Tarot Was Not Born
for Divination

01 · BEFORE TAROT

Playing cards came
before Tarot

We begin a little before Tarot itself appeared.

Playing cards began to spread through Europe around the fourteenth century. Card games have an older history still, and are thought to have travelled from Asia into the Middle East.

By the middle of the fourteenth century, cards probably reached European cities such as Venice from the Middle East through trade and other forms of contact.

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Playing cards came
before Tarot.

Tarot did not suddenly appear out of nowhere. It grew out of a card-playing culture that was already spreading.

Card games became popular in Europe among many different levels of society, not only among the powerful. They were also used for gambling. Their popularity may help explain why cities and religious authorities left records of attempts to prohibit or condemn card playing.[1]

There were probably people being told to stop playing and get back to work more than six hundred years ago. Some things do not change very much.

Then, in the fifteenth century, an unusual kind of card game appeared in what is now Italy. This is where the history of Tarot begins.

02 · A NEW GAME

New cards appear in
fifteenth-century Italy

The earliest surviving references to Tarot date from the 1440s and 1450s. They are concentrated in Renaissance Italy, in places such as Milan, Venice, Florence and Urbino.[2]

People there played a game that added a special set of trump cards to an ordinary pack.

“Trump” here has essentially the familiar card-game meaning: a card with the power to beat others.

Tarot developed as a trick-taking game, in which players take turns playing cards and compete to win each trick.[2]

You do not need to remember the phrase “trick-taking.” For now, it is enough to know that people played cards against one another to win.

The story does not begin with a fortune-teller turning over cards in a mysterious room. It begins with people holding cards and playing a game.

03 · FOUR SUITS

Cups, Swords,
Batons and Coins were already there

What did a fifteenth-century Tarot pack contain?

This is where anyone who has seen a modern Tarot deck begins to recognize something familiar. The cards already belonged to four suits.

These are the ancestors of the Cups, Swords, Wands and Pentacles found in Tarot today.

Each suit contained cards numbered from one to ten, together with four court cards: page, knight, queen and king.

Today we call these 56 cards the Minor Arcana. People in the fifteenth century did not use that name; “Minor Arcana” belongs to a later period.

From our point of view, however, the ancestor of the Minor Arcana was already present.

04 · THE TRUMPS

Then came twenty-two
mysterious cards

This is where Tarot separates itself from an ordinary pack. Alongside those 56 suit cards were cards bearing special pictures.

The Emperor.
The Pope.
Love.
The Wheel of Fortune.
Death.
The Sun.
The World.
And the Fool.

Anyone who knows modern Tarot may think, “Those are the Major Arcana.” The name “Major Arcana” is later, too, but the cards that would become its ancestors were already here.

Twenty-one of them served as special trumps in the game. A single Fool had a somewhat different role.

That is the same number found in a standard Tarot deck today.

This does not mean that the modern pack suddenly appeared in finished form. The order of the cards varied from one region to another, and some trumps did not yet carry the numbers we expect today.

Even so, the framework that would lead to the modern pack of 78 cards was already in place roughly six hundred years ago.

05 · ALLEGORY

If it was not divination, why
show Death and Fortune?

At this point, something may seem strange.

A game could work with nothing more than numbers and relative strengths. Why go to the trouble of depicting such weighty ideas as Death, Fortune, Love, the Emperor and the World?

The important point is that pictures full of meaning do not prove that the cards began as divination.

In Europe at the time, artists often gave visible human or material forms to invisible ideas such as Justice, Fortune and Death. This form of expression is called allegory.

In that sense, early Tarot pictured the world in which its makers and players lived.

There is power.
There is love.
There is justice.
There is fortune.
There is age.
And there is death.

The cards were not yet used for divination. But the material that later generations would want to interpret was already present.

07 · STILL A GAME

It was a game.
And yet...

Looking at cards made more than five centuries ago produces a curious feeling.

There is a Wheel of Fortune.
There is Death.
There is a Fool.
There are Cups.

They clearly lead toward Tarot today. Yet their original players were not using them to ask about love or to question the cards about the future.

Fifteenth-century Tarot was first of all a card game. Its deep association with divination and esoteric thought came centuries later.

And yet.

From the beginning, the cards contained love and justice, fortune and death, the Sun and the World.

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They were not created for divination,
yet from the beginning their pictures
made us want to think about being human.

This is one of the most interesting things about the history of Tarot.

It becomes a little easier to understand why later generations might look at the cards and wonder whether they were more than a game.

But that change still lies a long way ahead.