Manex IbarChairman & Founder at Sphinx Code

Tarot Origins: Visconti Card Game to Ancient Genetic Code #shorts

1 Oct 2026 · 2 min

Watch on YouTube

1:53

In this YouTube short, Manex Ibar challenges the conventional tarot narrative that attributes the deck’s origin to a 15th‑century Italian Visconti family card game later repurposed for divination in the 1700s. He argues that the true roots are far older, tracing back to ancient Egypt and the earliest known Sumerian cuneiform tablets, which he claims encode a visual/frequency "genetic" language—what he calls the "Sphinx Code." A second speaker adds that early human knowledge existed before written alphabets, later fragmenting across cultures, and that common threads in myths and symbols point to this underlying Sphinx Code. Ibar’s position is that the mainstream tarological account is incomplete and needs to be disrupted in favor of this deeper, cross‑cultural, frequency‑based origin theory.

Chapters

So 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. Then we started using it as divination around the 1700s, and this is what tarologists will say. So we're going to change that completely and disrupt it fully.
I feel like the knowledge at one point in time was a coherent And when I say at one point in time, it was probably before the beginning of humanity's written alphabet and knowledge. And then basically over time it got fragmented. We see all these common threads across cultures and across stories and ideologies that are connecting very important parts of the Sphinx Code information.
But it definitely goes back and it's related to Egypt. When you go back to the Sumerian tablets, which is the first written form of anything on this realm that we know of, the cuneiform of writing actually speaks of our genetic code. So in a sense, the original language— and it's a frequency code, so it's a visual code of, you know, pictures in a sense, but it's even like dots and lines.