Research · History
Tarot History: From a 15th-Century Game to a Yes/No Oracle
A yes/no tarot reading looks ancient. The deck is old; the yes/no layer is not. Knowing which part is which changes how much authority you give a card.
Reviewed 14 November 2026 · How this page is checked
The standard story says tarot was born as a secret book of wisdom and has been consulted for answers ever since. The documented story is stranger and more useful. Tarot began as a game for Italian courts, acquired an Egyptian origin myth in the 1780s, was rebuilt as an occult system in the 19th century, and only then became the illustrated 78-card deck that most people now call tarot.
None of that makes a reading worthless. It does mean that “the cards have always said no” is not a historical argument. The verdict table on this site is a modern editorial layer, and this page shows where the layers came from.
The game before the oracle
Tarot — tarocchi in Italian — appears in northern Italy in the 15th century. The oldest surviving cards are usually dated to around 1437–1442, and the Victoria and Albert Museum holds hand-painted, gilded examples from about 1490. These were luxury objects made for courtly families, not cheap fortune-telling tools.
The pack had the structure we still use: 78 cards, made up of 22 trumps and 56 suit cards. It was played as a trick-taking game, related to the family that includes modern bridge and whist. The trumps carried allegorical figures — the Fool, Death, the Wheel — drawn from Renaissance pageantry, moral literature and court entertainment. The imagery was rich, but it was not a coded prophecy system.
The game spread through Europe, entering France and other regions through trade routes that ran through Venice. It survives today in parts of Italy and France as a card game. If you want the shortest correction to the “ancient oracle” story, it is this: for its first three centuries, tarot was something people played.
The Egyptian story
In 1781, the French scholar Antoine Court de Gébelin published essays in Le Monde primitif arguing that the tarot encoded the wisdom of ancient Egypt. The claim was attractive: Egypt was fashionable, hieroglyphs had not yet been deciphered, and a mysterious origin gave the cards a pedigree. Other writers repeated it, and the idea stuck.
There is no evidence for it. The cards are Italian, the dates do not line up, and the “Book of Thoth” is a modern projection rather than a documented Egyptian tarot. The V&A's history describes the Egyptian theory as unproven; modern print historians treat it as a 1780s invention. The story is important not because it is true but because it changed what people did with the cards.
Around the same time, Etteilla — the pen name of Jean-Baptiste Alliette — began reading cards professionally in Paris. By the 1770s he had produced a deck designed specifically for divination, with altered imagery and assigned meanings. This is the moment tarot becomes fortune-telling in the documented record: late 18th-century France, not ancient Egypt.
The occult upgrade
The 19th century turned tarot into a system. Eliphas Lévi, writing in the middle of the century, linked the trumps to the Hebrew alphabet and to Qabala. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, in the late 19th century, built an elaborate set of correspondences between cards, astrology, elements and the Tree of Life. These were creative syntheses, not survivals from a lost Egyptian priesthood.
In 1910, Arthur Edward Waite and the artist Pamela Colman Smith published the deck now known as Rider–Waite–Smith. Smith illustrated all 78 cards with narrative scenes, including the minor arcana, which had often been plain pips. That decision gave later readers far more visual material to interpret and made the deck the standard English-language tarot.
The line from the Golden Dawn to modern tarot is therefore short and recent. Most of the meanings that feel traditional — the keywords, the elemental assignments, the “yes or no” leanings — were codified in the 19th and 20th centuries. They are traditions in the sense that people have used them for generations; they are not archaeological evidence.
Where yes and no came from
The yes/no question is a 20th-century convenience. Readers and publishers needed a quick answer for a paying querent, so cards acquired positive or negative leanings. Different books and websites produced different tables. There is no historical consensus, and the disagreements are not small: one popular table calls the Chariot a no; ours calls it a yes. Another calls the Hanged Man a yes; ours calls it a maybe.
This site's table is published as data, with a strength from 1 to 3, a condition for the conditional answers, and a timing note for reversals. The point is not that our table is the ancient one. The point is that it is consistent, inspectable and openly editorial. You can download it, compare it with another table, and decide which system you are using.
That is also why the verdict table and the data study exist. A table presented without a method is folklore wearing a lab coat. A table with a method can be argued with.
What history does not settle
History can tell you that tarot is a game with a modern occult layer. It cannot tell you whether a card can predict a job offer. That is a separate question, and the evidence for prediction is not there. What a reading can do is give you a fixed image to react to, slow a decision down, and make you name the condition you were avoiding.
The psychology page covers why that experience can feel uncannily accurate. The short version: people are good at finding personal meaning in ambiguous statements, and they remember the hits more than the misses. That does not make the reflection worthless. It makes the claim of prediction unnecessary.
Sources
- Victoria and Albert Museum, “A history of tarot cards”, updated 16 July 2026. Used for the 78-card structure, the 1490 court cards, the 18th-century shift to divination, Etteilla and the Egyptian claim.
- John Last, “The Colorful History of Tarot Is as Mesmerizing as the Decks Themselves”, Smithsonian Magazine, 30 June 2025. Used for the 1437–1442 dating and the game origin.
- Mary K. Greer, “Turning Points in Tarot History”, Tarot Heritage. Used for Court de Gébelin, Etteilla, Lévi and the Golden Dawn sequence.
- A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1911), and Rachel Pollack, Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom (Thorsons, revised edition 2009). Standard references for the Rider–Waite–Smith symbolism and modern card readings.
Dates in this page are the ones given by the cited sources. Where sources disagree — for example, the publication year of Lévi's Dogme et Rituel — the page uses the broader period rather than choosing a date the sources do not support.
Did tarot originate in ancient Egypt?
There is no evidence for it. The Egyptian origin story was popularised in the 1780s, decades before hieroglyphs could be read. The earliest surviving tarot cards are Italian, from the 15th century, and were used for a trick-taking game. Museums and print historians treat the Egyptian claim as a romantic invention rather than a fact.
When did people start using tarot for fortune-telling?
In the late 18th century. Etteilla, the pen name of Jean-Baptiste Alliette, was reading cards professionally in Paris by the 1770s and produced a deck designed for divination. The practice spread through French and later English occult publishing. That is roughly 300 years after the cards first appeared.
Is there an original yes or no meaning for each card?
No. The 15th-century game had no yes/no answers, and the 18th- and 19th-century occult writers did not agree on a single table either. Modern yes/no lists are editorial systems. We publish ours with a strength, a condition and a timing note so it can be checked against other tables instead of presented as tradition.
Why does this site use Rider–Waite–Smith imagery?
It does not reproduce that deck, but it follows its symbolic vocabulary because most English-language tarot writing does. The Waite–Smith deck, illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith and first published in 1910, made the 78 cards narrative scenes rather than decorative emblems. That choice shaped how later readers describe the cards.
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