The Egyptian Story, the Romani Story, and the Dates

Two origin stories dominate popular accounts of the tarot. Both are false, and both can be dated to the people who invented them.

The Egyptian story was invented by Antoine Court de Gebelin and published in 1781, in the eighth volume of his Monde primitif. He proposed that the cards were the surviving leaves of an Egyptian priestly book, preserved by accident as a game. He had no evidence, no manuscript and no knowledge of Egyptian, and he was writing four decades before the Rosetta Stone was deciphered, at a moment when Egypt could be made to mean almost anything. The claim was immediately popular and has never entirely gone away. Etteilla built a commercial practice on it within two years; the Golden Dawn inherited it; twentieth-century deck titles still trade on it.

The Romani story is later and works the same way. It holds that the cards were carried into Europe by Romani travellers from an eastern source, and it rests on a nineteenth-century European habit of attributing anything unexplained and vaguely oriental to the Roma. The chronology alone defeats it: the cards are documented in Italian courts before Romani populations are documented in the relevant regions, and the transmission route that is actually attested runs from the Islamic world through Mediterranean trade.

The evidence points somewhere much less romantic. Cards enter Europe in the 1370s from Mamluk Egypt or the Levant as a commercial import. Trumps are added in northern Italy around 1440 to make a new game. Divination follows around 1750, and the occult apparatus after 1781. Every date in that sequence is documented.