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.