The Ideas, reception

Tarot:
the invented pedigree,
and the real one

Ask where tarot comes from and you will be told: ancient Egypt, the priests of Thoth, wisdom smuggled through the centuries in pictures. It is a wonderful story. It is also, in every checkable particular, false, and the true story is better, because we can name the man who invented the legend and the year he published it.

Is tarot Egyptian? The evidence, dated

Tarot is not Egyptian: every dated source places it in fifteenth-century Italy, and its Egyptian origin first appears in print in Paris in 1781. The table gives each key fact, the evidence for it and its status.

Checked on 1 November 2026, each source at the link in the table or in the list of sources below.

Where does tarot come from?

Tarot comes from fifteenth-century northern Italy, where it appears as a game (Milan, Ferrara, Bologna): the earliest documentary mention of naibi a trionfi, cards with triumphs, dates from 1440. The early name is trionfi, later tarocchi: a trick-taking card game with a fifth suit of permanent trumps. Among the oldest surviving decks are three painted for the Visconti and Sforza courts of Milan between about 1440 and 1455, luxury objects for players, not oracles. For roughly three hundred years the historical record shows people doing one thing with these cards: gambling.

Who invented the Egyptian origin of tarot?

The Egyptian origin of tarot was invented in 1781 by Antoine Court de Gébelin, a French Huguenot pastor and scholar, in volume 8 of his encyclopaedic Monde primitif. He announced that an Egyptian book, the only one to escape the fires that destroyed the libraries of Egypt, was still in everyone’s hands: the tarot, a game unknown in Paris but well known in Italy, Germany and Provence. A second essay in the same volume, signed only M. le C. de M***, gave it the name that stuck, the Book of Thoth, read the 22 trumps as the letters of a sacred alphabet and explained how to divine with them. Neither offered evidence, and neither could have had any: they wrote four decades before Champollion deciphered hieroglyphs, at a moment when “Egyptian” functioned in French letters as a synonym for primordial wisdom. Court de Gébelin’s own essay even prints the rules of the game, as a friend explained them to him. Within a few years the Paris print seller Jean-Baptiste Alliette, who wrote as Etteilla, had turned the idea into a business: four booklets on the occult tarot (1783-1785) and some of the earliest tarot designs made for divination rather than play.

So the “ancient Egyptian tarot” is younger than the steam engine.

What is Hermetic tarot?

Hermetic tarot is the occult system that ties each trump to a Hebrew letter, a path of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life and a planet, sign or element, built in France and England from the 1850s. Here honesty cuts the other way: this connection is real, and it can be dated. By 1856 Éliphas Lévi had mapped the twenty-two trumps onto the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, the Bateleur (later the Magician) on aleph and the Fool on shin, welding tarot to Kabbalah in a chapter he titled Le livre d’Hermès, the Book of Hermes; the pairing of trumps and letters went back to the volume of 1781, the order was his. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (the name is not decoration) systematised the whole thing from 1888 and moved the Fool to aleph: trumps assigned to the paths of the Tree of Life, suits to elements, cards to planets and signs. Out of that workshop came the two decks that define the modern imagination of tarot: Waite-Smith (1909) and Crowley and Harris’s Thoth (1944).

That lineage is Hermetic, but it is the Hermeticism of the Renaissance revival and the occult orders, not of second-century Alexandria. Nothing in the Corpus Hermeticum, the Asclepius or the Emerald Tablet knows anything about cards, for the excellent reason that playing cards did not reach Europe until the 1370s.

What is the Thoth tarot?

The Thoth tarot is the 78-card deck designed by Aleister Crowley, a former member of the Golden Dawn, and painted by Frieda Harris; its cards were first published as illustrations in Crowley’s The Book of Thoth in 1944, and as a pack of cards only later. The book’s subtitle, A Short Essay on the Tarot of the Egyptians, kept the label of 1781 alive, and the deck borrows the name of Thoth, the Egyptian god whom the essay of 1781 already called the inventor of writing. Like every tarot, it has no Egyptian source: only the label is Egyptian.

What does tarot share with ancient Hermeticism?

What tarot shares with ancient Hermeticism is an idea, not a history: correspondence, the assumption that the levels of reality answer one another. Strip away the fake pedigree and something substantial remains. A tarot system works (as a symbolic machine, whatever you think it does or doesn’t reveal) only on that assumption: that a card can stand for a planet, a planet for a temperament, a temperament for a moment in a life. That assumption is correspondence, and it is authentically ancient. In that sense tarot is not a Hermetic relic. It is a late, practical child of Hermetic cosmology, which is a stronger claim than the Egyptian one, and true. That idea of correspondence is the one later compressed, from the Emerald Tablet, into the slogan as above, so below.

Did playing cards come from Egypt?

Playing cards did come to Europe from Egypt. Mamluk decks, with suits of cups, coins, swords and polo-sticks, reached Italy and Spain around the 1370s, and our suits descend from them. Court de Gébelin was pointing at the right country and the wrong thing: the medium is Egyptian, the mysticism is French and eighteenth-century.

This site is drawing its own deck, with the earliest attested form of each image and its date recorded beside the card. It does history of ideas, not divination.

Key facts

First appearance	Italy, by 1440 (trionfi, later tarocchi)
Original use	A trick-taking card game, not divination
Early surviving decks	Visconti-Sforza, painted for the Milanese court, c. 1440-1455
Egyptian origin claim	Antoine Court de Gébelin, Monde primitif, vol. 8, 1781
The name “Book of Thoth”	An essay signed M. le C. de M***, same volume, 1781
Early divination method	Etteilla (Jean-Baptiste Alliette), 1783-1785
Hermetic systematisation	Éliphas Lévi (by 1856) → Golden Dawn (from 1888)
Defining modern decks	Waite-Smith (1909); Crowley-Harris Thoth (1944)
The real ancient link	Correspondence, not Egypt, not cards

Fair questions

Is tarot Egyptian?

No. Tarot is documented as a card game in Italy by 1440, and the Egyptian story first appears in print in 1781, in volume 8 of Court de Gébelin’s Monde primitif. He wrote four decades before Champollion’s 1822 letter on the hieroglyphs, so no one could have checked his claim, and no evidence has appeared since.

Who invented tarot, and when?

No inventor is known. A card game called trionfi was played in Italy by 1440, and among the oldest surviving decks are three painted for the Visconti and Sforza of Milan between about 1440 and 1455. The name tarocchi, tarot, replaced trionfi in the early sixteenth century.

What is Hermetic tarot?

The occult system laid over the cards in the nineteenth century: Éliphas Lévi tied the 22 trumps to the Hebrew letters by 1856, and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, founded in London in 1888, added the paths of the Tree of Life, the planets, the signs and the elements. Tarot is Hermetic in that modern sense; the ancient Hermetica predate playing cards in Europe by more than a thousand years.

What is the Book of Thoth in tarot?

A name, not an Egyptian book. An essay printed in 1781 called the tarot the Book of Thoth, and Aleister Crowley reused the name in 1944 for The Book of Thoth, his guide to the deck painted by Frieda Harris. A real Egyptian text that its modern editors call the Book of Thoth survives on over forty Demotic papyri of the Graeco-Roman period (Jasnow and Zauzich 2005), but it is a dialogue about scribal knowledge, temples and wisdom, with no cards in it.

Why does the Egyptian myth survive?

Because it is a better story than ‘Milanese card game’, because Etteilla had a product to sell, because the Golden Dawn’s genuinely sophisticated system gave the legend intellectual cover it never earned, and because Crowley’s own deck still appeared, in 1944, in a book subtitled the Tarot of the Egyptians.

Sources & further reading

• Michael Dummett, The Game of Tarot (London: Duckworth, 1980): the standard history; Open Library record.
• Ronald Decker, Thierry Depaulis & Michael Dummett, A Wicked Pack of Cards: The Origins of the Occult Tarot (London: Duckworth, 1996); Wellcome Collection record.
• Jonathan Allen, review of Tarocchi: Le origini, le carte, la fortuna (Accademia Carrara, Bergamo, 27 February-2 June 2026), The Burlington Magazine 168, no. 1479 (June 2026), burlington.org.uk (consulted 1 November 2026).
• Lombardia Beni Culturali, “Carte da tarocchi”, Accademia Carrara, Bergamo, record C0120-00044, lombardiabeniculturali.it (consulted 1 November 2026).
• Antoine Court de Gébelin, Monde primitif, vol. VIII (Paris, 1781): “Du jeu des tarots” from p. 365, the source of the Egyptian claim, and “Recherches sur les tarots” by M. le C. de M*** from p. 395; Getty Research Institute copy at the Internet Archive.
• Jean-François Champollion, Lettre à M. Dacier relative à l’alphabet des hiéroglyphes phonétiques (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1822); BnF catalogue.
• Etteilla (Jean-Baptiste Alliette), Maniere de se récréer avec le jeu de cartes nommées Tarots, 4 parts (Amsterdam and Paris, 1783-1785), Wellcome Collection record; Etteilla’s engraving of the tarot as the leaves of the Book of Thoth (Paris, 1780s?), Wellcome Collection.
• Éliphas Lévi, Dogme et rituel de la haute magie, 2 vols (Paris: G. Baillière, 1856), BnF catalogue; 2nd edition (1861), vol. 2, “Le livre d’Hermès”, scan at the Internet Archive.
• Museum of Freemasonry, London, The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, its members and related bodies (GBR 1991 GD), AIM25 catalogue (consulted 1 November 2026).
• “A Description of the Cards of the Tarot, with their Attributions”, The Equinox I/8 (London, September 1912), IAPSOP copy at the Internet Archive.
• Israel Regardie, The Golden Dawn, vol. 1 (Chicago: The Aries Press, 1937): the table “Attribution of the Tarot Trumps”.
• The Occult Review 10, no. 6 (London: William Rider & Son, December 1909): “Notes of the Month”, pp. 300-301, and A. E. Waite, “The Tarot: A Wheel of Fortune”, from p. 307; IAPSOP copy at the Internet Archive.
• Victoria and Albert Museum, Rider-Waite-Smith deck, “The Fool”, E.423-1934, collections.vam.ac.uk (consulted 1 November 2026).
• Aleister Crowley (the Master Therion), The Book of Thoth, The Equinox III/5 (1944), artist executant Frieda Harris; Open Library record of the 1969 reprint.
• Richard Jasnow & Karl-Theodor Zauzich, The Ancient Egyptian Book of Thoth, 2 vols (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2005), publisher’s page (consulted 1 November 2026).
• Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy (Cambridge UP, 2012): on Egyptomania and invented pedigrees.