History of tarot: from the Visconti cards to Rider–Waite–Smith

Tarot was not born for divination. It began as a card game of the Italian nobility and became a spiritual tool over more than four hundred years.

Origins: Mamluk and Italian cards

Playing cards reached Europe in the late 14th century from the Islamic world. The Egyptian Mamluk deck preserved at Topkapı Palace in Istanbul has four suits — cups, coins, swords and polo sticks — the model for the four tarot suits. Around the 1440s, northern Italian courts such as the Visconti and Sforza of Milan added a special series of picture cards called trionfi (triumphs) to the deck, creating the game of tarocchi. These are the origin of the Major Arcana and of the word "trump".

The hand-painted, gilded Visconti–Sforza cards are the oldest surviving tarot, now scattered among museums and libraries such as the Morgan Library in New York.

The Marseille pattern and the game

In the 17th and 18th centuries woodcut tarot spread through France and Switzerland, known as the Tarot de Marseille. The 22 Majors settled into stable images, while the Minor cards were still just arrangements of suit symbols with no scenes. Across Europe tarot was played as a game, and in France it still is.

Tarot becomes a fortune-telling tool

In 1781 Antoine Court de Gébelin claimed the tarot was a book hiding ancient Egyptian wisdom — a claim with no historical basis, but it made tarot a subject of esoteric interest. Soon after, Etteilla designed the first deck made specifically for divination. In the 19th century Éliphas Lévi linked the 22 Majors to the 22 Hebrew letters and the Kabbalah, the foundation of modern symbolic reading.

The Thai name "ไพ่ยิปซี" (Gypsy cards) comes from the European belief that the Romani brought tarot from Egypt. In fact tarot existed in Italy before any record of Romani fortune-telling with cards, but the name has stuck in Thai.

The Golden Dawn

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, founded in London in 1888, unified the correspondences between tarot, the Hebrew letters, the Tree of Life, the elements, the signs and the planets. The Minor cards 2–10 were linked to the decans of the zodiac and the Majors to the 22 paths of the Tree of Life. This is the system used on every card page of this site.

The Rider–Waite–Smith deck (1909)

A. E. Waite, a Golden Dawn member, worked with the artist Pamela Colman Smith on a new deck published by William Rider & Son in London in December 1909. Its revolution was that every Minor card showed a scene rather than a row of symbols, inspired by the Italian Sola Busca deck of about 1490, so anyone could read the cards without memorising meanings. Waite also swapped the numbers of Strength and Justice to follow the zodiac, and wrote The Pictorial Key to the Tarot in 1910.

Smith was paid little and went uncredited for decades; many readers now say Rider–Waite–Smith to honour her.

The Universal Waite and modern decks

In 1990 U.S. Games Systems published the Universal Waite, which keeps Smith's line art but is recoloured by Mary Hanson-Roberts in softer, more even colours. Every symbol matches the original, so the meanings here apply to the Universal Waite and the whole family. The Thoth deck by Aleister Crowley and Lady Frieda Harris (painted in the 1940s) is the other major line using the Golden Dawn system, with different card names and details.