How Tarot Cards Evolved From a Renaissance Era Game to Fortune-Telling Tool

The tarot deck originally had nothing to do with fortune-telling. Tarot’s famous trumps (special cards that rank above ordinary suit cards) emerged as an innocuous addition to existing playing-card decks in 15th-century Italy and were used to play the popular game tarocchi. Only centuries later, in another country, were tarot decks and their trumps portrayed as embodiments of ancient wisdom that could be used in occultism and divination.

“It is of course in the interests of those who make their living from occultism, cartomancy [divination with cards] and selling tarot packs designed for these purposes to try to perpetuate the myth that these cards are of ancient origin and have some mystical meaning or even power, and to ignore the use of them for games,” says John McLeod, a historian of card games and the co-author of the 2004 book A History of Games Played with the Tarot Pack: The Game of Triumphs. “Their propaganda over the last 150 years or so has been extremely successful, so it is probably still the case that most people believe that tarot cards were originally used for divination of some kind.”

The earliest known mention of a tarot-type deck is in a diary entry from September 1440, in which a legal official named Giusto Giusti noted that he’d gifted a special set, handmade in Florence, to Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, the powerful lord (signore) of the city-state of Rimini. Giusti recorded that he’d spent four and a half ducats—several weeks’ wages for a skilled worker—to have artisans create the cards, which were adorned with the Malatesta coat of arms. He called them naibi a trionfi—that is, playing cards with triumphs. The name trionfi—triumphs, or trumps—seems to have been commonly used at this time for such decks and the games played with them. The Italian name tarocchi was only used later and became tarot in French.

Playing cards were introduced to Italy in the mid-14th century, probably from the Islamic world. The original four suits were Cups, Swords, Batons (or Wands) and Coins (later Pentacles), which are preserved in most modern tarot decks. The familiar suits of Hearts, Clubs, Spades and Diamonds were a later French innovation.

The tarocchi deck combined the 56 cards of the four suits with 21 trumps and “The Fool,” which stood outside the trump sequence and played a unique role in the game. Tarocchi was a trick-taking game, somewhat like modern bridge, in which trumps could be played when a player was unable to follow suit.

The trumps seem to have inspired the idea that the deck embodied arcane wisdom, although their imagery would not have been obscure to their original audience. Experts say the trumps drew on familiar symbols that would have been well-known to 15th-century Italians, such as “Fortune” and “Death.” But it’s not known exactly why those particular symbols were chosen or why the trumps were ranked in a hierarchy. The ranking varied between regions, but a later French tradition ranked “The Magician” the lowest and “The World” the highest.

French playing-card historian Thierry Depaulis, co-author of the 2018 book Con gli occhi et con l’intelletto, says the scholarly consensus is that the trumps were strongly influenced by Christian allegories. They represented a progression from earthly concerns—“The Magician” for example, and “The Emperor”—to celestial imagery like “The Moon” and “The Sun,” and finally to Christian concepts represented by the highest trumps, often “Judgement” and “The World.”

But Depaulis says the original meaning of the sequence remains uncertain. “To this day,” he writes, “no one has found the keys that would allow a convincing interpretation of it.”

The idea that the tarot deck of playing cards could be used to tell the future was popularized by 18th-century French writers, including Antoine Court de Gébelin, who argued that it preserved ancient Egyptian wisdom. “De Gébelin’s interpretations of the meanings of the cards were enthusiastically adopted and further developed by various occultists and cartomancers in France,” McLeod says.

From the 19th century, the tradition spread to the English-speaking world, aided by mystical groups who used it in their ceremonies. Many occultists redesigned the cards to make their supposed hidden meanings more apparent. As a result, McLeod says, "nowadays there are tarot cards made for occult use that are not really practical to play with, and tarot cards made for playing whose modern designs are of little interest to the occultists."

Tarot decks have taken on new life in the internet age, fueled by social media platforms that can spread tarot imagery to millions of people. Generative artificial intelligence has been used both to design new cards and purportedly to “read the future” from them. One industry estimate puts the global value of tarot and other oracle cards at nearly $1.5 billion a year.

But to many modern users, there’s nothing supernatural about tarot cards. Instead, they see the cards’ rich imagery as a psychological tool that can encourage introspection. Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung was sympathetic to this approach, arguing that the trumps represented archetypal ideas, an interpretation later adopted by other writers. Still, the belief that tarot is rooted in ancient wisdom or occult magic is now widespread—a far cry from the card game that it was at the beginning.