When people speak of tarot today, many immediately imagine cards created to predict the future, preserve esoteric secrets, or transmit ancient wisdom. The historical reality is very different, and in some ways even more fascinating. Tarot cards were born in Northern Italy during the fifteenth century as a refined courtly game, and only many centuries later became a systematic instrument of divination. Their history shows how a playful object can slowly transform into a symbolic, psychological, and oracular vehicle. The earliest certain evidence appears in Milan, Ferrara, Bologna, and other cities of Renaissance Italy between the 1430s and 1450s. Originally these cards were called Trionfi (“Triumphs”), a term that recalled allegorical processions, the moral culture of the time, and the taste for solemn imagery. To the normal suits of playing cards was added a special series of superior figures intended to outrank the others during play. From this emerged the deck that would later be called tarot. The famous Visconti-Sforza cards, commissioned in the ducal milieu of Milan, belong to this aristocratic and artistic phase. The images of the so-called Major Arcana, a much later term, were not created as an occult manual. They reflected the mental world of the Italian Renaissance. Among them appear the Emperor, the Pope, the Wheel of Fortune, the Hermit, Death, Temperance, Judgment, and the World. These are figures connected to Christian morality, social hierarchies, meditation on destiny, civic theatricality, religious iconography, and the philosophy of the age. The deck formed a small illustrated encyclopedia of the human and social cosmos. For more than three centuries, tarot cards were primarily a game. In Northern Italy, France, and German-speaking regions, regional variations spread. Bologna developed the Tarocchino, Piedmont and Lombardy preserved their own traditions, while in France the so-called Tarot de Marseille emerged, today world-famous. Yet until the eighteenth century, divinatory use remained marginal, sporadic, or poorly documented. The turning point came in eighteenth-century France. In the heart of the Enlightenment, paradoxically, there also arose a strong curiosity for the ancient, the mysterious, the Hermetic, and the occult sciences. In this climate, Antoine Court de Gébelin, a French scholar, published in 1781 a famous interpretation claiming that tarot cards were a book of wisdom inherited from ancient Egypt. The theory was historically unfounded, yet enormously influential. For the first time, the deck was presented as a repository of secret symbols and lost knowledge. A few years later appeared Jean-Baptiste Alliette, known by the pseudonym Etteilla, a decisive figure in the birth of modern cartomancy. He was among the first to construct an explicit and commercial method of divination with tarot cards, publishing meanings of the cards, spreads, interpretive rules, and modified decks. With Etteilla, tarot entered the urban world of consultations, manuals, and paying clients. Divination with cards became a recognizable and reproducible practice. In the nineteenth century the process deepened. French occultism, with authors such as Éliphas Lévi, linked tarot to Jewish Kabbalah, ceremonial magic, and cosmic correspondences. Later, Papus and other esoteric circles definitively transformed the deck into an initiatory as well as divinatory instrument. In the twentieth century, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn further reworked symbols, astrology, Hebrew letters, and spiritual pathways. From this line would emerge famous decks such as the Rider-Waite-Smith of 1909. Why did tarot lend itself so well to divination? The reason is twofold. On one hand, it possesses powerful, ambiguous, memorable images capable of evoking universal human situations. On the other, the limited number of cards allows almost endless combinations. Each card becomes a node of meanings, and every arrangement creates narrative. The consultant recognizes in the symbols fears, hopes, conflicts, and desires. In this sense, tarot often acts more as an interpretive mirror than as a predictive machine. The documented history, therefore, is clear. Tarot cards were not born for divination. They were born as a refined Italian Renaissance game. Only between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, especially in France, were they reinterpreted as a book of wisdom and an oracular instrument. Tarot cartomancy is a modern construction founded upon an ancient object. This does not make it less interesting. On the contrary, it shows how modern Europe was able to transform a courtly game into one of the most powerful symbolic engines of the Western imagination.
Roberto Minichini
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