The Origins of Tarot: From Renaissance Card Game to Modern Divination

The real history of tarot is stranger and better than the myth. No Egyptian temples, no gypsy caravans carrying ancient secrets — instead: Renaissance card players, a French pastor with a theory, a golden age of secret societies, and an under-credited female artist whose paintings became the most recognizable deck on Earth.

Where did tarot actually come from?

Playing cards reached Europe in the late 1300s, and in the early-to-mid 1400s, workshops in northern Italy — Milan, Ferrara, Bologna — added a fifth set of illustrated trump cards to the standard four suits. The result was carte da trionfi ("triumph cards"), later tarocchi, and it was a trick-taking game, the ancestor of bridge more than of fortune-telling. The oldest surviving decks, the hand-painted Visconti-Sforza cards, were luxury objects commissioned by Milanese nobility — and you can already recognize The Fool, The Wheel, and Death in them, nearly six centuries old.

How did a card game become a divination tool?

Three hundred years later, in 1780s Paris. Antoine Court de Gébelin, a French clergyman and scholar, published his theory that tarot's trumps encoded the lost wisdom of ancient Egypt — a romantic idea with no historical evidence behind it (Egyptian hieroglyphs hadn't even been deciphered yet). Evidence or not, the story electrified occult Paris. A professional fortune-teller who wrote under the name Etteilla ran with it, publishing the first guides to reading tarot for divination and even designing the first deck made specifically for that purpose. Card divination itself — cartomancy — was already being practiced with ordinary playing cards; tarot simply became its richest instrument.

Where does the astrology connection come from?

The same occult tradition, systematized a century later. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn — the influential late-1800s British magical society — built formal correspondence tables binding tarot to astrology: the four suits to the four elements (Wands/fire, Cups/water, Swords/air, Pentacles/earth), and each Major Arcana card to a planet or zodiac sign — The Emperor to Aries, The Moon to Pisces, The Sun to the Sun. These correspondences aren't ancient, but they're coherent and genuinely useful: many readers use a card's astrological association as a second layer of meaning, and if you know your birth chart, meeting "your" cards is a doorway into both systems at once.

Why does the Rider-Waite-Smith deck matter so much?

Because it made tarot readable. In 1909, Golden Dawn member A.E. Waite commissioned artist Pamela Colman Smith to create a new deck — and her decisive innovation was illustrating every card with a full scene, including all 56 Minor Arcana, which earlier decks had left as abstract pip arrangements (five swords, six cups, and so on). Suddenly a beginner could look at any card and see a story. That's why nearly every modern guidebook teaches from RWS imagery, why we recommend an RWS-based deck in our beginner's guide — and why Smith, who was paid a flat fee and died in obscurity, deserves the name recognition that mostly went to Waite. The other giant of modern design, the Thoth deck by Aleister Crowley and Lady Frieda Harris, arrived in the 1940s and anchors the deck's more esoteric lineage.

Does the invented history make tarot less meaningful?

Here's the honest take: knowing the Egyptian story was a myth doesn't diminish the practice — it clarifies what tarot actually is. The cards work not because they're ancient, but because 22 archetypes and four suits of human experience turn out to be a genuinely good map of a life. Six hundred years of players, occultists, artists, and readers kept refining that map. You're reading a living tradition, not a fossil — and that's the better inheritance.

Every deck on our shelves is a descendant of this six-century lineage — Renaissance game, occult reinvention, and Pamela Colman Smith's paintbrush. Meet the cards themselves in our guides to the Major Arcana and the four suits, and find your own piece of the tradition in our tarot and oracle collection.