The Occult

Tarot as a Tool of Divination

Divination · 11 min read

The tarot is a 78-card deck composed of 22 trumps (the Major Arcana) and 56 pip and court cards (the Minor Arcana). It is, in the twenty-first century, the most popular and most versatile of the Western divinatory tools, and the practical art of reading it is the focus of How to Read Tarot for Beginners. The tarot as a divinatory instrument, however, was not the original purpose of the cards. The earliest tarot decks were made as playing cards in northern Italy in the early fifteenth century, and the divinatory use of the deck developed gradually over the next four hundred years. To understand the tarot is to understand both its playful and its serious sides: the iconographic tradition of the Italian Renaissance, the symbolic tradition of the French occult revival, the English-speaking world of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the global mass market of the present. For the broader context of divinatory practice, see Divination Practices, and for the comparative methods, see Scrying, Runes, and Other Oracles. The standard scholarly history of the deck remains Michael Dummett, The Game of Tarot (Duckworth, 1980); Paul Huson’s Mystical Origins of the Tarot (2004) is the most readable divinatory history.

Origins as Playing Cards in 15th-Century Italy

The tarot emerged in northern Italy in the 1420s and 1430s, when four-suit playing-card decks — already common in the Islamic world and southern Europe — were augmented with a fifth suit of trumps depicting a sequence of allegorical figures. The earliest surviving references are to “carte da trionfi” (cards of triumphs), the term that became the Italian tarocchi and the English tarot; the first documented reference to carte da trionfi is a Florentine letter of 1442, but painted fragments of tarots survive from c. 1430. The Visconti-Sforza decks, commissioned by the Milanese ruling families in the mid-fifteenth century, are the earliest surviving complete or near-complete decks; they depict the trumps as the procession of a triumphal allegory, with the figures of the Fool, the Magician, the Emperor, the Pope, the Lovers, the Wheel of Fortune, Death, the Devil, the Star, the Moon, the Sun, and the World, in a sequence that has remained largely stable ever since.

The fifteenth-century tarot was a card game, played as a trick-taking game with additional trumps. The divinatory use of the cards, though sometimes retrospectively imagined as the original purpose, was not the contemporary use. The first documented divinatory use of the tarot is in northern Italy in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, where the cards were read as oneiromantic or symbolic prompts. The Sola Busca tarot (c. 1491), the earliest fully illustrated Italian deck, is sometimes treated as a transitional text between the playing-card tradition and the symbolic-divinatory one; its figures have the rich iconographic character that the later occult decks will adopt. The French tarot in the form of the Tarot de Marseille, with its numbered and unillustrated trumps, became the standard playing card in France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and was also used for cartomancy. The first explicit cartomantic tarot, designed specifically for fortune-telling rather than play, was published in 1780s Paris by the professional cartomancer Etteilla (Jean-Baptiste Alliette, 1738–1791), whose Cartes tarots of 1789–1790 introduced the practice of reading individual cards by their own meanings rather than by their position in a spread; his Manière de se récréer avec le jeu de cartes nommées tarots (1783) is the standard manual.

The Marseilles tradition has been the workhorse of European cartomancy. The French cartomantes developed the method of the tirage en croix (the cross spread) and the tirage en ligne (the line spread), in which a small number of cards are drawn and laid out in a fixed pattern, with the positions of the cards determining the meaning. The jeu de Mlle. Lenormand, a 36-card deck named after the famous French cartomancer Marie-Anne Adelaide Lenormand (1772–1843), is a related but distinct cartomantic tradition. Lenormand, who read for Napoleon and Josephine, used the small deck with fixed combinations of cards producing fixed meanings, a method that has been very popular in continental Europe and that has had a recent revival in the English-speaking world. The Marseilles “restoration” of the late twentieth century, associated with Alexandre Camoin, the Papus-influenced French Martinist tradition, and the cartomantic revival of Pierre Simon, kept the older French cartomantic methods in circulation.

The Rider-Waite-Smith Revolution of 1909

The major moment in the modern history of the tarot is the publication in December 1909 of the Rider-Waite tarot, designed by the painter Pamela Colman Smith under the direction of the scholar and Golden Dawn member Arthur Edward Waite, and published by the London publisher Rider & Company. The deck’s innovation was the illustration of all 78 cards — including all 56 pip cards — with full pictorial scenes, rather than the arrangement of suit symbols and numbers used in the Marseilles tradition. The pip cards of the Rider-Waite deck (the 2 through 10 of each suit) depict specific scenes: the 3 of Cups shows three figures raising goblets in celebration; the 6 of Swords shows a woman and child being ferried by a cloaked boatman; the 10 of Pentacles shows an elderly man seated within an arch with dogs, children, and figures of various stations. The scenes are drawn from a wide range of sources, including Waite’s own Kabbalistic and Golden Dawn attributions and the allegorical tradition of the English-speaking world.

The Rider-Waite tarot’s pictorial scenes made the deck much easier for the inexperienced reader to interpret; many experienced readers, however, prefer the abstract purity of the Marseilles and continue to work with it. The Marseilles reader has to learn the symbolic meaning of the 2 of Cups and the 5 of Swords without full pictorial scenes, though the Marseilles pip cards do carry suit symbols in stylized arrangements. The deck was an immediate commercial success in the English-speaking world, and it has remained the most popular English-language tarot for over a century. For many contemporary English-language readers, the Rider-Waite is simply the tarot.

The companion text, Waite’s The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910), remains in print and is still the standard English-language introduction to the deck. Waite’s own theory of the tarot, drawing on the Kabbalistic and Golden Dawn attributions, treats the 22 Major Arcana as a sequence of initiation, with the Fool as the beginning of the soul’s journey and the World as its completion. The 56 Minor Arcana are treated as the four suits of the Hebrew alphabet’s Tetragrammaton, with the four elements (Yod / fire / wands; first Heh / water / cups; Vav / air / swords; final Heh / earth / pentacles), and the various social-class mappings that authors from Court de Gébelin to the Golden Dawn have proposed (most often: pentacles = merchants, cups = clergy, swords = nobility, wands = peasants — though the order varies).

The Major Arcana

The 22 trumps of the Major Arcana, in the standard sequence, are the Fool (0), the Magician (I), the High Priestess (II), the Empress (III), the Emperor (IV), the Hierophant (V), the Lovers (VI), the Chariot (VII), Strength (VIII), the Hermit (IX), Wheel of Fortune (X), Justice (XI), 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 sequence is treated, in the Golden Dawn and in Waite’s reading, as a journey: the Fool goes out into the world, encounters the various conditions of the soul’s experience, and is finally reconciled in the World. The Fool is sometimes placed at the beginning, sometimes at the end, sometimes outside the sequence as a wandering figure who is everywhere and nowhere.

The 22 trumps also map onto the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, an attribution that was first proposed by the French occultist Éliphas Lévi in 1854 and codified by the Golden Dawn. The 22 trumps, read as letters, are read as a complex symbolic grammar in which each letter of the divine name is associated with a particular card, with a particular path on the Kabbalistic Mystical Tree of Life, and with a particular astrological, alchemical, and mythic meaning. The system is treated in the Golden Dawn and in subsequent occult works, and it is the basis for the most elaborate of the modern tarot traditions. The relationship between the tarot and the Sacred Symbolism and Geometry of the Western esoteric tradition is intimate and contested.

The Minor Arcana

The 56 cards of the Minor Arcana are divided into four suits of 14 cards each. The four suits, in the English-language tradition, are wands (or rods), cups (or chalices), swords, and pentacles (or coins, or disks). In the French and Italian tradition, the suits are bâtons, coupes, épées, and deniers. The 14 cards of each suit are the ace, the numbers 2 through 10, and four court cards. The Rider-Waite deck’s court cards, drawn by Pamela Colman Smith, are the basis of the modern English-language interpretation; the Marseilles tradition has no Page, replacing it with a cavalier (knight), and reads the four court cards as four royal figures.

The four suits have been associated with the four elements (wands with fire, cups with water, swords with air, pentacles with earth) since the seventeenth century, an attribution that the Golden Dawn and modern occult tarot have codified. The pips of each suit are read as the conditions of the element: the ace as the pure principle, the 2 as the balance, the 3 as the first manifestation, the 4 as the consolidation, the 5 as the conflict, the 6 as the reconciliation, the 7 as the perseverance, the 8 as the movement, the 9 as the culmination, and the 10 as the completion. The system is the working grammar of the modern tarot interpretation, and the modern reader of the Rider-Waite tarot often internalizes the 36 pairs of suit and number as a kind of second language.

The Thoth Deck and the Western Esoteric Tradition

The second of the two great twentieth-century tarot decks is the Thoth deck, designed by the artist Lady Frieda Harris (1877–1962) under the direction of Aleister Crowley (1875–1947), the founder of the religion of Thelema and one of the most controversial figures of the Western esoteric revival. Crowley began work on the deck in the late 1930s, and Harris continued to paint it through the 1940s; the deck was published posthumously in 1969 by US Games Systems, with a companion text, The Book of Thoth (Crowley, 1944). The Thoth deck and the origins of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn are intimately connected, since Crowley’s tarot attributions draw on the Golden Dawn system.

The Thoth deck incorporates the astrological, Kabbalistic, and alchemical attributions of the Golden Dawn and Crowley’s own Thelemic system, including the assignment of the trumps to the 22 paths of the Kabbalistic Tree and the elaboration of the four suits as the four elements. The deck is more abstract and more demanding than the Rider-Waite, and it has a different audience — readers who are willing to engage with the elaborate symbolic grammar of the Thelemic and Golden Dawn systems. The Thelemic reinterpretation of the trumps (most notably the reattribution of the Lovers to Gemini and the path of Gimel, and the renaming of Adjustment for Justice and of Art for Temperance) has entered the modern occult tradition.

Court Cards, Suits, and Reversals

The court cards of the tarot, in the English-language tradition, are read in two ways. The first reads them as persons: the Page is a young person, the Knight a young adult, the Queen a mature woman, the King a mature man. The second reads them as aspects of the reader: the four cards represent four modes of action of the suit. The Marseilles tradition reads the court cards differently, as four royal figures each associated with a particular quality.

The four suits of the tarot are read in several overlapping ways. The classical reading (Court de Gébelin, 1781) treats them as the four classes of medieval society; the most common attribution, in the Golden Dawn / Waite tradition, is cups = clergy, swords = military/nobility, wands = peasants/craftsmen, pentacles = merchants (the order and exact mapping varies by author). The elemental reading treats them as the four elements (fire = wands, water = cups, air = swords, earth = pentacles); the psychological reading treats them as the four functions of personality (sensation, feeling, thinking, intuition); and the Kabbalistic reading treats them as the four letters of the Tetragrammaton. The four readings are not mutually exclusive, and the modern reader typically works with several at once.

Reversals (cards drawn upside down) are treated as a complication or shadow aspect of the card. Some readers (notably most French cartomancers) work with reversals; others (notably most Golden Dawn and Thelemic readers) treat the card’s position in the spread as providing the necessary modulation. The choice depends on the spread and on the reader’s own practice. The same is true of the choice of deck: the Marseilles, the Rider-Waite, the Thoth, or one of the many modern decks, depending on the reader’s symbolic grammar, the spread, and the querent.

The tarot is one of several cartomantic traditions. The other major Western cartomantic traditions include the jeu de Mlle. Lenormand (a 36-card deck of small images, with fixed combinations of cards), the regular French and English playing-card decks (read in one- and three-card spreads), and the various “oracle decks” of the modern publishing industry, including the Osho Zen Tarot and the Wild Unknown. The Lenormand deck, with its strong positional grammar, is well suited to specific questions; the tarot, with its complex symbolic structure, is well suited to general questions and to meditation; the playing-card deck, with its accessibility, is well suited to the casual reader. The best of the modern cartomancers have, like the best of the readers of runes, developed a deep knowledge of the symbolic grammar and a working practice of reading that combines intuition, training, and ethical responsibility.

Sources and further reading

  • Michael Dummett, The Game of Tarot: From Ferrara to Salt Lake Lake City (Duckworth, 1980).
  • Paul Huson, Mystical Origins of the Tarot: From Ancient Roots to Modern Usage (Inner Traditions, 2004).
  • Robert M. Place, The Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination (Tarcher, 2005).
  • Michael D. Bailey, Magic: The Basics (Routledge, 2018).
  • Mary K. Greer, Tarot for Your Self: A Workbook for the Inward Journey (New Page, 1984).
  • Rachel Pollack, Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom: A Book of Tarot (Aquarian, 1980).
  • Ronald Decker, Thierry Depaulis, and Michael Dummett, A Wicked Pack of Cards: The Origins of the Occult Tarot (Duckworth, 1996).