It is completely understandable to look at the elaborate, mystical imagery of early Tarot decks and wonder if the “parlor game” explanation is just a modern, dismissive rumor.

However, the historical reality is actually the reverse: the idea that Tarot was created as a secret occult tool is the fabricated rumor. The evidence that it began strictly as a card game is backed by hard historical documentation, court ledgers, and literary records from the Renaissance.

Here is what we actually know—and don’t know—about its invention and use:

1. Do we know the specific inventor?
No, we do not know the exact individual who invented the game. There is no single “Thomas Edison of Tarot.”

Instead, it was an evolution of existing card games. Regular 52-card playing decks had already arrived in Europe from the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt in the late 1300s. In the early 1400s, Northern Italian inventors had the brilliant idea to add a fifth suit of “triumphs” (trionfi, which we now call trumps) to the deck to create a more complex, strategic trick-taking game similar to modern Bridge.

While we don’t know the exact inventor, we do have a few fascinating historical names attached to its early days:

Duke Filippo Maria Visconti of Milan: A letter from 1449 states that a couple of decades earlier, the Duke commissioned a precursor deck featuring classical gods.
Prince Francesco Fibbia of Bologna: An early account credits this nobleman with inventing Tarocchini (a variant of the game) in the early 1400s.

Bonifacio Bembo: While not the inventor of the game, he is the brilliant Renaissance artist who hand-painted the famous Visconti-Sforza deck (around 1450), which is the oldest nearly complete deck we have today.

2. “Used by them” vs. “Invented as a game”
The theory that the 1400s Italians were merely using an ancient, secret system that someone else invented doesn’t hold up against the historical timeline.

Every piece of 15th-century evidence points to it being born as entertainment:

The Rules: The earliest written records we have concerning Tarot are rulebooks for trick-taking.

The Imagery: The symbols on the Major Arcana (The Emperor, The Pope, The Wheel of Fortune, Death) look mystical to us, but to a 15th-century Italian, they were just standard, everyday cultural tropes. They were drawn straight from popular carnival pageants, Catholic iconography, and Renaissance theater.

The Absolute Silence on Occultism: For the first 350 years of Tarot’s existence, thousands of pages were written about witchcraft, alchemy, astrology, and Kabbalah by Renaissance thinkers. Yet, in all those extensive esoteric writings, not a single text mentions Tarot cards as a spiritual tool. They only mention them in court accounting books (buying decks for the court) or in sermons by priests railing against the evils of gambling.
The “rumor” that Tarot was actually a hidden, ancient book of mystical wisdom was entirely invented out of thin air in 1781 by a French writer named Antoine Court de Gébelin. He fell victim to the “Egyptomania” trend of his era and asserted—without a shred of proof—that the cards were a secret survival guide of ancient Egyptian priests.

So, while we will likely never know the name of the clever Italian courtier who first decided to paint a fool and some virtues onto extra pieces of cardboard, we know with historical certainty that their goal was a fun, high-stakes game night, not an esoteric ritual.