Before the magic: the real story of tarot’s origins

I was racking my brain for an interesting topic related to Halloween when the idea of divination came to mind. Fortune-telling has long been a part of Halloween traditions, and I immediately thought of tarot cards. Yet, as I started researching, I realized there was no mention of tarot at all. Instead, I kept coming across customs like using apple peels to reveal the initials of a soulmate, throwing nuts into the fire to fire to see if a couple would last, or gazing into a mirror at midnight to glimpse one’s future spouse, but not a single reference to tarot spreads. Intrigued, I decided to learn more. So, instead of writing an article about Halloween divination rituals, I found myself delving into the history of tarot cards. What follows is a brief outline of what I’ve managed to piece together from various articles and books.

Tarot today

If you’ve never heard of tarot before, let me enlighten you before we dive into its origins. Tarot, as we know it today, is a deck of 78 cards used for fortune-telling and divination. It consists of 22 pictorial cards, interpreted allegorically as the major journey from ignorance to enlightenment, and 56 pip cards divided into four suits – much like modern playing cards. However, instead of the familiar French suits – spades, clubs, hearts and diamonds – the tarot uses Italian ones: swords, cups, coins and batons (or wands).

Early history

There have been many theories about the origins of tarot. One suggests that the cards were created as a way to cure a mentally unwell king of France. Another traces tarot back to the ancient Egyptians, who supposedly encoded their wisdom into the cards so it could be preserved and later deciphered. Some even claim that it was the gypsies who brought the deck to Europe. As intriguing as these theories may sound, none of them has stood the test of time. In reality, tarot has a far more ordinary beginning: it started as a card game. It was designed simply to be played.

Tarot emerged in Italy during the first half of the 15th century as a form of playing-card game. Evidence suggests that tarot evolved from ordinary playing decks, rather than the other way around, as Helen Farley notes in A Cultural History of Tarot. These early decks most likely reached Europe in the late 14th century, arriving through the port of Venice—the main entry point for goods from the East and Near East. The most probable ancestor of European playing cards is thought to be the Arabic Mamluk deck, given the striking similarities between the Mamluk cards and the early Italian ones.

The triumph cards

The initial name for tarot, cartes de trionfi, marks the addition of 21 triumph cards to the existing pack, which distinguishes it from regular playing cards. It was originally a trick-taking game in which stronger cards triumphed over weaker ones. Each of the triumph cards was illustrated with imagery borrowed from various aspects of the Renaissance world the players inhabited. (The symbolism that we attach to the cards today was most likely absent in the 14th century, when tarot was just another card game.) There has been speculation that the sequence of the triumph cards, from the ignorance of The Fool card to the completion of the World card, drew heavily from the Renaissance carnival parade and aligns with the later interpretation of tarot as a journey from ignorance to wisdom.

The first references to tarot cards can be traced back to the courts of Northern Italy. It is in the courts of Ferrara and Milan that we find conclusive evidence of tarot cards mentioned in public records. The term first appears in 1442 in the account books of the Este court of Ferrara. Another piece of evidence pointing to the Italian provenance of the cards is a Milanese fresco from the early 1440s called The Tarocchi Players, which features five people playing cards. It is no longer possible to see the illustrations on the cards. The only reason it is thought to depict tarot players is the name itself, though it is possible that the title was a later addition.

The three surviving decks

Only three tarot decks from the 15th century have survived to this day. The first and oldest was created for Filippo Maria Visconti, Duke of Milan. Known as the Visconti di Modrone pack, it takes its name from a former owner and doesn’t follow the structure of the modern tarot — a sign that the standard deck had not yet been defined. Eleven trump cards remain, sixty-four cards in total. The originals are now housed at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library.

The second deck was also made for Duke Visconti. Called the Brambilla pack, it too was named after a later owner. Only two trump cards, the Emperor and the Wheel of Fortune, have survived the centuries. Today, this rare deck can be found at the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan.

The third and most complete deck was painted for Francesco Sforza and his wife, Bianca, the only child of Filippo Maria Visconti. Known as the Visconti-Sforza deck, it includes the Fool, nineteen trumps, and fifty-four pips. Missing from the trumps are the Devil and the Tower, while six cards appear to have been added later. Curiously, it was this very deck that went on to inspire most of the tarot designs that followed. The surviving cards are split between the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo and the Morgan Library & Museum in New York.

Divination, memory game and symbolism

There’s a fair bit of skepticism around the idea that tarot began as a simple card game – perhaps because today we know it almost exclusively as a tool for fortune-telling. Some argue that tarot cards couldn’t have been used for divination at all, since such practices were banned in Renaissance Italy. Others claim the deck served as a kind of memory game, designed to train the mind through the art of memory, or ars memoriae. But neither theory really holds up. The evidence we have points to something far more ordinary: tarot was created to be played as a parlour game.

If not for divination, then what explains the striking imagery on the cards? Was there a deeper meaning behind it? Librarian Gertrude Moakley was among the first to look for historical answers rather than mystical ones. She proposed that the images and sequence of the tarot cards were inspired by medieval carnivals. These festive parades featured floats carrying performers dressed as allegorical figures from Arthurian legend, scenes from classical mythology or personifications of virtues like Justice, or even the four elements. Much of this imagery also appears in the tarot trumps.

An important connection lies with Petrarch, the father of Italian humanism, who wrote a series of poems called I Trionfi. In them, he imagined a grand procession where six allegorical figures—Love, Chastity, Death, Fame, Time and Eternity—each triumph over the previous one. I Trionfi was a Renaissance favourite and inspired countless artists. Moakley believed tarot mirrored this same sequence. Her theory remains one of the most imaginative takes on tarot’s origins, but fitting it neatly to the evidence has proved difficult.

Another line of thought links tarot to medieval mystery and morality plays, especially the Dance of Death or Danse Macabre. This powerful allegory, which spread through late medieval Europe in art, poetry and theatre, reminded viewers that death spares no one. It typically showed a procession of the living – ranked from pope and emperor to child, clerk, and hermit – led by the dead toward the grave. The imagery is hauntingly familiar, echoing many of tarot’s trump figures. Yet, as scholar Helen Farley notes, “there is no close correlation between the two.”

Dante’s Divine Comedy has also been tied to tarot, but, as with the other theories, the parallels are more cosmetic than convincing. What all these influences – Petrarch’s I Trionfi, medieval processions, mystery plays, and Dante’s work – share is their cultural backdrop. As Farley puts it, they were all “drawing from the same pool of symbolism.” In other words, tarot’s imagery may have been less a coded language of secret meanings and more the Renaissance equivalent of pop culture: vivid, symbolic and unmistakably of its time.

It wasn’t until the eighteenth century that the fate of tarot cards changed dramatically. In France, during the Age of Reason, cartomancy began to take root, and the tarot, with its rich imagery, was reimagined under the guidance of several influential figures of the occult. From then on, the simple game of trumps assumed a mantle of mysticism, one that endures to this day.

References

Farley, H. (2019). A cultural history of Tarot: From entertainment to esotericism. Bloomsbury Publishing. books.google.be

Parlett, D. (2025, October 21). Tarot | History, meaning & uses. In Encyclopaedia Britannica. Retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/topic/tarot Encyclopedia Britannica

Victoria & Albert Museum. (n.d.). A history of tarot cards. Retrieved from https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/tarot-cards?srsltid=AfmBOoo99yDkPplNwH7ray5iWtCx0rcSKjy3R1zAmzHp5Oo-JeWhVUQz vam.ac.uk

Husband, T. (2016, April 8). Before fortune-telling: The history and structure of tarot cards. The Met. https://www.metmuseum.org/perspectives/tarot-2 metmuseum.org