Common Tarot Myths, Debunked

Tarot carries a lot of folklore, and much of it doesn’t hold up. The most persistent myth is that tarot originated in ancient Egypt, carrying secret priestly wisdom — an idea popularized by the French writer Antoine Court de Gébelin in 1781. It’s a compelling story, but there’s no historical evidence for it: tarot’s actual, well-documented origin is fifteenth-century Italy, where it started as a card game.

Another common myth credits the Roma people with inventing tarot or bringing it to Europe. In reality, tarot already existed in Italy before the Roma arrived on the continent; what Roma communities are historically associated with is the later, separate practice of cartomancy and fortune-telling with ordinary playing cards, not the creation of tarot itself.

A few smaller myths are worth clearing up too: the superstition that your first deck must be a gift, rather than bought for yourself, is a modern habit rather than an old rule, and plenty of readers buy their own first deck without issue. And the Death card, despite its name, is almost universally read as a card of transformation and ending one chapter to start another — not a literal prediction.