Timeline: the history of tarot from 1370 to the present

The history of tarot spans more than 650 years, and anyone who has read the five articles in this series knows how many names, cities and dates come together along the way. This timeline puts them in order: it begins with the first playing cards in Europe, leads via the Italian courts, the French card makers and the Parisian occultists to London, where the Waite-Smith tarot appeared in 1909, and ends in the present day.

Keep three things in mind as you read. First: many early dates are marked “c.”, because cards are rarely dated and researchers work with account books, bans and sermons. Second: for its first three hundred years, tarot was a game; interpretation only begins in the lower third of the table. Third: everything to do with Egypt, travelling peoples or ancient secret doctrines appears here only in 1781, because there is no source for it before then. You will find the background to the individual rows in the five articles of the series.

The milestones

Year	Event
c. 1370	Playing cards, arriving from the Islamic world, first become traceable in Europe; their models are packs from the Mamluk Sultanate with cups, coins, swords and polo sticks.
1377	Florence bans the new card game; the Dominican friar Johannes von Rheinfelden describes playing cards in detail in a Latin treatise.
c. 1420	Milan: Marziano da Tortona designs a card game for Duke Filippo Maria Visconti with sixteen cards of gods above four suits, a forerunner of the idea of trumps.
1440	Florence: the notary Giusto Giusti records a gift of “naibi a trionfi” to Sigismondo Malatesta, the earliest known mention of a trionfi game.
1442	Ferrara: the account books of the Este court record “carte da trionfi”.
c. 1441–1450	Milan: the hand-painted decks of the Visconti and Sforza are made, among them the Cary-Yale deck and the Pierpont Morgan-Bergamo deck (attributed to Bonifacio Bembo, 74 of 78 cards surviving).
c. 1491	Sola-Busca tarot, engraved on copper: the oldest completely preserved deck with 78 cards and illustrated number cards.
c. 1500	The sermon collection “Sermones de ludo cum aliis” is the first to list all 22 trumps by name and number (dated between about 1470 and 1500); the Cary Sheet shows a forerunner of the Marseille pattern.
1505	The names “tarocchi” (Ferrara) and “taraux” (Avignon) are recorded for the first time; the game has arrived in France.
c. 1650	Paris: Jean Noblet prints the oldest surviving deck in the Marseille pattern.
c. 1701	Lyon: tarot by Jean Dodal (dated to about 1701 to 1715).
c. 1750	Bologna: a manuscript lists divinatory meanings for Tarocchino cards, the earliest evidence of card reading with tarot.
1760	Marseille: Nicolas Conver prints the deck that becomes the benchmark of the Marseille pattern.
1770	Paris: Etteilla publishes his first guide to card reading, still using ordinary playing cards.
1781	In the eighth volume of his “Monde primitif”, Antoine Court de Gébelin declares tarot to be the Egyptian Book of Thoth; in the same volume, the Comte de Mellet links the trumps with the Hebrew letters.
1783–1785	Etteilla publishes four booklets on tarot and becomes the first professional card reader.
1789	Etteilla’s own deck appears: the first tarot made exclusively for interpretation.
1854–1856	Éliphas Lévi, “Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie”: tarot, Kabbalah and the Hebrew alphabet are combined into one system.
1870	Paul Christian, “Histoire de la magie”: a tale of Egyptian initiation; probably the origin of the term “arcana”.
1888	London: founding of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.
1889	Papus, “Le Tarot des Bohémiens”, spreads the “Gypsy” legend; Oswald Wirth draws 22 trumps following Lévi’s system.
1891 / 1901	Arthur Edward Waite (1891) and Pamela Colman Smith (1901) are admitted to the Golden Dawn.
1909	Smith draws the 78 cards; in December the deck is published by William Rider & Son in London, together with Waite’s “Key to the Tarot”.
1910 / 1911	Waite’s “The Pictorial Key to the Tarot” appears with Smith’s black-and-white drawings (title page 1911).
1930	Paris: Paul Marteau publishes the “Ancien Tarot de Marseille” with Grimaud; the name takes hold.
1942	Arthur Edward Waite dies in London.
1951	Pamela Colman Smith dies on 18 September in Bude, Cornwall, impoverished and largely forgotten.
1959 / 1960	New York: new edition of the Waite-Smith tarot; Eden Gray’s “The Tarot Revealed” (1960) makes the deck accessible to a wide readership.
1971	Stuart Kaplan’s U.S. Games Systems publishes the Waite-Smith tarot in the USA; “Rider-Waite” becomes a brand name.
1980	Sallie Nichols, “Jung and Tarot”; Rachel Pollack, “Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom” (part 1): the psychological interpretation becomes established.
1986	Hajo Banzhaf’s “Das Tarot-Handbuch” appears; the high point of the tarot boom in Germany.
2009	A hundred years of the Waite-Smith tarot; in the years that follow, crowdfunding makes possible a wave of independent decks.
2022	1 January: Pamela Colman Smith’s cards of 1909 enter the public domain in the EU (Waite’s texts already did so in 2013).
today	Tarot leads a double life: as a card game (Tarock, Tarot, Tarocchi) and as a tool for self-reflection, in print, in apps and online.