Tarot · 4 October 2026 · Charlotte Himsworth
The Tarot: A Short History and the Fool’s Journey
From a Renaissance card game to a mirror for the soul, the tarot’s story is richer and more surprising than its myths.
Playing cards reached Europe in the late 1300s, descended from the elegant cards of Mamluk Egypt. In fifteenth-century Italy, artists at the courts of Milan and Ferrara added a fifth set of painted “triumphs”, and a card game called tarocchi was born. For centuries the tarot was simply that: a game.
The mystical turn
In 1781 the French scholar Antoine Court de Gébelin proposed that the cards preserved the wisdom of ancient Egypt. There is no evidence for that, but the idea caught imaginations. Éliphas Lévi later matched the twenty-two trumps to the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn built a rich system of correspondences. In 1909 Pamela Colman Smith painted, with Arthur Edward Waite, the deck most people know today.
Seventy-eight keys
A tarot deck has seventy-eight cards: twenty-two Major Arcana, tracing the great passages of a life, and fifty-six Minor Arcana in four suits, Wands, Cups, Swords and Pentacles, linked to the four elements.
The Fool’s journey
Many readers see the Major Arcana as one story. The Fool, card zero, sets out with everything still ahead. The first seven cards meet the outer world, the next seven turn inward, and the last seven open the spirit, ending with the World: wholeness. In one old teaching, the Fool is a fool only because he has not yet recognised the divine within him. The whole journey is that recognition.
A mirror, not a fortune
We approach the tarot as a mirror for knowing yourself. The cards decide nothing. Their images simply help us notice what we already sense.
A practice
Draw one card each morning. Look before you read: what do you notice first? Ask its question of yourself, and write down whatever comes.