A short history of tarot: from Marseille to Rider–Waite–Smith to Thoth

Almost everyone has heard some version of the claim that tarot is an ancient Egyptian book of wisdom, its secrets encoded in pictures and smuggled through the centuries. It is a wonderful story. It is also demonstrably false, and we can date exactly when and by whom it was invented. The real history of tarot is better documented than the myth, and arguably more interesting: a Renaissance card game that was reinterpreted as an occult system three centuries after it appeared. Here is that history, from Marseille back to Milan and forward to the two decks that define the modern deck’s look.

The beginning: a fifteenth-century Italian game

Tarot begins in northern Italy in the first half of the fifteenth century, not as a divinatory tool but as a card game. To an ordinary pack of four Latin suits, players added a fifth sequence of illustrated trionfi — “triumphs,” or trumps — that outranked the suit cards. The game was called carte da trionfi and later tarocchi; in French it became tarot. It was, in structure, an ancestor of trick-taking games still played today.

The oldest tarot cards that survive are the luxurious hand-painted decks made for the ruling families of Milan, above all the Visconti-Sforza decks, produced across the 1440s to around 1460 — several attributed to the workshop of Bonifacio Bembo. These were expensive commissions for noble households, made to play a game, not to read fortunes. For roughly three hundred years, that is what tarot was across Italy, France and beyond: cards for play.

The Tarot de Marseille: standardising the pattern

As the game spread and moved into cheaper woodcut printing, a standard design settled in — the pattern now called the Tarot de Marseille, produced by French card-makers from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries onward (the name is a later label for a family of related decks). Its imagery — the numbered trumps, the Fool, the plain geometric pip cards — became the common reference deck of Continental Europe. When occult writers later began “decoding” tarot, it was very often the Marseille pattern in front of them. Crucially, nothing in its use up to this point suggests anything but a game.

1781: the Egyptian myth is invented

The occult reinterpretation of tarot has a precise birthdate. In 1781, the French cleric and scholar Antoine Court de Gébelin published an essay, Du Jeu des Tarots, in his vast work Le Monde Primitif. In it he announced that the tarot was not a mere game at all but the survival of an ancient Egyptian book of esoteric wisdom — the “Book of Thoth” — its truths hidden in the trump images and preserved, he supposed, by Egyptian priests and carried west by travellers. A companion essay in the same volume, by the Comte de Mellet, linked the 22 trumps to the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet.

It is essential to be clear: none of this was true. De Gébelin offered no evidence, and he was writing decades before the Rosetta Stone allowed Egyptian hieroglyphs to be read at all — so he could not have known what Egyptian religious texts actually said. The Egyptian origin was pure speculation, produced in the fashionable Egyptomania of the late eighteenth century. Yet it was seductive, and it stuck. Every later claim that tarot is “ancient Egyptian” traces back to this 1781 essay, not to Egypt.

Etteilla: the first divination system

Almost immediately, others built on the idea in practical form. The Parisian occultist Etteilla — the pseudonym (his name reversed) of Jean-Baptiste Alliette, 1738-1791 — took up de Gébelin’s Egyptian theory and, from the 1780s, made a living as a professional card diviner. He published the first tarot deck designed specifically for divination and the first systematic method of reading it, complete with card meanings and reversed meanings. Whatever one thinks of the practice, Etteilla is the documented point at which tarot-as-fortune-telling begins — the 1780s, in France, some 340 years after the game was invented in Italy.

The nineteenth century: Kabbalah and the Golden Dawn

The occult tarot deepened through the nineteenth century. The French magus Eliphas Levi (Alphonse-Louis Constant) elaborated the link between the 22 trumps and the Hebrew alphabet and the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, weaving tarot into a broader Western esoteric synthesis. In late-Victorian Britain this reached the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, whose members developed detailed correspondences between the cards, the Hebrew letters, astrology and the elements. The Golden Dawn is the immediate seedbed of the two most influential modern decks, because both of their makers were members.

1909: the Rider-Waite-Smith deck

In 1909 in London, the Golden Dawn member and occult scholar A. E. Waite commissioned the artist Pamela Colman Smith to design a full 78-card deck, published by William Rider and Son. Its great innovation was that Smith illustrated every card — including the numbered pip cards, previously plain — with a full narrative scene. This made the deck legible and teachable in a way no earlier deck had been, and it became overwhelmingly the most influential tarot ever made; a large share of modern decks are variations on Smith’s imagery. It is now properly credited as the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, restoring the artist’s name.

The Thoth deck: Crowley and Harris

The other landmark modern deck came from another Golden Dawn lineage. The occultist Aleister Crowley designed the Thoth tarot in collaboration with the artist Lady Frieda Harris, who painted it. They worked on it from roughly 1938 to 1943, and Crowley’s accompanying book, The Book of Thoth, appeared in 1944. Densely loaded with astrological, Kabbalistic and Crowley’s own Thelemic symbolism, and painted in a striking projective-geometry style, the deck was not published as cards until 1969 — after both its creators had died. Note the irony in the title: Crowley knowingly borrowed de Gébelin’s “Book of Thoth” label for a deck designed in the twentieth century.

Correcting the myth

Set the timeline out plainly and the story reorders itself. The cards are a fifteenth-century Italian game; the Egyptian-wisdom claim is a 1781 invention by Court de Gébelin; fortune-telling with tarot begins with Etteilla in the 1780s; the Kabbalistic system is nineteenth-century; and the two decks most people picture — Rider-Waite-Smith and Thoth — are from 1909 and the mid-twentieth century. Tarot is genuinely old, but it is old as a European card game and as an object of Enlightenment-era and modern reinterpretation, not as an Egyptian sacred text. Knowing the real dates lets you appreciate the cards as art and cultural history — and to enjoy the myth as exactly that: a myth with an author and a publication date.