What Are the Earliest Known Tarot Cards?

The use of Tarot cards is still evolving to this day, which is both a blessing and a curse but that’s a story for another time. What I was curious to know is just how far back do they go? What are the earliest known Tarot cards?

This is the short answer for a more detailed answer I recommend reading one of my books, The Tarot, Magic, Alchemy, Hermeticism, and Neoplatonism, or The Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination.

In the 14th century, Cards were introduced to European Christian culture through contact with the Islamic culture in Spain. Most early decks had four suits based on the Islamic Mamluk cards. In Northern Italy in the early 15th century, a fifth suit of trumps was added to the four-suit deck and these were the earliest Tarot decks. Cards were mainly designed to play card games and the new deck with trumps was designed to play a game that is the ancestor of bridge.

There are written records indicating that in 1392, King Charles VI of France commissioned three card decks from the artist Gringonneur, and it has been suggested that a hand-painted Tarot deck in the collection of the national library in Paris was one of those decks. This would allow France to claim the creation of the earliest Tarot deck instead of northern Italy. However, there is no evidence that any of the commissioned decks were Tarots, and the deck that is now in the French library has been shown to be one created in Venice c.1480.

The actual evidence indicates that the earliest Tarot decks were created in Ferrara, Bologna, and Milan.

From the beginning of their introduction to the West it seems that cards could also be used for divination. But at first, regular four-suit decks were used more often for this purpose. Early decks that were designed for divination had the meanings written on the cards or they could be used as a device to find a divinatory statement in the pages of a fortune book.

The earliest Tarot decks that I know of which were intended for divination are, first, a Spanish deck, Juego de Naypes, by Fernando de la Torre, created circa 1450. This deck had one trump, the Emperor, which qualifies it as an early Tarot. It was designed to predict a man’s future love interests. The second is Boiardo’s Triumph of the Vain World, created in Ferrara, Italy, between 1460 and 1494. This is the first deck to have a fool and twenty-one trumps in the fifth suit. But most modern readers would not recognize the list of trumps, which included figures like: Leisure, Fatigue, Desire, Secret, Doubt, Danger, and others. Also the four minor suits were: eyes, vases, arrows, and whips. This deck had the meanings written on each card in the form of a three-line poem.

The Knight of Vases and the Queen of Eyes from The Triumph of the Vain World

There is written evidence that Tarot divination was practiced in Spain, Northern Italy, and Russia (an account in Casanova’s memoirs) early in the 18th century, but the modern association of the Tarot with divination is considered to have begun with the French occultist, Court de Gebelin, who included an essay on the Tarot in the eighth volume of his occult encyclopedia, Monde Primitif, in 1781. He also was the first to express many of the modern misconceptions about the Tarot, including that the French Tarot, called the Tarot of Marseilles, is actually an occult text created in ancient Egypt. Although the Tarot images can be related to Egyptian Hermeticism, this does not mean that the cards originated in Egypt.

In the 19th century the Tarot became more popular for divination, especially with the creation of the first intentionally occult deck, The Grande Etteilla. Published in 1789. But oracle decks, particularly the Lenormand decks, which were based on four-suit decks of playing cards, were still more popular. In 1909 the Waite Smith Tarot, also known as the Ryder Waite Tarot, was published and over the 20th century it became world famous and helped to link the Tarot with divination in the minds of most people today.

If you’re trying to get a real person by email (and not a generic website script) I suggest The Tarot Guru. Just send your question and get a reply within a few hours from a Tarot reader sent straight to your email.