The History of Tarot: From Renaissance Card Game to Esoteric Oracle

The Magician (Il Bagatello) from the Visconti-Sforza tarot deck, c. 1450 — one of the earliest surviving tarot cards, painted for the Visconti and Sforza families of Milan. The deck began as a courtly card game called Tarocchi, with no esoteric purpose; its transformation into an oracle would take three more centuries

The myth of ancient Egypt dies hard. For more than two centuries, popular belief has held that the tarot is the survival of an ancient Egyptian wisdom tradition — the Book of Thoth encoded in cards, the secret knowledge of the priests of the Nile carried secretly through the ages in the hands of traveling Romani. It is a beautiful story. It is also, on the available historical evidence, entirely false.

The tarot originated in northern Italy in the fifteenth century, as a variant of playing card games already in use across Europe. The first decks were not oracles but game pieces — used for a trick-taking game called tarocchi, popular at the courts of the Italian Renaissance. The twenty-two Major Arcana cards that now form the esoteric heart of the tarot were originally called trionfi — "triumphs" — a set of allegorical trump cards that ranked above the standard four-suit deck in play.

The transformation of the tarot from game to oracle, from court entertainment to esoteric tool, took more than three hundred years — and the full story of that transformation is one of the most fascinating episodes in the history of Western esotericism.

The Origins: Northern Italy, c. 1440

The earliest surviving tarot cards date from around 1440-1450, painted for the Visconti and Sforza families of Milan — the most powerful dynasties of northern Italy during the Renaissance. The Visconti-Sforza deck (now divided among several museum collections, with the largest portion at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York) is the oldest substantially complete tarot deck in existence: hand-painted by court artists, gilded with real gold and silver, representing the major allegorical figures of late medieval Christendom.

The figures on these early trump cards — the Fool, the Magician (Il Bagatello, the juggler), the High Priestess (La Papessa, the female Pope), the Emperor, the Empress, the Pope, the Lovers, the Chariot, Justice, the Hermit, the Wheel of Fortune, Strength, the Hanged Man, Death, Temperance, the Devil, the Tower, the Star, the Moon, the Sun, Judgment, and the World — were not chosen at random. They reflect the iconography of the late medieval triumphs (allegorical processions celebrating virtues and cosmic forces), the figures of the tarot game as it developed from similar trump card games played in Mamluk Egypt and the Islamic world, and the symbolic vocabulary of Renaissance Italy: a culture saturated with classical mythology, Christian allegory, Neoplatonic philosophy, and the early stirrings of the Hermetic tradition.

What is striking about these earliest cards, in retrospect, is how much symbolic depth they contain — even without any explicitly esoteric intention on the part of their creators. The Hermit carries a lantern of hidden wisdom. The Wheel of Fortune turns with the figures of rising and falling fortune clinging to it. The Hanged Man, suspended by one foot, regards the world from an inverted perspective. Death rides his pale horse through a field of figures high and low. These images did not require occult overlay to carry meaning. They already spoke the visual language of archetypal experience.

An uncut sheet of Italian tarot cards from the Cary Collection at the Beinecke Library, Yale, c. 1500 — by this period tarot decks were being produced by woodblock printing for a broader market, spreading the game from aristocratic courts throughout northern Italy and eventually across Europe

The Tarot of Marseille and the Spread of the Game

By the mid-sixteenth century, tarot had spread from Italy northward through France and into Germany and Switzerland. A distinctive visual tradition developed in southern France — particularly in Lyon and later in Marseille — that standardized the imagery of the trumps into a form known as the Tarot of Marseille: the oldest continuous printed tarot tradition, still in production today in the form of classic decks like the Grimaud, the Nicolas Conver, and the Camoin-Jodorowsky.

The Tarot of Marseille's imagery is striking for its boldness and its apparent depth. The figures are stylized rather than naturalistic — closer to the formal conventions of Gothic art than to the Renaissance naturalism of the Visconti-Sforza deck. This formalization, which might seem to flatten the imagery, has paradoxically made the Marseille deck a particularly rich tool for divinatory and contemplative use: the simplified figures are more archetypal, more abstract, more readily projectable with the interpreter's own psychological and spiritual associations.

For the first three centuries of its existence, the tarot remained primarily a game. There is no documented use of tarot cards for divination before the eighteenth century. The earliest known divination with regular playing cards (not tarot specifically) dates from the 1540s; the first documented use of tarot cards as a divinatory tool appears in the 1750s, in a Bologna manuscript. The transformation from game to oracle was gradual, partial, and contested.

Court de Gébelin and the Egyptian Myth (1781)

The decisive moment in the tarot's transformation into an esoteric tradition came in 1781, when the French Freemason, antiquarian, and speculative historian Antoine Court de Gébelin published the eighth volume of his encyclopedic work Le Monde Primitif (The Primordial World). In it, he included an essay claiming that the tarot was not a card game at all, but the surviving fragment of an ancient Egyptian wisdom tradition — the Book of Thoth, preserved by Egyptian priests who had foreseen the destruction of their civilization and encoded their most sacred knowledge in a set of picture cards that would survive because they appeared to be mere playing cards.

Court de Gébelin had no actual evidence for this claim. The scholarship was wrong on every demonstrable point: the tarot demonstrably originated in fifteenth-century Italy, not ancient Egypt; the Egyptian hieroglyphs were not deciphered until the 1820s (by Champollion, four decades after Court de Gébelin's death); and no ancient Egyptian source mentions anything resembling a tarot deck.

But the claim was irresistible. It gave the tarot a mythological depth and an ancient pedigree that the game could not otherwise claim, and it activated the cultural longing — intense in the late eighteenth century — for a universal, primordial wisdom that underlaid all the world's sacred traditions. The Egyptian myth transformed the tarot's reception overnight: within years, French occultists were developing systems for divinatory use based on Court de Gébelin's claim.

Etteilla (the pen name of Jean-Baptiste Alliette, 1738-1791), a French wigmaker and cartomancer, published the first systematic divinatory system for tarot in 1783, including a new deck designed specifically for fortune-telling. Etteilla's work established the basic framework — cards with divinatory meanings, spread layouts, reversed meanings — that subsequent tarot divination has largely followed.

Eliphas Lévi and the Kabbalah Connection (1856)

The next decisive development came with Eliphas Lévi (born Alphonse Louis Constant, 1810-1875), the French occultist who created the systematic framework of modern Western magic. In his Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie (Transcendental Magic, 1856), Lévi made an extraordinarily influential claim: that the twenty-two Major Arcana of the tarot corresponded precisely to the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet and the twenty-two paths on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life.

This connection — even if Lévi invented it rather than discovered it — was genuinely transformative. It embedded the tarot within the Western esoteric tradition's deepest conceptual framework: the Kabbalah, with its map of divine emanation, its understanding of the structure of consciousness, and its rich system of correspondences connecting letters, numbers, colors, sounds, planets, and qualities of experience. The tarot was no longer simply a divinatory tool or a game with allegorical pictures. It was now a system for working with the fundamental structure of creation.

Lévi's framework was taken up and developed by the occult revival of the late nineteenth century — particularly by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the British magical fraternity founded in 1888 that counted among its members W.B. Yeats, Aleister Crowley, and Arthur Machen. The Golden Dawn developed one of the most elaborate systems of tarot correspondence in the tradition's history, assigning each card specific Kabbalistic, astrological, elemental, and color correspondences, and using tarot in magical and meditative practice rather than primarily for divination.

The Rider-Waite-Smith Deck (1909): The Image That Shaped the Modern Tarot

The Fool from the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot (1909), illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith under the direction of Arthur Edward Waite — the first deck to give illustrated scenes to all 78 cards, including the 56 Minor Arcana. Its visual vocabulary has shaped virtually every subsequent tarot deck and established the standard for modern tarot interpretation

The most influential tarot deck of the modern era was published in 1909 by the Rider Company in London: the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot, designed by the occultist Arthur Edward Waite and illustrated by the artist Pamela Colman Smith (1878-1951), both members of the Golden Dawn.

Waite's design contribution was primarily conceptual: he instructed Smith on the symbolic content of each card, drawing on the Golden Dawn's elaborate system of correspondences. Smith's contribution was transformative: she gave fully illustrated scenes to all 78 cards, including the 56 Minor Arcana cards which in previous decks had carried only repeating geometric arrangements of suit symbols (four cups, six swords, etc.). For the first time, the ace of cups was not just a cup but a scene: a hand emerging from clouds holding a chalice, a dove, a cross, and a rushing stream of water. The six of swords was not six swords arranged symmetrically but a boatman ferrying two huddled figures across gray water toward a distant shore.

This decision — to give narrative scenes to every card — is the single most important development in the history of tarot as a divinatory and psychological tool. The illustrated scenes give the reader a visual entry point for every card, a story to project onto, a scenario within which to situate the question at hand. The Rider-Waite-Smith visual vocabulary has shaped virtually every subsequent tarot deck produced in the English-speaking world, and most of those produced elsewhere.

Pamela Colman Smith herself — who was paid a flat fee for her work and received no royalties despite the deck's extraordinary success — was a remarkable figure: a mixed-race Jamaican-British woman working at the intersection of art, theater, and the occult at the turn of the twentieth century. She was a friend of W.B. Yeats, a contributor to The Green Sheaf (her own literary and art journal), and a deeply intuitive visionary whose images for the tarot encoded far more than even Waite's directions specified.

Crowley's Thoth Tarot and the Psychological Turn

Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) produced the other great twentieth-century tarot deck, the Thoth Tarot, illustrated by the artist Frieda Harris over the years 1938-1943 (though not published until 1969, after both Crowley and Harris had died). The Thoth Tarot draws on Crowley's synthesis of Thelemic magic, Kabbalah, astrology, I Ching, and his own system of correspondences, and Harris's images — rendered in a style influenced by projective geometry — have a hallucinatory depth and complexity unlike any other deck.

Alongside the esoteric schools, the twentieth century also saw the emergence of psychological tarot: the interpretation of the cards' images in terms of Jungian depth psychology. The Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung never wrote systematically about tarot, but his concepts of the archetypes — universal patterns of the collective unconscious expressed in mythology, dreams, and symbolic imagery — mapped so naturally onto the Major Arcana that the connection was made almost immediately by his students and followers. The Fool became the Self at the beginning of the individuation journey. The High Priestess became the Anima. The Devil became the Shadow. The Tower became the shattering of the persona. The World became the integrated Self at the end of the process.

This Jungian reading of the tarot — which understands the cards not as predictions of external events but as mirrors of psychological processes — has become the dominant framework for contemporary tarot in therapeutic and self-developmental contexts. The tarot spread is not a fortune-telling machine but a projection screen: the cards that appear in a reading reflect, through the mechanisms of synchronicity and unconscious selection, the psychological state of the person doing the reading at the moment of the reading.

The Tarot Today

The tarot has undergone a remarkable cultural renaissance in the early twenty-first century. Hundreds of new decks appear every year, drawing on every conceivable artistic tradition and thematic context. The internet has created communities of readers and students that would have been impossible in any previous era. The stigma associated with divination has diminished significantly, at least in secular Western cultures, as psychological and self-developmental uses of the cards have become increasingly mainstream.

What has not changed — what has remained consistent from the Renaissance courts of Milan to the Instagram feeds of contemporary tarot practitioners — is the peculiar power of the images themselves. Whatever their origin, whatever esoteric framework is overlaid on them, the twenty-two Major Arcana cards describe something true about the structure of human experience: the fool's leap into the unknown, the hermit's solitary lamp, the tower's sudden collapse, the star's quiet hope in darkness, the world's completion. These are not arbitrary pictures. They are something very close to what the esoteric tradition has always claimed them to be — a map of the journey the soul takes through a human lifetime.

— Lux Esoterica