The Origins of Tarot
Tarot cards were not used for divination at first. They began as a card game, and only centuries later did the occult tradition take them over and turn them into the cards we know today.
Beginnings: an Italian card game
The earliest surviving tarot cards appeared in fifteenth-century northern Italy, at the courts around Milan and Ferrara. They were first a card game called tarocchi, played as a trick-taking game somewhat like bridge, with no divinatory or occult meaning. The earliest written record that can be found today is a 1367 ban on card games in Bern. It mentions card games, which shows that such cards already existed before they were written into a prohibition. This is an important reason for concluding that tarot cards date from no earlier than the fourteenth century and most likely originated in Europe, not in ancient Egypt or North Africa. A story that later spread widely says that in 1392 the painter Jacquemin Gringonneur painted three packs of tarot cards for King Charles VI of France; many tarot historians now consider the evidence for it insufficient and its authenticity doubtful uncertain. The cards of that period already included a set of "trumps" resembling the later Major Arcana, but the number of cards, their order and their designs varied from one region to another. The early trumps also carried no numbers, so even when surviving cards are found, it is hard to tell how many cards a complete set originally had uncertain. Tarot is often grouped with two other systems, the I Ching (the ancient Chinese Book of Changes) and rune divination, as the world's three great methods of divination. Both of the others have histories measured in thousands of years, while tarot has only a few centuries, which makes it the youngest of the three. The three are thought to be close in their underlying principles and in the philosophy they explore: each tries to understand the patterns of the universe and nature through its own system of symbols.
Early decks: the Visconti tarot and the Sola Busca
The earliest surviving cards whose structure comes closest to modern tarot are the hand-painted decks commissioned in the mid-fifteenth century by the Visconti family of Milan. One of the more complete of these, often called the Pierpont Morgan-Bergamo tarot because its cards are divided among collections in several places, was made around 1451. Seventy-four cards survive, and it already has the structure of four suits of ten number cards each, four sets of court cards, and a set of trumps (major cards) with allegorical pictures. Only The Tower and The Devil are missing, and whether they were never painted or were lost later can no longer be determined. From the same period comes another deck now called the Cary-Yale Visconti, dated to roughly 1420–1450, one of the oldest tarot decks in existence. Its trumps include a full set of classical virtues: Temperance, Fortitude, Justice, Prudence, Faith, Hope and Charity, echoing the classification of virtues in the Platonic tradition. Two or three of these virtue cards are still part of the modern Major Arcana. The Visconti family was very wealthy at the time and commissioned tarot cards from several painters over the years. Fifteen Visconti-family decks survive, 271 cards in all, most of them scattered and incomplete; only a few are reasonably complete.
The fifteenth century also produced a deck now called the Sola Busca tarot. Its creator is unknown, and it may have been made in Ferrara or Venice. It is the earliest known tarot to survive complete with all 78 cards. What makes it unusual is that even the number cards show scenes with a story, instead of simply repeating a few cups or swords in a row, more than four hundred years before the Rider-Waite-Smith deck did the same. A widely repeated claim holds that Pamela Colman Smith, the artist of the Waite deck, drew on the Sola Busca when she designed the minor cards, but this has not been settled uncertain. Around 1500, a Latin manuscript recorded names essentially the same as those of today's Major Arcana. It is the earliest known document to list these card names clearly, and further evidence that the naming of the Major Arcana had largely taken shape by the fifteenth century.
How far to trust the origin legends
The documented timeline of how tarot was gradually taken over by occultism, the part that really happened and left records behind, is covered in How Tarot Became Occult. What has spread more widely in tarot lore, though, is another kind of story: legends of a secret origin with no historical support. One example is the claim that around 1300 Kabbalists met with masters of other schools in Morocco and built the secrets of the Kabbalah into the design of the tarot. No historical evidence has ever confirmed anything of the kind. Another claim puts the origin of tarot in Fez, Morocco, around 1200; this was the view of the tarot scholar Paul Foster Case, and it too lacks solid evidence uncertain. More telling still, the link between tarot and the Kabbalah was first proposed by tarot commentators as late as the nineteenth century. It was not part of the cards' heritage from birth. The vast body of Kabbalistic literature does not contain a single word about tarot, which plainly does not fit the claim that tarot has carried Kabbalistic wisdom since ancient times. Antoine Court de Gébelin's claim that tarot is a remnant of the ancient Egyptian Book of Thoth is a similar case: it owes far more to imagination than to documented fact, and does not hold up as historical research. The names and numbers of the cards were likewise added gradually by later hands after the original images were painted; the cards were not designed from the start according to some occult blueprint. On the whole, most of the popular "mysteries of origin" in tarot history do not survive a check against the historical record. They are better seen as a layer of poetic interpretation that later generations gave to tarot than as reliable historical fact.