History of tarot

Tarot did not begin as a fortune-telling tool. It began as a card game, and its use for divination came about three hundred years later.

A card game in Italy

The earliest tarot cards were made in northern Italy in the first half of the fifteenth century, as a fifth suit of trump cards added to the four ordinary playing-card suits. The game was called tarocchi, or earlier trionfi, triumphs. Wealthy families such as the Visconti and Sforza of Milan commissioned hand-painted decks, and some of these survive. The game spread across Europe, and a plainer, printed design known as the Tarot de Marseille became the standard pattern in France.

The turn to divination

Using the cards to tell fortunes started in the late eighteenth century. In 1781 the French scholar Antoine Court de Gébelin published an essay claiming that the cards held the lost wisdom of ancient Egypt. The claim had no evidence behind it, but it caught on. Soon afterwards a Parisian, who wrote under the name Etteilla, published the first deck designed for divination. From then on the cards were increasingly read for meaning, not only played.

The Golden Dawn

In late Victorian Britain the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a magical society founded in 1888, tied the tarot to astrology, the elements and the Hebrew alphabet. Most of the planet, sign and decan links on this site, such as the Emperor with Aries and the Two of Wands with Mars in Aries, come from that scheme.

The Rider-Waite-Smith deck

The deck used here was published in London by William Rider and Son in 1909. The scheme was set out by Arthur Edward Waite, a writer and member of the Golden Dawn, and the paintings were by Pamela Colman Smith, an artist and illustrator who also signed her work with a small monogram, visible in the lower corner of many cards. Smith's greatest innovation was to give every minor arcana card a scene. Earlier decks mostly showed the number of suit symbols, so a Three of Swords was three swords. In this deck it is a heart pierced by three swords on a rainy sky, and that made the minor cards far easier to read as stories.

Waite explained the cards in his book The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, first published in 1911, which is available online (see the sources on the about page). The deck is often called the Rider-Waite, or the Waite-Smith, in recognition of both makers. Smith's contribution was for a long time overlooked, and more recent writing has restored her to the name.

Why these pictures are free to use

Smith's paintings were published in 1909 and she died in 1951. The images are in the public domain, and the scans used on this site come from Wikimedia Commons, where each card's file page is linked from the card's own page here.

Tarot today

There are now thousands of tarot decks, almost all of them descended from the Rider-Waite-Smith or the Marseille pattern. Many readers treat the cards as a prompt for reflection and conversation rather than as a forecast, and that is the spirit of this site.

Tarot, astrology and numerology are traditions of symbolism. This page says what the tradition associates with its subject. It does not predict anything and it is not advice.