Nowadays, whenever you pull up your social media, you see curious content creators shuffling and spreading colourful decks of cards, while promising you knowledge of certain things in your life, yourself and even the future. However, have you asked yourself what tool makes them so confident?

Well, the answer is simple: it’s called Tarot. And they have their own vivid, kaleidoscopic history, which I will share with you!

Before understanding everything, we need to get our terminology right. Two terms you should definitely know are “Divination” -- the art of knowing hidden knowledge, guidance and insights into the future through spiritual means and “cartomancy” — divination through cards and playing decks.

Humanity has always fancied itself with the wonders of the world and nature; esoteric and spiritual practices often come down to that. The earliest successful cultures relied on the moving of the planets and junctions of the stars (which eventually became the zodiac and the study of astrology and astronomy) to predict the cycles of plantation and harvests — the basis of civilisation. This introduces the need to keep numbers; now, when these early cultures mix these numbers with early religious iconography, you get something mystical and not too light-hearted. It is theorised that Tarot comes from that.

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The earliest modern concept of Tarot comes from the 15th-century Italian Trionfi, meaning “Triumphs”.  These were used to denote trump cards in playing decks, as it was their first intended usage. It is from here that we get the English expression “trump cards” as well.

Scholarship claims that the concept of Tarot comes from the earlier Egyptian Mamluk deck, while it is believed that the Mamluks themselves got their concept from older Egyptian religious sources.

Nonetheless, Tarot soon spread across Europe, gaining stately and noble patronage to show prestige and inclinations towards the fine arts. It’s during this time that we see some bare resemblance to our modern-day Tarot. This deck was commissioned by the Duke Filippo Maria Visconti, described as a 60-card deck with 16 images of Roman gods and goddesses. This iteration is now sadly lost, only attested in the pages of history.

Early Tarots started popping out of important Italian centres such as Milan, Ferrara, Florence, and Bologna. Here we are introduced to the oldest surviving deck known as the Visconti-Sforza Deck, bespoke by the rulers of the Duchy of Milan.

Tarot soon found itself to be the court fashion of the era and started to jump from one powerful family to the other, but it was catapulted into superstardom when it reached the hands of the poster child of the Renaissance, the Medici. Their intricate and high-artistry-powered commission work gave Tarot the meteoric rise it needed.

With the advent of the printing press during the early 1500s and the Italian Wars, Tarot became accessible to the common masses. In this era, the Tarot of Marseilles, of Milanese origin, became the popular version, eventually paving the path for the much more acclaimed and symbolically significant Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot deck published in 1909, which is still the go-to version to this day, with an estimated 100 million published decks in circulation.

From the early Egyptians to the Italians, to Trionfi and poker, the imagery of playing cards and Tarot is related to the aesthetics of nobility, religion and cosmic conceptions. The randomness of games has long been associated with fate and fortune, and Tarot is at its vanguard.