Where tarot comes from · Lesson 1 of 6
Tarot began as a fifteenth-century card game
Trace tarot back to the card tables of Renaissance Italy, and read any Major with its first life as a trump card clearly in view.
Cards before readings
Playing cards reach Europe in the late 1370s, arriving from the Islamic world through Mamluk lands. The earliest European packs already have four suits of numbered cards with a small court at the top of each: cups, coins, swords and staves, close cousins of the Mamluk suits of cups, coins, swords and polo sticks. Olivia’s Cups and Swords keep those names; Wands descend from the staves, and Pentacles from the coins.
Tarot itself appears some sixty years later, and for roughly three centuries the surviving record shows it as something people played, not something they consulted. Account books, letters and city regulations mention it as a pastime. Readings with tarot cards are documented only from the eighteenth century. When you shuffle an Olivia deck, you are holding the descendant of a game.
A fifth suit of triumphs
By the early 1440s, records in Florence and at the court of Ferrara mention cards called trionfi, ‘triumphs’, and the ruling family of Milan was having sets painted. They are an extra series of picture cards added to the four suits, and they outrank every suit card in play. Many historians connect the name to the triumphal processions of Renaissance art and poetry, in which one figure overcomes the one before it. The English word ‘trump’ comes from the same root.
The pictures on these cards were not secret emblems. A fifteenth-century player recognised them at a glance: the cardinal virtues Justice, Fortitude and Temperance, Love, Death, the Wheel, the Sun, the Moon, the World. These are the stock images of Italian painting and sermons, set in a rising order. Around 1500 the word tarocchi appears for the whole pack, and ‘tarot’ is its later French form.
How the game is played
Tarot is a trick-taking game, a family that includes whist and bridge. Each player lays one card and the highest takes the trick. You must follow the suit that was led; if you cannot, you must play a trump, and any trump beats any suit card. Early trumps carried no numbers, so players learnt the order by heart, and cities did not agree on it. The order Olivia follows descends from the Milanese one, which the Marseille pattern later fixed, with one later swap you will meet in the example below.
In the Italian game the Fool was not a trump. It was the Excuse: you could play it instead of following suit, and it usually went back to its owner. That is why older decks leave it unnumbered, outside the sequence. The Magician, under the name Il Bagatto, was the lowest trump. The game is still alive: French Tarot is widely played in France, and Tarock games thrive in Austria, Hungary and Slovenia, usually with packs whose trumps show everyday or rural scenes rather than allegories. Michael Dummett, a philosopher and historian of card games, set out the evidence for tarot’s game origin in The Game of Tarot (1980).
The Visconti-Sforza cards
The oldest cards to survive in quantity were painted by hand for the ruling families of Milan in the mid-fifteenth century, the Visconti and the Sforza. They are luxury objects, laid with gold leaf and usually attributed to the workshop of Bonifacio Bembo. The best-known set is now divided between collections in New York and Bergamo, and some of its cards are lost, among them The Devil and The Tower.
These decks show how unsettled the design still was. One of them, now at Yale, has six court cards in each suit, with a mounted lady and a maid beside the knight and page, and trumps for Faith, Hope and Charity that later packs dropped. Even the four courts belong to this world of play: ordinary Italian packs had a king, a mounted knight and a jack on foot, and the tarot pack added a Queen.
What the history gives a reader
Knowing that tarot began as a game does not make reading with it less worthwhile. It changes where you look. The images were made to be understood by eye, by people who knew what a virtue or a triumph looked like. Reading closely from what a card shows is faithful to how these pictures began. The meanings layered on later, from the eighteenth century onward, are traditions of reading, and Olivia’s card pages present them as history.
It also frees the numbers. A card’s number was first its rank in play, and ranks moved from city to city. When a card page tells you that Strength and Justice traded places, you are watching a convention change, not a hidden truth being revealed.
Try this
- Open Justice’s card page, read its tradition section, and copy into your notebook the one detail that goes back to fifteenth-century Italy.
- Write the twenty-two Major titles in your notebook in order, then mark the three cardinal virtues and the one card that stands outside the sequence.
- Choose one Major and describe its picture as a Renaissance player might: which virtue, figure or heavenly body it shows, before any meaning.
- Draw one card in Olivia and write two lines: what the picture itself shows, and what later tradition has added to it.
To remember
- Tarot began as a trick-taking game; readings with it are documented from the eighteenth century.
- The Major images come from Renaissance allegory, virtues and triumphs, not from a secret doctrine.
- A card’s number was first its rank in play, and cities ranked the trumps differently.