How the Tarot Came to Be

For its earliest centuries, cards were individually hand painted luxuries available only to the richest families. In Renaissance Italy in the early 1400s, the 78-card deck came to be known as the Trionfi (meaning “triumph” cards, leading to the modern English term “trump” cards). Its suited cards resembled modern playing cards, with numbers and pips. Only its unsuited cards were fully illustrated, with lush images from then-popular Christian carnival parades. The Church even endorsed Trionfi cards for educating the young.

Use of the printing press grew in the 16th century, allowing cards to spread wider throughout Europe. Decks made by a cardmaker in the village of Tharaux became known in Germany as the Tarock. In France, they became the Tarot. Cardmakers in the city of Marseille simplified their artwork to be more suitable for printing, with bold black outlines and few colors. The Tarot de Marseille style is still reflected by the face cards of modern playing cards.

In the 1780s, archaeologists began making their first discoveries from ancient Egypt. Its pyramids, obelisks and mysterious heiroglyphics fueled the public’s imagination. (Witness the pyramid on the dollar bill, and the Washington Monument obelisk in DC.) In 1783, Antoine Gébelin published a Tarot deck with all 78 cards containing full illustrations on every card. He created astrological attributions and divinitory meanings he claimed were tied to ancient Egyptian texts, to ride the pop culture of the day. When the Rosetta Stone was discovered and enabled the actual translation of heiroglyphics in 1799, Gébelin’s claims were never supported. But by then his deck-wide interpretive meanings had established a new Tarot style.

In 1909, the Rider company first published a Tarot deck designed by academic A.E. Waite and drawn by artist Pamela Colman Smith. The deck’s Christian origins were further toned down, and every card received new illustrations filled with additional symbolism influenced by occultist Eliphas Levi. The Rider-Waite-Smith deck has been one of the most popular Tarot decks in the English-speaking world ever since. It remains the standard of comparison even now, over 100 years later.