Origins & history

The cards originated in fifteenth-century northern Italy as a game called tarocchi or trionfi. The earliest substantial surviving deck, the Visconti-Sforza tarot, was painted in Milan around 1450 for the Visconti and Sforza ducal families. There is no documentary or archaeological evidence of an earlier non-Italian origin, although later occult writers would assert one. Through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the deck spread through France, where the Tarot de Marseille pattern became the standard form, and into other European card-playing traditions.

The cards entered occult use in 1781, when the French Protestant pastor and Freemason Antoine Court de Gébelin published the eighth volume of his Le Monde primitif with an essay claiming that the tarot was a survival of an ancient Egyptian wisdom-book, the Book of Thoth, smuggled into Europe by Romani travellers. The claim was historically baseless — Egyptian hieroglyphics had not yet been deciphered when de Gébelin wrote — but it was extraordinarily influential, and almost every subsequent occult treatment of the cards depends in some way on it.

Within a decade the Parisian printer and cartomancer Jean-Baptiste Alliette, working under the anagram “Etteilla,” had built a commercial divinatory practice around the cards and produced the first deck explicitly designed for divination rather than for play. The next decisive figure was the French occultist Eliphas Lévi, whose Dogme et rituel de la haute magie (1854–56) attached the twenty-two trumps to the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet and to the Tree of Life of Kabbalah. Lévi’s synthesis became the canonical occult framework for tarot and was inherited substantially intact by the late nineteenth century’s most influential ceremonial-magic body, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

The Golden Dawn elaborated the cards into a comprehensive system, attaching each Minor Arcana card to a specific decan of the zodiac, each suit to one of the four classical elements, and each trump to a Hebrew letter and a path on the Tree of Life. Two decks emerged from the broader Golden Dawn milieu and have dominated English-language tarot ever since: the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, designed by A. E. Waite and illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith, first published by William Rider & Son in 1909; and the Thoth Tarot, conceived by Aleister Crowley and painted by Lady Frieda Harris between 1938 and 1943, posthumously published in 1969. Since the late twentieth century the field has expanded enormously: thousands of decks are now in print, ranging from strict reconstructions of the Marseille pattern to artist’s decks with no esoteric framing at all.