History of the decks

1440s to 1780s

A card game from Italy

Tarot began in northern Italy in the 1440s as tarocchi, a trick-taking card game. Rich families had decks painted by hand; the best known were made for the Visconti and Sforza dukes of Milan, around 1450. The game spread to France and Switzerland, where cheaper woodcut decks such as the Tarot de Marseille fixed the 22 trumps in roughly the order still used today.

Only in 1781 did anyone claim the cards were secret wisdom: Antoine Court de Gébelin wrote that they came from ancient Egypt. There is no evidence for that, but the idea took hold. In the 1850s Éliphas Lévi tied the 22 trumps to the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and the occult tarot was born.

1888 to 1900

The Golden Dawn

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, founded in London in 1888, built Lévi’s idea into a complete system. Its members linked every card to a Hebrew letter, a path on the Tree of Life, a planet, a sign or a decan, and taught it in a manuscript called Book T. That system, with Crowley’s tables in Liber 777 (1909), is what this site calculates with. Both decks below were made by former members, so they share it.

1890s, printed 1912

The card drawing ceremony

Book T also set out how a reading was to be drawn, in a method later called the Opening of the Key. It was taught inside the Order and kept secret until Crowley printed it in The Equinox (volume I, number 8, 1912) as “A Description of the Cards of the Tarot”. Israel Regardie printed the Order’s papers again in The Golden Dawn (1937–40), and Crowley repeated the method in The Book of Thoth (1944). In outline:

1. Choose a significator. A court card stands for the person asking, picked from how they look: rank from age and sex, suit from hair and colouring.
2. Invoke. The diviner holds the pack and calls on the angel set over divination:

   I invoke thee, I.A.O., that thou wilt send H.R.U., the great Angel that is set over the operations of this Secret Wisdom, to lay his hand invisibly on these consecrated cards of art, that thereby we may obtain true knowledge of hidden things, to the glory of thine ineffable Name. Amen.

3. Shuffle and cut. The person asking shuffles the whole pack while thinking of the question, and the pack is cut.
4. First operation: four packs. The pack is cut in two and each half cut again, giving four packs laid out for the four letters of the divine name, I H V H: Yod for work and business (Wands), Heh for love and pleasure (Cups), Vau for trouble and loss (Swords), Heh final for money and goods (Disks). The pack holding the significator shows which of these the matter really turns on.
5. Count and pair. That pack is spread in a ring. Starting at the significator, the diviner counts round in the direction the figure faces, by fixed values (court cards 4, Princesses 7, Aces 11, small cards their number, trumps 3, 9 or 12 by their attribution), reading each card landed on. Then the cards either side of the significator are paired off, working outwards.
6. Four more operations. The pack is shuffled again for each one: dealt into twelve packs for the astrological houses, twelve for the signs, then thirty-six cards in a ring for the decans, and lastly ten packs on the Tree of Life. Each is read by the same counting and pairing.

How the draw on this site compares

If you would rather draw by hand, with your own deck and any ceremony you like, Pick by hand lets you enter the cards in the order they fell. Method and limits describes the site’s draw in full.

1909

Pamela Colman Smith and A. E. Waite

Arthur Edward Waite, a scholar of mysticism and a Golden Dawn member, designed a deck that William Rider & Son of London published in December 1909. He asked the artist and stage designer Pamela Colman Smith to draw it. Smith drew all 78 cards in about six months and, unusually, gave every numbered card a scene with people in it, which made the deck easy to read from the pictures alone. She was paid a flat fee and died poor in 1951; only lately has her name been added, as the Rider-Waite-Smith deck.

1938 to 1969

Aleister Crowley and Lady Frieda Harris

Aleister Crowley joined the Golden Dawn in 1898, left it in a schism two years later and went on to found his own religion, Thelema. In 1938 the painter Lady Frieda Harris asked him to teach her about tarot, and the two set out to design a new deck. Planned to take a few months, it took five years: Harris painted and repainted the cards to Crowley’s exacting notes until 1943, and he gave several trumps new names (Lust, Adjustment, Art, the Aeon). Her paintings were exhibited in London in 1942, and Crowley explained the deck in The Book of Thoth (1944).

Neither lived to see it printed. Crowley died in 1947 and Harris in 1962; the deck was first published in 1969, and the better-known edition followed in 1977. Harris’s paintings are still under copyright, which is why this site shows Smith’s cards in their place. About the card art explains how each Thoth card is matched to its Waite counterpart and why some names differ.

Further reading

• Liber 777 (Aleister Crowley, 1909). The correspondence tables.
• The Book of Thoth (Aleister Crowley, 1944). The deck's own handbook, with the decan and letter attributions.
• Thoth tarot (Crowley and Lady Frieda Harris). Background on the deck.
• Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. The order behind Book T and the Opening of the Key.
• Decans. The 36 ten-degree divisions of the zodiac.
• Pamela Colman Smith. The artist of the 1909 cards shown on this site.

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