A short history of tarot

The earliest tarot decks we still have are Italian, from the middle of the fifteenth century. They were called carte da trionfi, cards of triumphs, and the game played with them was called tarocchi. The most famous surviving examples are the Visconti-Sforza decks, commissioned by the ruling families of Milan around the 1440s and 1450s, hand-painted on heavy stock with gold leaf and tempera and lapis-blue ground. Of the original seventy-eight, some are still complete and some are in pieces, scattered across museums in New York, Bergamo, and a few private collections. They are extraordinarily beautiful, and they are also, fundamentally, a luxury edition of a parlor game. The trumps are dressed in the iconography of the day — the Pope, the Emperor, the Wheel of Fortune, Death, the Devil, the Tower as the House of God, the Sun and the Moon — but the cards were used for tricks, not for telling. There is no surviving evidence that the Visconti court used the deck for any kind of fortune-telling. They played for money and ate dinner.

The game spread across Europe over the next two centuries. By the seventeenth century there were dozens of regional variants, and the woodblock-printed Tarot de Marseille, produced in southern France from the late 1600s onward, had become the standard cheap version of the deck. The Marseille pattern is the one most occult-leaning decks still descend from in their structure — the same twenty-two trumps in the same order, the same four suits, the same court cards. The art is simpler, almost rough, and the Minor cards are mostly just pips, a number of swords or coins or cups or batons on a plain ground, the way regular playing cards still are. The deck was a working-class object by then. A barber might own one. A soldier on leave might play with one in a tavern.

The turn toward divination happened in the late eighteenth century in France, and the man most responsible for it was a Protestant minister and amateur scholar named Antoine Court de Gébelin. In 1781 he published the eighth volume of his sprawling work Monde Primitif, in which he claimed, with no real evidence, that the Tarot de Marseille was the surviving fragment of an ancient Egyptian wisdom book — the Book of Thoth — that had been smuggled out of Egypt and disguised as a card game so the priesthood could preserve it through the centuries. Almost everything in this claim is wrong. Hieroglyphs had not yet been deciphered when Court de Gébelin was writing — the Rosetta Stone was discovered eighteen years after he died — so he was free to project anything he wanted onto Egyptian imagery, and he did. The cards have no Egyptian origin. They are northern Italian. But the idea was alluring, it spread, and within a few years a Paris cartomancer publishing under the name Etteilla — a pseudonym for Jean-Baptiste Alliette — was producing decks specifically designed for divination, with meanings and reversals printed on the cards themselves. Etteilla is the first professional tarot reader on record. The practice has him as one of its great-grandfathers.

The nineteenth century moved the deck into English-speaking occultism, and this is where the version of tarot most modern readers know was forged. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, founded in London in 1888, brought together a group of ceremonial magicians, theosophists, and literary figures — W. B. Yeats was a member, so was Aleister Crowley, so was the actress Florence Farr — who systematized tarot alongside Kabbalah, astrology, and Western ceremonial magic into a single occult curriculum. The Golden Dawn assigned each Major to a Hebrew letter, each suit to an element, each card to a path on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. Most of the symbolic correspondences a modern tarot book takes for granted come from this period and this group. They were inventing connections, not discovering them, but the inventions stuck.

In 1909, two members of the Golden Dawn produced the deck that would become the world standard. Arthur Edward Waite, a scholar and mystic, designed the symbolic program. Pamela Colman Smith, a Jamaican-British artist who had also illustrated Yeats and Bram Stoker, painted the cards in a few months on commission, for a flat fee, with no royalties. The Rider Company published the deck — hence Rider-Waite, though the deck is now more accurately called Rider-Waite-Smith or RWS in acknowledgment of Smith's enormous contribution. What made the deck revolutionary was that Smith illustrated every Minor card with a full scene — not just five cups stacked on a plain ground, but a man in a black cloak looking at three spilled cups while two stand upright behind him. The Minors became readable as pictures, the way the Majors always had been, and the deck was suddenly teachable to anyone who could look at an image and feel something. Almost every modern beginner deck is built on this innovation. Pamela Colman Smith died in poverty in 1951. Her name is now finally on most printings.

The twentieth century took the deck in several directions at once. Aleister Crowley, who had broken from the Golden Dawn and built his own occult system, spent the last years of his life collaborating with the painter Frieda Harris on the Thoth deck, finished in 1944 and published posthumously in 1969. The Thoth is denser, more symbolically packed than the RWS, drawing on Crowley's own theology and on the Egyptian imagery the deck never historically had — but Harris's art is luminous, watercolor and projective geometry, and the deck has a devoted following. The Marseille tradition persisted in France and was rediscovered by serious students of the older pattern. And by the 1960s and 70s, the New Age movement had folded tarot into a much larger ecosystem of self-help and esotericism, and the deck started to appear in mass-market paperbacks and on the shelves of metaphysical bookshops in every American small town.

The twenty-first century has been an explosion. Indie decks now number in the thousands, illustrated by artists from every cultural background, drawing on every conceivable theme — botanical, queer, Afro-futurist, mushroom-foraging, Catholic, lunar, oceanic, ancestral. Tarot has moved out of the purely occult frame and into a much wider one. Therapists use the cards as a projective tool with clients. Writers use them to break narrative blocks. Workshop facilitators use them as a way to get a group talking about their lives. The deck is being read by people who would not call themselves spiritual at all, who simply find the seventy-eight images a useful prompt for thinking about their own situation. The cards have become, finally, what Court de Gébelin pretended they were two and a half centuries ago — a wisdom tool. They just got there sideways.