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Sabio Tarot · History and curiosities

By Sabio Tarot

Tarot before divination: cards, trumps and games

A gilded card from an Italian tarot deck of around 1450 shows a figure familiar to tarot readers today. The historical question, however, is not “What did it mean in a reading?” but “What did it do in that deck?” The earliest known tarot references place the cards in northern Italy in the 1440s and 1450s. The evidence we have presents tarot as a card game with trumps. Its association with divination came much later, according to this Metropolitan Museum of Art overview.

This distinction does not force you to choose between historical interest and present-day practice. It helps you avoid presenting a modern interpretation as the documented intention of the people who painted the earliest cards.

What was in that deck?

Historical tarot developed from four Italian suits: Cups, Swords, Wands and Coins. Each suit had ten numbered cards and four court cards: King, Queen, Knight and Page. That makes 14 cards per suit and 56 in all. Alongside them were 21 pictorial trumps and a Fool. Together, these groups produce the 78-card structure familiar in many decks today. The Met describes this composition, and the Victoria and Albert Museum preserves examples that let us observe it.

It is easy to imagine today's 78 cards as an object that has always looked the same. Surviving pieces counsel caution. The Met explains that an early deck called the Visconti Tarot has as many as six court cards per suit and three additional theological virtues. Specialists cannot say with certainty whether it was a unique design or an earlier stage before more familiar patterns settled. You cannot deduce the history of a deck just by counting its present-day cards.

Older numbered cards often show repeated suit symbols to express their value. If the Five of Cups shows five cups, those objects form part of the card's composition. Narrative scenes on many Rider–Waite–Smith Minor Arcana cards belong to a much later visual tradition. That contrast explains why a guide written for one deck may fail to describe what you see in another.

What is a trump in a card game?

A trump is a card that takes part in the hierarchy of play differently from ordinary suited cards. Tarot was used in trick-taking games: players lay down cards in turn, and a card wins a trick according to shared rules. Pictorial trumps expanded that structure. The Fool had a particular role within the game; it was not a scene created to announce a player's future.

The Met notes that the precise rules varied. Describe the general role of trumps, then, without pretending that we have one complete, fixed record of every fifteenth-century game. A card titled the Emperor could be recognised by its figure and have a place in the sequence of play. That is a different historical observation from saying “the Emperor means stability” in a modern reading.

We should also distinguish ordinary playing cards from tarot cards. The former already had suits. Tarot's distinctive feature was adding the set of pictorial trumps and the Fool within that family of games. Tarot did not invent all the suits or card games.

What surviving decks tell us

Surviving cards are physical objects, not merely illustrations copied into guidebooks. Some were painted for courtly settings using pigments and decorated backgrounds. The Met describes luxury fifteenth-century decks associated with the Visconti and Sforza families and attributed to Bonifacio Bembo's workshop. Their cards are now held across different institutions; we do not always have a complete original deck in one box.

That matters for two reasons. First, a missing card in a surviving set does not by itself prove that the card never existed; it may have been lost. Second, differences between decks do show that tarot did not begin as a single fixed, unchangeable edition. The Met article compares sets that differ in court cards and trumps and identifies what remains uncertain.

The V&A shows painted and gilded Italian cards from around 1490, alongside reproductions and later decks. Looking at a dated object is more useful than repeating “tarot is ancient”: it lets you ask who produced it, where it is kept and which features can actually be seen. A nineteenth-century reproduction is not direct evidence for a fifteenth-century deck, even if it imitates its design.

A historical detail that changes how you see a card

Today we often speak of “Major Arcana” and “Minor Arcana”. Those terms are convenient for learning, but we should not automatically project them onto early games. The V&A links their spread to much later esoteric developments. For early history, “trumps” and “suited cards” are more precise.

The same caution applies to the idea that the images formed a complete spiritual story from the outset. We can use the sequence as an interpretive tool today. To claim that this was the intention of fifteenth-century makers, however, we would need specific evidence. The beauty of an image does not establish why it was painted.

This historical care does not diminish tarot. It reveals several layers. A card can be a game object from one era, an artwork and, centuries later, an image used for reflection. Naming each layer lets you study the past without dismissing present practice.

When did tarot become associated with divination?

Tarot's association with cartomancy and occultism came after the earliest Italian decks. The Met places the broad spread of that association in the nineteenth century. The V&A describes divinatory uses in the late eighteenth century and their growth during the nineteenth. These are different claims: one concerns early documented uses, the other concerns popularisation. Together they do not justify saying that everyone in the fifteenth century already read tarot for divination—or that nobody did so before the nineteenth century.

One rule helps with any Sabio Tarot history article: distinguish earliest known evidence, documented practice and popularisation. A date may refer to any one of these. Mixing them produces stories that are easy to remember but hard to support.

That is also why claims that tarot came from ancient Egypt need care. The museum sources consulted do not describe fifteenth-century decks as Egyptian objects. The V&A attributes that genealogy to later esoteric writers and regards it as unproven. The subject deserves its own article, with specific texts and dates, rather than a one-line dismissal.

What to observe in your own deck

Draw a numbered card and a Major Arcana card. First describe what you can see: suit, number, objects, figure, name and place in the series. Then ask which part of your explanation comes from the image before you and which you learned from a modern manual. That distinction helps both with card reading and with understanding tarot history.

For a chronological introduction, start with the general history of tarot. To study a particular deck, compare its images with the book pages for Marseille Tarot for Beginners and Rider–Waite Tarot for Beginners. History explains where some forms came from; a suitable guidebook explains how to work with the cards you own.

Sources consulted