How Tarot Became Occult
Beginning with an unproven but highly influential theory in 1781, tarot was drawn step by step into the correspondence systems of Western occultism, and it took its settled form in the hands of the Golden Dawn.
The middle ground between game and divination tool
Why did tarot cards change from a simple card game into a vehicle for divination and the occult? A popular story says that Europe from the late Middle Ages through the Renaissance was a turbulent place, and that some wise people who could not safely speak openly quietly packed the ideas they wanted to pass on into a game that everyone played and that would be hard to ban. No historical sources confirm this; it is closer to a poetic explanation, offered later, of why the cards feel so full of meaning uncertain.
The documented earlier milestones are these. In 1540 a book by the Italian writer Francesco Marcolino da Forlì contained the earliest known printed record of cards being used explicitly as a system of divination, which shows that people were looking into whether the cards could be used for divination more than two hundred years before Court de Gébelin. In 1612 an anonymous printed pamphlet describing the secret Rosicrucian brotherhood in Europe mentioned an "esoteric tarot" for the first time, calling it Rota and describing it as a device for finding out about the past, present and future. The Rosicrucians later became one of the main theoretical foundations on which the Golden Dawn built its own system.
Court de Gébelin and Etteilla: tarot meets the occult
In 1781 the Frenchman Antoine Court de Gébelin, in his Le Monde primitif, was the first to claim that tarot came from ancient Egypt and was the Book of Thoth written in hieroglyphs. He was the first person to formally connect tarot with the occult, although his claim has never had any evidence behind it uncertain. Another author in the same circle proposed that the Romani people (then called Gypsies) brought tarot from Egypt to Europe, a route of transmission that also lacks evidence uncertain. His contemporary Etteilla (born Jean-Baptiste Alliette; "Etteilla" is his surname spelled backward) went further. Not content with saying that tarot was mysterious, he was the first person to design a tarot deck specifically for divination and to call himself a fortune-teller in public. His writings were only published around 1785. One reason given for the delay is that Court de Gébelin used his greater influence to hold him back and accused him of plagiarism, though their theories were in fact quite similar uncertain. In short, Court de Gébelin tied tarot to the occult, and Etteilla was the first to put it into practice as a divination tool.
Nineteenth-century French writers: building the correspondence framework
Several French writers of the nineteenth century built a more systematic occult framework of correspondences for tarot. The French magician Éliphas Lévi, in Dogme et rituel de la haute magie (in English, Transcendental Magic: Its Doctrine and Ritual), was the first to match the 22 Major Arcana with the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet (his specific pairings are not entirely the same as the later Golden Dawn system). Papus linked tarot to the Tetragrammaton, the four-letter divine name YHVH, and from it established the correspondence between tarot and the four elements of Fire, Water, Air and Earth. Paul Christian introduced the term "Arcana" itself, and matched the 36 number cards (the 40 pips minus the four Aces) to the 360 degrees of the zodiac, one decan for every 10 degrees. Take card 0, The Fool: Lévi, Papus and the other French writers first assigned it the Hebrew letter Shin. MacGregor Mathers of the Golden Dawn later revised this to Aleph, which is the version in general use today. When Waite designed the image for The Fool, he actually left traces of both, but the real design intent points to Aleph, and Shin looks more like a smokescreen left for outsiders. These various systems did not fully agree with one another, but together they made up the raw material for the later Golden Dawn system.
The Golden Dawn and Book T
At the end of the nineteenth century, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in England (founded in 1887 or 1888) brought tarot into a more complete framework of Western occultism. Its central figure, MacGregor Mathers (the other founders were William Wynn Westcott and William Robert Woodman), sorted through the scattered correspondence theories of his predecessors, combined some and discarded others, and wrote them up as a manuscript known as Book T. It set out, for every card, the planet it corresponds to, its standard meaning and the picture elements to be kept. With the Kabbalah as its main thread, and drawing in astrology, alchemy and magic as well, it systematically established the correspondences between tarot and astrology, the Kabbalistic Tree of Life and the Hebrew letters (see The Kabbalah and the Tree of Life and Astrological Correspondences). The Kabbalah (from a Hebrew word meaning "receiving") is itself a much older Jewish mystical philosophy. Within it, the Sefer Yetzirah (Book of Formation), which established the correspondences between the Hebrew letters and astrology, dates back to around the third century CE and was the direct basis for Mathers's tarot-Kabbalah system. Tarot cards themselves were born in the fifteenth century, but the occult foundations they rest on reach back much further. Book T circulated at first only inside the Golden Dawn, and was made public in 1937 when the member Israel Regardie published The Golden Dawn. This system of correspondences has deeply influenced almost every major school of tarot since [inferred, but the generally accepted view among scholars].
Mathers himself once claimed that he had not written Book T, but had decoded it from a cipher manuscript found on the body of an important Rosicrucian. This is now widely regarded as a backstory he made up to make the manuscript seem more mysterious; in fact he compiled and wrote the contents himself uncertain. Later, Robert Wang's The Qabalistic Tarot further organized and explained these correspondences. Along with Regardie's The Golden Dawn, it is a key reference for understanding the system.