The History of Tarot Cards

The history of tarot is especially interesting because the same 78-card structure has served very different purposes: courtly entertainment, competitive play, occult philosophy, fortune telling, art and personal reflection. Separating those stages gives the subject a richer story than the popular myths.

Before tarot: playing cards reach Europe

Card games existed in Asia before they appeared in Europe. European playing cards are documented by the late fourteenth century, probably arriving through trade routes that connected Europe with the Middle East. Early European packs varied widely. Suits, card counts and images were not yet standardized, and luxury hand-painted cards could function as status objects as well as games.

By the fifteenth century, Italian packs commonly used the suits Cups, Swords, Batons and Coins. A conventional Italian pack contained numbered cards and four court cards in each suit. Tarot added a separate sequence of picture cards that acted as trumps, plus the Fool.

Tarot emerges in Renaissance Italy

The earliest known written references to tarot come from the 1440s and 1450s in northern Italy, especially the region associated with Milan, Venice, Florence and Urbino. The cards were first known as trionfi, or triumphs, and later as tarocchi. They were used for a trick-taking game: a trump card could defeat ordinary suited cards according to the hierarchy of the pack.

The structure recognizable today was already visible. There were 56 suited cards, 21 trump cards and the Fool. Later writers grouped the 22 special cards as the Major Arcana and the 56 suited cards as the Minor Arcana, but those occult labels were not the language of the earliest players.

The Visconti and Visconti–Sforza cards

Some of the best-known surviving early tarot cards were created for elite families in Milan. The Visconti and Visconti–Sforza groups were hand-painted on pasteboard, often with rich pigments, tooled gold and imagery resembling manuscript illumination. They were expensive works of art, not mass-market decks.

Their trump imagery reflected the social, religious and moral world of Renaissance Europe: emperors, popes, virtues, the Wheel of Fortune, Death, the Sun, Moon, Star and World. Decks were not completely standardized. Some surviving packs contain unusual court cards or additional virtues, showing that tarot evolved through experimentation rather than appearing as one fixed system.

For centuries, tarot was a game

Tarot was not originally designed for fortune telling. It belongs to the family of trick-taking games, and game forms are still played in parts of Europe. The word “trump” itself is historically related to the language of triumph. In play, the illustrated trump sequence introduced a special hierarchy that made the game more complex.

This gaming history matters because it corrects a common misconception: medieval tarot cards were not created as encrypted occult scripture. Claims that tarot came directly from ancient Egypt, the biblical era or a single secret society arose much later and are not supported by the surviving fifteenth-century evidence.

How tarot became associated with divination

People had used ordinary playing cards for cartomancy before tarot became widely occult. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, European writers and practitioners increasingly treated tarot images as an esoteric symbolic system. They connected the cards with astrology, Kabbalah, alchemy and imagined ancient wisdom.

Those theories changed how the cards were organized and interpreted. The trumps became a spiritual or initiatory journey, while suits, numbers and court cards received layered correspondences. Whether historically accurate or not, these systems had a major influence on modern tarot practice.

The Rider–Waite–Smith turning point

One of the most influential modern decks was published in 1909. It is commonly called the Rider–Waite or Rider–Waite–Smith deck: Rider was the publisher, A. E. Waite developed its program, and artist Pamela Colman Smith created its images.

Its major innovation was to give the numbered Minor Arcana detailed scenes rather than repeating suit symbols alone. A reader could interpret a situation through characters, gestures and settings even without memorizing a list of numerical meanings. Smith’s compositions became so influential that many contemporary decks quote, revise or respond to them.

Tarot in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries

Later decks expanded far beyond European court imagery. Artists have created tarot through feminist, LGBTQ+, African diasporic, Indigenous-inspired, ecological, psychological, secular and pop-cultural lenses. This variety demonstrates that tarot is not only a set of meanings; it is also a flexible publishing and illustration format.

Modern readers use tarot in different ways. Some understand it as spiritual divination. Others treat it as a prompt for journaling, storytelling, therapy-adjacent reflection or creative problem-solving. These approaches do not have to make identical claims, but responsible practice should state clearly what a reading can and cannot establish.

What the historical record supports

Why this history improves a reading

Knowing that tarot accumulated meanings over time gives readers permission to be both respectful and critical. A card can carry Renaissance imagery, nineteenth-century occult associations, twentieth-century illustration conventions and a reader’s present-day experience at once. History does not remove the mystery; it shows how many human hands helped create it.

Sources and further reading

• The Metropolitan Museum of Art: “Before Fortune-Telling: The History and Structure of Tarot Cards”
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art: “The World in Play: Luxury Cards, 1430–1540”
• Victoria and Albert Museum: “A History of Tarot Cards”

This educational overview distinguishes documented card history from later spiritual traditions. It does not assess personal beliefs or claim that tarot scientifically predicts future events.