Tarot / cartomancy

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Cartomancy is divination with cards, and the tarot is its most celebrated instrument — a deck of seventy-eight cards whose twenty-two picture-trumps, from the Fool to the World, have attracted centuries of esoteric speculation. Consulted, it behaves as a book shuffled before each reading: a question is put, the cards fall, and the images answer in a grammar of positions, pairings, and reversals. The history runs backward from what the occult tradition assumed: the cards came first, the mysteries later — and the record of their arrival is unusually complete.

A game of triumphs

The tarot began as a game. Its structural idea — an ordinary pack extended with a permanent fifth suit of allegorical trumps for trick-taking play — is first described about 1424–25, in a Latin treatise by Marziano da Tortona for Duke Filippo Maria Visconti of Milan: a deck of sixteen classical gods, ranked and trumping, now lost. The earliest record of the tarot proper is Florentine: on 16 September 1440 the notary Giusto Giusti recorded in his diary a gift of naibi a trionfi — “cards with triumphs” — to Sigismondo Malatesta. The d’Este account books at Ferrara follow in 1442, with payments for packs of triumph cards in the Italian suits of cups, swords, coins, and batons. Northern Italy — Milan, Ferrara, Bologna, with Florence now pressing a claim of its own — is the deck’s documented homeland; the earliest survivors are hand-painted luxury cards from the Visconti and Sforza courts of Milan, chief among them the Cary-Yale pack of about 1442–47, whose trumps include Faith, Hope, and Charity, and the Visconti-Sforza deck of the 1450s — the images to which every history of the tarot returns.

The trumps are an allegorical procession out of the late Middle Ages — Pope and Emperor, the Wheel of Fortune, Death, the Last Judgment, the World — the moral and cosmological furniture of Christian Europe, not of any older East. An anonymous Franciscan sermon of about the 1470s gives the earliest complete list of the twenty-two in essentially their lasting order, denouncing them as “twenty-one steps on a ladder sending into the depths of hell.” Around 1500 the name changed from trionfi to tarocchi, distinguishing the old game from a newer one called Trionfa; the deck itself did not change. Nor was the deck ever quite one thing — Bologna’s tarocchino ran shorter, Florence’s minchiate longer — and the earliest complete seventy-eight-card deck to survive, the engraved Sola Busca of 1491, replaced the standard trumps with antique warriors — an eccentricity with four centuries to wait. And the game never died: trick-taking tarot is played to this day in parts of continental Europe — French tarot and Austrian Königrufen among its survivals — where the trumps are simply the trump suit, the Fool is not a trump but the “excuse,” and “arcana” is a word no card player ever used. For roughly three centuries after 1440, this is all the sources show: cards shuffled, dealt, and scored — not read.

The Marseille pattern

The tarot that later centuries received was a standardized printed pattern, Milanese in imagery, carried into France — plausibly with the Italian Wars — and printed in quantity by French workshops. The earliest surviving cards of the pattern were made by Philippe Vachier at Marseille in 1639; the line runs through Jean Noblet at Paris around 1659 and Jean Dodal at Lyon after 1701 to Nicolas Conver at Marseille in 1760 — the deck the occult revival would take for a monument of remotest antiquity. The name is younger than the cards: “Tarot de Marseille” was coined only in 1856, by the card historian Romain Merlin; the pattern’s standard twentieth-century form is Paul Marteau’s Grimaud Ancien Tarot de Marseille of 1930.

The cards begin to answer

Fortune-telling with ordinary playing cards is documented in the eighteenth century; its first systematic manual came in 1770 from the Parisian fortune-teller Jean-Baptiste Alliette — his surname reversed as Etteilla — assigning upright and reversed meanings to the thirty-two cards of a piquet pack. The tarot, too, was answering questions before anyone called it Egyptian. A single folded sheet in the University Library of Bologna, written in the first half of the eighteenth century — likely after 1725 — lists divinatory meanings for thirty-five tarocchino cards: plain fortune-telling, domestic and Italian, innocent of any doctrine. Michael Dummett, the historian least disposed to romance, accepted the sheet as the earliest direct evidence of tarot divination anywhere. What 1781 brought was not the first reading of the cards but their transfiguration.

The Egyptian revelation

By his own account it happened in a Paris drawing room. Antoine Court de Gébelin — pastor, Freemason, author of the encyclopedic Monde primitif — was shown the game of tarots in progress, looked at the trumps, and knew at once what he was looking at: the scattered leaves of a sacred book of ancient Egypt, the Book of Thoth, scripture of the god the Greeks called Hermes Trismegistus, preserved by card players who had no idea what they held. He printed the revelation in 1781, in the eighth volume of Monde primitif, fortified by an Egyptian etymology of his own fabrication — a claim made four decades before Champollion read a hieroglyph, resting on nothing beyond the conviction itself.

Bound into the same volume was a second essay, “Recherches sur les Tarots,” by Louis-Raphaël-Lucrèce de Fayolle, Comte de Mellet — the quieter essay, and the more consequential. Mellet read the trumps downward, from the World to the Fool, as a fall through three ages of gold, silver, and iron; he described divination with the cards; and he matched the twenty-two trumps to the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet — the first appearance of that equation in print. Nearly everything the occult tarot would become is already in the volume: Egypt from Gébelin, the letters and the fortune-telling from Mellet.

From thesis to doctrine

The claim proved far more durable than its evidence, and it found its engineer at once. Etteilla, already a published cartomancer, took up the Egyptian thesis and issued the first books in history devoted to tarot divination, in four installments of 1783–85 — and then the thing itself: the Grand Etteilla, engraved by Pierre-François Basan in 1788–89, the first deck ever designed for divination rather than play, its trumps renumbered, its cards printed with astrological assignments and upright and reversed meanings. His apparatus — keyword, reversal, the sprawling tableau, the significator standing for the questioner — built the architecture of French card-reading for a century.

The doctrine came two generations later. In Dogme et rituel de la haute magie (1854–56), Éliphas Lévi took up the letter-correspondence and ran it in the natural order, Aleph falling on the first trump, so that the tarot became the hieroglyphic alphabet of Kabbalah and, in his system, the master key of occult science — the one book from which the others descend. He did not invent the equation; he made it doctrine. Around 1870 Paul Christian — Jean-Baptiste Pitois — recast the trumps as stations of an Egyptian initiation and gave the deck the vocabulary it has never since lost: Major and Minor Arcana, terms unknown to the game. In the occult Paris of the fin de siècle the school produced its summa, Papus’s Le Tarot des Bohémiens (1889), with Kabbalistic trumps drawn by Oswald Wirth. The “Bohemians” of the title carried the era’s companion legend — that the Romani had brought the cards out of Egypt — a tale given its enduring form by Jean-Alexandre Vaillant in 1857 and supported by nothing in the record; the deck’s real passage across Europe is documented in the ledgers of cardmakers.

The rectification and the two great decks

In England the construction took its decisive turn. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, founded in 1888, carried in its founding cipher papers a “rectified” form of Lévi’s attributions, expounded under grade secrecy in its tarot instruction, Book T, set down principally by Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers; the deck was folded whole into the initiatory curriculum. The Fool moved to the head of the trumps as zero and took Aleph, sliding every other card one letter along; Strength and Justice exchanged numbers, VIII and XI, to keep the trumps in step with the zodiac; the thirty-six decans were spread over the numbered suit cards. The full system belongs to the order’s Hermetic Qabalah; the consequences belong to the deck: the swap of VIII and XI is why nearly every deck in the English-speaking world disagrees with the Marseille numbering, and the decanic pips prepared the most consequential design decision in the deck’s history. From the order’s London came the two packs that dominate the modern trade.

The first was painted by Pamela Colman Smith, who, on the commission of her fellow initiate Arthur Edward Waite, made all seventy-eight cards of a new tarot, published by William Rider & Son in December 1909 — the first deck to give every minor card a full pictorial scene rather than a count of suit signs. Among her sources were photographs of the complete Sola Busca deck, given to the British Museum in 1907 — the 1491 deck lending its postures across four centuries. Waite’s companion volume printed, for the first time anywhere, the ten-card spread he presented as “an ancient Celtic method of divination” — the Celtic Cross, whose documented antiquity begins on that page and which became the most used spread in the world even so. The Waite–Smith deck has been printed past a hundred million copies; for much of the world it is simply what the tarot looks like. Its great rival came from the same lineage: between 1938 and 1943 Lady Frieda Harris painted, to Aleister Crowley’s designs, the seventy-eight cards of the Thoth tarot, its Egyptian name kept as an inheritance; Crowley’s Book of Thoth appeared in 1944, and the deck itself was published only in 1969, when designer and painter were both dead. On the French side, Marteau’s 1930 Marseille edition served the same canonical office. The constructed tradition now had its scriptures and its instruments.

The practice

Why the cards should speak at all has been answered differently in every generation of practice — by occult correspondence, the deck a compendium of the universe; by spirit agency; and latterly in the psychological language of projection and synchronicity, the spread read less as prophecy than as a mirror. A reading is a question put to a book of symbols. The deck is shuffled until no human intention orders it; the cards are laid in a spread whose positions articulate the question — past, obstacle, outcome; and the images are read in combination, upright and reversed, against a memory stocked with their meanings. The reader’s craft is real craft, learned and practiced, and the deck repays it as any deep book repays a deep reader. What the history leaves untouched is the instrument itself: a sequence of images open enough to carry whatever system is laid upon it, and sturdy enough to survive each one. The Egyptian book was never there; the deck, by long accretion of meaning, has become one.

The record and the scholarship

Historians of the deck, above all Michael Dummett and his collaborators, established the playing-card origin and dated the divinatory tarot to the eighteenth century; on the evidence, that finding is no longer seriously contested. The foundation is Dummett’s The Game of Tarot: From Ferrara to Salt Lake City (London: Duckworth, 1980, with Sylvia Mann), the full history of the game family. Two sequels follow the occult tarot: Ronald Decker, Thierry Depaulis, and Michael Dummett, A Wicked Pack of Cards: The Origins of the Occult Tarot (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), from Gébelin to the French school, and Ronald Decker and Michael Dummett, A History of the Occult Tarot 1870–1970 (London: Duckworth, 2002), through the Golden Dawn and the Anglo-American decks. Helen Farley, A Cultural History of Tarot: From Entertainment to Esotericism (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009), is the academic cultural history, Milanese courts to New Age, and her open-access article “Out of Africa: Tarot’s Fascination With Egypt” (Literature & Aesthetics 21:1, 2011) traces how the Egyptian story was assembled and why it held.

The founding documents are open. The 1781 volume containing both essays is scanned at the Bibliothèque nationale de France as Le Monde primitif, volume 8, alongside Etteilla’s 1770 piquet manual, Etteilla, ou manière de se récréer avec un jeu de cartes, and Lévi’s Dogme et rituel de la haute magie (1854–56). For the English line: S. L. MacGregor Mathers, The Tarot: Its Occult Signification, Use in Fortune-Telling, and Method of Play (London: George Redway, 1888), the Golden Dawn founder’s public primer; Arthur Edward Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (London: William Rider & Son, 1911), with all seventy-eight of Smith’s plates and the first printing of the Celtic Cross; and Papus, The Tarot of the Bohemians, in A. P. Morton’s period translation. The academy has lately come to the cards: Tarot — Origins & Afterlives, the Warburg Institute’s first tarot exhibition (London, 31 January – 30 April 2025), ranged from the Visconti-Sforza paintings to the decks of the living tradition — at the institute that also holds Frieda Harris’s original Thoth paintings.

→ In the library: Papus — The Tarot of the Bohemians (1889; tr. Morton 1892)

→ Related: Divination · Jean Baptiste Alliette Etteilla · Papus Gerard Encausse · Hermes Trismegistus · Antoine Court De Gebelin · Eliphas Levi Alphonse Louis Constant · Golden Dawn Lineage · Hermetic Qabalah · Pamela Colman Smith · Occult Paris · Thoth · Kabbalah · Christian Kabbalah