The origin of tarot lies not in the ancient Egyptian or Romani mystery people often imagine, but, surprisingly, in a card game of fifteenth-century Renaissance Italy. The nobility of that era enjoyed "trionfi," a card game with trump cards, and these lavishly painted picture cards are the ancestors of today's Major Arcana. In other words, tarot was not born a tool of divination but as playing cards much like an ordinary deck. The opulent hand-painted decks left by the Visconti-Sforza family survive even now as works of art.
Tarot bound deeply with divination in eighteenth-century France. In 1781 the scholar Antoine Court de Gébelin claimed that the lost wisdom of ancient Egypt lay hidden in the cards' images like a cipher; though this was later shown to be groundless romantic fancy, the captivating story stirred enormous interest. Around the same time, a figure working under the name "Etteilla" systematized tarot divination and published dedicated decks and guidebooks, opening for the first time the path of the professional tarot reader.
The form we know best today was born in England in 1909. It is the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, conceived by Arthur Edward Waite of the mystical order "the Golden Dawn" and drawn by the artist Pamela Colman Smith. The true innovation of this deck was to give all fifty-six Minor Arcana cards full scenic illustrations as well. Thanks to this, one could read a story intuitively from the pictures without memorizing every complex meaning, and tarot finally left the realm of a guarded few and passed into the hands of the public. Together with the older French classic, the "Tarot de Marseille," this Rider-Waite line forms one of the two great roots from which countless decks worldwide have branched.
In the twentieth century tarot transformed once more by meeting psychology. The concepts of archetype and synchronicity described by the analyst Carl Jung opened the way to reinterpret tarot's symbols as a "mirror of the unconscious"—the idea that a card drawn by chance can reflect a truth within. So today serious readers regard tarot not as a prophecy that nails down the future, but as a tool of reflection that clearly mirrors your present heart and situation to help you choose better.
As for its present, tarot is closer to us than ever. Countless independent artists draw new decks in their own sensibilities, friendly themed and oracle variants—cats, plants, and more—have multiplied, and smartphone apps and online readings let anyone lay out the cards with ease. Unlike its mysterious beginnings, tarot now stays beside us not as a tool that sternly pronounces fate, but as a kind ritual for self-understanding, comfort, and a calm look back over the day.