Tarot

Overview

The tarot is a deck of seventy-eight cards used today as a divinatory, meditative, and esoteric instrument. The deck is structured into two parts: a Major Arcana of twenty-two trumps, numbered from The Fool (0) to The World (XXI); and a Minor Arcana of fifty-six cards in four suits — Wands, Cups, Swords, and Pentacles — each running Ace through Ten with four court cards.

Tarot is not in itself a religion or an order. It is a tool that has been adopted in turn by every significant Western esoteric current of the last two and a half centuries — the eighteenth-century French illuminist circles, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Thelema, modern Wicca and traditional witchcraft, chaos magick — and it is also used widely by people unaffiliated with any of those traditions, principally as a focus for self-reflection.

Origins & history

The cards originated in fifteenth-century northern Italy as a game called tarocchi or trionfi. The earliest substantial surviving deck, the Visconti-Sforza tarot, was painted in Milan around 1450 for the Visconti and Sforza ducal families. There is no documentary or archaeological evidence of an earlier non-Italian origin, although later occult writers would assert one. Through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the deck spread through France, where the Tarot de Marseille pattern became the standard form, and into other European card-playing traditions.

The cards entered occult use in 1781, when the French Protestant pastor and Freemason Antoine Court de Gébelin published the eighth volume of his Le Monde primitif with an essay claiming that the tarot was a survival of an ancient Egyptian wisdom-book, the Book of Thoth, smuggled into Europe by Romani travellers. The claim was historically baseless — Egyptian hieroglyphics had not yet been deciphered when de Gébelin wrote — but it was extraordinarily influential, and almost every subsequent occult treatment of the cards depends in some way on it.

Within a decade the Parisian printer and cartomancer Jean-Baptiste Alliette, working under the anagram “Etteilla,” had built a commercial divinatory practice around the cards and produced the first deck explicitly designed for divination rather than for play. The next decisive figure was the French occultist Eliphas Lévi, whose Dogme et rituel de la haute magie (1854–56) attached the twenty-two trumps to the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet and to the Tree of Life of Kabbalah. Lévi’s synthesis became the canonical occult framework for tarot and was inherited substantially intact by the late nineteenth century’s most influential ceremonial-magic body, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

The Golden Dawn elaborated the cards into a comprehensive system, attaching each Minor Arcana card to a specific decan of the zodiac, each suit to one of the four classical elements, and each trump to a Hebrew letter and a path on the Tree of Life. Two decks emerged from the broader Golden Dawn milieu and have dominated English-language tarot ever since: the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, designed by A. E. Waite and illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith, first published by William Rider & Son in 1909; and the Thoth Tarot, conceived by Aleister Crowley and painted by Lady Frieda Harris between 1938 and 1943, posthumously published in 1969. Since the late twentieth century the field has expanded enormously: thousands of decks are now in print, ranging from strict reconstructions of the Marseille pattern to artist’s decks with no esoteric framing at all.

Beliefs & practices

There is no single doctrinal account of how tarot “works,” and serious users hold positions across a wide spectrum. At one end is a literal divinatory reading, in which the cards are taken to indicate future events with reasonable specificity; this position is rare among contemporary practitioners and largely associated with commercial fortune-telling. More common is a psychological framing, often Jungian-inflected, in which the cards function as a repertoire of archetypal images that prompts the reader to articulate something they already know but have not consciously formulated. A third common position treats the random draw of cards as a stochastic input that displaces habitual cognitive patterns long enough for the question at hand to be reconsidered — closer to a deliberate disruption technique than to divination in the traditional sense.

Practical use takes several forms. Cartomancy proper is the laying out of cards in a specified pattern (a “spread,” from the simple three-card past-present-future to the elaborate ten-card Celtic Cross and others) in response to a question, with the cards interpreted both individually and in relation to one another. Meditative work uses single cards or small selections as objects of sustained attention, treating each card as a compressed teaching to be unfolded over time. Magical use, particularly within Golden Dawn-derived and Thelemic practice, employs cards as ritual focal points, as components in pathworking on the Tree of Life, and as invocational aids.

The interpretive traditions diverge substantially. Marseille reading concentrates on the Major Arcana and the symbolic structure of the pip cards, with the Minor Arcana treated principally numerologically; Rider-Waite-Smith reading uses the fully illustrated Minor Arcana scenes as direct image-prompts; Thoth reading retains the Golden Dawn correspondences and Crowley’s Thelemic reframings.

Symbols

The Major Arcana is a sequence of twenty-two figures whose individual symbolism is the central study of esoteric tarot. The standard order, in the post-Marseille convention used by most occult systems, runs: The Fool (0, often unnumbered), The Magician (I), The High Priestess (II), The Empress (III), The Emperor (IV), The Hierophant (V), The Lovers (VI), The Chariot (VII), Strength (VIII or XI depending on tradition), The Hermit (IX), The Wheel of Fortune (X), Justice (XI or VIII), The Hanged Man (XII), Death (XIII), Temperance (XIV), The Devil (XV), The Tower (XVI), The Star (XVII), The Moon (XVIII), The Sun (XIX), Judgement (XX), and The World (XXI). The numbering of Strength and Justice was swapped by the Golden Dawn for reasons of zodiacal correspondence; the Marseille and Rider-Waite-Smith orderings differ on this point.

The Minor Arcana’s four suits are conventionally attributed to the four classical elements: Wands to Fire, Cups to Water, Swords to Air, and Pentacles (also called Coins or Disks) to Earth. (Some twentieth-century systems reverse Wands and Swords; the matter remains contested and is settled differently in different lineages.) Each suit runs Ace through Ten plus four court cards: Page, Knight, Queen, and King in the Rider-Waite-Smith convention; Princess, Prince, Queen, and Knight in the Thoth deck; Valet, Cavalier, Reine, and Roi in the Marseille pattern.

The composite system — twenty-two trumps mapped to the twenty-two paths of the Tree of Life and the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, four suits mapped to the four elements and the four worlds of Kabbalah, the forty pip cards mapped to the ten sephiroth across the four suits, the sixteen court cards mapped to the elemental sub-quadrants — is the principal structural inheritance of Golden Dawn tarot, and is preserved in some form in most twentieth- and twenty-first-century esoteric decks.

Notable figures

• Antoine Court de Gébelin 1725–1784
  First occult author of the tarot

  French Protestant pastor, Freemason, and encyclopaedist whose 1781 essay in volume eight of Le Monde primitif first proposed the tarot as a survival of ancient Egyptian wisdom. The thesis is historically false but became the founding move of occult tarot; without it none of the subsequent nineteenth-century elaboration would have happened in the form it did.

• Jean-Baptiste Alliette (“Etteilla”) 1738–1791
  First commercial cartomant; first divinatory deck designer

  Parisian printer and occultist who, working under the anagram of his surname, built the first sustained commercial cartomantic practice and produced the first deck designed specifically for divination rather than play (Le Tarot à enseigner, 1789). His system attached specific divinatory meanings to upright and reversed cards in a form that has shaped commercial reading practice ever since.

• Eliphas Lévi (Alphonse Louis Constant) 1810–1875
  Founder of the Tarot–Kabbalah linkage

  French occultist whose Dogme et rituel de la haute magie (1854–56) and Histoire de la magie (1860) attached the twenty-two trumps of the tarot to the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet and to the paths of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. The synthesis became canonical for almost all subsequent occult tarot work and was inherited essentially intact by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

• Arthur Edward Waite 1857–1942
  Designer of the Rider-Waite-Smith deck

  English mystic, Mason, and prolific occult author. A senior figure in the later years of the original Golden Dawn and head of one of its successor branches, Waite designed the conceptual structure of the deck published by William Rider & Son in 1909. His Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910) is the deck’s companion text.

• Pamela Colman Smith 1878–1951
  Illustrator of the Rider-Waite-Smith deck

  English-American artist, theatrical designer, and Golden Dawn initiate who painted the seventy-eight-card Rider-Waite-Smith deck. Her fully illustrated Minor Arcana — the first such treatment in any English-language deck — established the visual conventions that have dominated twentieth- and twenty-first-century tarot. Long under-credited; her authorship of the imagery is now widely acknowledged.

• Aleister Crowley 1875–1947
  Designer of the Thoth Tarot

  English occultist who conceived and wrote the Thelemic recasting of Golden Dawn tarot published as the Thoth Tarot (painted 1938–43, deck published 1969) with companion text The Book of Thoth (1944). The deck preserves the Golden Dawn correspondences while substantially reworking the iconography in line with Thelemic doctrine.

• Lady Frieda Harris 1877–1962
  Painter of the Thoth Tarot

  English artist who painted the Thoth deck over five years of close collaboration with Crowley. Her contribution was substantial enough — both artistic and conceptual — that the deck is now commonly cited as a Crowley-Harris collaboration rather than as Crowley’s alone.

Controversies

The Egyptian-origin claim originated by Court de Gébelin in 1781 and propagated by Etteilla, Lévi, and most subsequent nineteenth-century occult writers is rejected by mainstream historical scholarship. The historian of cards Michael Dummett, working with Ronald Decker and Thierry Depaulis, established the Italian fifteenth-century origin definitively in The Game of Tarot (1980) and A Wicked Pack of Cards: The Origins of the Occult Tarot (1996). Modern occult writers diverge on how to handle this: some have abandoned the Egyptian framing entirely, others retain it as an archetypal or initiatory metaphor while acknowledging that it is not historical, and a smaller number continue to defend the Egyptian thesis in various reduced forms.

The credit for the Rider-Waite-Smith deck is the principal twentieth-century controversy. Pamela Colman Smith was paid a flat fee — reportedly modest — for her illustrations, retained no royalties, and was not credited as co-creator on the deck itself, while A. E. Waite and the publisher William Rider received the institutional credit. Smith’s authorship of the imagery is now widely acknowledged in scholarship and in the practitioner community, and the deck is increasingly called the Rider-Waite-Smith or simply Waite-Smith deck rather than the older “Rider-Waite”. The substantive question of how much of the Minor Arcana imagery was Smith’s independent invention, and how much was working from instructions Waite supplied, is still actively researched; the consensus is that her contribution was substantial and creative rather than merely executive.

Commercial tarot reading has periodically been the subject of consumer-protection action. The cards as a tool are not legally fraudulent, but specific practices — vague predictive claims wrapped in unfalsifiable language, pressure to purchase “curse removal” or related follow-up services, encouragement of dependency in vulnerable clients — have been the basis of fortune-telling-fraud prosecutions in several jurisdictions, particularly in the United States. The contemporary professional-reader community generally distinguishes itself from these practices and emphasises consent, ethics codes, and a non-predictive framing.

Within the contemporary tarot publishing scene, the use of imagery drawn from living indigenous traditions in commercial decks — particularly Native American, Vodou, and Yoruba-derived material in decks designed for outsiders — has been the subject of cultural-appropriation criticism from both the source communities and the wider tarot community. Several major publishers have withdrawn or revised decks in response.