Was tarot always used for fortune telling?

Before tarot: playing cards reach Europe

Cards came to Europe from the Islamic world. The best surviving Mamluk pack, hand-painted and now in the Topkapı Palace Museum in Istanbul, has four suits of coins, cups, swords and polo sticks, each with ten number cards and three court cards.¹³

Within a few years of the first Italian mentions in 1377, restrictions on cards spread across Europe, and by 1404 the Church had joined city governments in condemning them.¹

Also in 1377, Johannes von Rheinfelden, a Dominican friar at Freiburg im Breisgau, wrote a Latin treatise on the moral meaning of card games; copies survive in Basel, London, Utrecht and Vienna.¹⁴

A card game at Renaissance courts

Tarot is a trick-taking game with a permanent suit of trumps, usually for three to five players, who score points from the cards they capture.²

Petrarch's poem cycle I Trionfi (The Triumphs), written around 1360, is cited as a likely literary influence on the tarot's series of allegorical trump pictures.²

The early luxury decks were hand-painted in tempera with gold leaf and costly blues; the Yale deck even includes female knights and pages, plus cards for Faith, Hope and Charity. Scholars have long credited Bonifacio Bembo's workshop, though recent study suggests his older brother Andrea may have painted the Yale cards.⁴

Luxury cards were already a court fashion before the trumps appeared: in 1423 Parisina d’Este of Ferrara ordered gilded cards from Florence for a game called Imperatori.¹

Tarot also had relatives. Florence developed its own 97-card game, Minchiate, in the 1540s.¹⁵

The 18th-century occult reading

Court de Gébelin's own 1781 text introduces the tarot as a card game well known in Italy, Provence and Germany, then argues it was really an Egyptian book preserving ancient teachings.⁵

His reading of the 22 trumps reflected the fashion for Egypt in the Masonic circles he moved in, and it misread some images, for example turning the Hanged Man upright and calling it Prudence.⁶

The Victoria and Albert Museum describes Etteilla’s deck as the first one designed specifically for divination.¹⁵

Lévi, Papus and the Waite-Smith deck

In 1886 A. E. Waite translated a selection of Lévi's writings for London readers, and in 1889 Papus (Gérard Encausse) published Le Tarot des Bohémiens with Oswald Wirth's drawings of the 22 major arcana.⁶

Pamela Colman Smith gave every minor arcana card its own scene, which lets readers follow the suits as a story; her role was long overlooked under the name Rider-Waite.⁹

Leach notes that the strong British belief in occult tarot came mainly from late 19th-century writers and spread widely only after the Second World War.³

What historians say

Card historian Michael Dummett, in The Game of Tarot (1980), rejected claimed origins in Egypt, Persia, India or China and traced tarot as a game played in many local forms across Europe.³⁸

By Leach's account of Dummett's findings, ordinary cards were being used for fortune telling by about 1760, and tarot cards only some twenty years later.³

Not every scholar accepted Dummett's view that tarot was only ever a game: historian Frances Yates argued that its images and Court de Gébelin's 'hieroglyph' idea drew on older Renaissance pseudo-Egyptian traditions.⁸

Marseille, the Golden Dawn and the Thoth deck

Marseille was a major card-making town from the 17th century, with nine master card-makers in the Panier district by about 1700, but the name Tarot de Marseille only came into use in the 19th century, among occultists.¹⁶¹⁷

In 1930 Paul Marteau of the Grimaud firm reissued an older Marseille-pattern deck that became the standard version, and his 1949 book helped recast it as an esoteric object.¹⁶¹⁷

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was founded in London in 1888 by William Westcott, William Woodman and Samuel Mathers, and admitted women as well as men; Reading University holds two of its teaching notebooks from 1893.¹⁸

Tarot was taught inside the order’s system of grades: a notebook from Alpha et Omega, one of its successor orders, is titled Lecture on Tarot Trumps. Waite was a member, and he commissioned the Smith deck for his own offshoot of the order.¹⁹¹⁰

A planned 1941 Oxford showing of Harris’s Thoth paintings was cancelled because of Crowley’s notoriety, and the deck was printed only after both had died, Crowley in 1947 and Harris in 1962. The Warburg Institute in London holds her 81 original designs in gouache and watercolour.¹⁰¹¹