🔮 Module 2 — The Origins of Tarot: A Renaissance Card Game | Tarot Course
- 2 days ago
- 7 min read
Free Course by Everything IFS Academy | Divination Series
Module 2 — The Origins of Tarot: A Renaissance Card Game
The oldest tarot cards in the world live in museums and private collections, and they are breathtaking: nearly hand-sized panels layered in gold leaf, painted by a master's workshop for one of the most powerful families in Italy. Princes and heralds glitter against tooled golden skies. These cards were made around the middle of the 1400s, and everything about them announces wealth, taste, and dynastic pride. Here is what is missing from the scene: any trace of fortune-telling. No mystic commissioned these cards, no one read futures with them, and no one who held them would have understood the question. The oldest tarot decks on earth were made for a game, and for roughly three hundred years after, a game is all tarot was. That documented story, which is stranger and better than the legend that later replaced it, is this lesson.
Carte da Trionfi: The Game of Triumphs
Playing cards reached Europe in the late 1300s, most likely through trade with the Islamic world, and they spread fast. By the early 1400s the four-suited deck was a fixture of European life, dealt in taverns and courts alike, and Italians were as devoted to it as anyone.
Then, somewhere in northern Italy in the early 1400s, someone had an idea that changed card-playing history: add a fifth set of cards to the deck, a series of picture cards that outrank everything else. These new cards were called trionfi, "triumphs," and the expanded deck was called carte da trionfi, cards of triumphs. In play, a triumph card beat any ordinary suit card, which is exactly what English speakers still mean by a "trump" card; the word trump itself descends from trionfi.
The pictures on those trumps were not random. They came straight out of the visual culture of the Italian Renaissance:
The triumph procession.
Renaissance cities staged elaborate parades in which allegorical figures and conquering heroes rolled past in sequence, each "triumphing" over the one before. The trumps work the same way: a ranked parade of images, each outranking the last.
Petrarch's I Trionfi.
The beloved 14th-century poet had written a famous sequence of poems in which great forces triumph over one another in turn: Love is overcome by Chastity, Chastity by Death, Death by Fame, Fame by Time, and Time by Eternity. Scholars still debate how directly the poem shaped the cards, and the honest answer is that the influence was the broader triumph culture Petrarch crowned rather than a card-by-card translation. But the family resemblance is unmistakable: a ladder of allegories, each conquering the last.
The shared imagery of the age.
Virtues, emperors, popes, the wheel of fortune, the Last Judgment: the trump subjects were the common visual furniture of late medieval and Renaissance minds, instantly readable to any player at the table.
That readability matters. To the people who invented tarot, the trumps were not occult secrets. They were the opposite: images so familiar that an entire culture could rank them in a parade.
The Visconti-Sforza Decks
The earliest surviving tarot cards come from the court of Milan, and they arrive wrapped in one of the great dynastic stories of the Renaissance.
Filippo Maria Visconti, the reclusive Duke of Milan, presided over a court that adored symbolic display and intellectual games, and he is the most likely patron of the earliest luxury trionfi decks. His only surviving child, Bianca Maria Visconti, married Francesco Sforza in 1441, a brilliant mercenary commander of modest birth. When the duke died without a male heir, Francesco took Milan and founded the Sforza dynasty, fusing the two family lines. The new dynasty needed legitimacy, and it pursued legitimacy the Renaissance way: through spectacle, art, and objects that announced authority.
The hand-painted trionfi decks were part of that program. Three famous partial decks survive from this world, and they are the oldest tarot cards known:
The Visconti-Sforza deck (often dated around 1451), the most complete, with 74 of its original 78 cards surviving, today split between the Morgan Library in New York, the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo, and the Colleoni family's private collection.
The Cary-Yale deck, an earlier and even more lavish commission, surviving in 67 cards.
The Brera-Brambilla deck, surviving in 48 cards.
Most of the surviving cards are attributed to the workshop of Bonifacio Bembo, a painter in Sforza service whose style carries the elegant lines and ornamental gold of the late Gothic courtly tradition. And the dynastic purpose shows right on the cards: scholars have long read two of the deck's crowned figures, the cards later traditions would call the Empress and the Emperor (each with its own entry in the Major Arcana course), as portraits of Bianca Maria and Francesco themselves. The family literally painted itself into the deck.
So what were these cards for? Three things, all of them visible at once: play, because trionfi was a genuine game the court actually enjoyed; prestige, because a gilded deck from a master's workshop was a luxury object on the level of jewelry; and dynastic display, because every heraldic device and family motto worked into the artwork said Visconti-Sforza to anyone who picked up a hand. Wedding gift, status symbol, entertainment. Not one document from this world connects the cards to divination.
From Tarocchi to Tarot
Around the turn of the 1500s, Italians began calling the game and its deck by a new name: tarocchi (the singular is tarocco). No one knows for certain where the word came from, which is its own small honest mystery; what's certain is that the name stuck and started traveling.
The game spread the way popular games do. It moved through the Italian cities first, and each region developed its own personality: Bologna, Ferrara, Florence, and Milan each settled on slightly different trump orders and local customs, a reminder that early tarot was a living folk game rather than a single fixed canon. French armies occupying Milan around the turn of the 16th century carried the game home, where tarocchi became tarot, the name the rest of the world inherited. From France and Italy it spread into Switzerland, the German-speaking lands, and beyond.
Picture the deck's actual life in these centuries through a Henri in a Lyon tavern in the 1650s: he plays tarot the way his neighbors play any card game, for small stakes and bragging rights, slapping down a trump to steal a trick. The card in his hand might show Death or the Wheel of Fortune, and it means exactly as much to him as the queen of spades means to a poker player: a rank, a value, a way to win the hand.
The Game Centuries
For roughly three hundred years, that was tarot: ordinary entertainment, played across half of Europe.
Printing transformed it. The hand-painted ducal decks were one-of-a-kind treasures, but woodcut printing made cheap, standardized decks available to everyone, and through the 1600s and 1700s one woodcut pattern gradually became the continental standard. Produced heavily in the French city of Marseille, among other places, it became known as the Tarot de Marseille, and it fixed the imagery most of the world now thinks of as "classic" tarot. That deck has its own full teaching in this course's lesson on the famous decks; here it matters as the game era's crowning product, the people's tarot, printed by the thousands for play.
It's worth saying plainly, because it surprises almost everyone: the game never died. Tarot is still played as a card game today in France and elsewhere, with official rules and tournaments, by players who have no interest whatsoever in divination. The game centuries never actually ended; the divination tradition grew up alongside them.
The Record and the Legend
Here is where the documented record stands at the eve of 1781, the year everything changed. Tarot was born in northern Italy in the early 1400s as a trick-taking game. Its trumps drew on the public allegorical imagery of the Renaissance. Its oldest surviving decks were courtly luxury objects. It spread across Europe as popular entertainment, and only in the later 1700s do the first documented traces of anyone using tarot cards for fortune-telling begin to appear, at the very end of the game centuries.
Nothing in that record, not one document, image, or artifact, connects tarot to ancient Egypt. And yet for more than two centuries, millions of people have believed tarot carries the encoded wisdom of Egyptian priests, and the tradition itself long told that story as its own origin. That belief did not come from nowhere. It came from one man, one essay, and one of the most consequential mistakes in the history of ideas, and it deserves to be told properly rather than waved away, because the legend built the tarot the world knows today. That story has its own lesson in this course: the Egyptian legend and the occult reinvention. Both stories, the Renaissance record and the Egyptian legend, are true teachings of tarot. One is true as history. The other is true as the tradition's own self-portrait, and this course honors each in its place.
Disclaimer:
Everything IFS Academy is an independent educational platform and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the IFS Institute. While we strive for accuracy, errors can occur, and users are encouraged to cross-reference critical information. These courses present divination systems and their traditions for educational, historical, cultural, and self-reflection purposes only. They describe what these systems and their traditions teach and how their readers have traditionally interpreted them; they do not constitute fortune-telling services, predictions, religious instruction, spiritual direction, or an endorsement of any metaphysical claim, and they should never be used as a basis for medical, financial, legal, or safety decisions. They do not constitute therapy, mental health treatment, clinical training, or crisis support, and they should not be used as a substitute for professional mental health care.
Crisis Support: 🚨
If you are experiencing a mental health crisis, feel unsafe, feel at risk of harming yourself or someone else, or feel too overwhelmed to safely use self-directed practices, please pause this material and reach out for immediate support. Contact a licensed mental health professional, call or text 988 in the U.S. or Canada, or use your local emergency or crisis resources.
Comments