Where do tarot cards come from?

Tarot cards most probably originated in Northern Italy somewhere between the late 14th to early 15th century. The oldest surviving deck happens to be one that was created for the Duke of Milan’s family around 1440. Known as the Visconti-Sforza deck, the cards were used to play tarocchi - a bridge-like game that was popular amongst all classes of people at the time.

According to expert historians, the detailed and fanciful images from the Fool to death were based on the costumed subjects who often participated in the carnival parades. Eventually, the popularity of the game grew beyond its borders and spread to other European countries, including the South of France, where it was popularly called tarot. Yet, at this time, it was still merely a game.

The cards were not ascribed any mystical powers until well into the 18th century when magic and the occult became fashionable. A man called Antoine Court de Gébelin wrote a book that put forth a revolutionary idea. He linked the cards to ancient Egyptian mysticism and said the tarot symbols were the code to the secret wisdom of the god Thoth. He was the God of writing, magic, knowledge, and the moon. Another thing that happened around the same time was that Jean-Baptiste Alliette published a treatise on using tarot cards as divination tools under the pseudonym Etteilla.

The card suddenly shot to fame as Europe became entranced with the supernatural realms. Another writer, the French Eliphas Lévi popularized connected tarot symbolism with the Hebrew alphabet and the Jewish mystical tradition of kabbalah. The racy book The Tarot of the Bohemians constructed the notion that tarot cards came from the Gypsy tribals. At the time, people believed all Gypsies came from Egypt, which several 19th-century Europeans thought of as the place where human knowledge came from.

But perhaps the biggest push came from the mystical groups such as the Theosophical Society and the Rosicrucians. What they did cement the status of tarot forever. They turned the simple game into the enormous American trend during the early 1900s.

Today tarot remains as popular, especially with the youth, who are out searching for answers to questions about the outcome of things in the future.