Tarot Origins: From Renaissance Playing Cards to Mystical Oracle

The Surprising Truth About Tarot's Origins

The history of tarot is one of the most misunderstood stories in the history of Western esotericism. Popular mythology holds that tarot cards are ancient — that they originated in ancient Egypt, or with the Roma people, or in the mystery schools of the ancient world, or that they encode the wisdom of the Kabbalah in a form that survived the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. None of these origin stories is historically accurate. The truth is both more mundane and more fascinating: tarot cards were invented in northern Italy in the early 15th century as a game — a card game played by the aristocracy for entertainment, with no mystical significance whatsoever. The transformation of tarot from a game into a mystical oracle is a story that unfolded over several centuries, driven by the imagination and the spiritual hunger of the people who encountered these remarkable images.

Understanding the true history of tarot does not diminish its power or its depth. On the contrary, it reveals something more interesting than any ancient origin myth: the story of how a set of images, created for entertainment, gradually accumulated layers of symbolic meaning until they became one of the most powerful tools for self-reflection and spiritual inquiry in the Western tradition. The tarot did not begin as a mystical system — it became one, through a process of creative interpretation and symbolic elaboration that is still ongoing today.

The Visconti-Sforza Tarot: The Earliest Surviving Decks

The earliest surviving tarot cards date to the mid-15th century and were created for the ruling families of northern Italy — particularly the Visconti and Sforza families of Milan. The most important of these early decks is the Visconti-Sforza tarot, created around 1450 for Francesco Sforza, the Duke of Milan, and his wife Bianca Maria Visconti. Approximately 74 of the original 78 cards survive, scattered across several museum collections, and they are among the most beautiful objects in the history of art — hand-painted on vellum with gold leaf and ultramarine blue, depicting the figures of the Major Arcana with extraordinary elegance and sophistication.

These early tarot cards were luxury objects — expensive commissions created for wealthy patrons, not mass-produced items for popular use. They were used to play a card game called tarocchi (from which the word “tarot” derives), a trick-taking game similar to bridge that was popular among the Italian aristocracy. The game required a standard deck of playing cards plus an additional set of 22 trump cards — the cards we now call the Major Arcana — which outranked all the other cards in the game. These trump cards depicted allegorical figures drawn from the visual culture of the Italian Renaissance: the Emperor, the Empress, the Pope, the Lovers, the Chariot, Justice, the Hermit, the Wheel of Fortune, Strength, the Hanged Man, Death, Temperance, the Devil, the Tower, the Star, the Moon, the Sun, Judgement, and the World.

The imagery of these early trump cards was not invented for tarot — it was drawn from the rich visual tradition of medieval and Renaissance allegory. The figures of the Wheel of Fortune, the Hanged Man, Death, and the World were familiar images in the visual culture of the period, appearing in manuscripts, frescoes, and woodcuts throughout Europe. The tarot trump cards assembled these familiar allegorical images into a single sequence, creating a visual encyclopedia of the moral and spiritual themes that preoccupied the educated classes of Renaissance Italy.

The Structure of the Early Tarot Deck

The structure of the early tarot deck was not identical to the structure of the modern tarot deck, and it varied considerably from one deck to another in the early period. The standard structure that eventually became canonical consists of 78 cards divided into two sections: the Major Arcana (22 trump cards, numbered 0 to 21) and the Minor Arcana (56 suit cards divided into four suits of 14 cards each).

The four suits of the Minor Arcana — Cups, Wands, Swords, and Coins (or Pentacles) — correspond to the four suits of the Italian playing card tradition: Coppe (Cups), Bastoni (Wands or Batons), Spade (Swords), and Denari (Coins). Each suit contains ten pip cards (Ace through Ten) and four court cards (Page, Knight, Queen, and King). This structure is essentially the same as the structure of a standard playing card deck, with the addition of a fourth court card (the Page or Knave) and the replacement of the Joker with the 22 trump cards of the Major Arcana.

The numbering and ordering of the Major Arcana was not standardized in the early period. Different decks placed the cards in different orders, and the numbering varied from one tradition to another. The ordering that eventually became standard in the French and English traditions — with the Fool as 0, the Magician as 1, and the World as 21 — was not established until the late 18th century, when French occultists began to systematize the tarot as a mystical system.

The Spread of Tarot Across Europe

From its origins in northern Italy, the tarot game spread gradually across Europe over the course of the 15th and 16th centuries. It was particularly popular in France, where it was known as tarot or tarock, and in the German-speaking lands, where it was known as Tarock or Tarot. The game spread along the trade routes of Renaissance Europe, carried by merchants, soldiers, and travelers who brought the Italian card game to new audiences.

As the game spread, the cards were adapted to local tastes and traditions. The Italian suits were sometimes replaced by the French or German suits, and the imagery of the trump cards was adapted to reflect the visual culture of each new region. The result was a remarkable diversity of tarot traditions across Europe, each with its own distinctive imagery and its own local variations on the standard structure.

The First Mystical Interpretations: Antoine Court de Gébelin

For the first three centuries of its existence, tarot was understood as a game — nothing more, nothing less. The transformation of tarot into a mystical oracle began in 1781, when a French Protestant pastor and amateur scholar named Antoine Court de Gébelin published an essay claiming that the tarot was not a European card game but an ancient Egyptian text — the Book of Thoth, the sacred wisdom of the Egyptian priests encoded in a set of images that had survived the destruction of ancient Egypt by being disguised as a card game.

Court de Gébelin’s claim was entirely without historical foundation — there is no evidence whatsoever that tarot has any connection to ancient Egypt, and the historical record clearly shows that it originated in 15th-century Italy. But his essay was enormously influential, because it gave tarot a mystical pedigree that captured the imagination of the educated classes of 18th-century France, who were fascinated by ancient Egypt and by the idea of a hidden wisdom tradition that had survived from antiquity.

Court de Gébelin’s essay was followed almost immediately by a pamphlet by a Parisian wigmaker named Etteilla (the pseudonym of Jean-Baptiste Alliette), who published the first tarot deck specifically designed for divination rather than for playing cards — establishing the template for the use of tarot as a divinatory system that has continued to the present day.

Why the Egyptian Origin Myth Persisted

The Egyptian origin myth of tarot — despite being historically false — persisted and flourished throughout the 19th century and into the 20th, because it served important psychological and cultural functions. It gave tarot a sense of ancient authority and mystical depth that a 15th-century Italian card game could not provide on its own. It connected tarot to the most prestigious mystical tradition of the Western world. And it provided a narrative framework within which the symbolic richness of the tarot images could be interpreted as the encoded wisdom of an ancient civilization.

The persistence of the Egyptian origin myth also reflects a deeper truth about the nature of tarot: whatever its historical origins, the images of the Major Arcana do encode a remarkable depth of symbolic meaning. The Fool, the Magician, the High Priestess, the Empress, the Emperor — these are not arbitrary images but a carefully constructed sequence of archetypal figures and situations that map the journey of the human soul through the full range of human experience. Whether or not they were designed with mystical intent, they function as a mystical system. For the deepest exploration of this archetypal dimension, Jung and the Archetype: Tarot, Astrology, and the Bridge of the Unconscious reveals why these images resonate so universally — mapping the 78 cards onto Jungian archetypes and showing how the deck functions as a complete model of the psyche.

The Legacy of Tarot’s Origins

The true history of tarot — its origins as a Renaissance card game, its gradual transformation into a mystical oracle through the creative interpretations of French occultists, its eventual development into one of the most widely used tools for self-reflection and spiritual inquiry in the modern world — is a story about the power of images to accumulate meaning over time, to become vessels for the symbolic imagination of successive generations, to grow in depth and richness through the creative engagement of the people who work with them.

The tarot did not begin as a mystical system. It became one — through a process of creative interpretation that is still ongoing, that has produced hundreds of different tarot decks in the past century alone, each reflecting the symbolic imagination of its creator and the spiritual needs of its time. The Renaissance noblemen who played tarocchi with the Visconti-Sforza deck could not have imagined what their card game would become. But the images they commissioned — the Fool, the Magician, the High Priestess, Death, the World — were rich enough to sustain six centuries of interpretation and still have more to say.

If you want to carry the full symbolism of all 78 of those cards with you beyond the reading table, our 78 Tarot Cards Scarf weaves every card’s imagery into a wearable piece of art — a beautiful way to stay connected to this six-century tradition throughout your day. And if you want to build a daily practice rooted in this rich history, The 52-Week Tarot Journey gives you a full year of structured weekly spreads and daily pulls to deepen your relationship with the cards.