For three hundred years, tarot was a game

Milan, the middle of the fifteenth century. Across a table at the ducal court go cards painted in tempera on a gold ground: the Fool, the Lovers, Death, the Angel of Judgement. They are the same figures you turn over one by one by candlelight today. Back then nobody looked to them for a message. Players counted tricks, and whoever laid the strongest card took everything on the table. For roughly three hundred years, that is what tarot was: a card game. To see how these cards reached your altar, start there.

The cards of triumph

The first firm record dates from 1440, in Florence: two packs of trionfi, ‘triumphs’, intended for Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, lord of Rimini. Within a decade packs like these turn up in Milan, Ferrara, Florence and Bologna. Each was an ordinary pack with a fifth suit added: twenty-one picture cards and the Fool. In play they did exactly what their name promised. They triumphed, beating any card from the other suits. The word tarocco came later, around 1502, in Brescia.

At the court of the Visconti and Sforza, the rulers of Milan, these were luxury objects: tempera and gold leaf on pasteboard, attributed to the workshop of the painter Bonifacio Bembo. The most complete of those packs is now divided between the Morgan Library in New York, the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo and a private collection. Of its original 78 cards, 74 survive, and among the lost four are the Devil and the Tower.

A game that is still played

The game never went away. In Bologna, tarocchino is played with a 62-card pack, and the city protects it as a De.Co., a municipal designation of local heritage. The trumps cut every other suit, and the Fool follows a rule of its own: it neither takes nor can be taken. Whoever holds it plays it when they choose, shows it and tucks it back among their own tricks. In France, tarot has a national federation and official tournaments; in Austria, people play Königrufen.

Three centuries without a reading

For all that time there is no trace of anyone reading the cards. The first evidence comes, once again, from Bologna: a handwritten sheet from around the middle of the eighteenth century, now in the University Library, listing 35 tarocchino cards with a word beside each one, a meaning. It was a local practice, using the same pack people played with.

1781: Egypt

Then came Paris. In 1781 the scholar Antoine Court de Gébelin published the eighth volume of his Monde primitif, with a long essay on tarot. Looking at the twenty-two trumps of a Tarot de Marseille, he saw a book from ancient Egypt, the wisdom of its priests disguised as a game. He even explained the name: tar, ‘road’, and ro, ‘king’, the royal road. In the same volume a second essay, by the Comte de Mellet, already suggested how to read them.

Historians reject the theory, for simple reasons. The records place the cards’ birth at Italian courts around 1440, and the images speak the language of the Christian Renaissance: the Pope, the Emperor, the virtues, the Angel of Judgement. And in 1781 nobody could read hieroglyphs. Champollion deciphered them in 1822, and the Egyptian language shows no trace of that etymology.

Yet that mistaken theory changed everything. It taught people to see the cards as images to contemplate rather than points to count, and from there runs the road that ends at your table.

Tarot was born to be played. Its meaning was built, over centuries, by the people who looked at it long enough.

From game to reading

Two years after Monde primitif, a Parisian fortune teller, Jean-Baptiste Alliette, published a method for reading tarot under the name Etteilla, his surname spelt backwards. By the end of the 1780s he had printed the first pack designed for divination, which, he claimed, restored the ‘hieroglyphs’ that ignorant card makers had spoilt.

In the nineteenth century the cards passed to the occultists. In London, at the end of the century, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn tied them to astrology and the Kabbalah, which is why, in the pack many people use today, Strength is VIII and Justice is XI, the reverse of older packs. In 1909 Arthur Edward Waite, a member of the order, asked a fellow initiate, the illustrator Pamela Colman Smith, to draw a new deck. She painted it between April and October and did something not seen since the Sola Busca tarot of the late fifteenth century: she put a scene, with people and gestures, on the numbered cards too. The Three of Swords and the Ten of Wands stopped being three swords and ten wands and became small stories. This is the deck now known as the Rider-Waite-Smith, after its London publisher.

Three cards tonight

A short spread for the kitchen table. It won’t tell you what will happen; it helps you see more clearly what you are living through.

1. Choose an open question. ‘What can I understand about this situation?’ works better than ‘Will it happen?’. Write it down.
2. Shuffle slowly, holding the question in mind, until the cards feel ready. Then cut the deck and put it back together.
3. Draw three cards and lay them face down, from left to right.
4. Turn them over one at a time. The first is the situation, the second the knot, the third the next step.
5. Look before you read. Before the meanings, study the pictures: where the figures look, what they hold, whether two cards echo each other. Then write down the three cards and one sentence that holds them together.

For a second view, bring your three cards to the free reading in our Guides: choose ‘My own deck’ and enter the ones you drew.

A gesture before you shuffle

Hold the closed deck between your palms and take three breaths. Think of all the hands that have touched these figures over almost six hundred years: court painters, card makers, players, readers. Then say your question aloud, once. That is the moment a pack of cards stops being a game and becomes a tool, and it is your gesture that decides it, not the pasteboard.

Caring for your deck

Keep it boxed or wrapped in cloth, away from damp, which warps the card, and direct sunlight, which fades the colours. Many readers wrap theirs in a square of silk or cotton and keep it on the altar. Shuffle with clean, dry hands. Avoid the riffle-and-bridge shuffle that bends the cards into an arch: over time it leaves them curved. Instead, hold them in one hand and slide small blocks into the other, or spread them face down on the table and swirl them with your palms. With a new deck, shuffle often and gently for the first few days: the card softens without creasing.