This was a major turning point.

Tarot wasn’t simply being played anymore.

It was being read.

19th Century: The Occultists Move In

During the 1800s, European occultists built increasingly elaborate systems around tarot.

French occultist Éliphas Lévi connected tarot with ideas drawn from ceremonial magic and the Kabbalah, helping establish associations that would influence generations of later tarot readers.

Other writers and occult organizations continued developing connections among tarot, astrology, numerology, Hebrew letters and various esoteric traditions.

By the end of the 19th century, tarot had become deeply embedded in Western occultism.

One organization in particular would have an enormous influence on the tarot most of us recognize today:

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

And from that circle would eventually come two of the most influential tarot decks ever created.

1909: The Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot

If you’ve ever seen a tarot card—even if you’ve never had a reading—there’s a good chance you’ve encountered imagery descended from this deck.

The Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot was conceived by occultist and Golden Dawn member Arthur Edward Waite and illustrated by artist Pamela Colman Smith. It was first published by William Rider & Son around 1909.

For years, the deck was commonly called the Rider-Waite Tarot.

Today, more people use Rider-Waite-Smith or Waite-Smith to recognize something that should probably have been obvious all along:

The woman who actually created its iconic artwork deserves to have her name attached to it.

And Smith’s contribution was enormous.

Earlier tarot decks often had relatively simple numbered Minor Arcana cards. Five Cups might simply show five cups.

Smith created fully illustrated scenes for the Minor Arcana.

Suddenly, the Five of Cups wasn’t just five objects on a card. It showed a cloaked figure mourning spilled cups while others remained standing behind them.

Those illustrated scenes made tarot far more visually intuitive.

More than a century later, countless modern decks still borrow their symbolism, compositions, and meanings from Smith’s artwork.

1940s: Crowley, Harris & the Thoth Tarot

The other enormously influential deck to emerge from Golden Dawn traditions was the Thoth Tarot.

Occultist Aleister Crowley worked with artist Lady Frieda Harris to create the deck during the late 1930s and early 1940s.

Harris’s artwork was dramatically different from Pamela Colman Smith’s.

Rich, geometric, abstract and intensely symbolic, the Thoth deck incorporated astrology, Kabbalah, ceremonial magic and Crowley’s own philosophical system, Thelema.

Although the artwork was completed during their lifetimes, the deck wasn’t widely published in its familiar commercial form until after both Crowley and Harris had died.

Like the Rider-Waite-Smith system, Thoth developed its own enormous following and continues to influence tarot creators and readers today.

Late 20th Century: Tarot Leaves the Occult Shop

Something interesting happened to tarot during the second half of the 20th century.

It exploded.

The growth of New Age spirituality, feminist spirituality, Jungian psychology, neopagan traditions and alternative religious movements introduced tarot to entirely new audiences.

At the same time, publishers began producing more decks.

A lot more decks.

Artists reimagined tarot through mythology, fantasy, feminism, nature, folklore, psychology, pop culture and countless spiritual traditions.

Tarot gradually became something much broader than the occult system developed by 19th-century European esotericists.

Some people used it spiritually.

Some predictively.

Some psychologically.

Some creatively.

And some simply because pulling cards helped them look at a problem differently.

Which brings us to now.

Tarot today

Walk into a bookstore today and you’ll probably find tarot decks about everything from traditional occult symbolism to cats, dragons, mythology, plants, pop culture and probably at least one deck involving extremely judgmental-looking woodland creatures.

Tarot has become remarkably adaptable.

And I think that’s part of why it survived.

There isn’t one universally agreed-upon way to use tarot.

Some readers believe the cards predict future events.

Some believe spirit guides, ancestors or deities communicate through them.

Some use tarot alongside astrology, magic or religious practices.

Others approach tarot primarily as a psychological or reflective tool.

And plenty of us land somewhere in between.

My own approach is considerably more grounded.

I don’t believe your entire future is predetermined and sitting inside 78 pieces of cardstock waiting for me to discover it.

I use tarot to explore patterns, possibilities, motivations, choices and perspectives. Sometimes the cards reinforce something you already suspected. Sometimes they point toward something you hadn’t considered.

And occasionally they produce one of those:

“Well… shit. That actually makes a lot of sense.” moments.

Those are some of my favorites.

So… Is Tarot Ancient?

Not in the way it’s sometimes advertised.

Tarot isn’t thousands of years old. We don’t have evidence that it came from ancient Egypt, Atlantis, secret mystery schools or an unbroken line of ancient mystical teachers.

The tarot tradition we can actually document begins in 15th-century Europe.

But I don’t think that makes tarot less fascinating.

Quite the opposite.

Tarot has spent roughly six centuries being played with, painted, printed, reinvented, argued about, mysticized, demystified and interpreted by generation after generation of people.

Its meanings weren’t handed down perfectly preserved from some mysterious ancient source.

People built them.

Artists added imagery. Occultists added correspondences. Readers developed interpretations. Different cultures and generations reconsidered what the cards meant.

Tarot is a living tradition.

And we’re still adding to it.

Want to Know What Tarot Looks Like in Practice?

You definitely don’t need to know six centuries of tarot history before getting a reading.

You don’t even need to know what the cards mean.

That’s my job.

If you’re new to tarot and wondering what actually happens during a reading, what you can ask, or what you can expect from me, I’ve put together a much easier place to begin.