A Lineage of Tarot

The earliest documented tarot-like cards do not come from Europe at all. A fourteenth-century Mamluk Egyptian deck — four suits of ten numerals plus several court figures — reached the Iberian peninsula and northern Italy through Mediterranean trade, arriving in Venice and Andalusia well before any native European playing-card tradition took shape.

Once in Italy the cards circulated under names like naibi or carte da gioco. Nothing in the contemporary record suggests any esoteric, divinatory, or Egyptian-wisdom association at this stage. They were a new kind of gaming implement in aristocratic salons, ranked beside dice and chess pieces rather than grimoires.

In the mid-fifteenth century the Milanese rulers Filippo Maria Visconti and, later, Francesco Sforza commissioned court painters to produce several hand-painted, gold-leaf decks now collectively called the Visconti-Sforza. These decks were the first to give the trump row its own pictorial iconography — the Emperor, the Pope, the Tower, the Star, the Moon, the Sun — and supplied the visual prototype from which the twenty-two Major Arcana would eventually crystallize.

At this point tarocchi was still a trick-taking game rather like whist. The trump images are drawn from Renaissance allegory and Christian iconography, not from any hidden doctrine. Reading Visconti-Sforza as the origin of tarot's visual grammar, rather than of an occult tradition, is the historically cautious move.

Once woodblock printing spread in the sixteenth century, cards escaped aristocratic patronage and entered the wider market. Marseille in southern France became a major manufacturing centre, and dozens of card-makers issued their own versions of what we now collectively call the Tarot de Marseille — less a single deck than a family of closely related prints.

The 1760 edition by Nicolas Conver is the most widely circulated and effectively canonized the four suits, twenty-two atouts (the French word for trumps), and each card's basic composition. The pips in this era were still repeated suit emblems — there are no narrative scenes yet. Throughout the Marseille period tarot remained above all a card game; direct documentary evidence of divinatory use is essentially absent.

In 1781 the French scholar Antoine Court de Gébelin published an essay in his encyclopaedia Le Monde primitif claiming tarot was a surviving fragment of a lost Egyptian wisdom book — the so-called Book of Thoth. Modern historians and Egyptologists have decisively debunked this claim: Gébelin offered no credible evidence, and the Egyptian origin story is not taken seriously in scholarship today.

Yet it was precisely this disproved hypothesis that opened the door to tarot as a divinatory instrument. Shortly after Gébelin's essay, Jean-Baptiste Alliette — writing as Etteilla — released the first decks and manuals explicitly designed for cartomancy, binding the cards to elements, planets, and astrological meanings. The idea of tarot as fortune-telling tool enters Western culture here. Its historical premise is false, but the occult tradition it launched is real, and most of what follows is a correction to, or elaboration of, this moment.

Founded in London in 1888, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn is where modern tarot actually takes shape. Its members fused Jewish Kabbalah's Tree of Life, Western astrology, and ceremonial magic into a single integrated system. The twenty-two Major Arcana were mapped to the twenty-two Hebrew letters and the twenty-two paths on the Tree; the Minor Arcana were distributed across the ten sephiroth and four elements; the courts were assigned to the thirty-six decans of the zodiac.

Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers and William Wynn Westcott were the order's principal architects; later members included A. E. Waite, Aleister Crowley, the poet W. B. Yeats, and the artist Pamela Colman Smith. An internal document, the Book T, set out the correspondences in full. Almost every English-language tarot tradition since — including both Waite-Smith and Thoth — is working downstream of this single schema, however each author subsequently modified it.

In 1909 A. E. Waite, by then separated from the Golden Dawn, collaborated with Pamela Colman Smith — a fellow former member and a trained artist — to publish the deck most commonly called the Rider-Waite, but now more accurately known as the Waite-Smith. Smith was the actual visual author. For the first time in the history of tarot, she painted an individual narrative scene for every one of the pip cards, from the spilled cups of the Five of Cups to the craftsman at the bench in the Eight of Pentacles.

This single aesthetic choice changed everything. The Minor Arcana were no longer abstract suit repetitions but images that could be read as scenes — which is the foundation of contemporary intuitive reading. Almost every modern deck, Lunarcana included, descends visually from Waite-Smith, even when the redrawn style is utterly different. Smith herself received a one-time fee and was long omitted from the deck's name; the correction of that omission is still underway.

From 1938 onward, Aleister Crowley collaborated with the painter Lady Frieda Harris on the Thoth deck. Harris, an accomplished artist in her own right, reinterpreted every card using projective geometry and an Art Deco sensibility; Crowley provided the accompanying text in The Book of Thoth, pushing the Golden Dawn's Kabbalistic and astrological scheme in more radical directions. He renamed several Major Arcana — Strength became Lust, Justice became Adjustment — and replaced the Pages/Knights/Queens/Kings of the courts with Princesses/Princes/Queens/Knights.

Although the paintings were completed by 1944, the deck itself was not released as a commercial product until 1969 — Crowley had died in 1947, Harris in 1962. Thoth remains, alongside Waite-Smith, the most influential twentieth-century deck, especially beloved by readers who come to tarot through ceremonial magic. Its symbolic density and visual difficulty make it a late rather than an early deck in most learners' journeys.

After the Second World War tarot left the closed orders and re-entered the broader culture. Though Carl Gustav Jung never wrote directly about the cards, his archetype theory provided the framework for the psychological readings that flourished in the 1970s counterculture. Sallie Nichols's Jung and Tarot (1980) read the Major Arcana as the archetypal sequence of individuation, and remains a primary narrative for newcomers today.

In the same period the Chilean-French filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky revived the Marseille tradition, arguing for its visual continuity with Renaissance iconography rather than with the Golden Dawn's Kabbalistic system. Scholarly tarot writing was re-founded largely by Mary K. Greer, whose work from the 1980s onward combined rigorous historical research with a long-overdue feminist re-reading; her Women of the Golden Dawn restored figures the male-authored histories had obscured.

Since roughly 2010 the independent-publishing boom has produced an explosion of decks — queer, Afrofuturist, ecological, non-Western, artist-led — that treat tarot not as a closed system but as an open symbolic language. Lunarcana is one voice inside that generation.