Tarot was born in Northern Italy at the beginning of the 15th century, in the princely courts of Milan, Ferrara, and Bologna. The earliest known decks, called "tarocchi" or "trionfi," were aristocratic card games commissioned by the Visconti and Sforza families. The oldest surviving deck, the Visconti-Sforza Tarot (circa 1440–1450), painted by Bonifacio Bembo, is now divided among the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo, and the Colleoni collection. These 78 cards — 22 "triumphs" and 56 suit cards — were used to play tarocchini, a trick-taking game similar to bridge, which was played in Bologna until the 19th century.
The divinatory use of tarot did not emerge until the 18th century, three hundred years after its invention as a game. In 1770, Jean-Baptiste Alliette, a former Parisian wigmaker who reinvented himself under the pseudonym Etteilla (his name spelled backward), published "Etteilla, or a Way to Entertain Yourself with a Deck of Cards," the first treatise on cartomancy using tarot. He invented the cross spread, assigned each card a specific divinatory meaning, and in 1788 created his own deck, the "Grand Etteilla." In 1781, the Freemason scholar Antoine Court de Gébelin claimed in "Le Monde primitif" that tarot was a remnant of the Egyptian Book of Thoth — a theory with no historical basis, but one that permanently anchored tarot in the esoteric imagination.
The name "Tarot of Marseille" is actually recent: it was the card maker Paul Marteau, director of the Grimaud company, who established this name in 1930 by standardizing the deck in his book "Le Tarot de Marseille." The cards did not originate in Marseille — the city was simply a major center for playing card production in the 17th and 18th centuries, with workshops like that of Nicolas Conver (1760), whose deck remains the historical reference. Other important production centers existed in Lyon (Jean Dodal, 1701), Rouen, and Paris. The standardization of the "Marseille type" fixed the iconography we know today.
The occultists of the 19th century profoundly transformed the reading of tarot. Éliphas Lévi (Alphonse-Louis Constant), in "Dogme et rituel de la haute magie" (1856), established correspondences between the 22 Major Arcana and the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, integrating tarot into the Kabbalistic tradition. In 1909, the British occultist Arthur Edward Waite commissioned the painter Pamela Colman Smith to create a new deck, the Rider-Waite, which for the first time illustrated all 56 Minor Arcana with figurative scenes. Published by Rider & Company in London, this deck would become the best-selling tarot in the world, with over 100 million copies sold. Aleister Crowley created the Thoth Tarot in 1943, painted by Lady Frieda Harris over five years, integrating astrology, Kabbalah, and alchemy.
The psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung took an interest in tarot through his work on archetypes and the collective unconscious. For Jung, the tarot figures — the Magician (persona), the Empress (anima), the Hermit (the inner Sage), the nameless Arcanum (transformation) — represent universal archetypes present in all cultures. In his 1933–1934 seminars on Christiana Morgan's "Vision," Jung directly analyzed tarot imagery as tools for psychological projection. The American psychologist Timothy Leary continued this idea in 1969 in "The Game of Life," linking the 22 Arcana to stages of consciousness evolution. Today, "tarotherapy" is practiced by some psychologists as a tool for introspection, particularly in Italy and Latin America.
The 21st century has seen a spectacular tarot revival. The global divination card market reached $793 million in 2024, driven by social media: the hashtag #tarot has accumulated over 40 billion views on TikTok. Artist Kiku Glover created the "Modern Witch Tarot" in 2018, reimagining the Rider-Waite with contemporary, diverse characters — it sold over 500,000 copies in two years. Filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky, co-author with Marianne Costa of "The Way of Tarot" (2004), popularized a psycho-symbolic approach to the Tarot of Marseille that influenced an entire generation of practitioners. In France, the "Tarot de Marseille Heritage" shop of Philippe Camoin (a descendant of Nicolas Conver) and Jodorowsky offers a deck restored from historical documents, considered the most faithful version to the 18th-century originals.