The Tarot: the history and meaning of the 78 cards

A game of the Italian courts

The tarot was born in northern Italy at the beginning of the fifteenth century. Playing cards had reached Europe shortly before, from the Islamic world, with four suits — cups, coins, swords and batons — and court figures. At the courts of Milan, Ferrara and Bologna, someone had the idea of adding a series of cards painted with allegorical figures: the Emperor, Death, the Wheel of Fortune, the Sun, the World. They were called ‘trionfi’, triumphs — and that is where the word trump comes from.

The oldest decks to survive were painted by hand, in gold and tempera, for the Visconti and Sforza families, lords of Milan, around 1450. They were luxury objects, used for a trick-taking game much like the card games of today, in which the trumps beat the cards of the suits. The name ‘tarocchi’, from which ‘tarot’ comes, only appears at the beginning of the sixteenth century.

The Tarot de Marseille

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the game spread through France and Switzerland, and the cards came to be printed from woodcuts and coloured with stencils. A design then became fixed that came to be known as the Tarot de Marseille, after the many card-makers in that city. The decks of Jean Noblet (around 1650), Jean Dodal (around 1701) and Nicolas Conver (1760) are the best known, and Conver’s became the model for almost all those that followed.

In the Tarot de Marseille the Major Arcana already bear the Roman numerals and the names we know — Le Bateleur, La Papesse, L’Empereur, La Maison Dieu — and the numbered cards of the Minor Arcana show only the suit symbols, arranged in geometric patterns, with no scenes.

From game to fortune-telling

Reading the cards as an oracle is more recent than the game. In 1781 the French scholar Antoine Court de Gébelin put forward the theory that the tarot held the wisdom of the priests of ancient Egypt. There is no evidence for this whatsoever — its origin is Italian and medieval — but the idea was hugely successful. A few years later the Parisian fortune-teller Etteilla published the first tarot deck made specifically for telling fortunes, with written meanings for every card, upright and reversed.

In the nineteenth century Éliphas Lévi linked the twenty-two Major Arcana to the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet and to the Kabbalah, and at the end of the century the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, in England, built a complete system of correspondences: each card was given an element, a planet or a sign, a letter and a place on the Tree of Life.

The Rider-Waite-Smith and the modern tarot

In 1909 Arthur Edward Waite, a member of the Golden Dawn, published in London a tarot drawn by the artist Pamela Colman Smith. It was a quiet revolution: for the first time in a mass-produced deck, every numbered card of the Minor Arcana had a scene — people, landscapes, gestures — which made reading far more intuitive. Waite also swapped the order of Strength and Justice, which became VIII and XI, to fit the astrological correspondences of the Golden Dawn.

The deck became known as the Rider-Waite, after its publisher, and today as the Rider-Waite-Smith, to give the artist the recognition that was so long in coming. It is the basis of almost every modern tarot — including the Sol da Alma Tarot, painted from scratch for this website following the same iconography, with a light and a palette all its own.

How the deck is organised

The twenty-two Major Arcana, numbered from 0 to XXI, are the great forces and the great stages of life — The Fool, The Magician, The Empress, Death, The Sun. When they appear in a spread, they give the matter a particular weight.

The fifty-six Minor Arcana are divided into four suits of fourteen cards: from the Ace to the Ten, plus four court cards — Page, Knight, Queen and King. Each suit corresponds to an element and to an area of life: Wands are Fire, will and action; Cups are Water, feelings and bonds; Swords are Air, thought and conflict; Pentacles are Earth, the body, work and money. The Minor Arcana speak of the events and situations of everyday life.

Any card can come up upright or reversed. Reversed, a card does not say the opposite of what it says upright: it speaks of the same force held back, delayed, in excess or turned inwards.