tarocchi

The word tarocchi — singular tarocco — appears in northern Italian records from the 1440s, describing a deck of cards expanded beyond the standard four suits to include a series of painted trump cards, the trionfi (triumphs). The earliest documented tarot decks, the Visconti-Sforza cards commissioned by the dukes of Milan around 1440, were luxury objects hand-painted on vellum, quite remote from the mass-produced cardboard of later centuries. The etymology of tarocchi is genuinely disputed: the most plausible derivation connects it to the river Taro, a tributary of the Po in the Emilia-Romagna region, near the town of Fornovo where playing cards were manufactured. Another theory derives it from the Arabic taraha ('to reject, put aside'), on the grounds that certain cards in an earlier game were removed from play. Neither etymology has been decisively settled, and the word remains one of the more honestly unresolved puzzles in the history of games.

For at least two centuries after their invention, tarot cards served primarily as playing cards for the game of tarocchi — a complex trick-taking game that spread from northern Italy into France (where it became tarot), Switzerland, and German-speaking lands. The twenty-two pictorial trump cards — the Fool, the Magician, the High Priestess, Justice, the Wheel of Fortune, and so on — were game-playing instruments before they were instruments of divination. Their allegorical imagery drew on the visual culture of the Renaissance: figures from Petrarch's Trionfi poem, personifications of virtues and vices, astronomical bodies, and theological concepts. This was the pictorial language available to educated audiences of the 15th century; it was put to work as trump-card iconography.

The transformation of tarot from a card game into a divination tool occurred gradually and largely in France during the late 18th century. The Swiss occultist Antoine Court de Gébelin published in 1781 the influential but entirely fabricated claim that the tarot was the Book of Thoth, an ancient Egyptian sacred text preserved in the form of playing cards. This invention — without any historical basis, as tarot predates European contact with any Egyptian textual tradition by only a few centuries and was demonstrably northern Italian — proved spectacularly successful as a cultural story. It gave the cards a mystical pedigree that appealed to an Enlightenment-era fascination with ancient mysteries. Etteilla, a Parisian occultist, promptly issued a redesigned deck for cartomancy, and the fortune-telling tradition was born.

Today the game of tarot is still actively played in France, Switzerland, and Austria, almost entirely unknown to the millions who use tarot cards for divination. The French Tarot federation has over 700,000 registered players; tournaments are held across the country; the game requires sophisticated strategy and card memory. Meanwhile, the Rider-Waite-Smith deck of 1909, with its fully illustrated pip cards designed by Pamela Colman Smith under the direction of Arthur Edward Waite, became the visual template for modern divination tarot worldwide. The two traditions — game and oracle — share a deck and a word and almost nothing else. The painted triumphs of Renaissance Milan have split into two parallel objects that inhabit separate cultural worlds.