The History of Tarot

Tarot didn't start as a divination tool at all — it began in 15th-century Northern Italy as a card game called tarocchi (or trionfi), played by noble families with hand-painted decks that had nothing to do with fortune-telling. The Visconti-Sforza deck, created around the 1440s for the ruling families of Milan, is among the oldest surviving examples, and its imagery already includes recognizable ancestors of today's Major Arcana — figures like the Emperor, the Wheel of Fortune, and Death appear in these earliest decks purely as trump cards within a trick-taking game, centuries before anyone treated them as symbolic or predictive.

Tarot's shift toward divination happened much later, and largely in France. In 1781, Antoine Court de Gébelin published a widely read (and, by later historical scholarship, thoroughly discredited) claim that tarot originated in ancient Egypt and encoded lost esoteric wisdom. There's no genuine historical evidence supporting an Egyptian origin — tarot's actual roots are 15th-century Italian playing cards, not ancient Egyptian scrolls — but Court de Gébelin's speculation caught on regardless and reshaped how tarot was culturally understood going forward. Shortly after, a French occultist writing under the name Etteilla published the first deck specifically designed for divination, along with structured interpretive meanings, moving tarot decisively from a card game into a fortune-telling practice for the first time.

The 19th century brought the next major shift, this time in England: the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, an influential occult society active in the 1880s and 1890s, developed the detailed astrological and elemental correspondence system this site's own card data draws on — assigning specific planets, zodiac signs, and elements to individual cards in a structured, internally consistent way that earlier tarot traditions hadn't attempted. Much of what modern readers consider 'standard' tarot symbolism, including the suit-element pairings and the numerological framework covered in our numerology guide, traces back to this specific circle's work rather than to tarot's much earlier Italian card-game origins.

1909 is the single most consequential year in tarot's modern history. Arthur Edward Waite, a member of the Golden Dawn, commissioned artist Pamela Colman Smith to illustrate a new 78-card deck, published by William Rider & Son. What made it genuinely groundbreaking wasn't the Major Arcana — earlier decks already illustrated those — but the fact that Smith fully illustrated all 56 Minor Arcana pip cards with detailed scenes, when the standard convention until then had been simple, undecorated suit symbols (four swords arranged on a plain card, and so on). That single change, giving every pip card its own scene to read intuitively, is a large part of why this deck became the reference point nearly every subsequent tarot deck and guidebook, including this site, still builds on.

Pamela Colman Smith's role went historically under-credited for decades — the deck was commonly called simply the 'Waite deck' or the 'Rider deck,' crediting the deck's commissioner and publisher while leaving out the illustrator whose actual artistic choices shaped nearly every card's now-standard imagery. U.S. Games Systems, the deck's modern publisher, formally renamed it the Rider-Waite-Smith (RWS) deck in more recent decades specifically to correct that omission, and 'RWS' is now the standard way tarot writers refer to it.

Since 1909, hundreds of independently themed tarot decks have been published, from the Thoth deck (developed by Aleister Crowley and illustrated by Lady Frieda Harris in the 1940s) to countless modern artistic reinterpretations, but the RWS deck's 78-card structure, numbering, and core suit-and-number logic remain the reference point nearly all of them build on — which is exactly why a reader who learns the RWS system, the one this entire site is built around, can pick up almost any modern tarot deck and read it competently from day one.

Tarot's popularity has moved in real, documented waves rather than growing steadily the whole time. After its 19th-century occult revival in France and England, it remained a fairly niche practice through much of the 20th century, picking up renewed popular interest during the 1960s and 70s counterculture, when the RWS deck in particular became widely available in mainstream bookstores for the first time. A second, larger wave of mainstream interest arrived in the mid-2010s and has continued since, driven heavily by social media and a substantial boom in independently published, artist-designed decks — a period that produced far more new tarot decks in a single decade than most of the 20th century combined, even as nearly all of them kept building on the same 1909 structural foundation.

It's worth being honest, too, about how much of tarot's popular narrative (the Egyptian-origin myth being the clearest example) reflects later storytelling layered onto the cards rather than the cards' own documented history. None of that later mythology makes the practice less genuinely useful as a reflection tool — but knowing the actual, verifiable history, a 15th-century Italian card game reshaped by 18th- and 19th-century occult writers into a divination practice, gives a more honest foundation than the more romantic but historically unsupported Egyptian-origin story still repeated widely today.