There are many different theories as to what the true origin of the Tarot deck is, but the first documented deck was a painted set of cards made in fifteenth century Italy.
Several other early tarot-like sequences of portable art survive to place the Visconti deck in context. It is later confusion about the symbolism stems, in part, from the occult decks, which began a system of steadily attributing paganism to it and creating a more universal symbol to the point where the underlying Christian allegory has been somewhat overshadowed.
Etteilla designed the first esoteric Tarot deck, adding astrological symbols and Egyptian motifs to a variety of the cards, altering many of them from the Marseille designs, and adding divinatory meanings in text on the cards. Etteilla decks, although now eclipsed by Smith and Waite's fully-illustrated deck and Aleister Crowley's "Thoth" deck, remain available today.
Although tarot cards were used for fortune-telling in Bologna, Italy in the 1700s, they were first widely made known to the public as a divination method by Alliette, also called Etteilla, who was a French occultist who reversed the order of letters in his name and worked as a card diviner not long before the French Revolution.
Tarot cards eventually came to be associated with mysticism and magic. However, tarot was not widely adopted by mystics, occultists and secret societies until the 18th and 19th century. The tradition originally began in 1781, when Antoine Court de Gébelin, a Swiss Freemason, published the book Le Monde Primitif, a speculative research report that included religious symbolism and its survivals in the modern world. De Gébelin first asserted that symbolism of the Tarot de Marseille represented the mysteries of Isis and Thoth.
Gébelin expressed these and similar views in a way that he presented no actual fact based evidence to validate the claims he made. In addition to this, Gébelin wrote before Champollion that he had deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs, it wasn’t until later Egyptologists found nothing in the Egyptian language that supports his findings he wrote about, but these findings came a little too late, by the time authentic Egyptian texts were available the identification of the Tarot cards with the Egyptian "Book of Thoth" was already greatly established in the occult practice.
Tarot became ever popular beginning in the year 1910, with the creation and publication of the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot, which took the step of including symbolic images related to divinatory meanings on the numeric cards. In the 20th century, a huge number of different decks were created, some traditional, some nearly unique. This being partly due to marketing by the publisher U.S. Games Systems Inc., the Rider-Waite-Smith deck has been extremely popular in the English-speaking parts of the world in the beginning of the 1970’s.