A Brief History of Tarot: From Renaissance Card Game to Modern Mirror
Tarot did not descend from ancient Egypt or arrive wrapped in occult secrets; it began as a card game for the Italian nobility and only later became a tool for divination and reflection. The real history is richer than the legends. This guide traces tarot from fifteenth century tarocchi through the Tarot de Marseille to the 1909 Rider-Waite-Smith deck and the modern practice you know today.
Fifteenth Century Italy and the Game of Tarocchi
Tarot's documented story begins in northern Italy in the early to mid fifteenth century, when an extra set of illustrated trump cards was added to the existing four suited playing card deck. The result was a game called tarocchi, a trick taking game in the same broad family as bridge, in which the trumps beat the ordinary suits. The most famous surviving early decks are the Visconti-Sforza cards, luxurious hand painted decks commissioned by the Visconti and Sforza families, the ruling dynasties of Milan. These were art objects and status symbols, gilded and gorgeous, and several partial decks survive today in museums and libraries. Their trump images, the Emperor, the Wheel of Fortune, Death, the Star, and others, drew on imagery familiar to Renaissance eyes: virtues, social roles, and allegories of fate common in medieval and Renaissance art. Crucially, there is no evidence that these cards were used for divination at the time. For roughly its first three centuries, tarot was simply a game, popular across Italy and France, played for entertainment rather than insight.
The Tarot de Marseille Standard
As the game spread into France, card makers needed to produce decks in quantity, and printing from woodblocks with stencil coloring replaced hand painted luxury. Out of this workshop tradition emerged the pattern now called the Tarot de Marseille, named for the French city that became a major center of card production. Standardized over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Marseille pattern fixed much of what we still recognize: twenty two trumps in a familiar order with titles like Le Bateleur, La Papesse, and Le Mat, plus fifty six suit cards in batons, cups, swords, and coins. The Marseille minor cards are pip cards, showing arrangements of suit symbols rather than illustrated scenes, which is why reading with a Marseille deck relies more on number and suit than on pictured narrative. This pattern mattered enormously because it became the shared reference. When later occultists and deck designers reimagined tarot, the Marseille was the template they were reinterpreting, and it remains in continuous use today, especially in France, Italy, and Spain, both for play and for reading.
The Occult Turn
Tarot's transformation from game to esoteric tool began in France in the late eighteenth century. Writers such as Antoine Court de Gebelin claimed, without historical evidence, that the trumps encoded the wisdom of ancient Egypt, and the professional fortune teller known as Etteilla published decks and methods specifically for divination. The Egyptian origin story was romantic invention, but it was influential invention, and through the nineteenth century French occultists like Eliphas Levi wove tarot into a broader web of correspondences with Kabbalah, astrology, and ceremonial magic. In late Victorian England, this current flowed into the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, an influential secret society devoted to Western esoteric study, whose members included poets, scholars, and artists. The Golden Dawn systematized tarot correspondences and used the cards in study and ritual, treating the deck as a symbolic map of consciousness. Whatever one makes of the metaphysics, this period gave tarot its modern interpretive depth: the idea that the cards form a coherent symbolic system rather than a stack of fortune telling tokens.
1909: Waite, Smith, and a Deck That Changed Everything
The single most consequential event in modern tarot happened in London in 1909, when the publisher William Rider and Son issued a new deck conceived by the scholar and mystic Arthur Edward Waite and illustrated by the artist Pamela Colman Smith. Both were members of the Golden Dawn milieu, and the deck, now known as the Rider-Waite-Smith or RWS deck, distilled that symbolic tradition into accessible imagery. Its revolutionary feature was Smith's decision, working with Waite's direction but with vast creative latitude, to paint full scenes on all forty pip cards. Where a Marseille Five of Cups shows five cups, Smith painted a cloaked figure mourning spilled cups while two still stand behind him, a complete emotional story in one image. This innovation made tarot dramatically easier to learn and read intuitively, and it is the main reason the RWS became the world's default deck. The overwhelming majority of modern decks are RWS descendants, borrowing its scenes, compositions, and meanings, often without users realizing whose visual language they are speaking.
Pamela Colman Smith's Contribution
For most of the twentieth century, the RWS deck was called simply the Rider-Waite, and the artist who created its images went largely uncredited. Pamela Colman Smith was a professional illustrator and stage designer with connections to the theatrical and literary worlds of her day, and she completed the entire deck, all seventy eight images, in a matter of months in 1909, reportedly for a modest flat fee and no royalties. Her theatrical eye shaped the deck profoundly: figures pose like actors on shallow stages, gestures read clearly at a glance, and emotional tone is legible even to a first time viewer. The minor arcana scenes, where Waite's written guidance was thinnest, are widely regarded as substantially her invention, which means much of what modern readers treat as traditional tarot meaning originates in one artist's imagination. Smith died in 1951 without wealth or fame from the deck that would sell in the millions. In recent decades her contribution has been rightly recognized, and the now common name Rider-Waite-Smith restores her to the story she largely drew.
Tarot Today
The past century took tarot from occult circles into mainstream culture. Popular guidebooks in the 1960s and 1970s fueled a boom, and psychological readings of the cards, influenced by interest in archetypes and the inner life, reframed tarot as a mirror for self examination rather than a machine for predicting fate. That reframing is the dominant mode today. Contemporary readers largely treat a spread as a structured prompt for reflection: the cards do not know your future, but they are remarkably good at helping you see your present from a new angle. Meanwhile the deck itself has flowered into thousands of editions, from faithful Marseille reproductions to art decks reflecting every imaginable style and community, alongside apps that put readings and journals in your pocket. It is a striking arc: a Renaissance card game, reimagined by French occultists, systematized by Victorian esotericists, illustrated into clarity by an underpaid theatrical artist, and finally adopted by millions as a tool for reflection. Knowing this history does not diminish the practice. It grounds it, replacing false ancient mystique with a true story of human creativity.
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Last updated: August 14, 2026