The history of tarot: from Renaissance card game to divination
It was a card game for about 350 years before anybody read fortunes with it.
4 min read · Published 17 August 2026
The short answer
Tarot originated in fifteenth-century northern Italy as a card game — tarocchi — in which the Major Arcana were trump cards. There is no evidence of its use for divination for roughly the first 350 years. Divinatory use is documented from the late eighteenth century in France, and the claim of ancient Egyptian origin was invented in the 1780s by Antoine Court de Gébelin with no supporting evidence. Knowing this does not diminish tarot; it just means its authority is not antiquity.
The actual timeline
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| c. 1440s | Tarot decks appear in northern Italy — Milan, Ferrara, Bologna — as trump cards for a game called tarocchi. The Visconti-Sforza decks survive from this period. |
| 1400s–1700s | Played as a card game across Italy, France and central Europe. No documented divinatory use. |
| 1781 | Antoine Court de Gébelin publishes the claim that tarot encodes ancient Egyptian wisdom. No evidence supports it, then or since. |
| 1780s–1790s | Etteilla produces the first decks designed for divination and the first systematic cartomantic method. |
| 1888 onwards | The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn systematises correspondences between tarot, astrology and Kabbalah. |
| 1909 | Rider publishes the Waite–Smith deck, with all 78 cards illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith. It becomes the standard. |
| 1969 | The Thoth deck is published, decades after Harris painted it. |
The Egyptian claim, and why it stuck
In 1781 Court de Gébelin, a French clergyman and scholar, asserted that tarot preserved the wisdom of ancient Egypt — that the cards were a surviving fragment of the Book of Thoth, smuggled through the centuries as an innocuous game.
He had no evidence. The claim predates the decipherment of hieroglyphs by decades, so he could not read a word of Egyptian, and nothing found since has supported any connection. The idea nonetheless became the foundation of the entire esoteric tarot tradition, and it is still repeated in deck guidebooks today.
It is worth understanding why it was so persuasive. An eighteenth-century European audience was fascinated by Egypt, and an ancient origin conferred authority that a Renaissance card game did not. That incentive has not gone away — see what Elon Musk says about astrology for the modern equivalent of a confidently sourceless claim.
What the Golden Dawn actually did
The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, founded in 1888, is where most of what people now think of as tarot's system was assembled.
They mapped the 22 Major Arcana onto the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet and the paths of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, assigned planetary and zodiacal correspondences to cards, and fixed the elemental attributions of the four suits. Waite and Crowley were both members, which is why both major twentieth-century decks encode the same framework.
This is the origin of nearly every 'tarot and astrology' correspondence you will encounter. It was constructed by a specific group of people in late-Victorian London, in a specific decade, and while it is internally consistent it is not inherited from anywhere older.
Does the history undermine tarot?
It undermines one specific claim: that tarot's value comes from ancient transmission. It does not.
What survives is more interesting. A set of images developed for a card game acquired, over two centuries, a rich interpretive apparatus — and that apparatus works as a reflective tool regardless of when it was assembled. The Five of Cups is a good image for grief whether Pamela Colman Smith drew it in 1909 or a priest drew it in 300 BCE.
The honest position is the same one this journal takes about astrology: the tradition is real, the antiquity claims are usually inflated, and the useful part was never the pedigree.
One more thing the history explains
It explains why reversals are optional, why the Celtic Cross is a 1910 invention with a Celtic-sounding name, and why the Fool's Journey is a twentieth-century narrative reading of a fifteenth-century trump sequence.
None of those are ancient. All three are useful. Once you stop needing tarot to be old, the actual history becomes considerably more interesting than the myth.
Common questions
- Where did tarot originate?
- In northern Italy in the 1440s, as a card game called tarocchi in which the Major Arcana served as trump cards. Surviving examples include the Visconti-Sforza decks made for Milanese nobility.
- When was tarot first used for divination?
- The late eighteenth century in France, roughly 350 years after the cards appeared. Etteilla produced the first decks specifically designed for divination in the 1780s and 1790s.
- Did tarot come from ancient Egypt?
- No. The claim was made in 1781 by Antoine Court de Gébelin without evidence, decades before hieroglyphs could even be read. Nothing discovered since supports any Egyptian connection, though the claim is still repeated in deck guidebooks.
- Who created the tarot and astrology correspondences?
- Largely the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn from 1888 onwards, which mapped the Major Arcana onto the Hebrew alphabet and Kabbalistic Tree of Life and assigned planetary and zodiacal attributions. Both Waite and Crowley were members, which is why their decks share the framework.