Tarot as a game
The Metropolitan Museum places tarot as a card game in 15th-century Italy, before its later occult associations.1
Starting with the game allows you not to read medieval images as if they had already been born with a single esoteric system.1
Cartomancy and Etteilla
The Bibliothèque nationale de France places Etteilla's divinatory decks in the period after the French Revolution and documents their expansion during the 19th century.2
The circulation of occult associations with the tarot postdates its use as a card game in the 15th century.12
Jewish Kabbalah
The linguistic theory of Jewish Kabbalah treats ten sefirot and twenty-two Hebrew letters in their own historical and religious framework.3
The diagrams and discourses on sefirot have their own historical contexts; they are not an automatic explanation of the structure of the tarot.4
Hermetic Qabalah
The correspondences of the Hermetic Qabalah belong to later occult associations and do not make Jewish Kabbalah a synonym for the tarot.13
There is no documented origin that makes the twenty-two Hebrew letters the origin of the twenty-two medieval trumps of the tarot.13
Correspondences and Rider–Waite–Smith
The Wellcome Collection credits Pamela Colman Smith and A. E. Waite on the seventy-eight-card Rider–Waite–Smith deck.5
A current symbolic practice can study correspondences if it names them as a later layer, not as the sole historical source of the tarot.15