Tarot History

In The Beginning
Some time in the late 1400s or late 1500s, the Italian aristocracy became passionate about a card game called tarocchi. They would commission artists to handcraft and engrave decks with the kind of imagery already presented in stained glass windows and other art of that era. These decks were expensive and called “carte da trionfi” or “cards of triumph". The oldest surviving sets of these cards are known as the Visconti-Sforza.

There is no sign (and people have looked) to these first decks of cards espousing any esoteric/philosophic system. The images were, however, of archetypal figures and themes that resonated with the Italian Renaissance. And the same aristocratic class was greedily paying for ancient philosophical and mystical systems such as the Corpus Hermetica to be translated and published. Pictures from alchemical and astrological texts have a lot of the same type of imagery as early tarot cards. So did the beautiful stained glass windows of 15th century churches and cathedrals.

Based on all of this? It seems reasonable to say that thematically, early tarot cards reflected the art and esoteric themes of the post-medieval Europe. The Renaissance popularized alchemy, astrology, Greek philosophy and classical mythology in the aristocratic courts at the same time those aristocrats were playing card games. So the intentional implementation of esoteric and religious imagery for those aristocrats as part of the new Western occultism makes sense. But most recorded references to playing cards in the 1500-1600s probably had nothing to do with Western Occultism and more with gambling. Based on their own writings, most of the academic class of Renaissance occultists and their patrons considering fortune-telling something for "ignorant peasants" and, at best, an amusement like card-playing.

Tarot as a word has a lot and debated history but we do know for certain it came into use in France after the game of tarocchi was introduced from Italy.

Romani (and others) doing fortune-telling using cards only happened when playing cards became increasingly common and affordable. Cards were a toy for the wealthy elite before they came into broader use. Soldiers and others using decks of cards to play games, gamble, and tell fortunes certainly happened throughout the 1600s and 1700s according to historians. The esoteric tarot, however, did not exist yet.

The Renaissance did see the rise of Europe's early occult (as in secret) esoteric institutions like the Freemasons and the Rosicrucians which brought opportunities to (secretly) explore esoteric mysticism to the emerging middle class. Most of this esoteric mysticism was grounded in Christianity combined with Hermetic writings now translated into modern European languages. Time passed. The European religious wars began to wane, especially after 1648. Europe's occultists began to publish works to a slowly widening audience as literacy became ever more common.

20th Century Tarot
Then from the Rosicrucians developed a new generation of occultists. Some of them formed The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and building on the work of Antoine Count de Gebelin,Ettellia and others, began to create and use tarot cards as part of their occultism. After they started to do so but before any of them including Waite and Crowley shared their work publically, Osward Wirth (a contemporary and not a friend) published a tarot deck (well, actually only a Major Arcana) that did have with it the kind of attributions to astrology, alchemy, and the kabbalah that would thereafter dominate tarot decks for a century. It was Waite, however, who provided 20th century tarot readers 78 uniquely illustrated cards which has been widely embraced ever since.

Further Resources

 * see timeline of Esoteric & Divinatory Tarot (1750-1980)


 * The Radical, 600-Year Evolution of Tarot Card Art