The History of Tarot: From Playing Cards to Divination
Ask around and you'll hear tarot traced back to ancient Egypt, lost libraries, or secret societies protecting forbidden knowledge. It's a good story. It's also not what happened. The actual history of tarot is documented fairly well, and it starts somewhere much less mystical: the card tables of 15th-century Italy.
Tarocchi: The Card Game That Started It All
In the 1440s, in the courts of Milan and Ferrara, wealthy families commissioned hand-painted card decks for a trick-taking game called tarocchi — similar in spirit to bridge. These early decks added a fifth suit of 21 numbered trump cards, plus a single unnumbered card called the Fool, to the standard four-suit deck already common in Europe. That fifth suit is the direct ancestor of what we now call the Major Arcana. For roughly three hundred years, that's all tarot was: a game, played for entertainment, with no divinatory meaning attached to the cards at all.
From Game to Divination
The turn toward fortune-telling happened in late 18th-century France. In 1781, a Swiss clergyman and scholar named Antoine Court de Gébelin published an essay arguing that tarot's imagery encoded lost wisdom from ancient Egypt — a theory with no real evidence behind it, but one that captured the public imagination at the height of Europe's fascination with Egyptian mystique. Shortly after, a Parisian occultist working under the name Etteilla published the first tarot deck designed specifically for divination and is generally credited as the first professional tarot reader. From there, tarot's identity as a fortune-telling tool grew alongside, rather than instead of, its life as a card game — both uses have coexisted ever since.
The Deck Most People Picture
When most people imagine "a tarot card," they're picturing one specific deck: the Rider–Waite–Smith, published in 1909. It was commissioned by Arthur Edward Waite, a scholar and member of the occult order the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and illustrated by artist Pamela Colman Smith. Smith's major contribution was giving every card in the deck — including all 56 Minor Arcana, which earlier decks usually left as plain suit symbols with no scene at all — a fully illustrated little narrative. That single choice made the deck vastly easier to read intuitively, and it's why the Rider–Waite–Smith imagery (or a close variant of it) still underpins the majority of tarot decks made today, including the deck illustrated on this site's own tarot table.
So… Is Tarot "Ancient"?
Depends what you're measuring. As a card game, tarot is genuinely old — nearly 600 years, which is ancient by the standards of most things people still do for fun. As a tool for divination, it's closer to 250 years old, which is old, but not Egyptian-mystery-school old. That doesn't make it any less worth doing. A tradition doesn't need a longer origin story to be meaningful — tarot's value was never really about how far back it goes, but about what happens when you sit with the cards and actually look at what they show you.