Tarot Kartlarının Tarihi ve Kökeni

Tarot cards originated in fifteenth-century Italy as playing cards. Their association with fortune-telling developed centuries later. Surviving decks, printers' records and reading manuals reveal several stages of change, rather than one invention with a known creator. The Morgan Library's collection provides a useful starting point.

Where did tarot cards originate?

The historical evidence points to northern Italy during the first half of the 1400s. The Metropolitan Museum of Art places the earliest references to tarot in the 1440s and 1450s, while noting that the game probably developed earlier. That distinction matters: the earliest document we possess does not necessarily record the first deck someone made. There is no securely identified individual who can be credited with inventing tarot. The Met's account of tarot's origins explains the evidence and its limits.

Early players used the cards for a trick-taking game. Alongside four suits were a separate sequence of trumps and the Fool. In fifteenth-century records, these packs were called carte da trionfi, referring to their trumps. The later Italian term tarocco belongs to the sixteenth century. The vocabulary changed along with the cards' history. The Met's exhibition catalogue discusses these early names.

What the surviving Visconti cards show

The Visconti and Visconti-Sforza cards connect tarot with the courts of Renaissance Milan. Their painted figures, gilding and family emblems make them valuable records of the people who commissioned them. The Morgan's Visconti-Sforza group dates from approximately 1450 to 1480. Related cards from that pack are divided between the Morgan, the Accademia Carrara and the Colleoni family collection. These are surviving portions of a deck, not a complete pack preserved in one place. The Morgan's catalogue record gives the dates, materials and ownership history.

A courtly commission can tell us about patronage without settling the identity of tarot's inventor. It also leaves gaps. A missing card cannot establish that its subject was deliberately excluded, and a modern reproduction may complete an old pack with newly made replacement images. When comparing editions, check which cards survive and which have been reconstructed.

The deck was never completely fixed

A familiar tarot pack contains 78 cards: 56 suit cards, 21 trumps and the Fool. Early examples nevertheless show variation. The Visconti pack at Yale includes additional court figures and the virtues Faith, Hope and Charity. The surviving evidence does not support the claim that every tarot deck has had an identical structure since its beginning. The Met describes these differences when comparing the early packs.

Tarot also moved beyond hand-painted court commissions. A sheet of Italian tarocchi cards dated around 1500 in the Met's collection was made by woodcut and colored with stencils. That object offers a concrete glimpse of printed production. A later French example, the Conver-pattern pack catalogued by the Bibliothèque nationale de France, has 78 woodcut cards with stenciled color. Different printing methods and regional designs are part of tarot's history, too.

Illustrated number cards existed before 1909

The Sola Busca deck is an important exception to any simple division between old symbol-only cards and modern illustrated cards. Its complete pack survives at the Pinacoteca di Brera. The museum dates its painted decoration to Venice in 1491 and describes figures and elaborate imagery on the pip cards, where other packs often repeated the suit symbols. Brera's guide to the Sola Busca deck documents its production and imagery.

This does not make Sola Busca a modern reading deck in disguise. Its unusual images need to be understood within their own historical setting. It does establish that illustrated number cards were possible long before Pamela Colman Smith's work.

When did tarot become associated with divination?

The late eighteenth century brought influential new accounts of what tarot meant. In 1781, Antoine Court de Gébelin presented tarot as a survival of ancient Egyptian wisdom. This was an interpretation of the cards, not evidence that an Egyptian tarot deck had been discovered. The Warburg Institute's discussion of Court de Gébelin places the theory within his much broader attempt to explain ancient symbols.

Jean-Baptiste Alliette, who wrote as Etteilla, helped turn divinatory interpretation into a published practice. The BnF catalogues a 1783 volume containing his work on reading tarot. The Warburg identifies his eighteenth-century Livre de Thot cards among the earliest decks explicitly designed for fortune-telling. These are firmer milestones than naming a supposed first private reading, which surviving publications cannot establish. The Warburg's exhibition overview distinguishes this development from the earlier game.

A striking object in the Wellcome Collection makes the Egyptian theory visible: an Etteilla collage from the 1780s arranges tarot cards as the supposed leaves of a book of Thoth at Memphis. It records what an eighteenth-century interpreter imagined about antiquity. Its date and construction are themselves evidence against treating it as an ancient Egyptian artifact. Wellcome's object record explains what survives.

1909: Pamela Colman Smith, Arthur Edward Waite and Rider

In 1909, Arthur Edward Waite commissioned Pamela Colman Smith to illustrate a tarot deck. Smith was already an artist working in illustration and theatrical design. Her contribution deserves to be named whenever the deck is discussed. The Morgan's account of Smith's career places the commission within her wider work.

The resulting deck was first published in 1909 by William Rider & Son. The name Rider-Waite-Smith therefore brings together its publisher, the person who conceived the project and its illustrator. The Morgan's exhibition records credit both Waite and Smith and identify the publisher.

Smith's pictures give a reader people, gestures and settings to consider alongside the suit symbols. The Whitney Museum's presentation of her work recognizes the 1909 deck as part of her artistic practice. When using a guide to tarot card meanings, check whether its descriptions refer to these pictures or to a different deck tradition. An interpretation of a particular scene is not automatically an explanation of every historical version of that card.

A concise timeline of tarot history

The timeline follows the museum and library records linked above. Dates identify particular surviving objects or publications; they do not imply that every user changed practices at the same moment.

How to look at a historical tarot deck

Later artists have continued to change tarot's visual language. The V&A, for example, holds cards from the 2011 Outrageous Fortune project, in which different artists designed individual cards. Its collection also includes older decks with subjects such as animals and buildings. The V&A's collection survey illustrates this range.

Before buying a reproduction or interpreting an unfamiliar pack, look for three pieces of information:

• The object's date: distinguish the original design from the date of the edition in your hands.
• The credits: identify the artist, designer, printer and publisher where those are known.
• The intended use: check whether the accompanying material describes a game, a reading method or a contemporary artistic project.

These details help explain why two cards with the same title can look quite different. They also let you enjoy a modern interpretation without mistaking its symbolism for an unchanged message from the fifteenth century.