The history of tarot begins not with fortune tellers but with a card game. Tarot was invented in northern Italy in the early fifteenth century as a trick-taking game for wealthy families, and for its first three hundred years, that is all it was: an expensive, beautiful pastime. The mystical meanings, the symbolism, the readings — all of that came later, layered onto a game by people who saw more in the pictures than their makers had intended. Knowing that history does not make tarot less interesting. It makes it more interesting, because the deck you hold today carries five centuries of reinvention in its 78 cards.
The story is often told with invented details — ancient Egyptian origins, secret gypsy wisdom, hidden temple knowledge — and none of those claims has evidence behind it. The real story is better documented and stranger in its own way.
Fifteenth-century Italy: a game for the wealthy
The earliest tarot decks appear in Milan, Ferrara, and Bologna in the 1420s and 1430s, under names like "trionfi", meaning triumphs. They were luxury objects, hand-painted for noble families such as the Visconti and the Sforza, and they cost a fortune: a single deck could cost as much as a horse. The cards were not printed but painted by artists, often with gold leaf, and they were as much a display of wealth as a game.
The game itself was a trick-taking game, like bridge or whist, played with a standard suit of cards plus a fifth suit of twenty-two picture cards — the trumps — which could beat any card of the ordinary suits. The pictures showed figures and ideas familiar to a fifteenth-century Italian court: the Emperor and the Empress, the Pope, the Lovers, the Wheel of Fortune, Death, the Devil, the Tower, the Star, the Moon, the Sun, and the World. These were not mystical symbols to their first players. They were a parade of the powers and forces of the world as a Renaissance court understood them: church, state, love, fortune, death, and judgement.
The earliest surviving decks, like the Visconti-Sforza deck from around 1450, are works of art in their own right, and they show how little the Major Arcana have changed in five centuries. The Fool is there, the Magician is there, Death rides his pale horse. The images were already the images we know.
Spread across Europe
By the end of the fifteenth century, tarot had spread from Italy to France, where it became "tarot" — the name most of the world now uses — and then to Switzerland, Germany, and beyond. The game remained popular for centuries, and it is still played today: in France, the game of tarot is a national pastime with organised tournaments, and in parts of Italy and Switzerland, local versions survive.
As the game spread, the cards changed. French makers simplified the images for woodblock printing, which made decks cheap enough for ordinary people. The Marseille pattern, which developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, became the standard French design, and it is still printed today. The Marseille deck's Minor Arcana cards are unillustrated — the Seven of Cups shows seven cups in a pattern, not a scene — because the game did not need pictures on the numbered cards, and the makers did not bother.
For three centuries, nobody read fortunes with tarot. There is no evidence of cartomancy — fortune-telling with cards — using tarot before the late eighteenth century, and the idea that tarot was always a mystical tool is a myth created later by people who wanted it to be one.
The eighteenth century: the occult reinvention
The reinvention began in 1781, when a French clergyman and scholar named Antoine Court de Gébelin published a book claiming that tarot was the surviving wisdom of ancient Egypt, encoded in cards by priests of the god Thoth. There was no evidence for this, and de Gébelin knew little about Egypt — hieroglyphs had not yet been deciphered — but the claim was exciting, and it caught on. Within a few years, a French occultist named Etteilla published the first deck designed for fortune-telling, with meanings printed on the cards, and the first guidebook for reading them.
De Gébelin's Egyptian theory was wrong, but it was productive: it gave tarot a grand origin story, and it attracted exactly the kind of people — occultists, mystics, and seekers — who would spend the next two centuries building the tradition we know today. The irony is that the false history created a real one.
The nineteenth century: the Golden Dawn and the modern deck
In the nineteenth century, tarot passed into the hands of occult orders, most importantly the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, founded in London in 1888. The Golden Dawn wove tarot into a larger system of Western occultism, connecting each card to astrology, the Hebrew alphabet, the elements, and the Kabbalah's Tree of Life. The deck became not just a fortune-telling tool but a map of spiritual development, a system for meditation, and a language for talking about the inner life.
It was from this world that the Rider-Waite-Smith deck emerged in 1909. Arthur Edward Waite and Pamela Colman Smith, both Golden Dawn members, created the first deck in which every Minor Arcana card had a full illustrated scene — a change that made the deck readable by anyone, not just initiates. Their deck became the standard, and it remains so. The Tarot hub gathers the meanings of all 78 cards in the tradition their deck established.
The nineteenth century also produced the other great strand of tarot history: the fortune-telling tradition that grew in Paris and spread through Europe, carried by professional readers who used the cards to advise clients on love, money, and work. The two strands — the occult and the practical — have run side by side ever since, and most modern readers draw on both.
The twentieth century: psychology, popularity, and the paperback
In the twentieth century, tarot left the occult lodge and entered the mainstream. Carl Jung's ideas about archetypes and the collective unconscious gave tarot a psychological language: the cards could be read as images of universal human patterns — the Mother, the Ruler, the Trickster, the Shadow — rather than as supernatural messages. That framing made tarot respectable to people who would never have visited a fortune teller, and it remains one of the most popular ways of understanding the cards today.
The counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s brought tarot to a wider audience still, and the paperback boom of the 1980s and 1990s put guidebooks in every bookshop. New decks multiplied: decks based on mythology, on nature, on science fiction, on particular cultures, on feminist and queer perspectives. Each new deck was a reinterpretation of the same 78-card structure, and each one proved how flexible that structure is.
By the end of the century, tarot was no longer a fringe interest. It was in films and television, in novels and comics, in shops on ordinary high streets, and in the hands of people who used it for reflection, creativity, and decision-making rather than prediction.
Tarot today: apps, artists, and a living tradition
Today tarot is more popular than ever, and more diverse. There are thousands of decks in print, from faithful reproductions of the 1909 original to decks that reimagine the cards entirely. There are apps that deal a daily tarot card, websites that offer a free tarot reading, and online communities where readers share spreads and interpretations. There are tarot readers on every social platform, and tarot imagery in fashion, advertising, and art.
The tradition is also more self-aware than it used to be. Readers today are more likely to talk about tarot as a tool for reflection than as a way of predicting the future, and more likely to be honest about its invented history. The Egyptian origin story is now recognised as a myth, and the real story — a game, reinvented by occultists, refined by artists, adopted by psychologists, and loved by millions — is told more often, and more proudly.
That honesty suits the cards. Tarot does not need a false ancient pedigree to be worth your time. Five hundred years of use, reinvention, and artistry is pedigree enough, and the deck you hold today is the product of all of it: a Renaissance game, an occult map, a psychological mirror, and a set of pictures that still, after all this time, have something to say.
A dream about death is sometimes mentioned in the same breath as tarot's Death card, and the parallel is a useful one: both the card and the dream are far older as symbols than any fortune-telling tradition, and both are about change rather than ending. The images outlast the uses we put them to.
What the history means for a reader
Knowing this history changes how you read, in small but useful ways. It reminds you that the cards are pictures with a past, not messages from elsewhere, and that their meanings were made by people, over time, for reasons you can understand. It takes the pressure off: you are not channelling ancient wisdom, you are using a tool that other people have used, argued about, and improved for five centuries. And it gives you permission to make the tradition your own, because that is what every generation of readers has done — including the ones who invented it.
Frequently asked questions
Where did tarot originate?
Tarot originated in northern Italy in the early fifteenth century as a trick-taking card game for wealthy families, under the name "trionfi". It was a game, not a fortune-telling tool, for its first three hundred years. The mystical use of tarot began in the late eighteenth century in France.
Is tarot from ancient Egypt?
No. That claim was made in 1781 by Antoine Court de Gébelin, but there is no evidence for it, and hieroglyphs had not yet been deciphered when he wrote. Tarot's documented history begins in Renaissance Italy. The Egyptian story is a myth, though it helped make tarot popular.
When did people start reading fortunes with tarot?
Fortune-telling with tarot began in the late eighteenth century, when the French occultist Etteilla published the first deck designed for readings, with meanings printed on the cards. Before that, tarot was played as a game across Europe.
Who created the Rider-Waite-Smith deck?
Arthur Edward Waite designed it and Pamela Colman Smith painted all 78 images; it was published in London in 1909. Both were members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. It was the first popular deck to illustrate every Minor Arcana card with a full scene, which is why it became the standard.
Is tarot still played as a game today?
Yes. In France, the game of tarot is a popular pastime with organised tournaments, and versions of the game survive in Italy and Switzerland. The game and the reading tradition have run side by side for centuries.
How has tarot changed in modern times?
Tarot is now used mainly for reflection, creativity, and decision-making rather than fortune-telling, and it is more diverse than ever, with thousands of decks in print. Modern readers are also more honest about its real history, and more likely to describe the cards as a psychological tool than as a supernatural one.