D’où vient le tarot ? Une brève histoire, du jeu à la divination

Tarot cards come from northern Italy, where they appeared in the 1440s as a card game for the nobility. They were not an Egyptian book, a Templar secret or a gypsy tool. The divination layer came much later, in France, in the 1780s. Here is the short version, with the dates that matter.

Where were tarot cards invented?

The earliest surviving tarot packs were painted for the ruling families of northern Italy: the Visconti and Sforza in Milan, and the d’Este in Ferrara. Surviving examples date to roughly 1441–1447. The game was called tarocchi. The cards were hand-painted, backed with gold leaf and decorated with family crests.

The idea was simple. Take the four-suit playing deck already in circulation and add a fifth set of permanent trumps. That gives 56 suit cards, 21 numbered trumps and the Fool. Total: 78 cards. The trumps showed figures people of the time knew well: Pope, Emperor, Death, Fortune, virtues, the Last Judgement. Players used them for a trick-taking game, not for prophecy.

One older trace exists. A deck linked to Duke Filippo Maria Visconti, often dated to 1418–1425, is described with 60 cards, four bird suits and 16 trumps of Roman gods. No card from it survives, so I treat it as a clue, not as proof.

What is the oldest tarot deck?

The best-known survivor is the Visconti-Sforza deck. Historians date it to around 1450. Giordano Berti proposes 1442–1447. His reasoning: the coin cards show the florin that Filippo Maria Visconti minted in 1442 and that was withdrawn at his death in 1447.

Of the original 78 cards, about 74 are said to survive. Roughly 35 are in the Morgan Library in New York, 26 in the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo, and 13 in private hands. The painter is often named as Bonifacio Bembo. Specialists do not all agree on that attribution, and I won’t pretend to settle it.

Are tarot cards really from ancient Egypt?

No. This is the most persistent myth, and it has a precise birthday. In 1781, the Swiss-born pastor Antoine Court de Gébelin published a volume of his encyclopedia Le Monde primitif. He argued that the tarot was the surviving pages of the Egyptian Book of Thoth. He even derived the word “tarot” from supposed Egyptian roots meaning “royal road”.

Modern scholars reject this. The word comes from the Italian tarocchi, and no Egyptian source mentions such a book. Even the Templar story fails: if crusaders met any cards, it would have been the 52-card playing deck used in Mamluk Egypt, not tarot.

The theory still mattered a great deal. It gave the cards a noble, mysterious past, and that is exactly what occultists wanted. A false origin story created a real tradition.

When did tarot become a divination tool?

Before the 18th century, tarot cards were used for playing games. The first hint of divination is an anonymous single page from Bologna, dated roughly 1750–1770. It gives short meanings for 35 cards of the Bolognese tarot, a 62-card variant. It is rudimentary, but it shows that someone was already reading the cards.

Then came the French turn. After Court de Gébelin, Jean-Baptiste Alliette, who wrote under the name Etteilla, designed what is usually called the first tarot deck made for divination, around 1789. He also wrote instructions for reading and linked the cards to astrology, the elements and numerology.

The next steps built on that base:

• Éliphas Lévi (19th century) tied the trumps to the Hebrew alphabet and to Kabbalah.
• Paul Christian, pen name of Jean-Baptiste Pitois (1811–1877), popularised the terms “Major” and “Minor Arcana”. If you want to see how the split works in practice, read major and minor arcana: what is the difference.
• The Golden Dawn, a late 19th-century British magical order, reworked the correspondences in a systematic way.

How did the Marseille and Rider-Waite decks appear?

Two families of decks dominate today. The Marseille pattern is the older one. By 1781, it was the most common tarot available in France, simpler and more stylised than the Milan courtly decks. Its pip cards are not illustrated. You read them by number and suit. The Fool of the Marseille tarot is a good example of how stripped-down and strange these images remain.

The Rider-Waite-Smith deck arrived in 1909. The artist Pamela Colman Smith drew it under the direction of Arthur Edward Waite, a Golden Dawn member, and the Rider company published it. Its big innovation was a scene on every card, including the minor arcana, which made reading far more intuitive. That convention then spread to most decks published in the 20th century.

If you are wondering which of the two suits you, the comparison is laid out in Marseille or Rider-Waite: what is the difference, and a buying angle is given in which tarot to buy as a beginner.

Mon avis

I prefer the true story to the Egyptian one. Tarot began as a refined game, and the divination came from people who looked at those images and read something in them. That is more interesting than a lost book of Thoth, and it needs no forged pedigree.

I do not think the late date weakens the practice. Divination systems are often built by layers: a tool, then a reading habit, then a theory. Tarot simply did it in plain view, with names and dates we can check.

My limit: I don’t take a side on who painted the Visconti-Sforza cards, and the 1418–1425 deck stays a question mark for me. More background pieces are gathered in the Comprendre section.

Your questions about tarot origins

Chana

Chana écrit pour voyanceenligne.ch : Les arts et pratiques divinatoires.