Gods 43%, spirits and angels 20%, humans 11%. Stolen or bought-with-blood origins add up to about one vote but make the best stories. And tarot didn't come from Egypt.
The most common answer is: the gods. We gathered myths about who gave divination to humanity for 52 practices from 29 cultures on all 6 inhabited continents, and counted one culture as one vote. Gods get 43%. Spirits, angels and jinn get 20%. Humans who worked it out themselves, or sages who wrote the books, get 11%. Ancestors get 10% and animals 10%. Altogether, 88% of the votes credit something superhuman or ancestral.
As for how it was handed over, 40% is a gift or direct teaching and another 22% is revelation, so a willing giver is the norm. Theft, self-sacrifice and plain observation add up to only about one vote between them, yet they are the stories people remember: Odin hanging himself on a tree for 9 nights to win the runes, or the jinn who eavesdrop on the angels and steal a single true word. And 4 practices in the set claim an ancient origin that the evidence shows was invented later. The most famous is tarot's supposed descent from ancient Egypt.
Closer to home: where Thai divination came from
None of the Thai practices in this set was taught directly by a god. Yam Ubakong, a quick method for picking an auspicious hour to move an army, comes, according to Thai Wikipedia, from a Rattanakosin-era war: Ubakong was a Burmese commander captured by the Thais. Burmese soldiers carried the method as a numerical yantra tattooed on their arms, and when Ubakong was jailed he gave it to the Thais, which is why it is called the Ubakong yantra. The source itself hedges with "there is a story that." For the Phrommachat manual, Thai sources say only that it has been handed down since the Ayutthaya period in black folding books, and that the oldest printed edition, from before 1912 (B.E. 2455), names no compiler.
For Thai astrology and the taksa system, Thai Wikipedia says, prefaced with "it is said," that it derives from the Brahmin Vedas and was inherited from India from the Sukhothai period. The only myth explains the numbers for each planet's strength: each planetary deity was moulded from that many animals. The Sun was made from 6 lions, so its strength is 6; Saturn from 10 tigers; and Rahu was created by Shiva from 12 ghost heads. As for the Chinese fortune sticks, siam si, that Thais shake in temples, we found no source for an origin myth, only the name "Guanyin's prophecies," so they aren't counted here.
Given by the gods: 43%, and first on every continent with more than 3 cultures
In Africa, Ifá teaching holds that the orisha Orunmila gave this system of divination to humanity. The Fon of Dahomey, who took Fa from the Yoruba, tell it further: the god Mawu learned that a war would destroy three kingdoms, so he had Legba send three men down to teach people "the alphabet of Mawu." The three sent were the sons of the goddess Gbadu, who has 16 eyes around her head, and humans reach her through palm nuts.
In Mesopotamia, the Akkadian text Secret of Heaven and Earth says that Enmeduranki, king of Sippar, was taken up to heaven by the gods Shamash and Adad and taught how to read oil on water and messages in an animal's liver. In Mexico, Quetzalcoatl ordered the couple Cipactonal and Oxomoco to devise the divinatory calendar, and the Codex Borbonicus shows them as the first human couple casting maize kernels. And in the Greek play, the chained Prometheus lists what he gave mankind, including telling which dreams will come true, reading the flight of birds, and reading entrails.
By continent, gods lead in Africa with 3 of 6 cultures, in Asia with 5.3 of 12, and in Europe with 3.1 of 6. North America is a three-way tie between gods, ancestors and animals at 1 vote each. South America and Oceania have only 1 culture each, and in both the giver is a spirit.
Spirits, angels and jinn: 20%
The strangest story in this group comes from the Etruscans of Italy. Cicero tells how a farmer near Tarquinii ploughed a furrow deeper than usual, and Tages sprang out of it and spoke to him. Tages looked like a child but had a sage's wisdom. The farmer's shout drew a crowd, and in the end all the Etruscans gathered, wrote down what Tages said, and his teaching became the foundation of the art of reading animal entrails. The myth is known only from later Latin writers.
An Arabic Hermetic text says Idris was idly drawing figures in the sand out of boredom when a stranger told him this was serious business, taught him what each figure meant, then revealed himself as the angel Jibril and vanished. That is the origin of Arabic geomancy. On Satawal in Micronesia, a canoe belonging to the spirits of heaven was let down to earth and the spirits taught people to divine by tying knots in palm-leaf strips: the 16 spirits match the 16 number combinations the knots can produce. In the Andes, a coca-leaf reader must first ask permission of Mamacoca, spirit of the coca plant, a "teacher plant," before beginning.
Animals, ancestors, and humans who worked it out
Animals get 10%. The Dogon of Mali say the Pale Fox knows "the first word" and reveals it to diviners, who draw a grid in the earth outside the village in the evening and come back at dawn to read the fox's tracks. This comes from Marcel Griaule's records, which later scholars have questioned on many points. In China, a magic turtle rose from the Luo River with dots for the numbers 1 to 9 on its shell. The Navajo hold that the Gila monster was the first medicine man; its feet tremble as it walks, so hand-tremblers draw their power to diagnose illness from it. And the Greek seer Melampus buried a mother snake crushed by a cart and raised her young, who thanked him by licking his ears clean until he understood the speech of animals.
Ancestors get 10%. In the K'iche' Maya Popol Vuh, the divine grandparents Xpiyacoc and Xmucane are the oldest diviners, casting lots during the creation of humankind. Humans who worked it out themselves get 11%, and nearly all of those are text-based arts: Zi Wei Dou Shu credited to the Daoist hermit Chen Tuan of Mount Hua, the Bhrigu Samhita bearing the sage Bhrigu's name, and Thailand's Yam Ubakong. The exception with a real story is Delphi. Diodorus Siculus tells of a goatherd named Coretas who noticed a goat acting strangely after falling into a crack in the earth; when he went in himself, he could see the past and the future. After a number of people died, the villagers chose a single young woman to receive the god's inspiration.
Theft, sacrifice, observation: about one vote in total, but the stories people remember
In the poem Hávamál, Odin tells how he hung on a windswept tree for 9 long nights, wounded with a spear, given to himself by himself, with no bread and no drink, then peered down and took up the runes, screaming, before falling back. It is the best-known sacrifice story in the set. But note that the myth says Odin won the runes, not divination, and English Wikipedia says there is no direct evidence that runes were ever used to divine. Of Odin's other power, the magic of foreseeing fate, the Ynglinga saga says he taught it to the priests and it spread far and wide from there.
There is only one theft, and it is told by the side that condemns it. Islamic tradition explains that the root of kihana, the divination of pre-Islamic Arab soothsayers, is jinn eavesdropping on the angels and casting what they hear into the soothsayer's ear. A hadith says the jinn snatch one true word and add 100 lies to it. Observation accounts for 2 stories: Coretas and his goat at Delphi, and the Chinese sage Fu Xi, who according to the Xici commentary looked up at the images in the sky, down at the patterns on the earth, at the markings of birds and beasts, and then began to make the eight trigrams.
One more story isn't quite theft but comes close. A Malagasy myth of sikidy tells how two men seized Ranakandriana while he was playing sikidy in the sand. He promised to teach them if they let him go. They went and told their chief to kill all his bulls, because a great herd of cattle would arrive on Friday. The chief lost patience and killed one of them on Thursday; on Friday the herd came, in pouring rain. Historically, sikidy was shaped by Arabic geomancy brought by traders.
The origin of tarot: Egypt in the legend, Italy in the evidence
The legend that tarot is a secret book of ancient Egypt began in Paris. In 1781 Antoine Court de Gébelin argued in Le Monde primitif that the tarot held Egypt's hidden wisdom, and an essay by the Comte de Mellet in the same volume called the cards "the Book of Thoth" and claimed the Egyptians used them for fortune-telling. In 1783 Etteilla replied with a book of his own, and around 1789 he produced the first tarot deck designed specifically for occult use, complete with Egyptian themes in keeping with that belief.
The evidence tells another story. Tarot cards were first called trionfi, and the earliest record of them is a court document from Florence dated 1440. They first appeared in Ferrara and Milan in northern Italy, made by adding the Fool and 21 trumps to the standard Italian pack of 4 suits. The oldest surviving cards are the 15 or so Visconti-Sforza decks painted for the rulers of Milan in the mid-15th century, and from at least then, people used them to play card games, not to tell fortunes. The earliest evidence of tarot used for divination is an anonymous manuscript from around 1750 listing rough meanings for the cards of the Tarocco Bolognese.
The card historian Michael Dummett called it "an entire false history and false interpretation" concocted by occultists and "all but universally believed." The joke is that Egypt does have a small real part in the story: scholars have found that early European playing cards were probably based on the Egyptian Mamluk deck, invented in or before the 14th century. But that is a medieval Egyptian card game, not an ancient Egyptian scripture. The word tarot itself comes from the Italian tarocchi, whose origin is uncertain, though in the late 15th century taroch was used to mean foolishness.
Claimed ancient, invented later: 4 practices
Besides tarot, 3 more practices in the set don't match the story told about them. Omikuji, the Japanese set of 100 fortune verses, is credited to the monk Ryōgen, with a legend that the bodhisattva Kannon revealed the verses to him, and a disciple of the monk Tenkai said Ryōgen appeared to Tenkai in a dream to tell him the verses, lost for centuries, still existed. English Wikipedia says the set actually derives from a Chinese Southern Song collection, and that it was Tenkai who attached Ryōgen's name to it.
India's Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra is ascribed to the great sage Parashara, but nobody knows when it was first composed. The scholar Gonda placed its first part after 600 CE, and the manuscripts that surfaced centuries later raise doubts about their authenticity. Korea's Tojeong bigyeol, a New Year fortune book, is credited to Yi Ji-ham, a Joseon scholar nicknamed after a 10-foot mud hut that survived a great flood, but one theory holds that the book only appeared in the late 19th century and its author borrowed Tojeong's name.
| Practice | Culture | Who gave it | How |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ifá (geomancy) | Yoruba, Africa | The orisha Orunmila | Gift |
| Fa | Fon, Dahomey | The god Mawu, via the 3 sons of the goddess Gbadu | Sent down to teach |
| Sikidy | Madagascar | The god Zanahary, to Ranakandriana | Gift · another tale: forced to teach |
| Fox divination | Dogon, Mali | The Pale Fox | Reveals the first word |
| Oil on water, liver reading | Mesopotamia | The gods Shamash and Adad | Taken to heaven and taught |
| Arabic geomancy | Arab | The angel Jibril, to Idris | Taught in disguise |
| Kihana | Pre-Islamic Arab | Jinn | Stolen from the angels |
| Forbidden astrology | Jewish (Book of Enoch) | The Watcher angels | Taught as forbidden knowledge |
| The eight trigrams | China | Fu Xi | Observed sky and earth |
| Luo Shu | China | The divine turtle of the Luo River | Carried the pattern out |
| Omikuji | Japan | Kannon, to the monk Ryōgen (claimed) | Revelation · shown to be later |
| Yam Ubakong | Thailand | Ubakong, a captured Burmese commander | Told the method in prison |
| Taksa | Thailand | Shiva moulding the planet deities | Explains the planet numbers |
| Entrail reading | Etruscan | Tages, the child from the furrow | Taught before a crowd |
| Runes | Norse | Odin | Hung himself 9 nights |
| Seiðr | Norse | The goddess Freyja | Taught the Æsir |
| Oracle of Delphi | Greek | Coretas the goatherd | Watched a goat in a chasm |
| Greek divination arts | Greek | Prometheus | Gift |
| The poet's insight | Irish | The Salmon of Knowledge | Hot fish oil burned Fionn's thumb |
| Tarot (Book of Thoth) | French occultism | Thoth (claimed) | Shown to be later |
| 260-day divinatory calendar | Aztec | Cipactonal and Oxomoco, at Quetzalcoatl's order | Gift |
| Hand-trembling diagnosis | Navajo | The Gila monster | Gave the power |
| Palm-leaf knot divination | Satawal, Micronesia | The 16 spirits | Came down by canoe and taught |
| Coca-leaf reading | Andes | Mamacoca, spirit of the coca plant | Answers through the leaves |
What actually holds
Across every continent, the repeated answer is that divination did not start with humans. 88% of the votes say it came from something greater, and 62% say the giver handed it over willingly, whether as a gift or a revelation. Gods are the top answer on every continent where we have more than 3 cultures: Africa, Asia and Europe. Of the roughly 1 in 9 that say humans worked it out, nearly all are book-based arts, and even those books like to name a legendary sage as their author.
The twist: not every gift was a good one
Thai readers might assume that a divine gift must be a good thing, but several cultures tell it the other way round. 1 Enoch says that 200 Watcher angels came down, married human women and taught forbidden knowledge: Baraqiel taught astrology, Kokabiel the constellations, Shamsiel the signs of the sun, Sariel the course of the moon, and all of it was counted among the causes of the earth's corruption. Cassandra of Troy got her gift of prophecy from Apollo, but when she broke her promise to him, he cursed her so that no one would believe her true prophecies. And Arab kihana is known to us only through the Islamic tradition that condemns it, never in the soothsayers' own words.
A caveat on this set: the sample leans toward Asia with 12 cultures, while South America and Oceania have just 1 each, and traditions with large written canons, Buddhist, Hindu, Abrahamic and Chinese, naturally leave more sources to cite. We had to drop several cultures, including Māori, Hawaiian and Fijian traditions and Chinese fortune sticks, because we couldn't find a source for an origin myth. No source doesn't mean no myth.
Finally
Next time you lay out tarot cards, shake a cup of fortune sticks, or check Yam Ubakong before a trip, remember that the deck began as a card game in Milan, the related Japanese fortune verses had a monk's name attached to them later, and Yam Ubakong came from a Burmese prisoner of war. Every form of divination has a story about where it came from, and some of those stories are better than the fortunes.
Frequently asked
What is the origin of tarot cards?
Northern Italy in the mid-15th century. The cards were first called trionfi, the earliest record is a Florentine court document from 1440, and they were used for card games. The earliest evidence of tarot divination is a manuscript from around 1750 in Bologna.
Did tarot come from ancient Egypt?
There is no evidence for it. The idea began with Antoine Court de Gébelin in 1781, whose book called the cards the Book of Thoth. Scholarship shows tarot was invented in Italy. The only real Egyptian link is that early European playing cards were probably based on the medieval Egyptian Mamluk deck.
Where does the word tarot come from?
From the Italian tarocchi, whose origin is uncertain, although in the late 15th and early 16th centuries taroch was used to mean foolishness.
How old is the Rider-Waite tarot?
The original Rider-Waite-Smith deck dates from 1909. It is one of the three most common esoteric decks, with the Tarot of Marseilles and the Thoth Tarot. The oldest tarot deck made in Marseille is Philippe Vachier's, dated 1639.
What is the myth of Odin and the runes?
In the Hávamál, Odin hangs on a tree for 9 nights, wounded by a spear and offered to himself, then takes up the runes with a scream. The myth says he won the runes, not divination, and there is no direct evidence runes were ever used to divine.
Who invented divination?
Among the 29 cultures we counted, 43% credit gods, 20% spirits, angels or jinn, and only 11% say humans worked it out, mostly for book-based arts.
Where did Yam Ubakong come from?
Thai Wikipedia says it came from a Rattanakosin-era war: Ubakong was a Burmese commander captured by the Thais who gave them the method while in prison, hence the name Ubakong yantra. The source frames it as a story, not confirmed history.
Sources for the traditions cited (60)
How we counted: 370 traditions from every continent, living and ancient, from sources in dozens of languages. One tradition, one vote, and only where a source confirms it. A tradition missing here is not evidence it lacks the belief, only that we found no document. Scriptural religions (Buddhist, Hindu, Chinese, Jewish, Christian, Muslim) are described in more detail than oral ones, and some records come through missionaries or outsiders. This page does not judge which belief is true.
Read next: Where astrology got its meanings (history) · Rahu swallowing the moon: where the Thai eclipse story comes from, and who eats the moon in 37 cultures · Where do the Thai colours of the day come from? The myths behind Thai fortune-telling · The Chinese Zodiac Race: Why the Rat Won, Where the Cat Went, and Who Swaps Which Animal · The Myths Behind the 12 Star Signs: the Golden Ram, Hera's Crab, Orion's Scorpion and the 13th Sign
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