Playing cards consisting of four suits were brought to Europe from the Middle East around the year 1200. Two hundred years later, they began to be used for gambling. Tarot cards, like the board game, appeared in northern Italy in the 14th century. As such, they are still used in southern Europe and North Africa.
The first drawings on the cards appeared in the late 15th century, at the same time the procedure was standardized numbering. For the first time about the game "Trionfo" that became popular at the princely court of Ferrara, mentioned in 1442. The oldest surviving to the present day is a gift packs artist Bonifacio Bembo for the wedding, bringing together family and Visconti Sforza. The first printed deck appeared around 1500, it was the impetus for the wide dissemination of the game among the common people.
By 1526 the first true appearance of the text on the Tarot divination. Since divination while engaged mainly Roma, were considered to come from Egypt, the legend that the Tarot come from ancient Egypt. In 1871, Antoine Court de Gebelin, French Protestant minister, said that the cards are the keys to the ancient mysteries, and she gamble in them is a lost Egyptian Book of Thoth, reveals the secrets of a lost civilization. Trainee Court de Gebelin, Parisian hairdresser Alete, fascinated by the occult, under the pseudonym Eteylla opened in Paris, first conjectural salon. He attached importance not philosophical aspects of the symbolism of the Tarot, and engaged in arrangement and enhancement of cartomancy.
The most popular deck Eteylly - Egyptian Tarot - was published in 1850 by the French publisher Baptiste Paul Grimaud. From this point of tarot gained its modern form. Developments Eteylly further used by researchers to study and development of the system of divination. In the 19th century it became fashionable to speculate on ordinary playing cards, so the Tarot became the privilege of occultists and mystics, few were interested in and pay attention to the predictions of the mystical and philosophical aspects of their symbolism. They have turned into a kind of Tarot alphabet and encyclopedia of European mysticism.
The famous French occultist Alphonse Louis Constant, speaking under the pseudonym Eliphas Levi, in the second half of the 19th century compared the 22 Major Arcana with 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, is the basis of Kabbalah. Thus, the old deck of cards become an influential mystical system.
In the late 19th century, there was a final identification of the Tarot with the Supreme Ritual Magic: English Hermetic Order of the "Golden Dawn" contributed to the fact that according to the sketches provided by the Christian occultist Arthur Edward Waite, a painter-decorator Pamela Coleman-Smith has created a deck of Rider, which is nowadays the most popular interpretation of the Tarot.
Rayderovskom Tarot, published in millions of copies, greatly influenced the modern perception of cards. It began to act as a basic version, which compares the innovation. Rider Tarot became popular largely due to new design. Earlier figure had only traditional Tarot Major Arcana, at the junior 56 cards were shown only numbers and symbols suits. Pamela Smith, providing all the cards with drawings of symbolic scenes, greatly facilitated their interpretation, making divination affordable for ordinary people.