The Real Origin of Tarot Cards: Two Inventions, Two Centuries, One Deck

There Are Only 22 Tarot Cards and the Other 56 Were taken From a Completely Different Game

Pick up a tarot deck. Any tarot deck. Fan the cards across a table and look at them.

You are looking at 78 cards. You have been taught to think of them as one thing, a single unified system, a complete oracle, a coherent book of symbols designed to work together as a whole. Every tarot guidebook treats them that way. Every reader lays them out as though they belong together. Every shop sells them in a single box.

They are not one thing. They are two completely different inventions from two completely different centuries, created by two completely different cultures for two completely different purposes, and they were forced together in a card game in northern Italy sometime around 1440. Nobody used either of them for fortune telling for another 340 years after that.

The 56 cards you know as the minor arcana, the ones divided into four suits of cups, swords, coins, and wands, came from Mamluk Egypt. They were playing cards. They arrived in Europe through trade routes connecting Cairo and Alexandria to the ports of Italy and Spain in the 1370s. They had nothing to do with divination, nothing to do with spirituality, and nothing to do with the occult. They were a game.

The 22 cards you know as the major arcana, the Fool, the Magician, the High Priestess, Death, the Tower, the World, were invented later. They were added to the existing 56 card deck by Italian aristocrats in the 1440s as trump cards for a trick-taking game called tarocchi. They were hand painted in gold leaf for the Duke of Milan. They depicted allegorical figures from Renaissance art and Catholic imagery. They had nothing to do with Egypt, nothing to do with ancient wisdom, and nothing to do with reading the future.

The idea that tarot cards are a mystical oracle was invented in 1781 by a French Protestant clergyman who walked into a Parisian salon, saw someone playing cards, and declared with zero evidence that the deck was secretly an ancient Egyptian book of wisdom. He could not read a single word of Egyptian. Nobody could. The Rosetta Stone would not be decoded for another 41 years.

This is the real history of the 78 cards in your deck. It is stranger, messier, and far more interesting than any myth about Egyptian priests or ancient mystery schools.

The cards from Egypt

The story begins not with tarot but with playing cards. And playing cards began in China.

The earliest written reference to playing cards appears in Chinese literature from the tenth century during the Tang dynasty. These early Chinese cards were strips of bamboo or paper, used in games that combined elements of chance and strategy. Over the following centuries, playing cards travelled westward along the Silk Road through Persia and into the Arab world, evolving as they went. Bamboo was replaced by papyrus and paper. The format shifted from strips to rectangular cards. The number of suits and the structure of the deck changed with each culture that adopted them.

By the thirteenth century, playing cards had reached the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt. The Mamluks, originally slave soldiers of Turkic and Circassian origin who had risen to become the ruling dynasty, controlled Egypt and parts of the Levant from 1250 to 1517. Their court culture blended influences from across the Islamic world, and it was within this context that the most important ancestor of European playing cards was created.

The Mamluk deck consisted of 52 cards divided into four suits: cups, coins, swords, and polo sticks. Each suit had ten numbered pip cards and three court cards: the king, the viceroy, and the second viceroy. The cards were hand painted works of art, decorated with intricate geometric patterns and Arabic calligraphy rather than human figures, in keeping with the Islamic tradition of avoiding figurative depiction in decorative art. The court cards bore no faces. Instead they carried the written titles of their ranks.

The most complete surviving set of Mamluk cards was discovered by the historian Leo Mayer in the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul. The deck, dating to the fifteenth century, contained 47 of the original 52 cards. Its structure was immediately recognisable to anyone familiar with modern playing cards or with the minor arcana of a tarot deck. Four suits. Thirteen cards per suit. Ten pip cards and three court cards. The suits, cups, coins, swords, and polo sticks, corresponded almost exactly to the four suits that would later appear in Italian playing cards and then in tarot: cups, coins, swords, and batons.

This was not coincidence. It was direct inheritance. The word naib, which referred to the viceroy court card in the Mamluk deck, was borrowed into Italian as naibi and into Spanish as naipes, which remains the standard Spanish word for playing cards to this day. In 1379, the chronicles of the Italian city of Viterbo recorded that a new game had arrived, one that in the Saracen language was called nayb. The first known written reference to playing cards in Spain comes from a Catalan rhyming dictionary of 1371, which includes the word naip.

Arab traders and sailors introduced their card games to the ports of Italy and Spain around 1370. Within a decade, playing cards had spread across western Europe with extraordinary speed. By 1377 they were documented in Switzerland. By 1380 they were recorded in Florence and Paris. The game was so popular that authorities began banning it almost immediately, a sure sign that everyone was playing it.

When European card makers began producing their own versions of the Mamluk deck, they made changes. The abstract calligraphic court cards were replaced with human figures, kings, knights, and knaves, reflecting European feudal hierarchy. The polo sticks, representing a sport that Europeans had never seen, were reinterpreted as batons, clubs, or wands. But the fundamental structure of four suits with numbered pip cards and court cards remained intact. It has never changed. The 52 card deck you use to play poker today has the same structure as a Mamluk deck from fifteenth century Cairo. And the 56 card minor arcana of a tarot deck is the same structure with one additional court card per suit, the page or knave, added by European card makers.

The minor arcana is not a mystical system. It is a set of Islamic playing cards that travelled from Egypt to Europe through Mediterranean trade routes in the fourteenth century. Every time you lay out the Four of Cups or the King of Swords, you are handling a direct descendant of a Mamluk game card.

The cards from Milan

For roughly seventy years after playing cards arrived in Europe, they remained what they had always been: a game. There were no trump cards. There were no allegorical images. There was no Fool stepping off a cliff, no Tower struck by lightning, no skeleton riding a horse and labelled Death. Those images did not exist yet.

Then sometime in the 1440s, in the wealthy courts of northern Italy, someone had an idea. What if you added an extra set of cards to the existing four suit deck? A set of special cards, each illustrated with an allegorical figure, that would function as permanent trumps in a trick-taking game? The cards would outrank all the suit cards, and they would be ranked among themselves in a fixed hierarchy.

These additional cards were called trionfi, meaning triumphs. The game played with them became known as tarocchi. And the combined deck of 56 suit cards plus 22 triumph cards became what we now call a tarot deck.

The earliest references to tarocchi and triumph cards all date to the 1440s and 1450s, concentrated in the northern Italian cities of Milan, Ferrara, Venice, Florence, and Bologna. Court account books from Ferrara in 1442 mention purchases of decks featuring triumphs. A letter from Milan in 1449 describes a painted set of triumph cards. These are not mystical texts. They are receipts and correspondence. They record a game.

The most famous surviving examples are the Visconti-Sforza decks, a group of approximately fifteen incomplete sets of cards dating from the mid fifteenth century, now scattered across museums and private collections around the world. The finest of these was probably commissioned for Francesco Sforza, a mercenary commander who married the daughter of the Duke of Milan and eventually became Duke himself. The cards were painted in the workshop of the artist Bonifacio Bembo, probably around 1450. They are breathtaking objects, hand painted on pasteboard with opaque paint and tooled gold ground, depicting figures from Catholic religious imagery, classical allegory, and Renaissance court life.

The trump cards showed the Pope, the Emperor, the Empress, Death, the Devil, the Wheel of Fortune, Temperance, Justice, Fortitude, the Sun, the Moon, the Stars, the World, and other figures drawn from the symbolic vocabulary of the Italian Renaissance. These were not secret symbols from an ancient mystery school. They were the standard allegorical figures that appeared on church walls, in carnival processions, in illuminated manuscripts, and in the poetry of Petrarch, whose poem I Trionfi, The Triumphs, described a series of allegorical victories that may have directly inspired the trump card sequence.

The Visconti-Sforza cards did not have numbers on the trump cards, and the order of the trumps varied from city to city. There was no fixed sequence. There was no Fool’s Journey. There was no spiritual progression from ignorance to enlightenment. There was a hierarchy of trumps for the purpose of winning tricks in a card game, and different regions argued about which trump beat which, just as different households argue about the rules of Monopoly.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which holds several Visconti-Sforza cards, states plainly that the present day association of tarot with fortune telling and the occult gained currency only in the nineteenth century and has nothing to do with medieval tarot cards.

For over three hundred years, tarot was a game. Just a game. Played across Italy, France, Austria, and other parts of Europe. Nobody read the cards for divination. Nobody assigned them spiritual meanings. Nobody asked the Tower what it meant for their love life. People played tarocchi at dinner parties the way people play bridge today, and the 22 trumps were no more mystical than the joker in a standard deck of cards. The game is still played today. In France it is called jeu de tarot and remains one of the most popular card games in the country. Millions of French people play tarot every week. None of them think they are communing with the divine.

Historians like Michael Dummett, the Oxford philosopher who spent decades researching the origins of tarot, have been unequivocal on this point. Tarot was invented for gaming. Not for divination. Not for occult practice. Not as a vehicle for Egyptian wisdom. For gaming. The evidence is overwhelming and consists of account books, personal letters, court inventories, and game manuals, none of which mention divination or spiritual practice in connection with tarot until the late eighteenth century.

Then in 1781, everything changed.

The man who made it all up

Antoine Court de Gebelin was born in Nimes, France, in 1725. He was a Protestant pastor, a Freemason, and a polymath who spent his career working on a vast encyclopaedia called Le Monde Primitif, The Primeval World, which he published in volumes from 1773 onward. The project, which had King Louis XVI among its distinguished list of subscribers, aimed to reconstruct what Court de Gebelin believed was a lost primeval civilisation of advanced wisdom.

In 1781, in the eighth volume of Le Monde Primitif, Court de Gebelin published an essay that would transform the history of tarot forever. According to the traditional account, he had walked into a Parisian salon and seen a group of people playing a card game. He looked at the tarot trumps and experienced what he described as an immediate perception that the cards held the secrets of the Egyptians.

He declared that the tarot was the Book of Thoth, the legendary repository of all knowledge attributed to the ancient Egyptian god of wisdom. He claimed that Egyptian priests had distilled their entire civilisation’s learning into these card images. He asserted that the name tarot itself was Egyptian, derived from the words tar, meaning road, and ro, meaning royal, making it literally the royal road to wisdom.

He was wrong about every single point.

The tarot was not Egyptian. It was Italian, invented 340 years earlier in Milan and Ferrara. The name tarot was not Egyptian. It was derived from the Italian tarocchi, which itself has no clear etymology but was simply the name of the game. The Book of Thoth did not exist as a physical text. It was a mythological concept. The card images were not hieroglyphs. They were standard Renaissance allegorical figures that any educated Italian of the fifteenth century would have recognised immediately.

And here is the most damning fact. Court de Gebelin could not read a single word of ancient Egyptian. Nobody in Europe could. Jean-Francois Champollion would not begin deciphering the Rosetta Stone until 1822, forty one years after Court de Gebelin’s essay was published. The entire theory that tarot was Egyptian was proposed by a man who had no ability whatsoever to verify whether anything he was saying about Egypt was true. He saw the cards, felt they looked exotic and ancient, and declared them Egyptian based on nothing but his own intuition.

Despite having zero evidence, the theory caught fire. It appealed to the Enlightenment era’s fascination with ancient Egypt. It gave tarot an exotic pedigree that a card game invented by Italian dukes could never provide. It was romantic, mysterious, and entirely false. And it has never gone away. Over two hundred years later, you can still find websites, books, and social media posts confidently stating that tarot originated in ancient Egypt.

The seed merchant who invented fortune telling

Court de Gebelin’s theory provided the mythology. But it took another man to create the practice of tarot divination as we know it today.

Jean-Baptiste Alliette was born in Paris around 1738. He was a seed merchant and print seller, an ordinary tradesman with an interest in cartomancy, the practice of using playing cards for fortune telling. Playing card divination had existed in a simple form since at least the mid eighteenth century, using standard 52 card decks rather than tarot.

Alliette reversed the letters of his surname to create the professional name Etteilla, and under this alias he became the first person in history to design a tarot deck specifically for divination rather than for gaming. He published his first book on the subject around 1770, and in 1789 he released his own deck, the Grand Etteilla, which featured redesigned imagery intended purely for divinatory use.

Etteilla introduced several innovations that remain central to modern tarot practice. He assigned specific divinatory meanings to each card, meanings that were distinct from the cards’ functions in the tarocchi game. He introduced the concept of upright and reversed meanings, where a card carried a different interpretation depending on its orientation. He developed card spreads, specific layouts for arranging drawn cards and reading them in sequence.

It is worth pausing to appreciate what happened here. A seed merchant in Paris, inspired by a Protestant clergyman’s completely fabricated Egyptian theory, took a 340 year old Italian card game and reinvented it as a fortune telling system. He created the framework that every tarot reader in the world still uses today. The card meanings, the reversed interpretations, the spreads, the idea that you draw cards and read them as messages about your life, all of this was invented by Etteilla in the late eighteenth century. None of it existed before him.

Etteilla also made another crucial innovation. He insisted that the cards should be read in a specific order and that their sequence told a story, the story of creation, of human history, and of the soul’s journey. This narrative approach to the trump cards, the idea that the sequence from card one to card twenty one represents a spiritual progression, would later be developed by the Golden Dawn and would eventually become what modern readers call the Fool’s Journey. But it did not originate with ancient priests or secret initiates. It originated with a man who sold seeds for a living and who saw an opportunity to turn a popular card game into something more profitable.

The Golden Dawn builds the system

The next major transformation came in the 1880s and 1890s through the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a British occult society whose members included some of the most influential figures in the history of Western esotericism.

The Golden Dawn took the fabricated Egyptian mythology, the invented card meanings, and the Kabbalistic correspondences that the French occultist Eliphas Levi had mapped onto the tarot in the 1850s, and wove them into a comprehensive system of occult practice. They assigned each of the 22 major arcana to one of the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet. They connected the cards to the Tree of Life from Kabbalistic mysticism. They incorporated astrology, alchemy, and Hermetic philosophy. They created a dense network of correspondences that made the tarot feel like a genuine repository of ancient wisdom.

It was not ancient. It was Victorian. Every correspondence, every Kabbalistic connection, every astrological attribution was invented by members of a London-based occult society in the final decades of the nineteenth century. But the system was so elegant, so internally consistent, so intellectually satisfying, that it became the foundation for virtually all modern tarot practice.

In 1909, one of the Golden Dawn’s most prominent members, Arthur Edward Waite, commissioned an artist named Pamela Colman Smith to paint a new tarot deck based on the Golden Dawn’s system. Smith did something revolutionary. For the first time in the history of tarot, she painted a full narrative scene on every single card, including all 56 minor arcana. Before her, the minor arcana were pip cards, simple arrangements of suit symbols like a playing card. The Five of Cups was five cups in a pattern. Smith turned it into a cloaked figure standing before three spilled cups with two standing behind them. She gave every card a story, an emotion, a human situation that readers could connect with intuitively.

She painted all 78 cards in roughly six months. She was paid a flat fee. She received no royalties. The deck was published by William Rider and Son and named the Rider-Waite Tarot. The publisher’s name came first. Then Waite’s name. Smith’s name did not appear on the deck at all. She was not credited for the work that would become the most reproduced tarot deck in history, a deck that has sold tens of millions of copies and has been in continuous print for over a century.

Smith died in Bude, Cornwall, in 1951. In poverty. Her original paintings have never been found.

Meanwhile the Rider-Waite deck, which should by rights be called the Smith-Waite deck or simply the Pamela Colman Smith Tarot, became the single most influential tarot deck ever created. Virtually every modern tarot deck is either a direct copy of her compositions, a stylistic variation on her themes, or a deliberate reaction against her imagery. When you picture the Death card, the skeletal rider carrying a black banner across a field of fallen figures, you are picturing her painting. When you picture the Tower, the stone structure split by lightning with figures falling from its windows, you are picturing her painting. When you picture the Fool, the young person stepping blithely off a cliff edge with a small dog at their heels, you are picturing her painting. She created the visual language of modern tarot, and the tarot industry, which is now worth hundreds of millions of pounds globally, was built on her unpaid labour.

It was not until recent years that publishers began crediting Smith by name. Some editions now call the deck the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot or the Smith-Waite Tarot. It took over a century for the woman who painted every card to get her name on the box.

What you are actually holding

When you pick up a tarot deck today, you are holding the result of a series of historical accidents, cultural misunderstandings, deliberate fabrications, and genuine creative brilliance, layered on top of each other over six centuries.

The four suits of the minor arcana are Mamluk playing cards from fourteenth century Egypt, redesigned for European tastes, with polo sticks turned into wands and calligraphic court cards replaced by kings, queens, knights, and pages.

The 22 major arcana are Italian Renaissance trump cards from the 1440s, painted for wealthy dukes and depicting allegorical figures from Catholic art and Petrarchan poetry, designed for a trick-taking game and carrying no spiritual significance whatsoever for the first three hundred years of their existence.

The idea that either of these sets of cards has anything to do with ancient Egypt was invented in 1781 by a man who could not read Egyptian.

The practice of using them for fortune telling was invented in the 1770s and 1780s by a Parisian seed merchant.

The Kabbalistic correspondences were invented in the 1850s by a French occultist.

The comprehensive system of astrological and mystical associations was built in the 1880s and 1890s by a London occult society.

The illustrated minor arcana, the visual language that makes modern tarot readable and emotionally resonant, was created in six months in 1909 by an uncredited artist who died without a penny from it.

None of this makes tarot less powerful. If anything, it makes it more remarkable. Because what this history reveals is that tarot’s power does not come from ancient Egypt or secret mystery schools or Kabbalistic encoding. It comes from the human ability to find meaning in symbols. It comes from the fact that Pamela Colman Smith was such a gifted artist that her images, painted in a few months over a century ago, still speak directly to people’s emotional experiences today. It comes from the archetypes, the Fool setting out on a journey, the Tower crumbling, Death clearing the way for something new, which resonate because they describe universal human experiences, not because they were handed down by Egyptian priests.

The tarot works. It just does not work for the reasons most people think it does.

Why the two halves matter

Understanding that the tarot is two separate inventions forced together changes how you work with it.

The minor arcana, with its four suits and numbered pip cards, describes the everyday texture of human life. Cups deal with emotions and relationships. Swords deal with intellect, conflict, and hard truths. Wands deal with energy, ambition, and creative drive. Coins or pentacles deal with the material world, money, work, health, and physical reality. These are the cards of daily experience, and their roots in a Mamluk card game are actually fitting. They are practical. They are grounded. They describe the suits of human activity the way a game board describes the squares you land on.

The major arcana, with its sequence of archetypal figures from the Fool to the World, describes the big forces that shape a life. The major transitions, the crises, the transformations, the encounters with power and fate and mystery that define who you become. Their roots in Renaissance allegory are also fitting. They are grand, symbolic, designed to be larger than life, exactly like the figures in a carnival procession or a fresco on a cathedral wall.

When you draw a minor arcana card, you are asking about the everyday. When you draw a major arcana card, the stakes are higher. Understanding that these two groups of cards came from completely different origins helps you feel the difference in their weight and their purpose.

The deck that matters

Every tarot deck on the market today is a descendant of these two separate traditions merged into one. The suits from Egypt. The trumps from Milan. The meanings from Paris. The mysticism from London. The images from Pamela Colman Smith’s studio.

What matters when you choose a tarot deck is not whether it claims to be ancient or mysterious or connected to some secret tradition. What matters is whether the images speak to you. Whether the artwork opens doors in your mind. Whether the cards, when you lay them out on a table, help you see your situation from an angle you had not considered before.

That is what tarot does. That is all it has ever done. And it has been doing it, in one form or another, since the first Mamluk player laid down a card in a Cairo game room six hundred years ago.

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