Before Fortune-Telling, Tarot Was Just A Card Game

Playing cards were a source of entertainment by the late 1300s in Europe. Most likely the tradition was brought by way of the Islamic world and Mamluk Egypt. In Italy, decks featured four suits: cups, swords, batons, and coins, as well as kings, knights, and pages, while tarot was virtually unknown.

Believe it or not, those crazy tarot cards started out pretty normally. In the early-to-mid 1400s, some Italian card makers decided to add a new series of pictorial trump cards and a wildcard Fool to the standard four-suit deck. Suddenly, you had popes and emperors, skeletons and devils, even visions of the apocalypse. Typically there were 56 normal cards, 21 trumps, and a lone Fool (78 cards in all).

Originally, tarot was simply a trick-taking card game: follow suit, take tricks with the highest card, but beware because the illustrated trumps have a hierarchy and can take over the game. It was one of the first European games to use a permanent trump suit. Players had to work the tricky scoring system, and success depended on memory and timing. Tarot was a good game just like any other.

Some modern historians hypothesize that there was a moral hierarchy in the order of the trump cards, but there is no guidebook in existence. The common iconography of Fortune, Death, the Devil, celestial bodies, emperors, popes, and other common characters in sermons, church art, festivals, and parades would have been common knowledge, so fifteenth century players would not have needed an explanatory guide, nor was there a designation like “Major Arcana” in fifteenth century Italy. Titles and numbers were not common on cards, and the player would navigate these cards by habit and the iconography of everyday life.

Another possibility: back in the day, tarot was also known as carte da trionfi (cards of triumphs) in reference to Petrarch’s poem, The Triumphs. In the poem allegorical figures (Love, Death, Eternity) triumph over one another in succession. Maybe it referenced cards that triumphed over the suits. Maybe the pictures looked like a triumphal procession. And/or maybe they were a reference to Petrarch’s work. Who knows.

Whereas modern people usually buy theirs off the shelf, some of the first and oldest tarot cards in existence are attributed to the Visconti and Sforza families of Milan. These original packs were hand-painted with intricate detail and finished with gold leaf. They also featured family emblems to connect the cards to their expensive owners. In contrast to readily available decks now, these were part of a more bespoke commission through the court.

While certain tarot decks were hand-painted and viewed as works of art, many more were likely played with until they wore out and then tossed. It’s the gold-leaf, fine art decks that have survived, preserved as precious objects of beauty and luxury. The switch from painting to printing tarot cards helped tarot proliferate and land more readily on people’s shelves.

As you might have guessed from the name l’Excuse, in French tarot the Fool plays much the same role it historically did: in later versions of the game, players would play the Fool to excuse them from following suit. So rather than the Fool being an archetype embarking on a spiritual quest, it was more of a get-out-of-jail-free kind of card. I’m sure there were various rules and meanings attached to it in 15th-century games, but their precise nature is still not entirely clear (and no, the modern Joker is not descended from the Fool).

We know a lot about what the early tarot cards looked like but less about how the first players used them. We don’t have any complete guides to the games from the 1400s; all we have are surviving decks, references in bills and house accounts, and rules written much later.

The rumor that tarot was subject to an overarching ban in Europe for being demonic isn’t true. What is true is that playing cards inherently invited gambling, and tarot got swept into general gambling bans as a result, not because it was considered demonic.

Far from referencing “black magic”, trump imagery was based on concepts familiar to a Renaissance viewer. The Death, for instance, was simply a reminder of mortality, and the Devil symbolized temptation. Judgment represented Christian resurrection. The virtues were standard, well known moral instructions. The idea that witches invented the tarot, that it preserves a secret knowledge of an ancient pagan religion, or that the Knights Templar or Cathars used the cards to encode their beliefs doesn’t stand up under scrutiny. These images are all drawn from the civic, Christian, astrological, and classical references that filled a Renaissance person’s world.

There was no one official tarot deck. The order of the trumps varied between cities, some decks had peculiar characters and additional court cards (see the Cary-Yale deck with its extra male and female Knights and Pages), and the numbering system was by no means constant. The Cary-Yale deck is a good example of this fluidity in design. It was only gradually, and well after it first appeared in Italy’s courts, that the familiar 78-card deck became the standard.

The Sola Busca deck was made in late fifteenth-century Italy, and is the oldest complete tarot deck known. It looks very different from tarot decks today. The trump cards feature strange warriors and characters from legend. Even the numbered cards in the four suits are fully illustrated with scenes. The deck apparently provided inspiration to the artist Pamela Colman Smith centuries later, and there are various theories about its symbols, which relate to alchemy, Roman history, and Venetian politics, that historians still argue about.

Tarot was first a game. It began in Italy, then spread to France, Switzerland, Austria and Central Europe, taking on regional variations (distinguished by number of cards and rules) including tarocchi, tarocchino, Tarock, Troccas and the French tarot, many of which are still in use today, especially the French tarot and Central European Tarock. Despite tarot’s reputation elsewhere, in much of Europe, tarot cards were and are still simply a set of cards for a good game.

Contrary to popular belief, standard playing cards were used for fortune-telling before anyone even created an entire occult-based tarot system. The first records of divination using tarot cards appeared centuries after the game existed, and although it’s possible someone started using them at some point in the past, we do not have enough evidence to determine that this was what the original intent was when the tarot was invented. The most likely origin of the tarot is that people just used them to play the game for generations before anyone decided to put mystical significance behind them.

In 1781, a French pastor named Antoine Court de Gébelin announced that the cards contained ancient Egyptian wisdom based on a mythical Book of Thoth. Although he had no historical evidence to support such assertions (and was writing before Europeans even knew how to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics, much less able to read Egyptian), tarot has picked up the Egyptian association since then. This false origin story was hugely influential, and was used by an occultist named Etteilla, who invented specific divinatory meanings and the first deck designed for cartomancy readings.

The belief that the cards’ design was somehow derived from the Hebrew alphabet, or the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, is just that: a belief, and a reinvention of tarot origins first started by Court de Gébelin and continued by 19th century occultists, who associated the 22 trump cards with the letters of the Hebrew alphabet (Éliphas Lévi) or with Kabbalah, astrology, alchemy, and ceremonial magic (many others). The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn developed its own elaborate system, though the details remain disputed among different occult schools. The point here is that the association is much later, and the 15th century designers were not beholden to such esoteric ideas.

Contrary to popular belief the “classic” tarot used primarily in the English-speaking world is not ancient at all. It was first published in 1909. Although Arthur Edward Waite created the deck and provided much of its occult theory, it was its illustrator, Pamela Colman Smith, that made the deck as unique and enduring as it is. Her drawings, especially of the numbered suit cards, drew heavily on the illustrated pips of the earlier Sola Busca deck, presenting entire scenes and allowing for more intuitive readings.

The Fool’s Journey is a concept popular with contemporary tarot readers. It holds that the trump cards tell a story of the journey from the Fool to the World as an arc of personal or spiritual growth. Although there’s no evidence this concept ever concerned fifteenth-century deck designers, the Fool’s Journey as a model for personal growth is still a perfectly useful way for modern readers to read the cards.

Tarot’s association with occultists, while entirely true and highly influential in modern understandings of tarot, is not its origin. Tarot’s mysterious origin is a myth, especially the notion that it derives from ancient Egypt. In fact, its very mystique comes from an unbroken history of reinvention: tarot began as a mere enlargement of the playing-card deck, using Renaissance imagery, before it was ever a source of divination. Soon enough, cartomancers turned the cards to fortune-telling purposes, occultists built mythologies upon them, and artists and readers have continued to reinvent the symbolic systems they invented.

This content was created with the help of AI.