What Tarot Actually Is (and What It Has Never Been) | Part 1

Welcome back. If you’ve been through the orientation, you already know how this course runs and you’ve shuffled your deck properly at least once.

Now we clear up where these cards came from, along with the stories about them that simply aren’t true.

Fair warning before we start.

Some of what you’ve been told about tarot is going to come apart in the next few minutes, which is a good thing.

Reading clearly through a fog of borrowed mythology is impossible, and clearing that fog is the whole point of this lesson.

History is the foundation. Skip it, and you’re building your practice on sand and someone else’s marketing.

Stay with me all the way to the end, too.

Waiting there is a two-minute exercise you can run with your own deck the moment you finish reading, and it’s easily the most useful two minutes in this whole lesson.

Where Does Tarot Actually Come From?

It started as a card game, not a crystal ball

Tarot began as a game. Not a sacred text, not a relic pulled from a burning temple.

A card game played by bored rich people in Italy almost six hundred years ago.

Yes, the most mysterious deck on earth started life as the Renaissance version of a Friday night card night.

Around 1440, wealthy families in Milan and a few other northern Italian cities paid artists to hand-paint beautiful decks for a trick-taking game called tarocchi.

Picture something closer to bridge than fortune telling.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art notes the rules have barely changed in nearly six hundred years.

The most famous surviving deck, the Visconti-Sforza, was painted around 1450 for the ruling family of Milan and now lives at Yale’s Beinecke Library.

Gold leaf. Tiny painted portraits.

A toy for the obscenely rich, with nothing to do with predicting anyone’s future.

Knowing this matters more than it seems.

Once you understand the cards began as a game, you stop treating them as a haunted object and start treating them as what they are, which is the only way to read them well.

How Old Are Tarot Cards, Really?

Old, though not as ancient as the legends claim

You’ve probably heard tarot holds the lost wisdom of Egyptian priests, hidden in pictures to survive the ages.

Gorgeous story. Completely invented, and we know exactly who invented it.

This is the part that made me rethink everything when I first learned it.

In 1781, a French scholar named Antoine Court de Gébelin saw a tarot deck for the first time at a party.

On the spot, with zero evidence, he decided the cards were a secret Egyptian text and published the claim.

Here’s the kicker.

He was writing decades before anyone could even read Egyptian hieroglyphs.

He looked at some Italian playing cards and simply decided they were Egyptian. Bold move for a man who couldn’t read a single one.

The Smithsonian and every serious historian agree there is no Egyptian connection at all.

The timeline gives it away.

Tarot shows up in Italy in the 1440s with a clear paper trail, while the Egyptian fantasy arrives over three hundred years later, attached to a man who admitted he had no proof.

None of this makes tarot weaker.

It simply moves the power to where it actually lives, which is the whole promise of this course.

When Did Tarot Become Fortune Telling?

Way later than you think

Fortune telling came late to tarot. For about three hundred years these were gaming cards and nothing more, the way a regular deck is just for poker today.

The shift happened in France in the 1780s, when a printseller working under the name Etteilla took that Egyptian fantasy and ran with it.

He published the first how-to manual for reading tarot, designed the first deck made specifically for divination, and even coined the word cartomancy.

Say that five times fast.

Here’s what surprises most beginners.

Much of what people call “ancient tarot tradition” actually dates to this single moment.

Laying cards out in a spread, giving each card a fixed meaning, reading reversed cards differently, all of it traces back to one self-promoting Frenchman in the late 1700s.

Not to Egypt. Not to a temple.

To Paris, to a man with a printing press and excellent branding instincts.

Nothing in tarot is sacred because it’s old. The parts that work, work because they map onto how human beings actually think.

Do You Have to Be Gifted Your First Tarot Deck?

The most stubborn myth in tarot, busted

You’ve heard it. You can’t buy your own deck, it has to be gifted, or it won’t work, or worse, it’ll be cursed.

It’s the single most common myth in tarot, and it falls apart the second you look at where it came from.

The origin is charming rather than spooky.

Back when decks were hand-painted and wildly expensive, they were treasured heirlooms, passed down through families.

Here’s the part everyone forgets.

At that point they were still playing cards for a game, since divination hadn’t entered the picture yet.

The gifting was simply how an heirloom got handed down, no different than a pocket watch.

Buy your own, and choose the one that calls to you.

The relationship that matters is between you and the cards.

What’s the Best Tarot Deck for Beginners?

Rider-Waite-Smith, and here’s the real reason

This course requires a Rider-Waite-Smith deck, or a close derivative of it, and not because it’s popular.

The symbolism runs so deep it keeps teaching you for life.

Even as a full-time professional, I’m still finding new things in it.

In 1909, the occultist Arthur Edward Waite hired artist Pamela Colman Smith to illustrate it.

She did what nobody had before, giving every card a full picture scene, even the number cards that used to just show rows of cups or swords.

Suddenly the picture did the teaching.

Look closer and the genius shows.

The Nine of Swords, the anxiety card, has all twelve zodiac signs embroidered on the bedsheet, a detail almost nobody notices.

Follow the salamanders through the Wands court cards.

On the Page, they don’t quite form a full circle, while by the King they’ve closed into a perfect loop, a salamander eating its own tail.

That’s the ouroboros, the ancient symbol of completion and the endless cycle.

The suit tells a story of growth in its tiniest details, and we’ll get into all of it later.

Smith built precise psychological triggers into the art, specific colors and symbols chosen to stir a subconscious response in anyone who looks, no matter who’s reading.

That’s the engine that makes tarot work.

While I’m being honest, oracle decks aren’t for me, never have been

There’s something singular about tarot, which is the whole reason I built my practice around it.

Each of the seventy-eight cards is a facet of the human psyche.

That number keeps echoing in ways I find beautiful.

Seventy-eight facets on a perfectly cut diamond, letting light through.

Seventy-eight angels and seventy-eight demons in Catholic tradition, every one a value or a vice.

Seventy-eight cards. Seventy-eight pieces of you.

That’s why these cards hold a mirror the way nothing else does.

If you want one book beside you, make it 78 Degrees of Wisdom by Rachel Pollack, widely regarded as the finest tarot book ever written.

She treated the cards as a serious language of the psyche, and she shared my allergy to the costume.

The flouncy dresses, the bangles, rings on every finger, the Madame Sosostris pageantry draped over everything so nobody questions it.

Her work strips that away and lets the cards stand on their own.

One last thing on the deck itself.

It was named for the publisher and the author, while Smith, a gifted clairvoyant who actually drew the images, got a flat fee and almost no credit for decades.

Many readers now call it the Waite-Smith deck to give her name back, and I’m one of them.

Do You Need to Believe in Magic to Read Tarot?

Not even a little

Here’s the question that actually matters. If tarot didn’t come from Egypt, wasn’t built for fortune telling, and most of its mystical reputation is only a few hundred years old, what gives it any power at all?

This is the best part.

Tarot works because the human mind is wired to find meaning in pictures, and seventy-eight well-chosen images cover almost every situation a life can hold.

When you pull a card, you’re not getting a message from beyond.

You’re meeting a mirror, and your own intuition does the reading.

The card simply gives that intuition something to push against.

People who think the cards hold ancient magic tend to read with fear. People who understand what tarot really is read with clarity.

One approach makes you smaller, using the images to wait for a verdict.

The other hands you back your own power, using the images to surface what you already know and haven’t said out loud.

Are Tarot Readings Evil?

Short answer: no. Here’s the honest truth.

This is one of the most common fears people carry into tarot, and it didn’t come from nowhere. Let’s deal with it head on.

Tarot is not evil.

It isn’t a way to summon anything, conjure anything, or open a door to anywhere dark.

The fear has two real sources, and both are worth naming.

The first is historical.

Tarot got tangled up with dark occultism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when secret societies and a few genuinely unsavory characters draped the cards in ritual and dread to make themselves seem powerful.

That’s a branding problem rather than a property of the cards.

A deck doesn’t absorb the intentions of everyone who ever shuffled it.

The second source is newer and, frankly, more annoying.

A wave of manipulative influencers has turned tarot into clickbait.

You’ve seen them. Someone is thinking about you right now. Your person is coming back.

That isn’t reading, it’s emotional bait designed to keep lonely or grieving people hooked and paying.

It preys on exactly the people who deserve honesty most, and it gives the whole practice a bad name.

The cards themselves are neutral.

The ethics live entirely in the hands holding them.

Can Anyone Learn to Read Tarot?

Yes, and the history is part of why

Here’s the freeing thing about everything you just learned. If tarot were an ancient Egyptian secret passed down through chosen priests, you might need permission to read it.

It isn’t, so you don’t.

The cards belong to everyone. They always have.

You don’t need to be gifted, initiated, or born with anything special.

What you need is a deck, a willingness to be honest with yourself, and a little practice, which is exactly what the rest of this course gives you.

Read without fear of getting it wrong.

Treat the cards as a tool rather than a boss.

Trust your own intuition instead of waiting for a dead priest to speak through the deck.

The real history hands you that freedom, lifting the pressure to honor a tradition that was never as old or as fixed as you were told.

Do You Have to Knock on Your Tarot Cards Before Reading?

One last myth, then we put your hands on the cards

Before we get to that exercise I promised, one more bit of theater worth clearing.

You’ve probably seen a reader knock or tap the deck before drawing, often with a little ceremony to it.

Plenty of people will tell you it clears the cards or seals your energy in.

Here’s my honest take.

It’s pageantry, the same costume theatrics that make tarot feel mysterious for the sake of mystery.

Your energy is already in everything you touch, the cards included, from the moment you pick them up.

A knock adds nothing your hands haven’t already done.

The real moment your intention enters the deck is the shuffle, even when you’re shuffling on behalf of someone else.

That’s where your focus, your question, and your state of mind genuinely meet the cards, which is why I broke the shuffle down properly in the orientation.

Skip the knocking. Shuffle with attention, and you’ve done the only part that matters.

Speaking of which, grab your deck. It’s time to actually use it.

What Are the Aces in Tarot? Try This Two-Minute Exercise

Four beginnings, and a reading you can do right now

Here’s the payoff I promised. The four aces will show you exactly where you stand, in any area of your life, in about two minutes.

First, a quick word on what the aces actually are, since they make the perfect place to begin.

Each ace is the seed of its suit, a pure beginning, the first spark before anything has happened yet.

Everything else in tarot grows out of what an ace starts.

Every suit also governs a different facet of being human, and the ace is that facet in its rawest, most hopeful form.

Four aces. Four beginnings.

One for love, one for the material world, one for drive, one for the mind.

Together they cover nearly everything a person brings to the cards, which is exactly why they make such a clear first reading.

The exercise, step by step

Give this the full two minutes, with your deck in your hands rather than in your head.

Take the Ace of Cups as your example.

Find it in the spread, then look at the card on its right, which hints at what’s in your way as you reach for a new connection or a deeper joy.

The card on its left points to an older pattern, something worth seeing clearly before you move forward into it.

A note on language here.

I’d never call that a blockage, since the word sounds like emotional constipation and your inner life deserves better than that.

Think of it instead as a pattern, something you can notice, name, hold yourself accountable to, and walk through with your eyes wide open.

Here’s the part that took me years to truly understand.

The only way past a pattern is to embrace it first.

Awareness comes at the start. Acceptance comes next. Release comes last, never a single moment before.

Try it tonight with all four aces, and write down what each pair shows you.

That’s your first real reading.

What Should You Take From Part One?

Five things worth remembering before you move on

If you keep nothing else from this lesson, keep these.

None of that shrinks the cards.

It hands them to you clean, without a single borrowed superstition attached.

What’s Next in the Course?

How the deck is actually built

In Part 2 we get practical. Seventy-eight cards, two halves, four suits.

Why a tarot deck holds seventy-eight cards instead of the fifty-two in a regular deck, and how that structure makes the whole thing click.

Once you see the skeleton of the deck, every card starts making sense next to the others.

That’s the moment tarot stops feeling like seventy-eight things to memorize and starts feeling like one system you can actually read.

Between now and then, keep working with those four aces.

Notice which one keeps surfacing for you, since the suit that shows up most often is usually pointing at the corner of your life asking for attention.

You can always revisit any lesson or see the full path on the free tarot course home page here.

I’ll see you in Part 2. Welcome to the work.

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If this resonated with you, book your private reading with me here.

If any of these speak to what you’re moving through right now, follow the one that pulls at you most.

• Start here: How to Read Tarot for Beginners
• True power: The True Power of Tarot
• Real intuition: Why Psychic Intuition Isn’t a Rare Gift
• Common questions: 7 Questions Everyone Asks About Tarot
• Tarot honesty: Is Tarot a Scam? What Readers Know That Most People Don’t
• Trusting yourself: The Real Reason Tarot Readings Help You Trust Yourself Again

About the Author

Chris Bennett is one of the world’s most highly rated psychic mediums and tarot readers, with over two decades of professional experience and thousands of client sessions to his name. Based in Canada and founder of The Tarot Medium, Chris is widely regarded as the best online tarot reader for those seeking accurate, evidential, and emotionally grounded guidance. Backed by more than 360 five-star Google reviews, his work spans authentic mediumship, intuitive clairvoyance, psychic life path readings, and grief support rooted in real psychological depth. Chris is known internationally for delivering readings that prioritize clarity, emotional intelligence, and personal agency, never theatrics or manipulation. He serves clients across Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and beyond through secure online psychic readings, tarot consultations, and mediumship sessions. To book a session, visit thetarotmedium.com/booking