The Colorful History of Tarot Is as Mesmerizing as the Decks Themselves

The original meaning behind the cards, first created 500 years ago, still remains elusive. But that didn’t stop our reporter from traveling to Milan in an effort to find out

John Last - History Correspondent

July/August 2025

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Not far from one of Milan’s last remaining medieval gates is a tiny shop door, sandwiched between shuttered storefronts. Cross the threshold, and you’ll enter a gilded world of esoteric symbols: stars, skeletons and fools. This is Il Meneghello, the workshop of some of Italy’s last known great tarot artisans.

Inside, on the register, is a portrait of its original owner, Osvaldo Menegazzi. While tarot may be a game or hobby for many, for Menegazzi, it was always first and foremost about the art. Before his death in 2021, he had become world-famous for his painstaking, hand-painted reproductions of some of the world’s most ancient and storied tarot decks. His desk, a mess of paints and materials, is just as he left it.

On a rainy day last spring, I met his niece, Cristina Dorsini, at the shop. Since Menegazzi’s death, Dorsini, an art historian and tarot expert in her own right, has taken over guiding visitors through the masterworks created by her late uncle. Among the stacks surrounding us are three tarots: a cat-themed tarot, a Hebrew tarot and a tiny tarocchi di fumatori (smoker’s tarot), wherein a characterization of Death can be seen enjoying a curly pipe. Menegazzi published more than 100 such decks, including many of his own invention. “Each deck offers us lo scrigno di sapienza,” a treasure trove of wisdom, Dorsini says.

What unites these diverse decks is their standard form: generally, 78 cards, separated into 56 numbered “minor arcana,” much like modern numbered playing cards, and 22 trumps—the “major arcana,” each with a mysterious character. Every card is rich with symbolism: adorned with pentacles, stars, chalices and wands; bearing names like the World, Justice and Temperance; and featuring enigmatic characters like the Fool, the Lovers or the Hermit. These cards may have started life in 15th-century Italy as a sophisticated game, but in the past 500 years they have taken on an entirely different meaning.

It’s the ambiguity of these figures that has drawn fortune tellers, who use combinations of images to open a window into the future. Dorsini, following her uncle, is skeptical of such uses. “We don’t do readings,” declares a sign near the cash register—a frequent point of contention with visitors to the shop.

Like her uncle, Dorsini was first drawn to these cards by their beautiful artistry, and by a historian’s desire to understand the origins of their imagery. “[Tarot] was a figurative culture that was born here, in Italy, in Milan,” she says. “But today, the symbology of each card is really difficult for us to understand.”

In fact, Menegazzi’s shop has become famous for his decades-long quest to collect, study and meticulously reproduce the historic decks that originated many of tarot’s most common figures. Some of these old decks, with just a few surviving cards, are extremely rare. In 2021, Menegazzi became the first person to reproduce one such deck in nearly 600 years.

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A few days after I first held one of Menegazzi’s reproductions, I traveled west, to Turin, where for a few short minutes I was able to look at the original.

In the former stables of an Italian royal palace, I met Federica Pozzi, the director of scientific laboratories at the Center for the Conservation and Restoration of Cultural Heritage “La Venaria Reale.” Here a team of 12 scientists works to analyze everything from large-scale paintings to ancient Egyptian sarcophagi, as well as some of the oldest tarot cards in the world, on which they perform material analysis. Upstairs, in the conservation lab, the restorer applies paint—removable, to allow for future correction—with a tiny brush. 

Researchers around the world, including Pozzi’s team, engage in a kind of historical detective work with these cards. Collaborating with six different institutions—the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, the Yale University Library, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, Yale’s Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage and the Art Institute of Chicago—and drawing on other collections in Italy, Pozzi was part of the first team to use advanced imaging techniques, including macro-X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy, to discover invisible layers in the tarot cards. Researchers from Yale managed to discern stationers’ watermarks to definitively date one of the world’s oldest tarot decks to an impressively narrow range, between 1437 and 1442.

These decks, known collectively as the Visconti-Sforza decks, offer the earliest blueprint for modern tarot, incorporating many of the same suits and trumps. Historical documents suggest the oldest of these, the incomplete Visconti di Modrone deck, was commissioned as a wedding present for the daughter of Filippo Maria Visconti, then Duke of Milan, and her groom, Francesco Sforza, founder of a powerful family. 

For many years, historians speculated that a deck as unusually fine as this one may have simply been meant as a piece of art. Yet Pozzi’s research has shown that the surviving cards bear signs of regular use: worn edges, lost pigments, separating layers. Her lab has confirmed that several cards are replacements, suggesting that their owners wanted a full deck, and corroborating the idea that these cards were meant for gaming. Some scholars, like the tarot historian Andrea Vitali, argue the figures on such cards were meant to offer a scala mistica, or mystical ladder, instructing wayward gamblers in moral and ethical precepts—or else perhaps satirizing those precepts by allowing fools and lovers to trump popes.

All this evidence suggests that the earliest tarot deck may have been used for little more than a courtly card game, an exquisite plaything for the super-rich. And yet, tarot has never been so simple to define—nor its origins clear.

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In Milan, at Menegazzi’s workshop, I’d held one of his reproductions of the Sola Busca tarot—the earliest complete tarot deck that survives today, dating to the late 15th century. What had struck me about it was just how unlike the modern tarot it is. In place of the standard major arcana is a series of entirely different and unsettling images: obscure figures from antiquity or famous villains, like the Roman Emperor Nero, reveling in the burning of babies. The occultist Peter Mark Adams called the deck “stubbornly and irredeemably odd,” writing that “even after prolonged study, the deck retains its strangeness.” 

For Adams, that oddness suggests that there is a foundational purpose to these cards other than simple entertainment. After all, tarot emerged during a very specific point in European history, when the wealthy courts of Renaissance Italy were retaining armies of scholars to recover hidden wisdom from ancient texts. In the centuries following the production of Visconti’s exquisite deck, tarot’s popularity as a game increased, and its production moved to France sometime in the 17th and 18th centuries. There, a new school of artists, thinkers and card readers began to see tarot as infused with a deep, occult significance.

It was in this milieu that occult writers first began to experiment with the idea that cards like these could be a key to greater wisdom. In 1770, Jean-Baptiste Alliette (under the pseudonym Etteilla) published the book How to Entertain Yourself With a Deck of Cards, providing one of the world’s first guides to cartomancy—that is, fortune telling with cards, a method still used by many fortune tellers today. Around the same time, Antoine Court de Gébelin, a French pastor, used a section of his opus, Le Monde Primitif (“The Primitive World”), published from 1773 to 1782, to rewrite tarot’s origin story and suggest for the first time that these cards were far more than just a game.

“If we heard that there still exists today a work of the ancient Egyptians, one of their books that escaped the flames which devoured their superb libraries, and which contains their purest doctrine about interesting objects, everyone would, without doubt, be eager to know,” he wrote. “If we added that this book is very widespread in a large part of Europe, that for many centuries it has been in the hands of everyone, the surprise would certainly increase.”

It was the tarot, Court de Gébelin suggested, that contained just such a book. Court de Gébelin’s entirely speculative account, which counted Louis XVI among its readers, spurred a European craze for all things ancient and Egyptian—and forever tied the origin myth of tarot with the stereotype of “Gypsy” fortune-tellers, whom Gébelin credited with preserving the cards over millennia and carrying them into Europe. In reality, “there is absolutely no evidence for Roma in the origin of tarot cards, or for any significant role in their spread,” says Egil Asprem, a professor at Stockholm University who studies the role of the Roma in the European history of magic.

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In the mountains just southwest of Bologna, a small stone house is home to the International Tarot Museum, founded by Morena Poltronieri and Ernesto Fazioli in 2007. Inside, Fazioli leads me around a narrow space crammed with pieces of tarot art and decks donated from around the world: There are tarot pop-up books, tarot embroidery, even tarot cards you can eat and drink. Each one is simultaneously a reinvention and a reference to tarot’s past spiritual uses. “The seed of a card is universal,” Fazioli says, yet “each artist has a different goal.”

The psychiatrist Carl Jung in 1933 attributed the suggestive power of tarot’s imagery to its use of “psychological images”—archetypal symbols, like crumbling towers and stumbling fools, that can take on infinite meanings in combination with each other. Not long after Jung offered that assessment, tarot became a centerpiece of America’s New Age revival and underwent thousands of subsequent reinterpretations as a tool for spiritual practice. The Motherpeace tarot, in print since the early 1980s, reimagines the deck through a feminist lens. The Black Power tarot, more recently produced by the artists King Khan and Michael Eaton, reconstructs the major arcana around images of Black icons. Collaborative decks, like the Slow Holler tarot, enlist dozens of artists from varied regional and marginalized identities to put their own spin on iconic images.

Recently, tarot’s popularity has been surging again, driven partly by interest in cartomancy on social media platforms like TikTok. Some sellers say their sales have doubled or tripled in periods of strife, including the 2008 financial crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic. Many practitioners are uneasy about such booms. Jessica Lanyadoo, an astrologer and tarot reader in San Francisco, says too many think the cards can help “micromanage our fate,” guiding every little decision through easy answers. A more common annoyance for longtime tarot devotees may be the irony with which some new users approach the cards. “People have a way of saying, ‘Oh, I’m too smart to take it seriously,’” Lanyadoo says. 

Helen Farley, a researcher who has written about the history of these cards, calls tarot “a mirror of the society in which it’s being used.” Peering into that mirror today, we might see a more atomistic world, with tarot just another product to brand and sell. Yet all around us, tarot is being reinvented. Alight upon the right deck and learn its history, and you might discover a piece of our collective future, too.

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The Divine Method

For millennia, curious souls have examined a range of worldly phenomena, from the palm of the hand to moldy cheese, to prophesy supernatural knowledge about their fates. Or sometimes just for fun

By Sonja Anderson

Chiromancy

Reading the lines of the palm may have originated in India before spreading to the Middle East and Europe. Aristotle believed the creases of the palm indicated the length of a life, and by the Renaissance, palmistry had become so popular that it was denounced by the pope. Shakespeare had Othello tell his wife, Desdemona, that her hand “argues fruitfulness and liberal heart.” Not all palm readings are so happy: According to an English guide published around 1700, if a small half-moon shape is lodged in someone’s “middle line,” they’re fated to suffer from “cold and watery diseases.”

Tasseomancy

Reading tea leaves may have originated in China—tea’s birthplace—thousands of years ago, when people first began examining the wet dregs left at the bottoms of their cups. After tea arrived in Europe, tasseomancy became a popular pastime for English women, especially in the Victorian period. Industrious diviners assigned meaning to images they saw in leaves, like animals, objects, numbers or letters, which they would interpret for curious souls. For example, a mushroom shape, according to a 19th-
century guide, signified a “sudden separation of lovers after a quarrel.”

Tyromancy

This funky divination method, first mentioned (derisively) by a second-century A.D. Greek citizen of Ephesus, in present-day Turkey, works best with varieties like blue cheese and Swiss, as a diviner discerns fortunes from moldy veins and holes. According to the modern practitioner Jennifer Billock, the niche method gained popularity in medieval and early modern England, used to predict the harvest, a child’s future or even a maiden’s romantic fate: A hopeful lass, Billock says, would carve suitors’ names into a block of Cheshire and watch to see which molded first, indicating her future husband.

Crystallomancy

Seeing visions in a crystal ball is one way to “scry,” or divine the future from a reflective surface. Celtic druids are thought to have crystal-gazed, and traveling Romani people have practiced the art for centuries. After it resurged in Victorian England, in 1905 one scholar explained that a scryer could see either a clear picture or a misty cloud dissolving to reveal a vision from the future. But conditions have to be right. According to a 1920s guide, the scrying room should be temperate and “charged with dull light,” and the seer must not have recently eaten.

John Last | | Read More

John Last is a freelance journalist and producer based in northern Italy. He writes on history, religion, and politics from locations around the globe. Follow him on Twitter @johnwlast.