The real history of tarot: from Italian card game to the 78 arcana

A 15th-century card game, not an ancient artifact

Tarot shows up documented in the courts of northern Italy between 1440 and 1450, in a radius covering Milan, Ferrara and Florence. The game was called tarocchi (or, before that, trionfi, "triumphs"): a trick-taking game for several players in which an extra suit of 21 cards, plus the Fool, acted as a permanent trump over the four ordinary suits. The English word "trump" itself comes from there, from the Italian trionfi via the Latin triumphus. The earliest decks were luxury objects, hand-painted with gold leaf, commissioned by noble families, not sold to just anyone. There was nothing mystical about it: it was an expensive card game, the way a limited-run collector deck would be today.

The most famous example is the set of decks now called Visconti-Sforza, commissioned by Filippo Maria Visconti, Duke of Milan, and by his son-in-law Francesco Sforza, who succeeded him as duke. Watermark analysis places one of these decks, the Visconti di Modrone, between 1441 and 1442; another, the Cary-Yale, may have been made for Francesco Sforza’s marriage to Bianca Visconti, also in the early 1440s. No deck from that period survives complete. The best-known set has 35 cards held today at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, plus 26 cards from the same deck at the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo; Yale University’s Beinecke Library holds another set (the Cary-Yale) in its historical playing-card collection. These are real museums and libraries, with pieces anyone can consult, not relics of dubious origin.

Tarocchi / Trionfi

Names of the 15th-century Italian trump card game that gave rise to tarot; trionfi ("triumphs") is the older term, and the source of the word "trump" in dozens of other games.

Suit

Each of the deck’s four groups of 14 cards, equivalent to the suits of an ordinary 52-card deck.

Arcana

Today’s standard term for tarot cards, from the Latin arcanum, "secret". It is not original to the 15th-century game: it entered common use later, through the occult tradition.

The Egyptian myth: an invention from 1781, not a real origin

Antoine Court de Gébelin, a French Protestant pastor and writer, claimed in volume 8 of his Le Monde primitif (1781) that tarot was a surviving fragment of the legendary Book of Thoth, a compendium of ancient Egyptian priestly wisdom, and that the word "tarot" itself came from the Egyptian "tar" (path) and "ro" (royal). He offered no archaeological, textual or linguistic evidence, only a symbolic reading of the card images. The detail that exposes the problem: Court de Gébelin wrote this 41 years before Jean-François Champollion deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs, in 1822. In 1781, literally no one in Europe could read a word of ancient Egyptian, Court de Gébelin included. The Egyptian link was, at best, an erudite guess.

Wrong as it was, the idea caught on. In the same volume, a collaborator of Court de Gébelin, the Comte de Mellet, published an essay linking the 22 trumps to the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet and to Kabbalistic tradition, another connection with no historical basis, yet one that became a pillar of esoteric tarot to this day. It was that pair of 1781 essays, not any archaeological discovery, that turned a parlor card game into an "ancient wisdom system" in the European popular imagination.

Etteilla: the birth of tarot cartomancy

The step from "tarot is Egyptian" to "tarot predicts the future" came from someone else. Jean-Baptiste Alliette, a Parisian merchant and occultist, published under the pen name Etteilla, his own surname spelled backward, the first manual dedicated to reading tarot as an oracle, around 1783. In 1789 he went further: he released his own deck, named Livre de Thot ("Book of Thoth", a direct nod to Court de Gébelin’s thesis), with 78 hand-colored cards and Egyptian themes he invented himself. Etteilla also assigned fixed meanings to every card, both upright and reversed, and organized readings into fixed positions on the table, the skeleton of every tarot spread practiced today. That is why he is credited as the first to popularize tarot specifically as a divination tool.

1. 1440-1442The game is born in the Italian courts

   The earliest records of tarocchi/trionfi appear in Florence, Milan and Ferrara; the first Visconti-Sforza decks date from this period.

2. 1781The Egyptian thesis

   Antoine Court de Gébelin publishes volume 8 of Le Monde primitif, linking tarot to ancient Egypt with no historical evidence.

3. 1783-1789Etteilla invents tarot cartomancy

   Jean-Baptiste Alliette publishes the first reading manual and, in 1789, his own oracle deck, the Livre de Thot.

4. 1909The modern standard deck

   A. E. Waite and Pamela Colman Smith publish, through the Rider Company, the deck that is today’s worldwide reference.

The gap between the two stories matters: tarot spent roughly 300 years as nothing more than a parlor card game, and it took less than a decade, between 1781 and 1789, to be reinvented as an Egyptian oracle system in the European imagination. It is that late-18th-century reinvention, not the 15th-century origin, that underpins the mystical reading that spread afterward.

The structure of the 78 arcana

Setting the legend aside, the deck’s structure is the easiest fact in this whole history to verify: any "standard" tarot deck has exactly 78 cards, split into two parts. The 22 Major Arcana, numbered 0 (The Fool) to 21 (The World) and sometimes called "trumps", a direct echo of the original game, depict standalone figures and themes, like Death, The Tower or the Wheel of Fortune. The 56 Minor Arcana split into four suits of 14 cards each: Ace through 10, plus four court cards, Page, Knight, Queen and King.

The math is simple: 4 suits times 14 cards (Ace through 10 is 10 cards, plus Page, Knight, Queen and King is 4 more) add up to 56 minor cards; add the 22 major ones and you get exactly 78. The four suits trace back to the suits of an ordinary 52-card deck, a kinship still visible today, and it is why tarot is still played as a trick-taking game in parts of Europe (France, Italy, German-speaking countries) nearly 600 years after it was created, with no connection to divination whatsoever.

The modern standard deck: Rider-Waite-Smith, 1909

Practically every tarot image in circulation today, including this site’s online tarot, descends from one specific deck, published in 1909 by the British publisher Rider & Son, commissioned by the scholar A. E. Waite and illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith. Smith’s most influential contribution was not tying tarot to any new tradition, it was a structural detail: until then, the Minor Arcana simply showed the suit’s symbols repeated by number (three cups, five swords), no scene at all. Smith illustrated all 56 minor cards as small visual narratives, each with a full scene, which made the deck far easier to "read" intuitively. It is that visual standard, not any historical discovery, that most modern decks still copy.

The story behind the scenes is well documented and less cheerful. Smith received a flat, modest fee for the work, no royalties, and her name did not appear on the original cover, only the publisher’s (Rider) and Waite’s. For decades the deck was known simply as "Rider-Waite". Starting in the 1970s, tarot historians began reclaiming credit for Smith, and in 2009, on the centennial of publication, the American publisher U.S. Games Systems released the "Smith-Waite Centennial Deck", putting her name first. Today the deck is increasingly called Rider-Waite-Smith or Waite-Smith, in recognition of work that has carried the tarot industry for over a century.

Common spreads, and what science says about them

Like any old card game, modern tarot has standardized "spreads": fixed card layouts on the table that organize a reading. Three are particularly common and available in this site’s online tarot:

1. Single cardA single card, drawn for a daily focus or a specific question. It is the simplest spread and the most used for a quick reading.
2. Three cards: past, present, futureThree cards in a row, read as past, present and future. It is the most common spread after the single card, since it fits almost any question.
3. Celtic CrossTen cards in fixed positions (current situation, challenge, past, future, what is above, what is below, advice, external influences, hopes and fears, outcome). It is the most elaborate spread in common use.

If the same question applied to a different symbolic system interests you, the how a birth chart is calculated guide documents the same split between exact astronomy and unproven reading, and the Big Five vs. MBTI guide shows the difference between a tested personality model and one that is not. If you prefer fixed numbers to cards, the numerology guide walks through a similar origin myth.