Manex IbarChairman & Founder at Sphinx Code

Are the Origins of the Tarot Right? From Game to Occult Secrets! #shorts

4 Oct 2026 · 2 min

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1:43

Manex Ibar outlines the contested history of the tarot. He explains the mainstream scholarly view that the tarot began as a 15th‑century Italian card game created by an artist of the Visconti family for aristocratic entertainment. He then traces how, in the 17th‑18th‑century French occult revival, the cards were repurposed for divination, spirit‑channeling, and linked to astrology. By the late 1700s, occultists began to claim an ancient Egyptian origin, associating the 22 Major Arcana with the god Thoth, the 22 Emerald Tablets, and the 22 letters of the Kabbalistic Hebrew alphabet. Ibar notes the ongoing tension between “purists” who dismiss these esoteric connections as later inventions and modern tarologists who embrace the divinatory system.

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The history of the tarot. If you look at most tarot experts today, there's a bunch of them, they'll tell you mostly that the tarot comes from the Visconti family in Italy around the 1400s. And it was a card game that was made up by an artist in this family, and that's it. It was just for fun during the high royal courts, and they had a lot of money, so they were bored, and so they made this amazing card game. And that basically, eventually, became more of an occult system in the French 1600s, 1700s, where they went deeper into these kind of spirit channeling sessions, divination, and the occult started to want to tie the tarot to astrology, tie the tarot to other things. And then so those people around the 1700s started saying that the tarot comes from Egypt, and that actually there was a link to Egypt, especially with the discovery of Thoth and the 22 Emerald Tablets. And so there's 22 Major Arcanas, of course it's that. And they also tied it to the Kabbalah with the Jewish letters, which is also 22. And so this is where the tarot started taking this form. And purists will say, no, no, that's all whatever and it's just a game. But then we've started using it it as divination around the 1700s, and this is what tarologists will say.