The True Origins of Tarot - Part 1: Gilded Games
It was believed for generations that the occult wisdom of the tarot all came from the school of Egyptian mysticism, and that the cards’ history is shrouded in mystery. This is because in 1781 French Swiss Protestant clergyman and occultist Antoine Court published in his massive work Le Monde primitif his idea that the Tarot was actually an ancient Egyptian book of arcane wisdom. It’s not exactly backed up by evidence.
The set of 78 cards we know today as the Tarot was formed by combining two decks of cards that both existed at the time, Trionfi and the Egyptian Mamluk playing card deck invented around the 14th century, which followed the introduction of paper from Asia into Western Europe. So, playing cards came from China by way of Egypt, but not the occult wisdom that was later attached to them. The earliest references to tarot decks fall between the 1440s and 1450s and happened within the north Italian cities of Venice, Milan, Florence, and Urbino.
The first known Tarot decks were hand painted sets, many times embellished with gold, commissioned by obviously wealthy Italian families and given as wedding gifts. You can buy new copies of the Visconti tarot, originally commissioned by the Duke of Milan, reproduced today for modern hands.
Tarot cards employed the standard 4 suits, with values from 10 to 1 and with four face cards—king, queen, knight, and knave—for a total of 56 cards. Alongside them were a fool, which was a wild card, and the 21 trump cards. This is still the format we work with today.
The Major Arcana as we know it came from a set of cards called Triumphs. They pictured processions parading down a road, like a victory parade, and many of the images are laden with the same symbolism we still see depicted in the Majors. The motifs present are found in trionfo, theatrical processions that were popular in the Italian Renaissance. These nameless, numberless illustrated cards changed very little over hundreds of years. The same presentation is still visible in cards like Hermit, Lovers, and the Moon.
The Joker card from today’s playing card decks has nothing to do with The Fool from Tarot, by the way. The Joker was an American civil war era addition to playing cards to help with playing bacharach.
Click here to read the next part in our True Origins of Tarot series.
