When Did Tarot Begin? From Card Games to Divination

The early evidence concerns a game

In his 2016 Metropolitan Museum of Art essay, Tim Husband places the earliest references he discusses in the 1440s and 1450s, in northern Italian cities. He describes tarot as a trick-taking game using Italian suits, additional trump cards and a fool. This gives a more concrete starting point than a story about a timeless system of hidden wisdom.

Husband's essay is a modern museum overview, not a fifteenth-century document. Its discussion helps locate and explain early evidence; this article has not independently inspected the original records. A date attached to a surviving reference establishes that something was recorded then. It does not, by itself, establish the moment of invention.

The essay also discusses the later popularity of occult associations. That observation should not be converted into a claim that divination first began when those associations became popular. The first use of a practice and its wider circulation are separate historical questions.

A later book offers a different kind of evidence

A. E. Waite's The Pictorial Key to the Tarot provides an example of later interpretive writing. The edition available through Wikisource has a title page dated 1922, while its publication notice states that the work was first published in 1910. The volume also credits Pamela Colman Smith for the designs used in its illustrations.

These details matter because a book's publication date, a reprint date and the origin of the subject it discusses are not interchangeable. Calling this the consulted 1922 edition avoids making it sound as though the text first appeared that year. Naming Smith also avoids giving the writer sole credit for the visual material associated with the book.

The volume can help us understand what Waite presented to his readers. It cannot, simply by describing a tradition, establish how old every part of that tradition was. A dated publication is a useful historical reference point, not a certificate of antiquity for everything inside it.

Reading Waite's origin arguments with attribution

In Part I, including his discussion of tarot in history, Waite considers and criticizes occult explanations of the cards' origins, including Egyptian theories. This makes the chapter useful for examining the arguments of a historical author. It does not make those theories independently verified facts.

The distinction is simple but important in writing about tarot. Reporting that Waite discussed an Egyptian explanation describes something in his text. Asserting that tarot originated in ancient Egypt would require evidence for the origin itself. The first statement does not establish the second, and his participation in occult writing should not be treated as a substitute for modern historical scholarship.

His criticisms also complicate an overly simple picture in which every later interpreter accepted the same origin story. Readers can examine where he agrees, objects or qualifies a claim, rather than treating his book as a collection of interchangeable assertions. Here, those positions remain attributed to Waite; no precise eighteenth-century chronology is inferred from them.

Divinatory meanings are evidence of interpretation

Part III presents divinatory meanings and methods of reading cards. It therefore supports a different claim from the early game evidence: Waite was explaining ways to interpret the cards, not merely describing the rules of a card game.

For a historical reader, the useful question is what this author taught and how he organized it. That does not require adopting the meanings as advice. Nor does the presence of reading methods in this book prove that they can predict events or that they were used continuously from the fifteenth century onward.

A beginner can read such material as an account of an interpretive practice while keeping its claims open to examination. Describing a belief is not the same as endorsing it. This is particularly important where a historical text offers alarming or deterministic readings: reproducing them without context would turn a historical explanation into advice the evidence does not justify.

For a modern reflective approach, our guide to reading tarot explains how to distinguish observations from interpretations and leave room for personal agency.

What we can conclude

The clearest answer from these sources is that early tarot evidence concerns a card game, while Waite's much later book documents divinatory interpretation. The exact beginning of divination is not established by this limited source set, so this article leaves that question open. It also makes no claim that historical longevity demonstrates predictive power.

Keeping game history, publication history and interpretive claims distinct offers a useful way to approach tarot: follow what each source can show, credit the people involved, and resist replacing a gap in the record with a more memorable story.

To explore the imagery discussed here, visit the Rider–Waite–Smith card library, which separates card descriptions from practical reflection.