A Short History of Tarot

The earliest tarot decks appeared in northern Italy around the 1440s, commissioned as luxury items for wealthy families and used to play a trick-taking game called tarocchi — a distant cousin of modern bridge. For roughly three hundred years, that’s essentially all tarot was: a game, played across much of Europe, with no occult meaning attached.

The shift began in the late eighteenth century, when French writers started connecting the cards to Egyptian mysticism and esoteric symbolism — mostly invented associations that had nothing to do with the deck’s actual Italian origins, but which caught on. The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries added more layers: astrology, Kabbalah, and elaborate systems of correspondence, culminating in the 1909 publication of the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, whose imagery still shapes most modern tarot decks.

What started as a card game is now, a few centuries later, most commonly encountered as a set of pictures people use to think out loud about their lives — which is a strange and interesting journey for seventy-eight pieces of illustrated paper.