Where Tarot Cards Came From: From Court Game to Divination
AdminToday tarot is associated with divination, esotericism, candles and dim rooms. But the earliest known cards were quite different. They were made in fifteenth-century Italy as expensive games for noble families, not for predictions. To understand how one became the other, it is worth going back to the origins and looking at the facts without romantic layers.
The word “tarot” in its modern sense came later. In fifteenth-century Italian sources the cards were more often called “trionfi” (triumphs), after the trump cards that beat the ordinary ones. The game they were used for was popular at courts and in wealthy families. The cards reflected the taste of the era: they were bright, finely drawn and often commissioned from well-known masters.
A game at the Milanese court
The Visconti-Sforza deck, which the Morgan Library now shows, dates from this period. Its cards were made around 1456–1458. The Art Newspaper notes that the exhibition will show most of the deck’s surviving cards together in North America for the first time, including a loan from Bergamo.
The Milanese court of that time was one of the most refined in Italy. The Sforza family had consolidated its power and sought a brilliance that emphasized its status. The cards, like manuscripts, tapestries and painted objects, were part of this pursuit of luxury. Only wealthy people could play with them, which made the deck a symbol of standing as well as a pastime.
The cards were created by a Renaissance artist, even though they look medieval.
This paradox is one of the main lessons of tarot’s early history. The medieval simplicity of the cards is deceptive: behind it stands an artist who knew perspective, proportion and classical architecture. If we judge the cards by first impression, we easily project onto them ideas that came later and do not belong to them.
How the cards became divinatory
The shift to divination came later, in the late eighteenth century and especially in the nineteenth. French writers of the time began linking the cards with ancient mysteries, Egyptian origins and Kabbalah. These ideas were largely products of imagination and of the Romantic era, but they shaped tarot’s later career as a tool of prediction.
A particular role was played by Éliphas Lévi, who in the mid-nineteenth century combined tarot with the Kabbalistic tradition. Later the Golden Dawn turned these correspondences into a system that is still in use. This grew the symbolic language that became the basis of modern decks, including the 1909 Rider-Waite deck.
It is important to distinguish two things: how the meanings of the cards changed, and whether tarot has any proven predictive power. History answers the first question: the meanings did change, and many of them arose in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The second question is outside history, and it requires other methods: experiments, statistics, reproducibility. Mixing these questions is a common mistake.
What history proves and what it does not
History shows how people have attributed meaning to the cards over centuries. It does not prove that the cards predict the future. The Wild Hunt review of the exhibition describes exactly this path: from game to occult tool. The reviewer’s account is about the evolution of meanings, not about confirming their predictive power.
The useful conclusion for a modern reader is this: knowing the history does not oblige you to believe in predictions, but it helps you read the cards consciously. You understand where an image came from, why it is interpreted this way and which meanings were added later. This protects against blind trust as well as against dismissing the tradition altogether.
For background on the deck and its creators, the Wikipedia article on the Rider-Waite deck is useful, and for the context of the exhibition, see The Art Newspaper overview.
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