A Card Game for Three Centuries First

The tarot deck existed as a set of playing cards for a trick taking game called tarocchi in fifteenth century Italy for roughly three hundred years before anyone used it to tell fortunes, and the earliest surviving decks, commissioned by noble families, show no sign of the esoteric symbolism later readers found in them. The turn to divination is usually dated to eighteenth century France, associated with the writer and occultist known as Etteilla, who was the first to publish a systematic method of cartomancy specifically for the tarot and to design a deck meant for divination rather than play. The claim, popular in the same period, that the cards preserved ancient Egyptian wisdom smuggled into Europe by the Roma people has no historical support and is now understood by scholars as a romantic invention of the period rather than a real transmission; the cards' actual imagery draws on late medieval and Renaissance Christian and allegorical iconography, not Egyptian sources.

The most influential modern deck, published in 1909 by Arthur Edward Waite and illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith, both members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, added fully illustrated scenes to the previously abstract numbered minor arcana cards and fixed much of the symbolic vocabulary readers still use today, an innovation less than a century old set beside a game five centuries old.