Where tarot came from — and the stories that aren't true

Ask where tarot comes from and you will hear some wonderful answers. Ancient Egypt. A secret book of the god Thoth. Lost Atlantis. Romani travellers carrying it across the world. Some of these still turn up in books on sale today.

None of them is true. The real story is shorter, better documented and, in its way, just as interesting. It's worth knowing, because it tells you what the cards actually are, and it means nobody can sell you a false history later.

Cards reach Europe

Playing cards were not invented in Europe. They came, most likely, from the Islamic world. Historians point to a deck used under the Mamluk rulers of Egypt and Syria, with four suits: polo sticks, cups, coins and scimitars. Paper and card-making spread into Europe in the fourteenth century, probably through Spain or Sicily, and written records show cards in use there by the late 1300s.

Look at those four suits again and you'll see the Minor Arcana taking shape: batons, cups, coins and swords. Those are still the suits of ordinary playing cards in Italy and Spain.

A fifth suit, for a game

Then, in the early fifteenth century, somewhere in northern Italy, someone added something new: a fifth suit of allegorical pictures, such as Love, Death, the Wheel of Fortune and the World. In the game played with this deck, those picture cards beat all the others. They were trumps.

Historians disagree a little about the date. The two who did most to establish this history put the invention in the 1420s. Others allow anything from about 1410 to 1430. The likeliest birthplaces are Milan, Ferrara or Bologna, all centres of card-making. The deck was first called carte da trionfi, cards with triumphs, and the English word "trump" comes from those trionfi. Around 1530 the Italians began calling it tarocchi, and that is where our word tarot comes from. Nobody is sure what tarocchi originally meant.

The oldest cards that survive are luxury hand-painted decks made for noble families in the mid-1400s, such as the cards painted by Bonifacio Bembo for the Visconti family of Milan. Cheaper printed decks certainly existed too, but cards that are played with get worn out and thrown away, so few survive.

You will sometimes read that tarot dates from the fourteenth century, or earlier. Some well-known books still say so. The surviving evidence doesn't support it: the four-suit pack is fourteenth century, but the tarot, with its trumps, is fifteenth.

Was it used for divination?

Mostly, at first, it was used for play. That's not to say nobody ever read meaning into it. Ordinary playing cards were used for fortune-telling in the Renaissance, and there are sixteenth-century accounts of a parlour game in which a trump card was given to each guest and the others explained why it suited them. A set of Venetian poems from 1527 describes trumps being dealt to describe people's characters. By the eighteenth century there was a settled tradition of reading tarot cards in Bologna.

So reading the cards is old. But the grand claims about the cards' origins are not, and they all start with one man.

1781: the Egyptian story

In 1781 a French scholar named Antoine Court de Gébelin published an essay in a large work on the ancient world. He described calling on a countess and finding her playing a card game with a tarot deck. When she laid down The World, he said, he recognised it at once as Egyptian. The cards, he decided, were the surviving pages of an ancient Egyptian book of wisdom, saved from destruction by being disguised as a game.

He had no evidence. He also claimed the word "tarot" came from two Egyptian words meaning "royal road", but nobody in Europe could read Egyptian at the time. After the Rosetta Stone was found in 1799 and Egyptian writing was finally deciphered, his etymology could be shown to be false, and no link between ancient Egypt and the tarot ever turned up.

The World, above, is the card that started it all, though Court de Gébelin saw an older French version, not this 1909 one: a figure in a wreath, with the four winged creatures at the corners.

Almost every occult idea about tarot can be traced back to that one essay: the Egyptian origin, the Romani connection, links to the god Thoth and to the Hebrew alphabet. Later writers took up one idea or another and built on it.

• Etteilla, a Paris fortune-teller and print dealer, became the first professional tarot reader and teacher, and commissioned the first tarot deck designed mainly for divination. He took Court de Gébelin's Egypt and ran with it.
• Éliphas Lévi, in the nineteenth century, tied the twenty-two trumps to the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet and made tarot central to his magical system.
• Paul Christian forged supposed evidence linking the cards to Egyptian mystery cults, and gave us the word arcana, secrets, for the cards.

The Romani story

The idea that Romani people brought the tarot to Europe also starts with Court de Gébelin, who suggested it as an alternative. At the time, people believed the Romani had come from Egypt, which is where the English word "Gypsy" comes from. Nineteenth-century scholars traced their origins to India instead, and showed that they reached western Europe in the early fifteenth century, after playing cards were already in use there. The story was popularised in the 1840s, more than four hundred years after the cards appeared.

Some Romani fortune-tellers did come to use cards, as many people did. That's very different from bringing them.

Atlantis, and the rest

Atlantis, secret councils of sages hiding wisdom in a game, a passage of tarot images under the Sphinx: these are later still, and none has any evidence behind it. One writer on tarot sums them up kindly as more romantic than the reality.

Why the true story is enough

You might worry that taking away the ancient Egyptian origin takes something away from the cards. It doesn't. The pictures don't stop working because they were painted in Renaissance Italy rather than in a pharaoh's temple. If anything, the true story is more useful: these images came from a culture that loved allegory and used even games to picture virtues and vices, fortune and death. That's exactly what the trumps still show.

There is a debt to the occultists too, and it's fair to name it. Without them tarot would probably have stayed a card game. Most of the meanings you'll learn for the Minor Arcana go back, through the 1909 deck in these pictures, to Etteilla. The myths were false. The reading tradition they started is real, and it's the one this course teaches.

What to take from this

• Playing cards came to Europe in the 1300s, most likely from the Islamic world, already with four suits.
• Tarot is a fifteenth-century Italian invention: a fifth suit of allegorical trumps added for a game.
• The Egyptian origin began with one essay in 1781, with no evidence behind it. The Romani and Atlantis stories have none either.
• Reading the cards is old; the grand myths are not. The occult tradition built from them is the one most tarot reading still uses.

Next, we look at the obvious question: why should cards that turn up at random mean anything at all?