Earliest Evidence: Playing Cards Reach Europe First
Europe Gets Playing Cards
Playing cards reached Europe from Asia in the 14th century1. The earliest citywide ban on cards was recorded in Bern in 1367. Anti-gaming ordinances followed quickly, a sign of how fast the new game spread. Few ordinary medieval cards survive because they were handled until they wore out. What does survive tends to be luxury material: hand-painted, commissioned decks decorated with expensive pigments and gold or silver.
Documents referring to playing cards emerge from about 1375. Tarot under the name “triomphe” is only mentioned from the early 15th century. That gap matters. Playing cards existed in Europe for decades before anything that looked like tarot appeared in the written record.
An early record, not the first
A Ferrara court record of 1442 mentions the game as carte da trionfi or triumphorum ludus, “triumph cards”2. Older catalogues treated that note as the first mention. It is an early record, not the earliest. On 16 September 1440 the notary Giusto Giusti of Anghiari wrote that he had given Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta a pack of naibi a trionfi made for him in Florence. Nerida Newbigin published a transcription of that diary in 2002. The card historian Thierry Depaulis later recognized the entry as the earliest known written record of triumph cards. The familiar tarot deck eventually became standardized around 78 cards: 22 trumps, including the Fool, and 56 suited cards. Early decks and regional variants did not always follow this arrangement. The four suits came from the Islamic world, but the trump principle was a European invention. Around 1500 the term tarocchi appears in a Ferrarese court account book, and the French word “tarot” is documented in 15052.
Tarot as a 15th-Century Italian Card Game
Trick-Taking and Elite Patronage
Early tarot was a trick-taking or gambling game, not a divination tool. No evidence exists that tarot was invented for occult use or used for divination before the 18th century3. A 15th-century uncut Northern Italian tarot sheet, displayed in a Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition, was originally made for a trick-taking game. The history of tarot rules is now known except for its beginnings, according to Michael Dummett’s research.
Regional Variants
The main Italian centers were Milan, Ferrara, and Bologna. Each had its own deck model and style of play. By the early 16th century, variants included the Florentine minchiate, which added 19 extra trumps, and the Bolognese tarocchino, which omitted the number cards 2 through 5. Hand-painted luxury decks circulated alongside cheaper woodcut and printed decks.
Early Surviving Decks: The Visconti-Sforza Cards
Three Luxury Decks
The earliest surviving illuminated Italian tarot decks are the three Visconti-Sforza decks, made in the middle of the 15th century for elite patrons4. They are generally attributed to Bonifacio Bembo and his workshop, though that attribution is not certain; one scholar has proposed Francesco Zavattari instead. The cards feature a rich colour palette and intricately tooled gilded backgrounds.
These decks survive in museum and library collections:
| Visconti-Sforza deck | Current holding |
|---|---|
| Deck 1 | Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library |
| Deck 2 | Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan |
| Deck 3 | Morgan Library & Museum, New York; Accademia Carrara, Bergamo; private Italian collection |
They are luxury hand-painted, gilded artefacts made for gaming, not evidence of early fortune-telling.
Dispersal and Conservation
One Visconti-Sforza deck was later split across the Morgan Library & Museum, the Accademia Carrara, and a private Italian collection; separate decks are at Yale and the Pinacoteca di Brera. In spring 2020, conservators, conservation scientists, and curators from the United States and Italy began a joint project to compare the three decks. The goal was to identify and compare the composition of the decks and to study their materials and techniques.
The so-called Charles VI Tarot probably originated in Bologna. The 19th-century identification of these cards as belonging to Charles VI’s own deck is now rejected as erroneous.
Courtly and Renaissance Imagery in the Trumps
Petrarch and Allegorical Processions
Tarot iconography draws on medieval Christian, humanist, and courtly imagery, especially allegorical processions and Petrarch’s I Trionfi. The term “triomphe” for the trumps echoes Petrarch’s work, though the sequence of trumps resembles an allegorical procession or masquerade more than the poem itself. The Fool is a special unnumbered trump, sometimes numbered 0.
The four traditional suits—swords, batons, cups, and coins—derive from the Islamic world. The trumps, by contrast, were created in Europe. From Milan, tarot spread into France, Switzerland, Germany, and the rest of Europe.
No Ancient Egyptian Roots
The trumps are essentially European rather than ancient Egyptian. The claim that tarot cards were leaves of an ancient Book of Thoth is a later occult construction, not documented history. Court de Gébelin’s Egyptian-origin narrative, which appeared only in the late 18th century, is historically untenable and was later contradicted by Egyptology. When you see an Egyptian-themed tarot deck today, you are looking at a modern occult layer, not at tarot’s origins.
The 18th-Century Occult Turn: Court de Gébelin and Etteilla
Court de Gébelin and the Book of Thoth
The late 18th-century occult reinterpretation began with Antoine Court de Gébelin, a Protestant pastor and Freemason in Paris. In the eighth volume of his Le Monde primitif, he interpreted tarot allegories as Egyptian hieroglyphs forming a “Book of Thoth”. The volume is dated 1781 in one source and 1782 in another; the exact publication date remains unresolved across sources.
Court de Gébelin encountered tarot through the widow of the philosopher Helvétius. His writing was a best-seller of its era. But his Egyptian-origin story is an 18th-century legend, not documented history. Academic and national-library sources describe the claim as historically untenable.
Etteilla’s Public Divination
Etteilla was the pseudonym of Jean-Baptiste Alliette, who lived from 1738 to 1791. He published at least ten books on his personal tarot interpretation between 1783 and 1786. Before that, he had annotated and altered ordinary tarots by hand rather than creating a new deck.
In 1788, Etteilla produced his “rectified” engraved tarot, financed by the Société des interprètes du Livre de Thot. The deck circulated from March 1789. Etteilla claimed the tarot figures were deformed pages of the Book of Thoth and redrew them with Egyptian motifs such as obelisks, crocodiles, and the letter T for Thoth. He also integrated astrology into the deck. These are occult claims, not evidence of Egyptian origin.
After Etteilla’s death in December 1791, a disciple, Melchior-Montmignon D’Odoucet, tried to take over his succession. Some surviving copies of Etteilla’s deck show D’Odoucet hand-writing his own name and address over the master’s printed address.
Etteilla is sometimes called the first professional tarot reader, but that claim is attributed to unnamed historians and should not be treated as settled fact. The idea that he was the first to give divinatory meanings to cards and spreads is similarly a scholarly opinion rather than a proven fact.
French Occult Traditions: Lévi and Wirth
Kabbalistic Correspondences
Éliphas Lévi linked the 22 major arcana to the 22 Hebrew letters and the four suits to the four letters of the tetragrammaton (the four-letter name of God). He associated the first trump, the Bateleur or Magician, with the first Hebrew letter, aleph. This is a later occult interpretation, not historical tarot origin. The term “arcana” as a tarot word was popularized by Paul Christian, whose legal name was Jean-Baptiste Pitois.
Lévi’s kabbalistic reading influenced a younger generation of occultists, who adopted it while rejecting the Egyptian origin story. The correspondence system remains an interpretive layer, not a historical fact.
Wirth’s 1889 Kabbalistic Trumps
Oswald Wirth drew and published a first set of 22 kabbalistic arcana in 1889, placing a Hebrew letter on each trump. He was a Freemason. His deck was called a kabbalistic tarot “of the medieval imagiers”. In 1909, Papus’s Le Tarot divinatoire appeared with illustrations by Jean-Gabriel Goulinat, continuing the French occult tarot tradition.
The Rider-Waite-Smith Deck and Pamela Colman Smith
A 1909 Landmark
The Rider-Waite-Smith deck was published in 1909, inspired by Arthur E. Waite and illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith5. It was one of two complete 78-card tarots to appear that year; the other was Papus’s Le Tarot divinatoire. This deck became internationally influential and is widely used today as a modern esoteric tarot. It has been frequently reprinted and imitated.
Pamela Colman Smith’s Illustrations
Pamela Colman Smith, the illustrator named in the 1909 Rider publication, defined the deck with her illustrations.
You can see the contrast with The Fool. In early tarot, the Fool is an unnumbered outsider, a special trump without a number. The Rider-Waite-Smith Fool is a 1909 card, not a 15th-century gaming card. Its later interpretive layers belong to that modern deck, not to tarot’s origin.
A similar comparison works for Temperance. The historical card belongs to the courtly allegory of the early trumps, while the 1909 Rider-Waite-Smith version belongs to a modern interpretive tradition. If you want the full modern interpretation, you can explore it on the Temperance card meaning page.
Tarot’s Modern Development and Historical Legacy
Return to Marseille and Modern Divination
In 1930, the French manufacturer B.-P. Grimaud published an “Ancien Tarot,” supporting a return to the Marseille tarot tradition. Modern tarot now includes many interpretive decks and uses, but its documented origin remains a card game.
Museums and Critical History
Museum collections, academic publications, and primary sources make it possible to separate documented evidence from later occult claims. Tarot as a repository of ancient wisdom, or as a tool for the unconscious, is a later interpretive tradition, not an established historical fact.
Italo Calvino’s The Castle of Crossed Destinies used the Visconti and Marseille tarot images as literary story-generating devices. That is one example of tarot’s cultural reach beyond both game and divination. For a practical overview of how modern meanings build on these layers, see the All 78 Tarot Card Meanings guide.