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Tarot: cards, game, and later divination

Europe & MediterraneanItaly · later global historyDivination & interpretation Stories & symbols

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Quick overview

Tarot began as a card game in fifteenth century Italy. Occult and fortune telling meanings became prominent much later. Its images can be studied as art and cultural history without claiming that cards predict events.

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In depth

Tarot cards emerged in fifteenth-century Italy as cards for play. Their use in occult interpretation and divination developed later. Early painted decks are important works of art and social history, while later readers created new symbolic systems. Neither history supports the popular claim that tarot originated in pharaonic Egypt.

Cards and play

The Metropolitan Museum places the earliest references to tarot in northern Italian cities in the 1440s and 1450s. Suits and added trump cards structured games in courtly settings. Surviving cards also show artistic patronage and the values of their makers. A deck's imagery is not an encrypted transcript of an ancient priesthood.

Images have changing meanings

Trumps show figures such as rulers, virtues, and religious symbols. Their meaning in a game, a painted commission, and a later divinatory reading may differ. Cards can be interpreted creatively without claiming one permanent ancient meaning for each image. Historical analysis asks when a particular association first appeared.

The occult turn

Later European writers developed correspondences between tarot, astrology, Kabbalah, and other materials. These are historically significant new interpretations, not evidence that the fifteenth-century card makers encoded the whole later system. Recognising invention and adaptation can make occult history more interesting, rather than dismissing it.

Sources for this section: Before Fortune Telling · Metropolitan Museum ↗ · Tarot in the Met collection · Metropolitan Museum of Art ↗ · Occult Tarot · Morgan Library & Museum ↗ · Tarot workshop on Waite–Smith correspondences · Morgan Library & Museum ↗

A reflective use

A two-author study describes a tarot-based storytelling game that its designers used for self-reflection. That example shows one contemporary use of tarot imagery; it does not establish how regular readers use cards or demonstrate predictive or therapeutic efficacy. The game has its own recent history and does not change the chronology of the cards' origins. A randomly drawn card cannot diagnose illness or replace an informed decision.

Sources for this section: Self Arcana and reflective tarot storytelling · International Journal of Role-Playing ↗

Material evidence and gaps

Museums preserve particular decks, sometimes incomplete and removed from their original settings. They can show date, materials, design, and ownership, but not every way historical players understood the cards. A careful account joins objects to written records and avoids filling gaps with an attractive origin myth.

Modern use and ancient claims

A small qualitative design study documents tarot-based storytelling used for self-reflection. It does not establish how all contemporary readers use cards or whether the practice improves wellbeing. Calling an image meaningful in one conversation differs from asserting that original deck makers intended that reading or that cards reveal future events.

Sources for this section: Self Arcana and reflective tarot storytelling · International Journal of Role-Playing ↗

A surviving Milanese deck

The National Gallery of Art's research on fifteenth-century decks follows the Visconti-Sforza cards and the gradual stabilisation of their allegorical images. The cards developed within a courtly visual culture, where patronage, game play, and familiar figures shaped the designs. A particular surviving deck can tell us about materials and imagery, but it cannot certify what every player thought of each trump. The historical uncertainty leaves room for careful interpretation, not for a claim that all later occult meanings were secretly painted into the first cards.

Sources for this section: Origins of Visconti-Sforza tarot imagery · National Gallery of Art ↗

A change in purpose

The same physical object can move from game to collected artwork to instrument of divination. Those uses are linked by reception, yet each has its own dates and communities. The Met's collections document luxury cards and games; later occult writers attached new systems of correspondences. Modern readers may use a card to start reflection, but the value of that conversation is a present practice. It does not alter the evidence for an Italian gaming origin or make a draw a verified way to predict illness, law, or finance.

Sources for this section: Before Fortune Telling · Metropolitan Museum ↗ · Tarot in the Met collection · Metropolitan Museum of Art ↗ · Origins of Visconti-Sforza tarot imagery · National Gallery of Art ↗ · Self Arcana and reflective tarot storytelling · International Journal of Role-Playing ↗ · Occult Tarot · Morgan Library & Museum ↗

Two decks, two kinds of evidence

The Visconti-Sforza cards made for a fifteenth-century Milanese court survive incompletely, with painted and gilded figures that disclose patronage and taste. The Sola-Busca deck survives as an early complete seventy-eight-card set and uses different imagery, including historical figures. The Metropolitan Museum's account places both in tarot's material history. Neither deck can by itself tell us how every contemporary player interpreted a card, and neither supports an ancient Egyptian origin. Their contrast also challenges the idea of one original symbolic code: artists and patrons made choices within a developing game. Later occult interpreters had every right to make new readings, but those readings belong to later dates and aims. A historically honest article can appreciate the Sola-Busca's suggestive pictures and still ask for evidence before assigning them a fixed secret message. It can use a surviving object to describe materials and design while acknowledging the conversations around play that no museum label can recover.

Distilled highlights

Short ideas for orientation; the article and sources provide context.

TarocchiEarly Italian cards with added trumps.

TrumpA special card in the game sequence.

FoolA distinctive card in early decks.

Occult tarotA later reinterpretation.

ImageArt that invites multiple readings.