My research leads me to believe that cards originated in China around the 9th century before spreading to the Middle East. From there, they entered Europe, standards and regional variants ever adjusting. The symbols used in modern esoteric Tarot (capital T) descend from tarot (lowercase t) developed in Italy and France.
With the sword of happiness I shall redeem a beloved who will afterwards take my life.
There are several records of card prohibitions in Europe during the 14th century onward, often related to their use in gambling.
One of the earliest mentions of tarot is by a 15th century Dominican preacher who described tarot cards as the devil's picture book. Additional references to the social plaguing of tarot cards continued through the 17th century. However, fortune-telling with regular playing cards only began in the 1780s.
Hanafuda cards developed in Japan by the Portuguese in the 16th century. They were banned during the Edo period, but card gambling remained popular and led to disguised card designs. When one deck was outlawed, a new design would emerge. They feature twelve suits that correspond to the months. The cards are adorned with flowers, animals, and scenery that correspond to each month.
Every deck of card is encoded with information about its time, place, and makers. The material, methods of construction, ornament, text, and symbolism give us details about the culture that produced them.
Beyond the implicit things we can learn from cards, some cards were explicit about the information they were encoding. Various decks were used as mnemonics to teach botany, heraldry, cosmology, and geography. For example, the Mantegna Tarocchi outlines hierarchy of persons, the muses, liberal arts, seven virtues, and celestial bodies. These cards are theorized to be educational tools rather than playing cards, but decks often multiple functions.
Mass production, such as block printing, allows for wide distribution of ideas and aesthetics. In my lifetime, I've seen cards used for corporate and political advertisement, as artwork, and as commemorative and souvenir decks. They could be easily adapted to all kinds of education, propaganda, and indoctrination.
I can only imagine the encoding of secret meanings into regular playing cards.
This deck of cards shares the name with other tarot decks and Italian tarocchi, but they probably weren't used for divination or card playing. There isn't a record of their original purpose, but the categories they encode make some believe they were educational tools for the upper class. The major arcana of many modern Tarot decks share many of its symbols.
A deck of cards named after a famous French cartomancer during the Napoleonic era. This deck is modeled after a German card game which used the German suits: Heart (♥︎), Leaves (♠︎), Bells (♦︎), and Acorns (♣︎). It has cards numbered 6 through 9; "banner" for card 10; deuce (2) replacing ace; and Jack, Queen, and King.
A friend of mine read a Facebook post from some European witches who said that Tarot (as a tradition of divination) is Romani. They claim that is a closed practice that has been appropriated by non-Roma. I couldn't find the post my friend referred to, and nothing else credible showed up with a quick online search.
I've never talked to a Roma person about Tarot before. I don't know if it's a niche belief or a widespread one. I haven't found any trusted sources yet, but part of the argument is that the Romani rely on oral tradition and so there is less written and able to be cited.
In theory, Tarot cards are neutral in their meaning. In practice, several of the images have a strong leaning.
I've always wanted a set of cards where each card explicitly shows two sides / the extremes of an underlying archetype. It can be easy to get a lot of happy cards and interpret that as good news, but I'd rather my deck highlight tensions rather than definitive outcomes. Instead of Chariot, I might have Movement / Stillness.
I've saved a large collection of images of cards from around the Internet. I saved the websites for some of them, and I almost certainly do not have the right to distribute any of them.