From Playing Cards to Symbols: A Brief History of Tarot

Today, Tarot is often associated with divination, symbolism, self-reflection, and the search for answers. But its story began very differently. In fact, playing cards existed long before Tarot itself. Some of the earliest evidence of card games comes from China around the 9th century. Cards later appeared in India and the Islamic world, eventually reaching Europe by the late 14th century, most likely through trade and cultural exchange. Early European decks were far from standardized: suits, numbers, and imagery varied from place to place. Above all, cards were a form of entertainment — and a popular one, sometimes attracting restrictions from authorities because of their connection with gambling.

The Birth of Tarot in Renaissance Italy

Tarot as we recognize it today emerged much later, in 15th-century Northern Italy. Some of the earliest surviving references and decks are connected with Milan, Ferrara, Florence, and other centers of the Italian Renaissance. A special sequence of 21 trump cards and the Fool was added to the four traditional suits — Cups, Swords, Batons, and Coins.

These cards became part of a game later known as tarocchi. They were not originally created for fortune-telling. Tarot was a trick-taking game in which the special illustrated cards functioned as trumps, outranking ordinary suit cards.

But almost from the beginning, Tarot was more than an ordinary pack of playing cards.

Wealthy Italian families commissioned elaborate hand-painted decks from artists. Among the most famous surviving examples are the Visconti-Sforza cards, produced in the 15th century for the Milanese aristocracy. Painted with rich pigments and decorated with gold, these cards existed somewhere between game, luxury object, and work of art.

Within their small frames appeared emperors and lovers, chariots, death, virtues, celestial figures, and allegories of fortune. These were not mysterious symbols imported from a forgotten civilization. They belonged to the visual world of Renaissance Europe — a world shaped by Christianity, classical culture, social hierarchy, morality, fate, and the constant awareness of mortality.

When the Images Began to Live Their Own Lives

This may be one of the most fascinating aspects of Tarot.

The original trump cards were not designed as a secret esoteric system. Their imagery drew from ideas and allegories familiar to people of their time. Yet the images proved remarkably durable.

As Tarot spread across Europe, decks changed and printing made cards more accessible. In France, patterns developed that would eventually become associated with the Tarot de Marseille. Centuries passed and the cultural context surrounding the original images changed dramatically — yet the Fool continued his journey, the Wheel of Fortune kept turning, and figures such as Death, the Hermit, and the Lovers remained.

The game survived, but its images gradually acquired a life beyond the game itself.

From Playing to Reading

The major transformation came only in the 18th century — roughly three hundred years after the earliest Tarot decks appeared.

In 1781, French writer Antoine Court de Gébelin proposed that Tarot contained fragments of ancient Egyptian wisdom. There is no historical evidence supporting this idea: modern scholarship traces Tarot to 15th-century Italy rather than ancient Egypt.

Historically inaccurate as it was, the theory proved enormously influential.

Around the same period, Jean-Baptiste Alliette — better known as Etteilla — developed methods of using cards for divination and eventually produced one of the first Tarot decks specifically designed for occult and divinatory practice.

The cards were beginning to move from the table of a game into the world of interpretation.

Tarot Becomes a System

During the 19th century, the relationship between Tarot and Western occultism became much stronger. Writers and esoteric societies connected the cards with astrology, Kabbalah, alchemy, numerology, and other systems of symbolic thought.

Meanings became increasingly elaborate. Correspondences were created between cards, planets, elements, letters, and spiritual concepts. Tarot was gradually transformed into a visual language in which an individual card could carry meaning — but combinations of cards could create something more complex.

A spread became a story.

And perhaps this is one reason Tarot proved so adaptable: the images never had to communicate through words alone.

The Deck That Changed Modern Tarot

One of the most important moments in the development of modern Tarot came in 1909, when artist Pamela Colman Smith created the illustrations for a deck conceived with Arthur Edward Waite and published by William Rider & Son.

Today it is usually known as the Rider–Waite–Smith Tarot.

Its influence is difficult to overstate. One particularly important innovation was the treatment of the Minor Arcana. Instead of showing only repeated suit symbols on many numbered cards, Smith created complete illustrated scenes.

Three swords were no longer simply three swords. A figure, a landscape, a gesture, a storm, a celebration, or an encounter could transform an abstract number into a visual situation.

The reader could look at the card and begin asking: What is happening here? Who is this person? What came before this moment? What might happen next?

This approach became one of the foundations of modern Tarot imagery.

From Esoteric Circles to Popular Culture

During the 20th century, Tarot gradually moved beyond relatively small occult circles. A particularly visible wave of interest appeared during the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, alongside growing Western interest in alternative spirituality, psychology, Eastern philosophy, mysticism, and new approaches to consciousness.

At the same time, artists increasingly began to treat the 78-card structure as a creative medium of its own.

Tarot could be surrealist, feminist, psychedelic, mythological, minimalist, political, psychological, or deeply personal. The basic architecture remained recognizable, while entire visual universes could be built inside it.

In this sense, a Tarot deck became something unusual: an art form with a pre-existing structure. Seventy-eight frames, seventy-eight opportunities to reinterpret an archetype, emotion, conflict, transformation, or human experience.

The New Tarot Boom

The 21st century brought another major wave of Tarot popularity, becoming especially visible in the late 2010s and during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Publishers reported strong demand for Tarot and oracle decks. In 2021, Publishers Weekly reported that around half of the top 100 products sold by the specialist publisher Llewellyn were Tarot decks. The Dark Wood Tarot, released in June 2020, had already sold approximately 50,000 copies by that time.

Meanwhile, Instagram, YouTube, and especially TikTok brought Tarot into a completely different cultural environment. Cards were no longer encountered only in books, specialist shops, or private readings. They became part of everyday visual culture — appearing in videos, art, fashion, photography, and conversations about psychology and self-reflection.

For many people discovering Tarot today, belief in fortune-telling is not even a requirement.

Tarot Today: Prediction or a Way of Seeing a Story?

Over almost six centuries, Tarot has been an aristocratic game, a luxury art object, a mass-produced deck of cards, an occult system, a divination tool, and a medium for generations of artists.

Today, some people still use Tarot to ask what the future might bring. Others use it for meditation, journaling, creativity, psychological reflection, or simply as a way to look at a familiar situation from an unfamiliar perspective.

And contemporary Tarot artists continue a tradition that has existed since the painted decks of Renaissance Italy: taking familiar archetypes and giving them a new visual world.

This is also the idea behind Immersa’s Ancient Greek Tarot. Greek mythology gives the traditional structure of Tarot another language through which to speak. Gods, heroes, journeys, conflicts, transformations, and ancient myths become ways of exploring experiences that remain surprisingly recognizable today.

Perhaps this is why Tarot has survived for so long.

We place images beside one another — and somewhere between mythology, art, chance, memory, and imagination, a story begins to appear.