The origin of the deck, mythically attributed to the divine potential of the god Thoth, is lost in the expanses of time, perhaps a real invention of medieval taste or perhaps, like most things, reinvention or rediscovery of previous divinatory systems that have fallen into oblivion.

Not even the etymology, very skilled in many cases to solve mysteries, intervenes actively in the question.

In fact, there are those who recognize the origin of the name tarocco in the Greek term etarioi (= companions), those in the Arabic tar (= revenge), or those in the Latin terère (= to beat), those in the Phoenician astaroth, those in Hebrew tarah (= to throw lots) and who in the Egyptian tar rag (= royal way). But there are also those who, perhaps supported by a more concrete spirit, go back to a term that is only a few centuries old that alludes to the printing system on the back, usually gilded.

By relying on the ascertained presence of divination cards or tablets in various civilizations of the past such as the Indian, Egyptian and Chinese, some authors identify them with the tarot. An arbitrary assimilation thus becomes the basis of the alleged origin of the tarot among the Egyptians, Jews, Hindus or even among the mythical inhabitants of Atlantis. This is a justifiable position if we intend, under the term of tarot, any divination system based on graphic symbols of archetypes.

There is no doubt, precisely because it is an integral part of human needs, that representatives of every race and tradition have somehow tried to scrutinize the future, codifying its symbols into archetypal images, common to the entire human species. But if we intend to seek the historical origin of the tarot as we know and use it, we must await the threshold of Humanism, a fervent period of creation and rediscovery.

The first historically attested testimony of the tarot is in fact discernible only in the "naibi", a series of didactic cards for the education of children, quite widespread at that time and centered on allegorical figures of situations and characters. Justice, the Sun, Temperance would therefore be daughters or grandchildren of the muses, of Apollo, of the theological virtues, cultural baggage of fourteenth-century schoolchildren.

The most interesting issue however lies in the fact that the actual tarot, consisting of the 22 trumps, the numeral cards and the figures, probable descendants of the game of dice and chess, made its official appearance towards the middle of the fourteenth century. We are in the middle of the Templar era, an era rich in oriental ferments and syncretisms captured during the crusades, spiritualized by the rise of the cathedrals, veiled by the disturbing mystery of the knights of the Holy Sepulcher, exterminated by Philip IV, the Handsome.

An era, therefore, in which esotericism emerges and impregnates itself, on the threshold of the great fires that will burn in the squares, the common mentality of the noble and the commoner. It may then happen that a deck of cards, originally intended for playful purposes, is affected by this arcane current, by this rampant symbolism of archaic origin, and becomes imbued with it until it becomes a divination deck.

What is certain is that the game of tarot almost immediately suffered the fate of everything that was opposed to the rigid schematisms imposed, severely hampered by ecclesiastics and rulers. Anathemas and threats of biblical punishments continued for centuries to hang over the heads of those who dared to lift the veil on the future, fading only when the irony of the rationalists, in the age of enlightenment, began to label the mystery as a ridiculous form of superstition.

Later on, Romanticism, with its proverbial restlessness, its "salons", its myth of magic and its passionate lovers of mystery, decreed the true triumph of tarot cards and related divination cards. Since then it has been a growing, passionate competition between artists, connoisseurs, amateurs, professionals; we are witnessing more and more the multiplication of decks, the invasion of specialized shops, the proliferation of professional studios and television broadcasts on the subject.

This is a sign that despite the arrival and the haste, the burgers gobbled up and the fall of values, we still believe in the Emperor and in the Popess, in the Devil and in Justice and still, like and more than seven hundred, seven thousand or seventy thousand years ago, we need to dream, hope, survive.