The most reproduced tarot image on earth is probably the Fool: a young traveller stepping off a cliff edge with a white rose in one hand and a small dog at his heel. It was drawn in London in 1909 by a woman paid a single flat fee who died more or less penniless. Behind her lies a longer story again, because for its first three centuries the tarot pack had nothing to do with fortune-telling. It was equipment for a card game.
How cards reached Europe
Playing cards are a Chinese invention that came to Europe by way of the Islamic world. Mamluk Egypt had a fully developed pack of fifty-two cards in four suits of cups, coins, swords and polo sticks, and a near-complete example survives in Istanbul. European records appear suddenly and in quantity during the 1370s, in Florence, Basel, Paris and Barcelona, mostly in the unromantic form of municipal bans on gambling. A frequently quoted Italian mention from 1299 almost certainly refers to something else; the 1370s cluster is where the reliable trail begins.
Europeans kept the four suits, converted the polo sticks into batons because nobody there played polo, and by the 1440s were printing cards cheaply from woodblocks. Britannica's history of playing cards traces how the German block-printing trade and later French stencilling drove the price down and produced the suit marks most of the world now uses. That is the ordinary world the tarot was born into: a mass entertainment, denounced from pulpits, played by everyone.
The fifth suit
In the courts of northern Italy during the 1440s somebody had an idea any modern card player would recognise at once: add a permanent trump suit. Alongside the four ordinary suits went a run of picture cards that outranked everything else, the trionfi or triumphs, a word that entered English as trump. Death, the Hanged Man, the Wheel, the Star, the Tower. These are the trumps, and their rank order is the entire point of them.
An account book from Ferrara dated 1442 records payment for carte da trionfi. The most spectacular survivals are the Milanese packs made for the Visconti and Sforza families around the middle of that century, hand-painted with gold and silver leaf and generally attributed to Bonifacio Bembo. Sixty-seven cards of one such pack are held in the Cary Collection at Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, with features later packs dropped, including female knights and pages and cards for the theological virtues. These were luxury objects for a ducal household, not instruments of prophecy.
The game never went away, either. Tarot is still played competitively in France, Tarock in Austria and Hungary, Tarocchini in Bologna, under rules recognisably descended from the fifteenth century. The Italian word tarocchi surfaces around 1505, and nobody has satisfactorily explained what it originally meant.
Three centuries of nothing occult
This is the part that tends to surprise. Across some three hundred years of references to the pack, in sermons attacking it, in poems that use the trumps as a parlour game for characterising one's friends, in household inventories and printers' records, there is essentially no evidence that anybody used these cards to divine the future. Fortune-telling with cards did exist, but it used ordinary packs and amounted to a minor amusement rather than a system.
The trumps were understood as precisely what they look like: a moral procession, a sequence of allegories about fortune, virtue, death and the last things, of a type entirely conventional in Renaissance art and public pageantry. A viewer in 1500 would have found the imagery unremarkable, which is exactly why almost nobody troubled to write about it.
Paris, 1781
The reinvention happened in one city, within one decade, and can be dated. In 1781 Antoine Court de Gebelin, a Protestant pastor, freemason and energetic amateur scholar, published the eighth volume of his vast Le Monde primitif, a project devoted to recovering the lost universal civilisation he was convinced lay behind all human culture. In it he announced that the tarot was a surviving fragment of Egyptian sacred learning, the Book of Thoth, carried through the centuries disguised as a game. He derived the word tarot from Egyptian roots supposedly meaning royal road.
It is worth being blunt about the evidential basis, which is none whatsoever. Court de Gebelin could not read Egyptian. Nobody could, since hieroglyphs were not deciphered until Champollion published his results in the 1820s. The etymology is fabricated and the Egyptian origin is fabricated. A second essay in the same volume, by a writer styling himself the Comte de Mellet, contributed the further idea that the twenty-two trumps correspond to the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, a proposition with no historical foundation that has underpinned occult tarot ever since.
Etteilla, Levi and the making of a system
Court de Gebelin supplied the myth. A Parisian named Jean-Baptiste Alliette, trading under his surname spelled backwards as Etteilla, supplied the business model. He had already published on cartomancy using an ordinary piquet pack in 1770; from 1783 he turned to the tarot, produced a stream of pamphlets, took paying clients, trained students and around 1789 issued the first pack ever designed specifically for divination, complete with printed meanings and separate significations for cards drawn upside down. Etteilla is the first professional tarot reader in the historical record, and the convention of reversed cards is his invention.
The nineteenth century turned all this into a system. Eliphas Levi, the pen name of Alphonse Louis Constant, folded the tarot into ceremonial magic and the Kabbalah during the 1850s and hardened the trump-to-Hebrew-letter scheme into doctrine. Papus published a book in 1889 attributing the cards to Roma travellers, a romantic ascription with nothing behind it that did lasting harm to actual people. By the time the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was founded in London in 1888, an elaborate architecture of correspondences was in place, and the oldest part of it was barely a century old.
The deck in your hands
Two Golden Dawn members produced the pack that now dominates the world. Arthur Edward Waite, a scholarly and somewhat pompous occultist, commissioned the artist Pamela Colman Smith to illustrate a new deck, and William Rider and Son published it in London in December 1909.
Smith's contribution is the reason it won. Every earlier pack had abstract pip cards: the five of cups was simply five cups, much like a five of hearts. Smith illustrated all fifty-six of them as small dramatic scenes, with characters, weather and body language, so that a novice could look at a card and read a situation without memorising a table of meanings. Art historians have pointed to the fifteenth-century Sola Busca deck, photographs of which the British Museum acquired in 1907, as a plausible prompt. The execution is entirely hers, and so is the visual grammar most decks published since have copied.
She was paid once, modestly, and received no royalties. Born in 1878 to American parents and raised partly in Jamaica, she was a theatre designer, folklorist and publisher who ran her own small press for women writers, and she signed her work with a compact monogram while being credited for decades as little more than an assistant. She died in Cornwall in 1951 in reduced circumstances, her effects sold to settle debts, her grave unmarked. The pack is increasingly called Rider-Waite-Smith, and in 2022 the Whitney Museum of American Art showed it as modernist art beside her 1903 painting The Wave.
The deck's present ubiquity dates from 1971, when a New York publisher reissued it and the counterculture took it up wholesale. Since then its centre of gravity has shifted again, away from prediction and towards reflection: journalling prompts, therapy-adjacent self-enquiry, a set of seventy-eight vivid pictures of human predicaments to think against.
That may be closer to what the cards always were. A Renaissance player laying down the Wheel of Fortune to take a trick was handling the same allegory a reader considers today, in a pack whose oldest layer is a game and whose occult layer was assembled by a pastor, a fortune-teller and a magician within living memory of the French Revolution. Seeing the joins does not make the images any less good. It only means the meaning arrives from the person holding them, which is where it was coming from all along.
