The Surprising History of Tarot Cards

Tarocchi Cards

A news story, The Surprising History of Tarot Cards, relates that tarot cards have carried an aura of mystery for many centuries.  To many they are tools for reflection, storytelling, or spiritual insight.  To others they are simply beautiful art.  To some they are a source of fear or disdain.  But few are aware that tarot's earliest history has nothing to do with divination.  They were simply a card game.

Tarot emerged in northern Italy in the early 15th century at the height of the Renaissance.  Card games were a fashionable diversion among aristocratic courts.  Wealthy families commissioned ornate decks to play a game called tarocchi.  The exact rules have not survived intact it seems that Tarocchi is a trick-taking game a bit like bridge.  Using a special trot deck the game involved bidding for tricks.  Play involves following suit, or trumping, and scoring points.  Players aim to capture high-value cards, particularly the powerful trump cards (The Fool, The World, the Sun, the Moon, The Angel).  Players bid to declare how many tricks or points they think that they can win.  Play typically moves counter-clockwise and players must follow the suit led if possible; if not they can play any other card, including a trump.  The highest trump wins. If no trumps are played, the highest card of the suit led is the winner of the hand.

These early tarot cards were not intended as occult devices.  Their imagery drew from a shared visual language familiar to Renaissance viewers:  Christian virtues, classical allegory, courtly hierarchy, and reminders of morality.  The characters on the cards – emperors, popes, virtues such as Justice and Fortitude, and figures such as Death or the Fool – echoed themes found in their every day environment of sermons, pageants, poetry and art.

Scholars have suggested that the true sequence – the set of allegorical cards later known as the Major Arcana – functioned as a loose meditation on the rise and fall of worldly power.  The game spread across Europe gradually finally reaching France by the 16th century, where the current name took hold (adapted from the Italian tarocchi). By the late 18th century tarot became ripe for "reinterpretation". That reinterpretation arrived during a period of intense intellectual ferment.  France was in the grip of Eggyptomania, a fascination with Egypt fueled by Napoleon's campaigns there and a popular belief that ancient Egypt held some kind of key to universal wisdom.  At the same time, traditional religious institutions were struggling to adapt to political and social upheaval, creating space for alternative spiritual systems.

A French Scholar, Antoine Court de Gébelin in the mid and late 1700s declared that tarot was no mere card game, but a fragment of ancient Egyptian wisdom long disguised for the sake of its own survival.  The theory was entirely made-up, but it was nevertheless compelling.  Tarot, once a Renaissance amusement, was reborn as an esoteric relic.

Court de Gébelin's ideas found eager successors, especially in France. French occultist Jean-Baptiste Alliette published one of the first tarot decks designed explicitly for divination in 1789, layering astrology, numerology and invented Egyptian lore onto the cards.  In the 19th century occultists soon linked tarot to hermeticism, astrology, and Kabbalah, embedding the cards within elaborate metaphysical belief systems.  Tarot was no longer a game for anyone to pick up.  It was treated as a powerful tool that required initiation and expertise.

The next major transformation occurred in England under the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.  Golden Dawn practitioners mapped tarot's 22 trump cards onto the cabalistic Tree of Life, assigning each a specific spiritual pathway.  These associations still underpin many contemporary interpretations.

Two Golden Dawn members proved especially influential:  English occultists Aleister Crowley and Arthur Edward Waite.  Crowley expanded tarot's network of esoteric correspondences, while Waite made a more practical innovation.  In 1909, Waite commissioned artist Pamela Colman Smith to illustrate a new deck in which even the numbered suit cards, previously simple arrangements of symbols, became narrative scenes.  The result, now known as the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, transformed tarot reading by making it more story-driven.  It remains the most widely used tarot deck in the world.

Tarot underwent another shift in the 20th century with the rise of New Age Culture.  While divination remained central, the emphasis moved from predicting the future to healing, self-development, and psychological insight.  Influenced by Jungian ideas about archetypes, modern tarot users embraced the cards as mirrors of inner experience rather than fixed messages from beyond.

Themed decks proliferated – pagan, astrological, pop-cultural, playful, and profound – and anyone with curiosity and a little time could learn to read them.  What had once been a guarded esoteric system became a flexible personal practice.

Tarot has changed meanings many times, reshaping itself to fit the hands that hold it.  It began as a game, was transformed into an esoteric symbol system, and now lives in countless forms at once.  Each era reworked the cards to reflect its own concerns, be they power, fate, mysticism, or self knowledge.

Tarot reveals something quite human; the enduring impulse to find meaning in images, to tell stories and to see our own lives reflected in symbolic form.  Rather than containing guarded timeless secrets tarot invites us to look, interpret and imagine.  

Good exercise for conscious minds.