The History of Tarot โ From Parlor Game to Tool for Self-Reflection
People encountering tarot for the first time often assume it descends from the mystical wisdom of ancient Egypt, or that it is a divination art the Romani carried for thousands of years. Romantic stories โ but the origin history actually records is far humbler. Tarot began as a card game of fifteenth-century Italian nobles.
A nobleman's pastime: trionfi
Court records from Milan and Ferrara in the 1440s mention a card game called trionfi ("triumphs"). It took the existing four-suit playing cards โ the ancestors of today's Minor Arcana โ and added a special set of 22 allegorical picture cards. The oldest surviving tarot deck, the Visconti-Sforza deck, was a lavish handmade commission celebrating a marriage in the ducal family of Milan: not a divination tool, but a display of wealth and refinement.
What is fascinating is that these game cards already carried nearly all of today's Major Arcana imagery โ the Fool, the Magician, the Lovers, Death, the World. The symbols of the allegorical plays and religious art familiar to medieval Europeans had simply stepped into the cards.
The eighteenth century: tarot meets divination
Tarot put on its mystical clothing three hundred years later, in eighteenth-century France. In 1781 the scholar and former Protestant pastor Antoine Court de Gรฉbelin claimed in his encyclopedia that tarot was the ancient Egyptian "Book of Thoth," surviving in the form of playing cards. Egyptian hieroglyphs had not yet been deciphered, so the claim could not be tested โ but the romantic hypothesis set the imagination of Europe's intellectuals on fire.
Soon after, the fortune-teller Jean-Baptiste Alliette, working under the name Etteilla, published history's first tarot deck designed specifically for divination โ and the practice of assigning each card an upright and reversed meaning, still standard today, began to take hold.
1909: the birth of the Rider-Waite deck
The standard of modern tarot was set in early twentieth-century England by the occult society known as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. One of its members, the scholar Arthur Edward Waite, commissioned the artist Pamela Colman Smith to illustrate a new deck; published by the Rider company in 1909, it became the Rider-Waite deck.
Its real innovation lay in the Minor Arcana. Where earlier decks had drawn the numbered cards as mere arrangements of symbols โ five cups, seven swords โ Smith painted full scenes with people in them. Suddenly even a beginner could read a card's emotional tone straight from the picture, and this became the decisive moment in tarot's popularization. The great majority of decks published today follow this deck's compositions and symbols, and Starlight Tarot's meanings for all 78 cards are likewise grounded in the Rider-Waite tradition.
Today โ from divination to reflection
From the late twentieth century, tarot changed clothes once more. Meeting the psychologist Carl Jung's theory of archetypes, tarot began to be reinterpreted less as a "tool for predicting the future" and more as a mirror held up to the inner life. Today many counselors and coaches use tarot cards as a catalyst for conversation, and "tarot journaling" โ tarot combined with diary-keeping and meditation โ has spread widely. The relationship between tarot and psychology gets a full article of its own.
A card game that began in a nobleman's parlor six hundred years ago now sits on millions of desks as a tool for self-reflection. The history of tarot, in the end, is not the history of the cards โ it is the history of the people who kept giving them meaning.