What is tarot?

A standard tarot deck has 78 cards. Twenty-two form a series of named picture cards, such as The Fool and The World. The other 56 fall into four suits. Early Italian decks used batons, cups, swords and coins. The English deck of 1909 used on this site has wands, cups, swords and pentacles.

In the original game the picture cards were trumps. The names Major Arcana and Minor Arcana came much later, in French occult writing. Wikipedia credits Paul Christian, and the Victoria and Albert Museum places the change around the 1850s.

A reader holds a question in mind, shuffles, and lays out one or more cards in a set pattern called a spread. Each position in the pattern stands for part of the question, and each card has a meaning that may change if the card lands upside down, which is called reversed.

The meanings come from books and from teachers, and they differ from one to the next. Etteilla's French system of the 1780s, for example, renamed and reordered cards that A. E. Waite would later treat in his own way. A meaning printed beside a card tells you what a particular writer said about it.

A Bern ban dated 1367 is the earliest reported mention of playing cards in Europe, and its date has been questioned. Florence banned them in 1377. The diary of the notary Giusto Giusti records two decks of trionfi passing to Sigismondo Malatesta in 1440, the earliest document of these cards. The name Tarocho is first found at Brescia in 1502.

The earliest surviving tarot cards are hand-painted objects associated with the Italian nobles Filippo Maria Visconti and Francesco Sforza. Yale's Beinecke Library holds 67 cards of the Visconti di Modrone deck, dated about 1440 to 1445. In 2023 Yale reported that the watermarks support a recent proposal of 1441 to 1442. That deck has female Knights and Pages and three extra virtue cards, and Yale estimates it first had at least 89 cards, so not every early deck had 78.

Yale describes tarocchi as a popular trick-taking game. It spread across much of Europe and is still played today.

The earliest known account of reading tarot cards is an anonymous manuscript from about 1750, giving meanings for the deck used in Bologna. In 1781 the Protestant minister Antoine Court de Gébelin published an essay in Le monde primitif arguing that the cards preserved ancient Egyptian wisdom. Egyptian hieroglyphs had not yet been deciphered.

Jean-Baptiste Alliette of Paris, who wrote as Etteilla, published a book on tarot divination in 1783 and a deck made for that purpose in 1789. In the 1850s Éliphas Lévi tied the 22 picture cards to the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet. By then, according to the Victoria and Albert Museum, tarot was an established fortune-telling tool.

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, an occult society, was established in London in 1888. Arthur Edward Waite and the artist Pamela Colman Smith met through it. In 1909 Waite commissioned Smith to design a full deck, which William Rider and Son of London issued in December of that year in a small printing, followed by a larger one in March 1910.

Waite gave Smith detailed instructions for the picture cards. He changed some names, so the Pope became the Hierophant, and he swapped the positions of Justice and Strength. The museum credits Smith alone with the suit cards. Earlier decks usually repeated the suit emblem on these, and she gave each one its own scene. The deck was long called the Rider-Waite, a name that left her out.

Nobody knows who invented tarot or in which city. The first documents naming such decks come from Italian cities in the 1440s, and how the game began before then is unknown. The artists of the oldest decks are also unsettled: Yale now suggests Andrea Bembo for its cards, where Bonifacio Bembo was the usual attribution.

The origin of the word is unknown. It reached French from the Italian tarocco, and the explanations offered are still debated.

The Egyptian origin has no support. Court de Gébelin said tarot came from Egyptian words meaning royal road, and no such words have been found. Later claims linking the cards to Kabbalah, Tantra or the I Ching are likewise unsubstantiated as origins, however often they are repeated. Scholars have found no significant evidence that anyone told fortunes with tarot before the eighteenth century.

History can show how these meanings came to be attached to the cards. It has nothing to say on whether a reading is true.