Mystical associations

Since the Egyptianizing ruminations in Le Monde primitif by Antoine Court de Gebelin (1781) which soon inspired the occultism of "Etteilla," it has been believed by many that the Tarot is far older than this. Based on similarities of the imagery and reinforced by the added numbering, some associate the Tarot with ancient Egypt, or the Hebrew mystic tradition of the Kabbalah, or a wide variety of other origins. This is all, however, pure mythology.

In fact, the earliest Tarots seem to have been depictions of the carnival parades that ushered in the season of Lent. These elaborate productions layered then-fashionable Graeco-Roman symbolism over a Christian allegory of sin, grace, and redemption; notably, the earliest versions of the World card (the final Trump, XXI) show a conventional image known from period religious art to represent St. Augustine's "Heavenly City", and it is not coincidence that this closely follows the Judgment card.

Several other early Tarot-like sequences of portable art survive to place the Visconti deck in context. Later confusion about the symbolism stems from the Marseilles decks, which began a process of steadily paganizing and universalizing the symbolism to the point where the underlying Christian allegory has been almost completely obscured (as, for example, when the Rider-Waite deck of the early Twentieth Century changed "The Pope" to "The Hierophant" and "The Popess" to "The High Priestess") It is notable that between 1450 and 1500 the Tarot was actually recommended for the instruction of the young by Church moralists (reference is urgently needed here); not until fifty years after the Visconti deck did it become associated with gambling, and not until the 19th century and "Etteilla" with occultism.

In the Anglo-Saxon world today, the Tarot is usually seen as a means of fortune-telling. However, early references such as the sermon refer only to the use of the cards for game-playing and gambling; and in some European countries such as France, Italy, Switzerland, Austria and Germany; this is still seen as the primary purpose of the Tarot today.

The relationship between Tarot cards and playing cards is often said to be unclear, but in fact the history is tolerably well documented. Playing cards are first recorded in 1321 in a Swiss monastic chronicle that notes their recent importation from the Orient; they thus predated the earliest Tarots by a century. They may have evolved by mutation from circular cards used in India to play a wargame called "Chaturanga" ("Four Kings"); some very early decks, including one preserved in the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, were circular.

Early European sources describe a 52- rather than 78-card deck, like a modern deck but without jokers. 78-card Tarots were what happened when the 21 Trumps were merged into early 52-card gambling decks. Why this happened is not completely clear, but there is some evidence that it may have been done as an end-run around anti-gambling laws that targeted the 52-card deck.

The Tarot cards eventually came to be associated with mysticism and magic. This was actually a late rather than early development, as we can tell from period sources on card divination and magic. The Tarot was not widely adopted by mystics, occultists and secret societies until the 18th and 19th century. The tradition began in 1781, when Antoine Court de Gébelin, a Swiss clergyman and Freemason, published Le Monde Primitif, a study of religious symbolism and its survivals in the modern world. De Gébelin first called attention to the unusual symbols of the Tarot de Marseille, and asserted that the symbols in fact represented the mysteries of Isis and Thoth. De Gébelin furthermore claimed that the name "tarot" came from the Egyptian words tar, meaning "royal", and ro, meaning "road", and that the Tarot therefore represented a "royal road" to wisdom. De Gébelin wrote before Champollion had deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs, and later Egyptologists found nothing in the Egyptian language that supports de Gébelin's fanciful etymologies, but these findings came too late; by the time authentic Egyptian texts were available, the identification of the Tarot cards with the Egyptian "Book of Thoth" was already firmly established in occult practice.

It was first practically applied by a charlatan named Alliette, aka "Le Grand Etteilla", an ex-barber who reversed his name and marketed himself as a seer and card diviner in the Paris of the French Revolution. Etteilla designed the first esoteric Tarot deck, adding astrological attributions to various cards, altering many of them from the Marseilles designs, and adding divinatory meanings in text on the cards. The Etteilla decks, though now eclipsed by Smith and Waite's illuminated deck and Aleister Crowley's "Thoth" deck, remains available. Etteilla's best known successor was Marie-Anne Le Normand, whose cartomancy became fashionable during the reign of Napoleon Bonaparte, due largely to the influence Le Normand wielded with Joséphine de Beauharnais, Napoleon's first wife. After the fall of Napoleon and the restoration of the Bourbon kings, interest in cartomancy declined.


Interest by more serious occultists came later, during the Hermetic Revival of the 1840s in which (among others) Victor Hugo was involved. The idea of the cards as a mystical key was first seriously developed by Eliphas Levi and passed to the English-speaking world by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Levi, not Etteilla, is the true founder of most contemporary schools of Tarot reading; his 1854 Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie (English title: Transcendental Magic) introduced a new system for interpreting the cards. While Levi accepted Court de Gébelin's claims about an Egyptian origin of the deck symbols, he rejected Etteilla's innovations and his altered deck, and devised instead a system which related the Tarot to the Kabbalah and the four elements of alchemy.

The breakthrough into mass popularity began in 1910, with the publication of the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot, which took the step of including symbolic images in the minor as well the major arcane. (Arthur Edward Waite had been an early member of the Golden Dawn) In the twentieth century, a huge number of different decks were created, some traditional, some wildly different.

Tarot decks display the archetypes of spiritual life.