These cards are the primary evidence for what tarot was before it was anything esoteric. They show a court game deck: heraldic devices of the ruling family, courtly figures, and a set of trump images drawn from the ordinary visual vocabulary of fifteenth-century Italy, the wheel of fortune, the theological and cardinal virtues, the triumph procession, the danse macabre, the last judgement. There is no Egyptian content, no Kabbalah, no astrological scheme; the numbering and titles are not even fixed, and different early Italian patterns order the trumps differently. Michael Dummett used exactly this material to establish that the trumps are a fifteenth-century Italian invention with an intelligible iconographic context. Anyone told that tarot descends from ancient Egypt or from the Kabbalah can be pointed at these cards, which are the earliest ones there are.
The variation between the Cary-Yale deck's expanded trump set and the more standard structure of the Pierpont-Morgan-Bergamo cards is itself part of Michael Dummett's documented evidence that early Italian tarot had no single fixed canonical form even within one court's own commissions, let alone across the different regional patterns, A, B and C in Dummett's own classification, that competed across fifteenth-century Italy before something closer to a standard trump order and count settled. This variability is difficult to reconcile with any claim of a single ancient esoteric source transmitting one fixed, authoritative sequence of trump images and meanings from antiquity, since the earliest surviving physical evidence shows exactly the opposite: regional experimentation and gradual convergence.