A Colorful History of Tarot Cards

The original meaning of the maps created 500 years ago is still mysterious.

Not far from one of Milan's last surviving medieval gates is the door of a tiny store wedged between closed store windows. Crossing its threshold, one enters a gilded world of esoteric symbols: stars, skeletons and fools. This is "II Meneghello", the workshop of some of the last known great tarot masters in Italy.

Inside, a portrait of the original owner, Oswaldo Menegazzi, hangs on the cash register. While for many taro may be a game or hobby, for Menegazzi it was always first and foremost an art. Before his death in 2021, he became world-famous for his meticulous, hand-painted reproductions of some of the world's oldest and most legendary tarot decks. His desk, littered with paints and materials, remains just as he left it.

Menegazzi's niece Cristina Dorsini, an art historian and tarot expert, took over as tour guide after his death, showing visitors the masterpieces created by her late uncle. Among the stacks of books are three tarot decks: a cat-themed tarot, a Jewish tarot and a tiny tarot tarocchi di fumatori (tarot for smokers), which features a character of Death enjoying a smoking pipe.

Menegazzi has published more than 100 such decks, including many of his own invention. "Each deck offers us 'lo scrigno di sapienza' - a treasure trove of wisdom," says Dorsini.

What unites these various decks is their standard form: as a rule, 78 cards divided into 56 numbered "minor arcana", very similar to modern numbered playing cards, and 22 trumps - "senior arcana", each of which has a mysterious character.

Each card is rich in symbolism: decorated with pentacles, stars, bowls, and wands; bearing names such as "Peace", "Justice", and "Moderation"; and depicting enigmatic characters such as "The Fool", "The Lovers", or "The Hermit". These cards may have originated in 15th century Italy as an elaborate game, but over the last 500 years they have taken on a completely different meaning.

It is the ambiguity of these figures that attracts fortune tellers who use combinations of images to open a window into the future. Dorsini, following his uncle's example, is skeptical of such use. "We don't do fortune-telling," reads a sign near the cash register, which often causes arguments with the store's customers.

Like her uncle, Dorsini was initially drawn to these cards because of their beautiful artistic execution and because of her desire as a historian to understand the origins of their imagery. "The Tarot was a figurative culture that originated here in Italy, in Milan," she says. "But today, the symbolism of each card is really hard for us to understand."

In fact, Menegazzi's store became famous due to his years of researching, studying and meticulously reproducing the historical decks from which many of the most common tarot figures originated. Some of these old decks, of which only a few cards survive, are extremely rare. In 2021, Menegazzi became the first person to reproduce one of these decks in nearly 600 years.

In the former stables of the Italian royal palace in Turin, Federica Pozzi, director of the scientific laboratories at the La Venaria Reale Center for the Conservation and Restoration of Cultural Heritage, and her team of 12 scientists analyze everything from large-scale paintings to ancient Egyptian sarcophagi to some of the oldest Tarot cards in the world. Upstairs, in the restoration lab, a specialist applies paint - removable so that corrections can be made in the future - with a tiny brush.

Researchers from around the world, including Pozzi's team, are doing a kind of historical detective work with these maps. Working with six different institutions - the Morgan Library and Museum in New York, the Yale University Library, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, Yale University's Institute for Cultural Heritage Preservation, and the Art Institute of Chicago - and drawing on other collections in Italy, Pozzi was part of the first team to use advanced imaging techniques, including macro-X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy, to detect invisible layers in Tarot cards.

Researchers at Yale have managed to recognize the paper makers' watermarks and accurately date one of the world's oldest tarot decks with impressive precision - between 1437 and 1442. These decks, collectively known as the Visconti-Sforza decks, represent the earliest example of modern tarot, incorporating many of the same suits and trumps.

Historical documents indicate that the oldest of these, an incomplete deck of Visconti di Modrone, was commissioned as a wedding gift for the daughter of Filippo Maria Visconti, then Duke of Milan, and her fiance Francesco Sforza, the founder of the influential family.

For years, historians have speculated that an unusually beautiful deck like this one might have been a mere work of art. However, Pozzi's research has shown that the surviving cards show signs of regular use: worn edges, lost pigments, and peeling layers.

Her lab confirmed that several cards are replacements, suggesting that their owners wanted a full deck and supporting the idea that these cards were intended for games.

Some scholars, such as tarot historian Andrea Vitale, argue that the figures on such cards were meant to suggest a "scala mistica," or mystical ladder, teaching willful players moral and ethical principles-or perhaps satirically mocking those principles by allowing "fools" and "lovers" to trump popes.

All of this evidence suggests that the earliest tarot deck may have been used only for a courtly card game, a sophisticated pastime for the "super-rich." Yet tarot has never been easy to define, nor its origins.

Menegazzi's workshop in Milan has one of his reproductions of the Sola Busca tarot, the earliest complete tarot deck extant, dating from the late 15th century, and it is very different from the modern tarot.

Instead of the standard major arcana, here is a series of very different, disturbing images: mysterious figures from antiquity or famous villains, such as the Roman emperor Nero enjoying the burning of infants. Occultist Peter Mark Adams called the deck "persistently and hopelessly strange," writing that "even after long study, the deck retains its mystique."

For Adams, this strangeness suggests that these cards have an underlying purpose beyond mere entertainment. After all, tarot emerged at a very specific moment in European history, when the wealthy courts of Renaissance Italy maintained armies of scholars to recover the hidden wisdom of ancient texts.

It was in this milieu that occult writers first began to experiment with the idea that such cards might be the key to greater wisdom. In 1770, Jean-Baptiste Alliette (under the pseudonym Etteia) published How to Amuse Yourself with a Deck of Cards, which was one of the world's first guides to cartomancy, that is, divination by cards, a method still used by many fortune-tellers today.

Around the same time, the French pastor Antoine Coeur de Gebelin, in his work Le Monde Primitif (The Primitive World), published from 1773 to 1782, rewrote the story of the origin of the tarot and suggested for the first time that these cards were something much more than just a game.

"If we heard that there still existed a work of the ancient Egyptians, one of their books, surviving the flames that consumed their magnificent libraries, and containing their purest doctrine on interesting subjects, all would no doubt be eager to know about it," he wrote. "If we were to add that this book is very common in the greater part of Europe, that for many centuries it has been in the hands of all, the wonder would certainly be increased."

Cours de Gebelin speculated that it was the tarot that contained such a book. Cours de Gebelin's utterly speculative description, whose readers included Ludovic XVI, sparked a European fascination with all things ancient and Egyptian - and forever linked the myth of the tarot's origins to the stereotype of "gypsy" fortune-tellers, to whom Gebelin attributed the preservation of the cards over millennia and their transfer to Europe.

In fact, "there is absolutely no evidence of Roma involvement in the origin of Tarot cards or their significant role in their dissemination," says Egil Asprem, a professor at Stockholm University who studies the role of Roma in the European history of magic.

In the mountains southwest of Bologna in a small stone house is the International Tarot Museum, founded by Morena Poltronieri and Ernesto Fazioli in 2007. The museum houses tarot fold-out books, tarot embroideries, and even tarot cards that you can eat and drink. Each is both a reinterpretation and a reference to past spiritual uses of the tarot. "The idea of the card is universal," says Fazioli. "But each artist has a different goal."

In 1933, psychiatrist Karl Jung attributed the power of tarot images to the use of "psychological images" - archetypal symbols such as collapsing towers and stumbling fools that, when combined with each other, can take on an infinite number of meanings.

Shortly after Jung made this point, the tarot became central to the New Age revival in America and has undergone thousands of subsequent reinterpretations as a tool for spiritual practice. The Mother of Peace Tarot, published since the early 1980s, reimagines the deck through the lens of feminism.

The "Black Power" tarot, recently created by artists King Han and Michael Eaton, reconstructs the older arcana around images of black celebrities. Collaborative prequests such as the Slow Holler tarot attract dozens of artists from different regions and marginalized groups who give their iconic images their own visions.

Tarot has been growing in popularity again recently, thanks in part to interest in cartomancy on social networks such as TikTok. Some sellers say their sales doubled or started during periods of conflict, including the 2008 financial crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic.

Many practitioners are skeptical of this boom. Jessica Lanyadou, a San Francisco-based astrologer and tarotologist, says too many people think the cards can help "manage our destiny" by guiding every little decision with simple answers.

A more common irritant for longtime tarot fans may be the irony with which some new users approach the cards. "People have a habit of saying, 'Oh, I'm too smart to take this seriously'," says Lanyadoux. Helen Farley, a researcher who has written about the history of these cards, calls tarot "a mirror of the society in which it is used."

"Looking in that mirror today, we can see a more atomistic world in which tarot is just another product to be branded and sold. All around us, however, tarot is experiencing a new birth. Find the right deck and study its history, and you might discover part of our shared future as well," says Farley.

For millennia, inquisitive souls have explored various phenomena of the world, from the palm of their hand to moldy cheese, to divine supernatural knowledge of their destiny. Or sometimes just for fun.

Reading the lines on the palm of the hand - chiromancy - probably originated in India and then spread to the Middle East and Europe. As Aristotle believed, the creases in the palm of the hand indicate longevity, and by the Renaissance, chiromancy had become so popular that it was condemned by the Pope.

In Shakespeare, the hero Othello told his wife Desdemona that her hand "demonstrates fertility and a generous heart." Not all palm predictions are so lucky: According to an English manual published around 1700, if there is a small half-moon shape on the "middle line" of a person's hand, they are destined to suffer from "colds".

Tea leaf divination probably originated in China - the birthplace of tea - thousands of years ago, when people first began to study the moist residue left at the bottom of cups. After tea was introduced to Europe, tea leaf divination became a popular pastime for English women, especially during the Victorian era.

Hardworking fortune tellers gave meaning to the images they saw in leaves, such as animals, objects, numbers or letters, and interpreted them for curious souls. For example, the shape of a mushroom, according to a 19th-century manual, meant "the sudden separation of lovers after a quarrel."

Tyromancy (cheese fortune-telling) is an unusual method of divination, first mentioned (with derision) by a Greek citizen of Ephesus in the second century CE, in modern-day Turkey, that works best with cheese varieties such as blue cheese and Swiss, as the fortune teller predicts fate by the moldy veins and holes.

According to modern practicing fortune teller Jennifer Billock, the method gained popularity in medieval and early modern England, where it was used to predict crops, a child's future or even a girl's romantic destiny.

According to Billock, the hopeful girl carved the names of suitors into a piece of Cheshire cheese and watched to see which one molded first, indicating her future husband.

Seeing images in a crystal ball or crystallomancy is one way of "divining" or predicting the future from the reflective surface. It is believed that Celtic Druids divined by crystal ball, and nomadic Gypsies have practiced the art for centuries.

After its revival in Victorian England in 1905, a scholar explained that a fortune teller can see either a clear image or a misty cloud that dissipates and reveals a vision of the future. But the conditions must be right.

According to 1920s guidelines, the room for divination should be of moderate temperature and "filled with dim light," and the diviner should not have eaten the day before.