Tarot

Based on Wikipedia: Tarot

In 1440, a curious transaction was recorded in the court documents of Florence: two decks of cards were transferred to a warlord named Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta. These weren't ordinary playing cards. They contained something new—a set of allegorical picture cards called "triumphs" that would eventually change how millions of people think about fate, fortune, and the hidden forces shaping their lives.

But here's the twist: for centuries, nobody used these cards to tell fortunes at all.

A Game Before It Was an Oracle

The tarot deck was invented to play card games. This might surprise anyone who associates tarot primarily with mysticism and fortune-telling, but for roughly three hundred and fifty years after its creation, tarot was simply an elaborate trick-taking game—think of it as a more complex ancestor of Bridge or Spades.

The original tarot emerged in northern Italy, specifically in the courts of Milan and Ferrara, sometime between 1418 and 1450. Italian card makers took their existing four-suited deck—which used batons, coins, cups, and swords—and added something revolutionary: a fifth suit of twenty-one special cards called "trionfi" (triumphs), plus a wild card called the Fool. These triumph cards depicted allegorical scenes: the Pope, the Emperor, Death, the World, celestial bodies, and virtues like Justice and Temperance.

The word "triumph" itself tells us what these cards were for. In the game, they trumped the other suits. When you played the Chariot or the Star, you were beating your opponent's King of Swords the same way a trump card works in Bridge today. The English word "trump" actually derives from this Italian "trionfi."

The Visconti-Sforza Legacy

The oldest tarot cards that survive today are astonishingly beautiful objects. Around fifteen decks from the mid-fifteenth century were painted by hand for the Visconti and Sforza families, the ruling dynasties of the Duchy of Milan. These weren't mass-produced items—they were luxury goods, commissioned by dukes and painted with gold leaf and expensive pigments.

One of these decks, called the Visconti di Mondrone pack, contains something found in no other tarot deck of its era: three additional trump cards representing the theological virtues of Faith, Hope, and Charity. It also had two female court cards in each suit—a Dame and a Maid—instead of the standard single Queen. This tells us something important: the early tarot wasn't standardized. Different courts experimented with different configurations.

Even earlier than the Visconti-Sforza cards, Duke Filippo Maria Visconti commissioned a related deck sometime between 1418 and 1425. We know about it only from written descriptions, because the deck itself has been lost for centuries. It had sixty cards, with sixteen depicting Roman gods and suits showing four kinds of birds. Whether this counts as the "first tarot" depends on how strictly you define the term, but it shows that the idea of adding special trump cards to a regular deck was already circulating in Milanese aristocratic circles.

How Playing Cards Reached Europe

To understand where tarot came from, we need to step back and ask where playing cards themselves originated. The answer takes us east.

Playing cards first entered Europe from the Islamic world, specifically from Mamluk Egypt. The Mamluk deck, invented sometime in or before the fourteenth century, followed the introduction of paper-making technology from Asia into the Middle East and then into Europe. The Mamluks used four suits—cups, coins, swords, and polo sticks—with court cards representing officials of the sultan's court.

European card makers encountered these Mamluk cards and rapidly adapted them. The first documented reference to playing cards in Europe comes from Bern, Switzerland, in 1367. Within just a few decades, cards had spread across the entire continent—we know this because city after city began issuing laws banning card games, which tells us both that cards existed and that people were gambling with them.

The polo stick suit didn't translate well to European contexts, since polo wasn't played in medieval Europe. Card makers transformed it into batons or clubs. They also localized the court cards, replacing Mamluk officials with European royalty: Kings, Queens, and Knights. The four suits we still use in traditional Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese decks—batons, coins, swords, and cups—are direct descendants of those original Mamluk designs.

The Name Nobody Can Explain

For the first sixty or seventy years of its existence, everyone called the tarot deck "carte da trionfi"—triumph cards. Then, around 1502 in the city of Brescia, a new name appeared: "Tarocho."

Nobody knows where this word came from.

The mystery deepens when you learn that "taroch" was already being used in late fifteenth-century Italy as slang for foolishness or nonsense. Was the game named after the Fool card? Was it an insult that stuck? The connection between tarot and foolishness appears in modern Italian too: "taroccare" means to fake or forge something, derived from the game's rule that certain cards can be played in place of others.

The name change coincided with a practical problem. A different card game called "Trionfa," played with a standard deck, was becoming popular at the same time. To avoid confusion between the two games, players started calling the one with the special picture cards "tarocchi" instead of "trionfi." That name then spread north, becoming "Tarock" in German-speaking lands and "Tarot" in France.

The Great Card Game of Europe

During the eighteenth century, tarot reached its peak as a gaming phenomenon. It was played nearly everywhere in continental Europe—France, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Italy, Switzerland, Denmark, and beyond. The only places it never caught on were the British Isles, the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal), and the Balkans under Ottoman rule.

The game spread through war. When French and Swiss armies invaded Italy during the Italian Wars of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, soldiers brought tarot cards home with them. The most influential deck design, the Tarot of Marseilles, originated in Milan but became the standard across France and much of Western Europe.

Different regions developed their own variants with their own rules and their own deck configurations. In Bologna, the highest trump is the Angel, followed by the World. In Ferrara, the World outranks everything, with Justice second and the Angel third. Milan placed the World highest and the Angel second—this is the ordering preserved in the Tarot of Marseilles and most modern divination decks.

Some regions went further, creating entirely new deck structures. In Florence, an expanded ninety-seven-card deck called Minchiate added astrological symbols and the four classical elements (earth, water, fire, air) to the standard tarot motifs. The earliest mention of this game, under the name "germini," dates to 1506.

The Occultists Arrive

Everything changed in the late eighteenth century.

French occultists, searching for ancient wisdom, became fascinated by tarot cards. They made elaborate claims about the deck's history—claims that were, as historians would later demonstrate, entirely unsubstantiated. Some said the tarot encoded the secret teachings of ancient Egyptian priests. Others claimed it preserved the mystical wisdom of the Kabbalah, the esoteric tradition of Jewish mysticism. A few insisted the deck contained hidden knowledge from Atlantis or other lost civilizations.

None of this was true. The tarot was invented by Italian card makers in the fifteenth century, not by Egyptian priests or Kabbalistic mystics. But the claims stuck, and they transformed the tarot's cultural meaning completely.

By the nineteenth century, specially designed decks began appearing for use in fortune-telling and divination. These "cartomantic" decks departed from the gaming tradition. Card makers assigned specific symbolic meanings to each card, created elaborate systems of interpretation, and marketed the decks not to game players but to people seeking spiritual insight.

This split persists today. There are now two distinct types of tarot decks in circulation: those designed for playing card games, and those designed for divination. Some older patterns, like the Tarot of Marseilles, serve both purposes—you can use them to play French Tarot or to do a reading.

The Anatomy of a Tarot Deck

A standard tarot deck contains seventy-eight cards, divided into two main groups.

The first group, sometimes called the "minor arcana" in divination contexts, consists of four suits of fourteen cards each. Unlike a standard fifty-two-card deck where each suit has thirteen cards, tarot suits have fourteen because they include four court cards instead of three: King, Queen, Knight, and Jack (also called the Knave or Page). The ten numbered cards in each suit are called "pip cards."

The suit symbols vary by region. In southern Europe, the traditional Italian suits remain: swords, batons (or clubs), cups, and coins. In France and most of western, central, and eastern Europe, the familiar French suits dominate: spades, clubs, hearts, and diamonds. These are essentially the same concept with different visual symbols.

The second group consists of twenty-one trump cards numbered from one to twenty-one, plus the Fool, which is unnumbered. In gaming contexts, these are simply called trumps. In divination contexts, they're called the "major arcana," from the Latin word for secrets or mysteries. The trump cards typically depict allegorical figures and concepts: the Magician, the High Priestess, the Empress, the Emperor, the Hierophant, the Lovers, the Chariot, Strength, the Hermit, the Wheel of Fortune, Justice, the Hanged Man, Death, Temperance, the Devil, the Tower, the Star, the Moon, the Sun, Judgement, and the World.

The Fool occupies a unique position. Depending on the game being played, the Fool might serve as the highest trump, the lowest trump, or might function as an "excuse" card that can be played to avoid following suit—similar to a wild card but with its own special rules.

Tarot Gaming Today

After declining through much of the twentieth century, tarot card games have experienced a remarkable revival in several countries.

The most dramatic comeback happened in France. French Tarot was once a regional game, largely confined to Provence in the eighteenth century. Then it exploded in popularity during the 1950s. By 1973, the game had grown so much that players organized the French Tarot Federation (Fédération Française de Tarot). Today, French Tarot is the second most popular card game in France, trailing only Belote.

Austria has become another stronghold. The game of Königrufen (literally "calling the King") is played seriously enough that international tournaments are held, drawing competitors from Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia—all countries with their own surviving tarot traditions from the Austro-Hungarian era.

In southern Germany, particularly the Baden region near the Black Forest, a variant called Cego has grown in popularity again. Denmark remains the only Scandinavian country where tarot games survive, playing their own version called Danish Tarok, which descends from the historical German game Grosstarock.

Italy, birthplace of the tarot, still plays regional variants. Tarocchini survives in Bologna. Sicilian Tarocchi is played in parts of Sicily with a distinctive sixty-four-card deck called the Tarocco Siciliano. In Switzerland, the games Troccas and Troggu persist in certain valleys.

The Remarkable Diversity of Decks

If you've only ever seen tarot decks sold for divination—the Rider-Waite-Smith deck with its symbolic imagery, or one of the thousands of artistic variations available today—you might be surprised by the variety of decks used for gaming.

The Tarocco Piemontese, used in northern Italy, has the standard seventy-eight cards but with a peculiar rule: trump number twenty outranks trump number twenty-one in most games. The Fool is numbered zero but isn't actually a trump.

The Swiss 1JJ Tarot makes some notable substitutions, replacing the Pope with Jupiter and the Popess with Juno—a change likely made to avoid religious controversy in Protestant regions. The Angel becomes Judgement, and the Tower is called the House of God.

The Tarocco Bolognese, used in Bologna's Tarocchini game, strips out the numbered cards two through five from the regular suits, leaving only sixty-two cards. Four of its trumps are equal in rank, creating unique strategic situations.

The Tarocco Siciliano is stranger still. It uses the "Portuguese suit system," which combines Spanish-style pip designs with Italian-style intersecting layouts. Its lowest trump is called Miseria, meaning destitution or poverty. The deck has sixty-four cards, but the ace of coins isn't used for playing—it was historically reserved for bearing the stamp tax.

French-suited tarot decks, which use clubs, diamonds, hearts, and spades, developed their own traditions. The earliest French-suited tarots appeared in the late 1650s, created by the de Poilly family of engravers. Around 1740, a style emerged showing animals on the trump cards, giving these decks the German name "Tiertarock" (animal tarock).

Today's French-suited gaming tarots come in several patterns. The Industrie und Glück deck, whose name means "Diligence and Fortune," uses Roman numerals for trumps and is sold as a fifty-four-card deck with certain pip cards removed. The Tarot Nouveau, also called the Bourgeois Tarot, keeps the full seventy-eight cards and is the standard deck for French Tarot and Danish Tarok. The Adler-Cego and Schmid-Cego decks serve players in the Upper Rhine valley and Black Forest region.

What Makes Tarot Different

To appreciate tarot's unique position in card game history, consider what makes it structurally different from other card games.

Most card games use a single hierarchy: within each suit, the cards rank from low to high, and games like Bridge or Whist use one suit as trumps for a particular hand. Tarot has a permanent trump suit—those twenty-one numbered cards plus the Fool—that always outranks the regular suits. This creates a different strategic landscape. You know from the start of every hand which cards are the most powerful.

The large deck size also matters. Seventy-eight cards is significantly more than the fifty-two in a standard deck. This means more variety in each hand, longer games, and more complex probability calculations for serious players.

The four court cards per suit (instead of the standard three) add another layer. The Knight, sitting between the Queen and the Jack, creates finer gradations of rank within each suit.

And then there's the Fool, that strange card with no fixed place in the hierarchy. In some games it's the highest trump. In others it's valueless but lets you avoid playing a card you want to keep. This ambiguity—is the Fool powerful or worthless?—has made it one of the most symbolically rich cards in the deck, whether you're playing games or reading fortunes.

The Two Lives of Tarot

Today, tarot lives a double life.

In France, Austria, and pockets of Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Denmark, and Eastern Europe, tarot remains what it was invented to be: a card game. Players gather in clubs and cafes, shuffle their Tarot Nouveau or Industrie und Glück decks, and compete using rules that have evolved over five centuries. They might be vaguely aware that other people use similar-looking cards for fortune-telling, but that's not their world.

In English-speaking countries, and increasingly worldwide, tarot means something entirely different. It's a tool for divination, self-reflection, and spiritual practice. The seventy-eight cards of the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, first published in 1909, have become one of the most recognizable symbol systems in popular culture. Countless artistic reinterpretations exist—feminist tarots, cat tarots, science fiction tarots—all designed for reading, not playing.

Neither tradition is more "authentic" than the other at this point. The gaming tradition is older, but the divinatory tradition has its own history now stretching back over two centuries. What's remarkable is how completely the two worlds have diverged. A French Tarot champion and an American tarot reader might not even recognize that they're using variations of the same deck.

The cards themselves don't care what you do with them. They're pieces of printed cardboard, no more and no less. But the human meanings we've attached to them—the strategies and the symbols, the trump tricks and the archetypal journeys—have made tarot one of the most culturally significant objects to emerge from the Italian Renaissance. Five hundred years after those first decks were painted for Milanese dukes, the triumphs continue.