Origin and History
The oldest surviving Tarot cards are three mid-15th century sets all made for members of the Visconti family, rulers of Milan. The oldest existing Tarot deck was painted to celebrate a mid-15th century wedding joining the ruling Visconti and Sforza families of Milan, probably painted by Bonifacio Bembo and other miniaturists of the Ferrara school. 35 of the cards are now in the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York. Of the original cards, 35 are in the Pierpont-Morgan Library, 26 cards are at the Accademia Carrara, 13 are at the Casa Colleoni, 4 cards being lost (the Devil, the Tower, the Three of Swords, and the Knight of Coins). This "Visconti-Sforza" deck, which has been widely reproduced in varying quality, combines the Minor Arcana (the original suits of (Swords, Wands, Pentacles & Cups, and face cards King, Queen, Knave and Page) with Major Arcana that apparently combine already traditional iconography with considerable artistic license, a sign that the original significance of the designs was already lost.
More simply-drawn decks survive from Marseilles, France, from
the early 16th century.
It is believed by many that the Tarot is far older than this. Based on similarities of the imagery and numbering, some associate the Tarot with ancient Egypt, or the Hebrew mystic tradition of the Kabbalah, with the heretical Cathars of Languedoc and Piedmont, where the Tarot first appeared, or a wide variety of other origins. This is all, however, pure mythology. In fact, study of the iconography of the earliest tarots via standard comparative-historical methods suffices to pin their origin down to very near the time and place of the original Visconti deck; that is, Northern Italy in the early Renaissance period. We can, for example, place their origin after the Black Death, because the skeletal-death-with-a-scythe motif found on effectively all versions of Trump XIII does not predate the plagues. Before then, skulls in pictorial art were primarily a symbol of scholarship and learning.
In fact, the earliest Tarots seem to have been depictions of the carnival parades that ushered in the season of Lent. These elaborate productions layered then-fashionable Graeco-Roman symbolism over a Christian allegory of sin, grace, and redemption; notably, the earliest versions of the World card (the final Trump, XXI) show a conventional image known from period religious art to represent St. Augustine's "Heavenly City", and it is not coincidence that this closely follows the Judgement card.
Several other early Tarot-like sequences of portable art survive to place the Visconti deck in context. Later confusion about the symbolism stems from the Marseilles decks, which began a process of steadily paganizing and universalizing the symbolism to the point where the underlying Christian allegory has been almost completely obscured (as, for example, when the Rider-Waite deck of the early Twentieth Century changed "The Pope" to "The Hierophant" and "The Popess" to "The High Priestess") It is notable that between 1450 and 1500 the Tarot was actually recommended for the instruction of the young by Church moralists (reference is urgently needed here); not until fifty years after the Visconti deck did it become associated with gambling, and not until the 19th century and "Etteila" with occultism.
In the Anglo-Saxon world today, the Tarot is usually seen as a means of fortune-telling. However, early references such as the sermon refer only to the use of the cards for game-playing and gambling; and in some European countries such as France, Italy, Switzerland, Austria and Germany; this is still seen as the primary purpose of the Tarot today. The rules of the French version of this game, bearing little or no relation to the fortune-telling purpose of the cards and still very popular in France, can be found here.
The relationship between Tarot cards and playing cards is often said to be unclear, but in fact the history is tolerably well documented. Playing cards are first recorded in 1321 in a Swiss monastic chronicle that notes their recent importation from the Orient; they thus predated the earliest Tarots by a century. They may have evolved by mutation from circular cards used in India to play a wargame called "Chaturanga" ("Four Kings"); some very early decks, including one preserved in the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, were circular.
Early European sources describe a 52- rather than 78-card deck, like a modern deck but without jokers. 78-card Tarots were what happened when the 21 Trumps were merged into early 52-card gambling decks. Why this happened is not completely clear, but there is some evidence that it may have been done as an end-run around anti-gambling laws that targeted the 52-card deck.
The Tarot cards eventually came to be associated with mysticism and magic. This was actually a late rather than early development, as we can tell from period sources on card divination and magic. The Tarot was not widely adopted by mystics, occultists and secret societies until the 18th and 19th century. The tradition began in 1781, when Antoine Court de Gébelin, a Swiss clergyman and Freemason, published Le Monde Primitif, a study of religious symbolism and its survivals in the modern world. De Gébelin first called attention to the unusual symbols of the Tarot de Marseille, and asserted that the symbols in fact represented the mysteries of Isis and Thoth. De Gébelin furthermore claimed that the name "tarot" came from the Egyptian words tar, meaning "royal", and ro, meaning "road", and that the Tarot therefore represented a "royal road" to wisdom. De Gébelin wrote before Champollion had deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs, and later Egyptologists found nothing in the Egyptian language that supports de Gébelin's fanciful etymologies, but these findings came too late; by the time authentic Egyptian texts were available, the identification of the Tarot cards with the Egyptian "Book of Thoth" was already firmly established in occult practice.
It was first practically applied by a charlatan named Alliette, aka "Le Grand Etteilla", an ex-barber who reversed his name and marketed himself as a seer and card diviner in the Paris of the French Revolution. Etteilla designed the first esoteric Tarot deck, adding astrological attributions to various cards, altering many of them from the Marseilles designs, and adding divinatory meanings in text on the cards. The Etteilla decks, though now eclipsed by Smith and Waite's illuminated deck and Aleister Crowley's "Thoth" deck, remains available. Etteilla's best known successor was Marie-Anne Le Normand, whose cartomancy became fashionable during the reign of Napoleon Bonaparte, due largely to the influence Le Normand wielded with Joséphine de Beauharnais, Napoleon's first wife. After the fall of Napoleon and the restoration of the Bourbon kings, interest in cartomancy declined.
Interest by more serious occultists came later, during the Hermetic Revival of the 1840s in which (among others) Victor Hugo was involved. The idea of the cards as a mystical key was first seriously developed by Eliphas Levi and passed to the English-speaking world by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Levi, not Etteilla, is the true founder of most contemporary schools of Tarot reading; his 1854 Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie (English title: Transcendental Magic) introduced a new system for interpreting the cards. While Levi accepted Court de Gébelin's claims about an Egyptian origin of the deck symbols, he rejected Etteilla's innovations and his altered deck, and devised instead a system which related the Tarot to the Kabbalah and the four elements of alchemy.
The breakthrough into mass popularity began in 1910, with the publication of the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot, which took the step of including symbolic images in the minor as well the major arcana. (Arthur Edward Waite had been an early member of the Golden Dawn) In the twentieth century, a huge number of different decks were created, some traditional, some wildly different.
Tarot decks display the archetypes of spiritual life, see iconography.
Tarocchi
Egyptology
New Age
Further reading
- The Game of Tarot by Michael Dummett ISBN 0-71-561014-7 - a history of the Tarot, and a compilation of Tarot card games. (out of print)
- A Wicked Pack of Cards: The Origins of the Occult Tarot by Ronald Decker, Thierry de Paulis, and Michael Dummett ISBN 0-312-16294-4 - a history of the French origin of the occult Tarot, focusing on Etteilla, Le Normand, and Lévi.
- A History of the Occult Tarot by Ronald Decker and Michael Dummett, ISBN 0-7156-3122-5, continuing the story of the occult Tarot through the Golden Dawn tradition and its reception in the English-speaking world.
- Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom by Rachel Pollack - comprehensive, covering and the minor as well as the major arcana; and taking several angles on the Tarot.
- Complete Guide to the Tarot by Eden Grey - concentrates on classical divination, but has some information on the more spiritual aspects.
- Qabalistic Tarot by Robert Wang - a comprehensive and highly regarded, but frequently challenging, reference to the esoteric aspects of T
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The conventional 78-card deck is structured into two distinct sets. The first called the 
For example, take a look at the Rider-Waite-Smith Strength card. We can know more about the symbolic intentions of the designer here, since he conveniently wrote many books on the subject. As with its Marseilles-deck ancestor, the card shows a woman holding the jaws of a lion, but this picture is far more elaborate. The strangely-shaped hat of the Marseilles card has traditionally been interpreted as a symbolic lemniscate: the sideways-figure-eight representation of infinity. In the newer card, this symbol appears explicitly. Other symbols are included: a chain of roses symbolizing desire or passion, against a white robe symbolizing purity. The mountains in the background demonstrate another kind of strength. Even here there is room for interpretation: the card is sometimes considered as showing intellect triumphing over desire, sometimes as the equal union of intellect and passion, sometimes just as a symbol of mental strength or endurance.