Learn Tarot
Tarot at the Morgan Library: where the cards began
Most people hear “tarot” and think of fortune telling. But the cards began as a game, played by wealthy families in Renaissance Italy about 600 years ago. When the Morgan Library & Museum in New York gathered some of the oldest surviving decks in one place, I flew out to see where it all started.
A luxury card game from Renaissance Italy
The oldest tarot cards we have were made in Milan in the mid 1400s for the ruling Visconti and Sforza families. Each card was painted by hand, the trumps and court cards set against backgrounds of gold and silver leaf. They were made for a card game, a little like bridge, where the picture cards were trumps. People played it with friends; nobody was reading the future.
No complete deck from that time survives. The Morgan holds 35 cards from one of the most complete sets, attributed to the painter Bonifacio Bembo. The rest of that deck is split between the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo and the Colleoni family, who have owned cards from it for centuries.
How a game became fortune telling
The game was first called trionfi, Italian for “triumphs,” and later tarocchi. Players added a set of picture cards to an ordinary four suit deck, and those cards outranked every suit card. The pictures set the order: the Emperor beats the Empress, Death beats almost everyone. The Fool was not a trump at all. It was an “excuse” card you could play to get out of following suit, which is part of why it sits at zero, outside the numbered cards.
Tarot did not become a fortune telling tool until the 1780s in France, more than 300 years later. A writer named Antoine Court de Gébelin claimed the cards held hidden wisdom from ancient Egypt, a story with no basis in history. Soon after, a card reader who called himself Etteilla published the first deck designed for reading fortunes, and the occult tradition grew from there.
The game never went away. People in France, Austria, and Italy still play tarot as a card game today.
Pamela Colman Smith, the artist behind modern tarot
If you picture a tarot card today, you are probably picturing Pamela Colman Smith’s work. She illustrated the deck published in London in 1909, now known as the Rider-Waite-Smith deck. The box simply said “Tarot Cards,” and for most of the last century the deck was named after the publisher and the writer of its guide, not her. Today her name is usually included. She drew every one of the 78 cards.
Her deck was the first one I learned on, and the one I started with when I began building Lantern Arcana. One of my favorite things at the exhibit wasn’t a tarot card at all. It was seeing more of her other artwork, and now I really want to explore a deck inspired by her.
Lady Frieda Harris and the Thoth deck
The other surprise was Lady Frieda Harris, the painter behind the Thoth deck. She worked with the writer Aleister Crowley for years starting in the late 1930s, sometimes repainting a single card many times over. Her paintings were first exhibited in 1942, but the deck itself was not printed until after both of them had died.
The Thoth deck is known for its occult side, which is not what draws me to tarot. But seeing her artwork made me curious about her and her life, so I bought the deck in the gift shop.
Never just one thing
Walking through the exhibit, it was clear that tarot has never been one thing. It has been a game, a collection of artworks, a set of symbols, and for some people a tool for divination. Artists have been reimagining the cards for centuries, and they still are.
For me, tarot is a way of reflecting. Not predicting what happens next, but looking at an image, thinking about your life, and mulling it over. That is the idea behind Lantern Arcana: you draw your own cards, and the app helps you think about what they bring up.
About the exhibit
Tarot! Renaissance Symbols, Modern Visions was on view at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York from June 26 to October 4, 2026. The images in the video were photographed at the exhibit and are used with the Morgan Library’s permission.