What is the true origin of the Tarot? Not Egypt, not Atlantis, and not a secret priesthood guarding lost wisdom beneath the sand. In this chapter from The Ideology of Tarot, the Tarot is placed back into its real cultural and historical context: the processions, Mystery Plays, mnemonic images, and organic cosmology of medieval and Renaissance Europe. From Petrarch's Trionfi and the Visconti courts, through the Reformation, Rosicrucianism, and Freemasonry, to Court de Gébelin and Etteilla, the text follows the slow transformation of the cards from a living picture of cosmic harmony into a reconstructed occult system. The tragedy of modern occult Tarot, the author argues, is not that it invented new symbols, but that it forgot the world from which the old ones came.
Between the middle of the fifteenth century and the second half of the eighteenth century, the conditions for the emergence of modern occult Tarot were gradually taking shape. This was an age marked by the decline of the old operative mysteries and the birth of new speculative ones; an age of religious conflict, Reformation and Counter-Reformation; an age of the suppression of imagination, the rise of Puritanism, the emergence of Rosicrucianism, and the birth of modern thought.
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* The images on the cards are accompanied by titles that occasionally differ from the traditional ones. The Magician is replaced by Bracus (Branchus, son of Apollo and founder of the sanctuary of Apollo at Didyma). The Emperor becomes Aenobarbus ("Red-Beard"), a cognomen of the Domitii family from which Emperor Nero descended. The Pope is renamed Le Grand Pastor ("The Great Shepherd"). Justice becomes La Balance ("The Scales"), Death becomes Libitina (the Roman goddess of the dead, death, and funerals), Temperance becomes Le Verseau ("Aquarius"), the Devil is replaced by L'Antéchrist ("The Antichrist"), and the Sun by Aemathien (Aemathion or Emathion, the son of Cephalus and Aurora in Roman mythology, and of Tithonus and Eos in Greek mythology). See: Julij Berkovski, Tarot: An Ancient System of Symbols, Logos, Belgrade, 2007, pp. 16-17.
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However, contemporary Tarot historiography does not regard these claims as proven. Instead, the development of Tarot de Marseille is generally explained through the continuity of Italian and French card traditions between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries.
In his book Fortuna's Wheel, Nigel Jackson points out that Tarot is virtually absent from the writings of the major Hermetic authors of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. Most likely, in the eyes of the initiates of those centuries, Tarot did not occupy the central role that it later acquired among modern occultists. Nevertheless, Jackson provides several examples in which Tarot or related ideas appear to be mentioned.
At the end of the sixteenth century, the French theologian Pierre de la Primaudaye condemned playing cards as an invention of the pagan god Mercury.
In the 1651 English edition of Agrippa's Occult Philosophy, one encounters a passage derived from Plato in which the god Thoth is mentioned as the inventor of cards and dice. Jackson further refers to the treatise Kore Kosmou, contained within the Corpus Hermeticum, which describes how Hermes Trismegistus, in the age preceding the mythical Flood, inscribed his secret wisdom upon tablets and concealed them within the World of Imagination, conceived as a true sanctuary that would preserve his wisdom for future generations. There is also an allusion to Tarot, under the name ROTA, as a divinatory instrument in The Fame and Confession of the Rosicrucians of 1612. Whether such references constitute direct evidence of an established modern occult Tarot tradition is open to debate. Yet they demonstrate that, long before the works of Court de Gébelin and Etteilla, certain symbolic associations already existed that linked cards, ancient wisdom, Hermes, Thoth, prophecy, and hidden knowledge. These scattered references would eventually provide fertile ground for the occult reinterpretation of Tarot that emerged during the late eighteenth century.
In The Mystical Origins of the Tarot, Paul Huson draws attention to a theory that includes the celebrated Italian poet Petrarch among the possible influences on the development of Tarot. According to this view, Petrarch's poem I Trionfi (The Triumphs) may have contributed the name given to the earliest forms of Tarot, namely trionfi ("triumphs"). Indeed, Petrarch lived in Milan from 1353 onward, enjoying the patronage and hospitality of the powerful Visconti family, whose name is itself closely associated with the earliest Tarot decks.
In fourteenth-century Italy, the term trionfi was used to designate painted panels carried in religious and civic processions and public festivals. These visual representations, the triumphs, were presented as allegorical themes, each one overcoming or surpassing the previous in the significance of the message it conveyed. Several allegories from Petrarch's poem were represented in such processions. Most likely, Petrarch himself was drawing upon already established allegorical themes rather than inventing them.
The sequence begins with the Triumph of Cupid over both mortals and gods, representing the triumph of love and reflecting Petrarch's devotion to Laura. Cupid is followed by Chastity, symbolizing Laura's rejection of Petrarch's love, since she was already married. The next triumph is Death, for Laura died during the plague. Death is overcome by Laura's Fame, which in turn is overcome by Time, represented as an old man and signifying the transience of all earthly things. Finally, Eternity triumphs over Time, allowing Petrarch and Laura to be united forever. Within Petrarch's poem we encounter motifs corresponding to the following Tarot cards:
Love,
Temperance,
Wheel of Fortune,
Chariot,
Pope,
Emperor,
Empress,
Death,
Hermit,
Devil,
Sun,
Moon,
World.
Nevertheless, it should be remembered that the term trionfi, derived from Petrarch's poem and the broader culture of allegorical processions, remained dominant until the end of the fifteenth century. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the term tarocchi appeared for the first time in Italy. Its etymology remains disputed among historians, but it most likely originated in Ferrara or Bologna and was adopted in order to distinguish these cards from ordinary trump cards used in other games.
Petrarch's poem illustrates the already established presence of motifs and concepts represented by the Major Arcana, motifs that did not appear yesterday, nor are their symbolism and sequence arbitrary. They are expressions of a deeper esoteric doctrine, one that also possesses profane reflections so that it may be accessible to everyone on a more general level of understanding. This doctrine is rooted in the civilization and culture of medieval Europe, a civilization that was forgotten and pushed aside with remarkable speed by generations inspired by new intellectual and cultural trends.
Contempt for the European Middle Ages remains very much alive today. It reflects the desire of the agents of modernity to distance themselves radically from everything perceived as conservative, backward, and belonging to the past.
For the last half millennium, modernization has functioned as a kind of mantra, one whose consequences have been the creation of ever denser mists and the progressive narrowing of the horizons of intellectual perception. Thus modernity found itself in a peculiar condition of rootlessness, and the expression of that rootlessness was an immersion into an imaginary distant past, accompanied by fantasies of ancient Egypt, Sumer, Atlantis, Sirius, and other lost origins. This need for connectedness and historical continuity prefers distant targets such as Egypt rather than seeking its own roots in what immediately preceded it.
The widespread eighteenth-century assumption, still believed by many today, that Tarot originated among the priests of late Egyptian civilization, who concealed their sacred knowledge within the Tarot Arcana in order to preserve it from oblivion, is an expression of precisely such a mentality. And these supposed secrets lay dormant for nearly two thousand years before being rediscovered in the eighteenth century by a group of French enthusiasts, the most influential of whom was Court de Gébelin.
Under the spell of Egyptomania and Kabbalah, we often overlook the fact that the figures of the Major Arcana are present throughout Europe: in stories, processions, theatre, songs, legends, frescoes, paintings, sculptures, ornaments, and the collective imagination itself. They belong to a broader cultural tradition whose roots ultimately reach back to classical antiquity. We may indeed trace some of these motifs to Egypt, but we should not be surprised if we encounter them elsewhere as well. These figures form part of the common heritage of an entire segment of humanity and possess an archetypal significance. Ultimately, they are reflections of the sacred.
Yet the keys to that sacred dimension will not be found buried beneath the sands of Egypt. Even if such were the case, we do not truly understand ancient Egypt, for we are separated from it by an abyss of time. We are unable to comprehend the purpose of many elements of that culture, nor do we possess the keys to the gates of consciousness through which those people perceived the world. In truth, we lack such keys even for our own ancestors, who are far closer to us in time, let alone for a civilization so radically different from our own and so capable of inspiring our imagination. It is true that everything rests upon foundations that precede it.
Nevertheless, if we wish to be more precise, we will find nowhere outside Europe, nor before the Middle Ages, a system corresponding to the fundamental Tarot figures, their meanings, and their sequence. As archetypes, these figures and motifs may be recognized almost everywhere, whether as mythological characters or symbolic themes. Yet it is only in Europe that they were systematized and codified in a form that would eventually find its expression in Tarot.
In light of the preceding discussion, Paul Huson's observation is particularly interesting. He notes that during the early Middle Ages the Church in Western Europe faced the enormous challenge of converting largely illiterate Germanic and Celtic peoples. Let us consider the significance of this for our present inquiry.
In addition to the Christianization of pagan customs, legends, beliefs, and sacred sites, Pope Gregory I, better known as Saint Gregory the Great (pontificate 590-604), made extensive use of art and architecture, poetry, music, liturgical ritual, and related cultural forms in order to penetrate the imagination of the population. The task of developing and disseminating these instruments of Christian influence and proselytization fell largely to the Benedictine Order, founded in 529.
Huson suggests that the origins of the Tarot mysteries should be sought precisely in the sixth century and in the context of Christian missionary activity. One of the cultural instruments of Christianization was the so-called Mystery Plays (probably derived from the French mystère, itself originating from the Latin ministerium, meaning ecclesiastical service), the most important form of medieval drama. Accompanied by music, these performances brought to life biblical narratives ranging from the creation of the world and humanity, through the birth of the Savior, to the Last Judgment. These dramas were performed in churches, public squares, and marketplaces, and they often incorporated painted panels illustrating the subjects of the performances.
It is therefore in such images that we may seek prototypes of the Major Arcana, for they are essentially the same thing, only on a smaller scale. The purpose of these images was to impress themselves upon the memory of the audience. Spectators watched the performance, listened to the music, heard the words of the songs and the dialogues of costumed actors, while at the same time contemplating painted illustrations. Even if they forgot much of what they had seen, they were unlikely to forget the simple and colourful images, which would remain in their memory associated with a particular lesson or message. These images, and the sequence in which they appeared, certainly embody a deeper doctrine. Yet the intention of those who employed them was not esoteric but exoteric: ideological, missionary, and instructional.
The deeper meaning lies within the tradition from whose treasury these images were fashioned, and that depth ultimately leads us back to Neoplatonism and beyond. The sequence of the Arcana tells a story that may fruitfully be compared to the alchemical process, for there is no Christian content that cannot be explained through alchemy, nor any alchemical content that lacks its Christian analogies. It is precisely this fact that gives the whole tradition its mystical character. The alchemical paradigm of Christianity, or the Christian paradigm of alchemy, appears to have been the original doctrine underlying the Major Arcana. Not infrequently, this alchemical-Christian paradigm was represented through pagan symbols and mythological figures.
Over time, however, the Christian character of Tarot gradually faded, giving way to pagan and syncretic elements, while retaining at its core the ancient organic worldview outside of which the Tarot system becomes essentially meaningless. Of course, one may ask how much of the original and hidden content embodied in Tarot iconography and symbolism disappeared in the course of this process. The occultists clearly showed little concern for such questions. They promoted their own ideas and devoted considerable effort to inserting their own doctrines into the Tarot images, thereby modernizing those same images in accordance with the spirit of their age.
Paul Huson points to another intriguing connection, this time between Tarot and astrology. In this context, he mentions the German engraver and painter Erhard Schön, whose work from 1515 depicts the houses of the zodiac, many of which have counterparts among the Major Arcana. For example, one finds the Wheel of Fortune associated with the houses of Pisces and Aquarius, the Emperor with Aquarius and Capricorn, the Pope with Capricorn and Sagittarius, Death with Sagittarius and Scorpio, the Lovers with Scorpio and Libra, and the Sun with Leo and Virgo. What exactly this signifies, and why only these particular Arcana were taken into consideration, is beyond my ability to investigate or determine with certainty. What does seem apparent, however, is a gradual loss of knowledge concerning the meanings of the cards, a process that coincides with the disappearance of operative Masonry and authentic alchemy from the European continent.
The announcement of what was to come arrived in 1614 with the publication of the famous Fama Fraternitatis, the manifesto of the alleged Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross.*
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* The rose was already a symbol of Martin Luther, the father of the Reformation, by around 1520. By approximately 1530, Luther's seal had assumed the form of a black cross set within a red heart projected upon a white five-petaled rose. The five-petaled rose is undoubtedly related to the symbolism of the pentagram. Luther's seal may still be seen in a stained-glass window of the church at Köblitz, in the German state of Thuringia. What is particularly interesting is that the symbol is depicted at the center of a cruciform structure resting upon a stepped triangular base. The cross upon the triangle would later become one of the fundamental symbols of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.
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I shall not enter here into the question of who stood behind this ideological pamphlet of universal ambitions, evidently written by someone whose sympathies lay closer to Protestantism. The text was addressed, as it explicitly states, to the learned men, estates, and rulers of Europe. Its author, or authors, proclaimed as their goal nothing less than the universal reformation of the whole world. Only a few years later, the devastating Thirty Years' War (1618-1648) erupted, engulfing the territories of present-day Germany and the Czech lands. The peace established in its aftermath would endure until it was shattered by Napoleon. A little more than a century after the appearance of this manifesto, the Grand Lodge of Freemasonry was founded in London in 1717. I emphasize these events in order to indicate a broader historical trend.
The Catholic Church had fallen into decadence and corruption, and with the discovery of the New World the center of gravity of European civilization and development shifted from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. The old operative Masonry gradually disappeared, the original meaning of Tarot was forgotten, alchemy began to wither, and a new current gradually crystallized, one symbolized by the Rose and the Cross. The decisive transformation occurred precisely during the age of the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Counter-Reformation. As a consequence, the old world vanished, and in the light of the Enlightenment and the expanded horizons of the modern age, the Middle Ages suddenly came to be regarded as dark and unattractive.
The spirit of the Renaissance gave rise to two parallel developments. One moved toward the formation of a scientific and rational worldview which, joined with the forces of the Reformation and Humanism, eventually became dominant. The other, seemingly retrograde in character, sought to preserve and further deepen the old organic model of the world which, through the medieval esoteric tradition, Hermeticism, Neoplatonism, Platonism, and ultimately the civilizations of antiquity, had once constituted the prevailing worldview. With the translation of the Holy Scriptures into the vernacular languages, the Bible became accessible to anyone capable of reading, a development that produced far-reaching consequences. From that moment onward, one can trace a particular historical progression: Reformation → Rosicrucianism → Freemasonry (and the Enlightenment associated with it).
The spread of Protestantism fostered the belief that ordinary believers now stood in a more direct relationship with the divine than had been possible under the authority of the medieval Church. Emerging from what they perceived as the darkness of error into the light of truth, many Protestants came to regard themselves as particularly receptive to God's voice and inspiration. Such a conviction naturally encouraged prophetic expectations, and sixteenth-century Europe witnessed an extraordinary proliferation of visionaries, prophets, and individuals claiming direct spiritual insight. In this sense, the Reformation did not merely transform religious institutions; it also transformed the way people imagined their access to revelation and sacred authority. The milieu of Freemasonry ultimately redirected the ideology of Tarot toward Egyptomania, Kabbalah, and the occult. Shortly after the Reformation began to spread throughout Europe, the medieval religious theatre that had employed images corresponding to the figures of the Major Arcana rapidly disappeared from Italy, France, and England.
Paul Huson notes that in 1548 the authorities in Paris prohibited the popular medieval religious plays. This illustrates a broader cultural trend and changing fashions. Under the influence of renewed interest in classical antiquity, the Italian nobility increasingly turned their attention to Greek and Roman authors, while the old religious dramas were discarded onto the rubbish heap of history as medieval debris. Upon that same rubbish heap were cast the original meanings of the Tarot cards and the doctrine from which the figures of Tarot had emerged. A new age was dawning.
Yet, as I noted earlier, embedded within the very structure of Tarot there still remains the ancient organic model of the universe. It is precisely this underlying vision that continues to give Tarot its charm and fascination despite all subsequent transformations, for its structure reveals how everything is interconnected within the general harmony of a cosmic hierarchy of forces, principles, natures, and beings. This is the legacy of the spirit of the Renaissance, which made possible the descent into the material world while at the same time preserving the core of the metaphysical and spiritual organic worldview.
To this I would draw attention to the work of the Hungarian scholar György Szőnyi, who has argued that Renaissance occult philosophy and magic, among other things, fostered a subversive mode of thought that prevented the complete triumph of a purely logical and rational view of the world. Without such a subversion, very little of the ancient Western esoteric traditions would have survived to the present day. According to Szőnyi, Renaissance magic emerged naturally from the idea of the Great Chain of Being and the interconnectedness of all its links. For this reason, Szőnyi emphasizes, it is no coincidence that Renaissance magi such as Cornelius Agrippa frequently referred to this system.
He further observes that the metaphor of the Chain of Being did not disappear immediately after the scientific assumptions upon which it rested were abandoned. The aesthetic appeal of symmetry and divine order continued to captivate the imagination of poets from Dante to the thinkers of the Enlightenment. And here we arrive at the essential point. Szőnyi illuminates it by arguing that the concept of the Chain of Being implied another fundamental characteristic of the premodern worldview: its organic nature.
In contrast to the seventeenth-century paradigm, which viewed the world as a machine, or as a clock that God merely wound up and then left to run on its own, the cosmos, writes György Szőnyi, was conceived during the late Renaissance as a living organism animated and governed by sympathetic forces based upon similarities and analogies. Within such a framework, it was natural to accept that the spiritus mundi, the World Spirit, permeated the universe, and that each hierarchical level reflected itself in the others, united with them through common functions and correspondences. This is, in fact, the ancient image of the cosmic hierarchy familiar to the civilizations of the ancient world. Here we recognize the doctrine of emanation that lies at the foundation of the Kabbalistic teaching concerning the Sephiroth of the Tree of Life, as well as the assumptions of modern occultism from which the meanings of the Tarot images are derived.
Although direct evidence for the use of Tarot as a divinatory instrument prior to the eighteenth century remains scarce, it is difficult to accept that this most famous of divinatory instruments did not serve such a function in earlier periods. Nevertheless, Helen Farley mentions a reference that connects the Tarot with divination. Merlin Cocai, better known as Coccalo, was the author of the fictional work Il Caos del Triperuno (Venice, 1527). Merlin Cocai was the pseudonym of the Italian poet Teofilo Folengo, a member of the Benedictine monastic order (1491–1544). The poem in question contained a cycle of five sonnets in which the names and motifs of all the Major Arcana were employed.
Between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the use of cards in magic belonged primarily to the sphere of popular folk divination (sortilegio), that is, forms of divination based upon symbolic interpretation. Only in the eighteenth century, through the works of Etteilla and Court de Gébelin, did cartomancy acquire a systematic, synthetic, and textual character, as the cards were for the first time interpreted as a coherent esoteric vocabulary. Nevertheless, as I shall demonstrate in the section devoted to the Tarot of Marziano da Tortona, there are indications that this deck may already have served a divinatory purpose and that professional fortune-tellers with substantial clienteles existed. Tarot therefore possessed not only a ludic function as a card game but also a divinatory one, and it was this latter aspect that endowed it with its magical aura.
Had it been nothing more than an ordinary game, it is difficult to imagine that anyone would later have conceived the idea of transforming Tarot into an modern occult Tarot without the pre-existing association between the cards and the prediction of destinies or future events. The reason why so little evidence and documentation concerning such practices survives from earlier periods lies in a simple fact: the practice of divination could easily attract trouble. Not only from the ever-present Inquisition, but also from the attitudes of Puritan Protestants. The telling of fortunes was regarded as the Devil's work. Among other things, that is precisely what cards were used for. As a general principle, many instruments created for gambling also possess a potential divinatory function.
Dice themselves provide a useful example. A die may serve as an instrument of chance and gambling, yet at the same time it can function as a tool of divination.
Gambling and divination are closely related phenomena. Gambling creates dependence upon fortune, and Tarot itself contains among its Arcana one that symbolizes both hazard and the lawful operation of the Wheel of Fate: the Wheel of Fortune, the expression of the goddess Fortuna.
The very logic behind the sequence of the triumphs points toward the unfolding of destiny. Memory and recollection form part of attentive awareness, and, as every skilled card player knows, they are of crucial importance for the successful conduct of a game. At the same time, memory is also an instrument of imagination, employed by those who read signs in an attempt to foretell destinies and predict future events.
Interestingly, Helen Farley has suggested that Tarot may once have served as an instrument for training the memory, although she does not develop the idea at any great length. The only example she mentions is a deck created by the German Franciscan friar, satirist, poet, translator, and jurist Thomas Murner, entitled Chartiludium Institute Summarie (1502), which contained logically coherent mnemonic images while simultaneously functioning as a card game. The purpose of Murner's memory cards was to facilitate the study of Justinian's Corpus Juris Civilis.
During the Renaissance, memory was not understood merely as a mechanical faculty of recollection but as a Hermetic and spiritual discipline. The images of the Major Arcana functioned as loci or agentes, inner mnemonic stations within the mind of Renaissance humanity. Before they became instruments of divination, these images served to organize the soul and to bring it into visual harmony with a structured cosmic hierarchy.
Paul Huson draws yet another parallel, this time between bibliomancy and cartomancy. At one time, it was common practice to seek divinatory guidance through books believed to contain universal wisdom, such as the Holy Scriptures, the Iliad, the Divine Comedy, Petrarch's sonnets, and similar works. People would open these books at random, or with the aid of dice, and then use a small rod or pointer to indicate a particular passage, which would subsequently be read as the book's response to a question or dilemma. Huson notes that certain card decks were accompanied by books containing quotations from revered works of wisdom that were associated with individual cards and used in a similar manner. Perhaps it is precisely within this practice that we may seek one of the reasons why the cards eventually acquired names.
Paul Huson also refers to the Dutch Tarot historian Gerard Van Rijnberk, who discovered references to card divination in a fourteenth-century epic poem later published in Milan in 1519 under the title Spagna Istoriata (The History of Spain). Canto XX describes how the famous hero Roland (Orlando) attempts to discover the movements of the enemies of Charlemagne, King of the Franks, through the use of cards. Although it was always customary for military leaders to consult seers and prophets before going to war, it is nevertheless unlikely that Roland did so with playing cards, given that he lived in the eighth century.
Finally, of particular importance to this subject is a study cited by Huson, Ruth Martin's Witchcraft and the Inquisition in Venice, 1550-1650, which documents cases involving the use of Tarot in witchcraft, a practice that today has become one of the most common occult applications of Tarot. Thus, by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Tarot was already regarded as a significant occult instrument. Yet, for understandable reasons, there were few authors willing to write about such matters or to develop a formal methodology around them.
The tragedy of modern occult Tarot does not lie in the fact that it invented new symbols, but rather in the fact that it forgot, or discarded, the context from which those symbols originally emerged. The figures of Tarot did not arise from secret subterranean chambers hidden within ancient Egyptian temples. They emerged from the living fabric of medieval and Renaissance Europe: from street processions, mnemonic exercises, allegorical dramas, and an organic vision of the cosmos in which all things are interconnected by invisible threads of analogy. With the loss of the authentic alchemical and Neoplatonic paradigm under the conditions of the Enlightenment and the rise of mechanistic thought, modern occultists experienced a profound sense of rootlessness.
In an attempt to fill that void, they imposed Egyptomania and Kabbalistic correspondences upon the images of Tarot, transforming what had once been a living picture of cosmic harmony into a rigid and reconstructed system. Yet despite this ideological superstructure, the original structure of Tarot still preserves an echo of that ancient organic model of the universe, in which every image continues to speak the language of a forgotten wholeness.
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Originally published in Serbian. This English version is an AI-assisted translation of the original text.
