Tarot has been part of my life for nearly three decades. I remember seeing my mum consulting the cards as a teenager, fascinated with the mystery of it all. It wasn’t until I was 18 that I got my first deck and began learning for myself.  Over the last 5 years, I've noticed a resurgence in the tarot's popularity, it has become fashionable.  No longer is tarot purely associated with dimly lit smokey parlour rooms with a majestic woman sitting behind a glowing crystal ball, people young and old, men and women are becoming more interested in its history and its use as a divination tool . The Parisian fashion house Dior used the Visconti-Sforza cards in their Spring/Summer 2021 campaign with the video and photographs styled to mimic archetypes from the Major Arcana.   

So where did the tarot come from? In this blog I’ll discuss the tarot and its history, investigating how this cultural artefact was commissioned and much sought after by wealthy patrons in the Renaissance, its place in the courts of the European Aristocracy and  how it evolved from being a trick playing card game to a tool of divination used by prominent members of secret societies and its links to esoteric knowledge. 

The origin of the tarot is a bit of a mystery.  There are various theories with some scholars connecting it to Jewish Mysticism and the Kabbalah, others argue that it came from ancient Egypt and the Book of Thoth and even from as far as India or China.    Some evidence suggests that the symbology in the four suits in the minor arcana took influence from the suits in playing cards. During the 14th Century, the Mamluk playing cards were brought over to the Mediterranean by sailors and merchants, the cards of which were referred to as “Moorish” or “Saracen”, relating to their Islamic origins, such as the Mamluk Sultanate (1270 - 1517) that governed Egypt and Syria. An example of the Mamluk playing cards is the Trzes deck, which has been reconstructed using digital printing techniques and is held at the Topkapi Museum in Turkey. They are beautifully ornate, with vibrant colours and hand-painted gold designs reflecting Islamic taste.

Sometime between the 14th and 15th centuries, playing cards were redesigned to take on European cultural values.  Instead of the Coins, Scimitars, Polo Sticks, and Myriads used on the Mamluk cards, Coins, Swords, Batons, and Cups were depicted, reflecting late Medieval/early Renaissance objects of Europe. 

The earliest known record of the tarot comes from early Renaissance Italy.  Around 1425, the Duke of Milan, Filippo Maria Visconti (1392-1447) commissioned his secretary, humanist scholar and astrologer, Maurizio Da Tortona together with artist Michelino da Besozzo to create a deck based on allegories of the four cardinal virtues.  The style of the deck is quite different from what we know of the tarot today with 78 cards. From what I understand, the deck had four suits, similar to the minor arcana but only 4 trump cards each representing a virtue and associated with one of the four suits.  The cards were hand-painted by da Besozzo and were known to be very beautiful.

Although tarot was usually commissioned by the aristocracy as a hand-painted luxury item, and not mass produced in the same way as playing cards were, there is some evidence to suggest that tarot cards were also block printed using the woodcut method. This method entailed an artist copying a design onto a piece of wood and then carving the image out, and then printing onto parchment or vellum, enabling them to reproduce the same design over and over again.  The Church also printed religious imagery with images of saints such as Saint Christopher, the patron saint of travellers on to small pieces of parchment, similar in size to a playing card or tarot card,  that would also be used as talisman, their light weight ideal for carrying around on journeys.  A beautiful example of this particular card can be found in the Special Collection at the University of Manchester.  Due to copyright, I’ve put a link to their site at the bottom of this article.

In 18th century France, occultism was on the rise and tarot began to intertwine with theories that related to Jewish Mysticism and ancient Egypt. In 1781, Antonie Court de Geblin (1725 - 1784) wrote, Le Monde Primitif, an essay on tarot and its apparent origins in ancient Egypt and its connection to the Book of Thoth.  However, he had no evidence that backed up this association, it was merely speculation. It is thought that his ideas went on to influence Jean Baptiste-Alliette a.k.a Etteilla (1738-1791) who had influence on the French occult and tarot circles and founded the Nouvelle École de Magie (New school of Magic) in 1790.

Across the channel, the English occultists were also influenced by the work of the French Occultists. Éliphas Levi was initially a Catholic priest but later abandoned the church to become a ceremonial magician.  He wrote several influential works on magic and esoteric matters, such as Historie de La Magie, 1860 (The History of Magic), which later had great impact on the doctrines of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, notable members included Aleister Crowley (1875 -1947) and Arthur Edward Waite (1857-1942).

Waite was the co-creator of one of the most popular pictorial keys in tarot today, the Rider Waite Colman Smith deck, which he produced with artist Pamela Colman Smith in c.1909.  They were both members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a secret society that studied and practised esoteric philosophy such as the Kabbalah and western astrology. This can be seen in the decks imagery and the often controversial reordering of the two major arcana cards Strength and Justice.  

Waite’s interest in Christian mysticism is also reflected in the cards. The Ace of Cups for example depicts a chalice running over with water sitting on a hand coming out of a cloud. A dove representing the holy spirit appears to be flying down into the cup with what looks like a Communion wafer - the body of Christ.  The Chalice has all sorts of mystical associations, the Chalice Well in Glastonbury, one of my favourite pilgrimages I used to make as a youth, is according to legend where Joseph of Arimathea hid the holy grail.   

I have yet to come across the actual link to ancient Egypt, but the connection to the Kabbalah and the Hebrew alphabet is emphasised further in Paul Foster Case’s book The Tarot, A Key to the Wisdom of Ages.  He suggests that ‘adept’ men from all over the world would come together in Fez, Morocco to discuss science and literature but due to the language barrier they had difficulty fully understanding each other. So they designed a picture book of sorts, that contained all their cultures' most important doctrines and ‘occult harmonies of numbers’ (Case, 2006, p2).  I assume these meetings took place sometime in the 13th Century as he writes on the invention of the tarot :

It seems that the Kabbalah was one similar to esoteric wisdom taught in secret societies in India, Tibet and China and therefore this system was attributed to the cards.  Case also suggests that the idea to create the picture book or tarot could have come from the Chinese ‘adept’ as there is a Chinese proverb:

Another theory is that tarot actually came from China.  Perhaps this theory is based more on the Chinese divination system called the Kau Chim, whereby your fortune is told by shaking a pot or basket that contains 1 to 78 bamboo sticks (some variations have 100) and angling the pot to release one stick.  

I could go on writing about tarot, as I’ve merely scratched the surface but I’ll leave here. Tarot has a complex history so this is by no means conclusive.  No one truly knows where tarot originated, what we do know is that the archetypes and symbols in the tarot weave together stories from a collective source of the Western Mystery traditions - Paganism, Gnostic, Catholicism & Christianity, Hermeticism, Neo Platonism and Witchcraft.  There is so much information on tarot history, whole websites have been dedicated to the topic. If you find this article interesting I wholeheartedly recommend looking at the Sherryl E Smith’s Tarot Heritage website, which has a wealth of tarot information and history, much of which I used as research for this article.   

Bibliography & Notes

Sherryl E. Smith, Tarot Heritage, https://tarot-heritage.com/history-4/before-tarot-1375-1420/

Sherryl E. Smith, Tarot Heritage, https://tarot-heritage.com/2019/04/05/trzes-mamluk-deck-the-granddaddy-of-european-playing-cards/

Wikipedia, Duke Visconti, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filippo_Maria_Visconti

Wikipedia, Etteila, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etteilla

Wikipedia, Antoine Court de Geblin, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antoine_Court_de_G%C3%A9belin

Wikipedia, Eliphas Levi, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89liphas_L%C3%A9vi

Arthur E. Waite, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._E._Waite

Case, Paul Foster (2006) The Tarot, A Key to the Wisdom of the Ages,

Woods, Kim W. (2007) Making Renaissance Art

Link to Manchester 

https://www.library.manchester.ac.uk/rylands/special-collections/subject-areas/history-of-the-book/