A Game Before It Was an Oracle

The historical point that the scholarly literature has established beyond dispute, and that most popular tarot writing ignores, is that the tarot was invented as a card game. Michael Dummett's The Game of Tarot (1980) and the work he did with Ronald Decker and Thierry Depaulis showed that the pack originated in fifteenth-century northern Italy as an ordinary playing-card deck with an added fifth suit of permanent trumps, that the game of tarocchi and its descendants have been played continuously in Italy, France, Switzerland, Austria and elsewhere ever since, and that no evidence exists for divinatory or esoteric use before the eighteenth century. The occult reading begins with Antoine Court de Gebelin in 1781, who asserted without evidence that the cards preserved an Egyptian book of Thoth, and with Etteilla, who published the first divinatory system in 1783. The Egyptian origin is a fabrication, and the deck it was attached to is this one.