The history of tarot

Ordinary playing cards reached Europe in the late fourteenth century, most likely from the Islamic world through Mediterranean trade. They already had four suits and court figures. Tarot grew out of them when a special series of allegorical picture cards was added to the regular deck.

That happened at the courts of northern Italy — Milan, Ferrara, Bologna — in the first half of the fifteenth century. The new cards were called trionfi, triumphs, because in play they beat the cards of the ordinary suits, much like trumps. The best known early examples are the so-called Visconti-Sforza cards, hand-painted for the dukes of Milan around the middle of the century. No complete deck survives; individual cards are scattered across museums and private collections.

The word tarocchi appeared later, in the early sixteenth century, when people needed a name to tell this game apart from others. The order and names of the trumps varied from city to city for a long time, and the cards were not always numbered at all.

Until the late eighteenth century tarot was first and foremost a game — a trick-taking game with trumps, a distant relative of bridge. From Italy it spread to France, Switzerland and Central Europe. People in France still play tarot today, and Austria and Hungary have their own versions of the game.

In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France a design took shape that would later be called the Tarot de Marseille: woodcut prints colored through stencils, in bright, simple tones. This is the tradition that fixed the structure we know today.

The turning point came in 1781. Antoine Court de Gébelin, a self-taught French scholar, declared in the eighth volume of his work Le Monde primitif that tarot was a surviving book of ancient Egyptian wisdom, the Book of Thoth. He had no evidence: nobody could read hieroglyphs at the time, and once they were deciphered in the 1820s, Egyptian texts turned out to say nothing about tarot. The legend outlived the facts all the same.

Close behind came Jean-Baptiste Alliette, a Paris print dealer who wrote under the name Etteilla. In the 1780s he published guides to reading tarot and created one of the first decks made specifically for divination rather than play. Etteilla is also credited with giving cards separate upright and reversed meanings.

In the mid-nineteenth century Éliphas Lévi linked the 22 trumps to the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet and to Kabbalah. From then on, French and English occultists read tarot as a system of symbols rather than a set of pictures. In 1888 the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was founded in London — a society that studied tarot alongside astrology and Kabbalah. The authors of the two most influential decks of the twentieth century came out of its circle.

In 1909 the London publisher William Rider & Son released a deck designed by the mystic Arthur Edward Waite and illustrated by the artist Pamela Colman Smith. For decades it was named after the publisher and the author — the Rider–Waite deck — and only in recent years has the artist's name been widely restored to the title.

The big innovation was in the minor cards. In the Tarot de Marseille the Five of Cups is just five cups arranged in a pattern. Smith turned every numbered card into a scene: a cloaked figure bowed over spilled cups, with two upright cups still standing behind. The meaning became visible without a book. Illustrated pip cards had existed before — the Italian Sola Busca deck from the late fifteenth century is the famous example — but the 1909 deck made scenes on every card the norm.

Waite also swapped Strength and Justice, making Strength number eight and Justice number eleven, as the Golden Dawn did. Together with Waite's own book on the symbolism of the cards, this deck set the language people still use to talk about tarot. Most of the meanings you find in guidebooks and apps today trace back to it.

The century's other great deck is the Thoth tarot, conceived by Aleister Crowley and painted by the artist Frieda Harris between 1938 and 1943. It was not printed until 1969, after both of them had died. Thoth is more complex and abstract than Rider–Waite–Smith, with more astrology and geometry, and several cards were renamed — Strength became Lust, Temperance became Art.

From the second half of the twentieth century, decks began to appear by the thousands: feminist, nature-based, minimalist, inspired by fairy tales and films. The way people use a reading changed too. More and more, it is understood not as fortune-telling about a fixed fate but as a way to ask yourself a question and see your situation from the outside. The cards became a mirror.

The internet took the next step. First came websites with card meanings, then apps, and now AI tarot, where a language model writes the reading. It does not invent new meanings; it connects the classic meanings of the cards with the positions of the spread and the person's question.

Tayna continues that line in its own way. It has its own deck art: 78 cards in the classic structure, each a separate painting on black lacquer framed in old gold. The deck is shuffled on the server with a cryptographic random generator, and roughly a third of the cards come out reversed — just like a physical deck shuffled without minding which way is up. The reading draws on the classic meanings and on your question.

You can try it for free: three readings a day without signing in, ten once you sign in. The history of tarot is the story of people finding new meaning in the same pictures, again and again. Now it is your turn.