· 2 min read ·
From Card Game to Omen: A Short History of Tarot
Tarot began as a deck for playing a game. How did it become horror's favourite prop?
BLACK ARCHIVE's Writs borrow the shape of tarot cards, so it is worth knowing where those cards came from. The real history is stranger, and more ordinary, than most horror films suggest.
**A game first.** Tarot cards appeared in northern Italy in the fifteenth century as playing cards. They were used for a trick-taking game, *tarocchi*, in which the extra picture cards acted as permanent trumps. Some of the oldest surviving decks were hand-painted for noble families such as the Visconti and Sforza of Milan. Tarot card games are still played in parts of Europe today, most famously French Tarot.
**The occult turn.** For roughly three centuries, nobody seems to have treated tarot as a mystical device. That changed in late eighteenth-century France. In 1781 the scholar Antoine Court de Gébelin argued that the cards preserved the wisdom of ancient Egypt. There was no evidence for this, but the idea spread. Within a few years a Parisian fortune-teller known as Etteilla was publishing decks designed for divination.
**Symbols and systems.** In the nineteenth century, writers such as Éliphas Lévi tied the major arcana to the Hebrew alphabet and the Kabbalah. Occult societies in Britain built on these ideas. In 1909 the Rider–Waite–Smith deck appeared, designed with A. E. Waite and illustrated by the artist Pamela Colman Smith. Its pictures, including fully illustrated minor cards, shaped how most people imagine tarot today.
**Why horror loves it.** Tarot gives a story an object that seems to know the future. A single card turned face-up is a perfect scene: silent, visual, ominous. The Death card (XIII) is horror's favourite, even though modern tarot readers usually read it as change or an ending, not literal death.
**What BLACK ARCHIVE takes from it.** The numbered major cards, the four suits, the frame and the name band, and above all the sense that a card is a record of something already decided. In BLACK ARCHIVE the cards do not predict deaths. They remember them.