Playing cards of the type used for playing games in general are first mentioned in the 14th century when the town council of Regensburg banned their use in 1378. During 1397 in Paris, their use by the so called common people during ordinary working days was prohibited.

During the early 15th century printing from wooden blocks was first used in Southern Germany, this was used to print the bible and playing cards both of which then became available to the masses. In 1415, there is a mention of a hand painted set of Tarot Cards prepared for the Duke of Milan, both paying cards and Tarot seem to spread rapidly throughout Europe over the next few centuries.

It was during this period that amusing, decorative, and instructive packs were published and their popularity came and went every 40 or 50 years, and it was in the quiet periods that the cards were only used by Gypsies and Fortune Tellers. Sometime during the 16th century when cards where going through a popular phase printers added their own changes to different packs and their signature, the packs of cards were also taxed (nothing changes much there then!). Later on esoteric writers like Lévi, Waite and Crowley would make their own interpretations of how the cards should look, which lead to more variations of tarot decks appearing.

None of the early historical references has any real indication of where the cards originally came from and it wasn’t until the early eighteen century that people started taking the Tarot seriously. During that time Antoine Court De Gébelin wrote a series of books about customs, religion, science and ides of ancient times comparing with their modern day equivalents. In volume eight, he discussed the “Game of Tarot” speculating on its ancient Egyptian origins, these books were written in the 1770’s when European Scholars were discovering huge hoards of Egyptian antiquities, this included hieroglyphics that were obviously writing but nobody could decipher. This was about 20 years before the discovery of the Rosetta Stone: which finally allowed the hieroglyphics to be deciphered, at this time all Europe was going mad for anything Egyptian. De Gébelin ideas were taken up by Allietee who wrote books on the subject in the mid 1780’s under the pen name Etteilla, he enthusiastically adopted the Egyptian theory and gained an enormous following. 

About 70 years later the most famousFrench occultist a certain Alphonse Louis Constant wrote two major books in 1855 and 1856 under the name of Eliphas Lévi, by this time the hieroglyphics had been deciphered and discovered they had nothing to do with tarot so he had to go elsewhere for his mystic source so he chose to connect the Tarot to the Qabalah also known as Kabbalah. The Qabalah is a Jewish mystic system based on the link between letters and numbers of the Hebrew alphabet. By changing the letters in a name to the corresponding number, it was possible to decipher the mysterious names in the old testament to give support to a very complicated vision of the universe. Again there was no real evidence offered, only that the system worked. Later on in his career, Lévi became convinced the cards originated in the middle east, but were actually brought to Europe by the gypsies. It was well known that the gypsies had travelled all over the face of the earth and could trace their origins back to ancient Egypt.