September 16

A Notary's Gift of Trionfi

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On Friday, September 16th, 1440, a notary and public official from Anghiara named Giusto Giusti sat down and made an entry in his personal diary: he had given a “pair of naibi a trionfi,” a pack of triumph cards, to the condottiero Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, custom-made expressly in Florence with Malatesta's own coat of arms, beautifully done, at a cost of four and a half ducats. That single line is, as far as documented history can currently confirm, the earliest known reference to Trionfi cards anywhere in the world, the direct historical ancestor of what would eventually become the tarot.

What makes this particular piece of tarot history worth a second look isn't just its age. It's how astonishingly recently we actually found out about it…

Before going further, one small but genuine clarification is worth making about what kind of document this actually is. Giusti wasn't recording, in his official capacity, a transaction between two other parties the way a modern notary might witness a sale. This was his own personal diary entry, a day-book he kept across an extraordinary forty-five-year span from 1437 to 1482, and he was noting his own personal gift to Malatesta rather than any commercial exchange he'd formally witnessed. That distinction matters for understanding exactly what kind of evidence we're working with: a private, first-person record of an actual gift-giving, not a formal legal instrument, though no less historically valuable for it.

For well over a century, historians confidently cited a different document as the earliest known reference to trionfi, a 1442 payment record from the Ferrarese court of the Este family, first published by scholar Giuseppe Campori in 1874. Giusti's diary entry, despite predating that record by two full years, sat unread and unrecognized until 2002, when scholar Nerida Newbigin produced the first full scholarly edition of his journals, and it wasn't formally identified and published as the new earliest reference until 2012, by the tarot historian Thierry Depaulis. In other words, the “earliest known reference to tarot” that most modern readers encounter is a piece of scholarship younger than many working adults' own careers, a genuine reminder that even foundational facts in a well-studied field can shift the moment someone finally reads the right forgotten diary closely enough. Some tarot historians, including researcher Franco Pratesi, have also urged appropriate caution about the copying history of surviving notary journals like Giusti's, since later copyists sometimes selected which entries to preserve based on their own interests, a reasonable scholarly caveat rather than a reason to doubt the find.

This date carries a particular resonance for readers who followed this magazine's recent look at Christophe Poncet's research into the Tarot de Marseille's Neoplatonic origins. Giusti's 1440 entry predates Marsilio Ficino's founding of his Florentine Platonic Academy in 1462 by a full twenty-two years, meaning trionfi already existed as an established, commercially produced game, purchasable to order with a patron's own coat of arms, well before Ficino's circle ever had the chance to shape it philosophically. That timeline doesn't undercut Poncet's argument so much as sharpen it: the case he and Peter Mark Adams have built isn't that Ficino's circle invented tarot from nothing, but that they took an already-existing, already-popular game and layered genuine Neoplatonic and Hermetic philosophy into its later iconographic development, working with an established form rather than conjuring one into being.

None of this diminishes the genuine significance of Giusti's small, personal entry. A single line in a private diary, unread for over five and a half centuries, quietly rewrote the opening chapter of tarot's documented history. It's worth remembering, the next time any date in this history seems settled beyond question, that the “earliest known” anything in a field this old is really just the earliest anyone's currently found, and the next forgotten diary might be sitting in an archive somewhere still waiting for someone to look closely enough.

Modern Occultist is proud to present today's “Daily Occult Review” from our ongoing series—as part of the newly-launched Occult Reads... Today, in honor of the scholarship that keeps rewriting tarot's earliest chapters, we're recommending the direct conversation between two researchers doing exactly that work right now.

Two Esoteric Tarots

By Peter Mark Adams and Christophe Poncet | Scarlet Imprint

Two Esoteric Tarots gathers a genuine conversation between the two researchers whose work this magazine has followed closely in recent posts, Adams on the elite, Saturnian Sola-Busca Tarocchi, and Poncet on the more popular, luminous Tarot de Marseille, discussing directly how their two separate investigations converge on a shared conclusion: that fifteenth-century Italian tarot decks encoded genuine heterodox philosophy, not merely decorative whimsy, for audiences equipped to read it.

Reading the two scholars in direct dialogue, rather than through their separate standalone volumes, offers a genuinely useful vantage point on how independent research converges, or productively diverges, when two experts compare notes on adjacent corners of the same historical puzzle, precisely the kind of scholarly cross-checking that turned Giusti's forgotten diary entry into a genuine discovery in the first place. This is a conversation between specialists rather than an introductory history, and readers new to this research should start with either Adams's or Poncet's standalone volumes first. But for readers of this magazine who've followed the recent run of tarot scholarship here with real interest, this direct dialogue between its two leading voices is a genuinely rewarding next step.

(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and your "Daily Occult Review" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today’s many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we’ll bring the best stories and latest trends to today’s own modern occultists everywhere.)

Modern Occultist