Tarot

The tarot's origin is one of the few points in Western esotericism where the documentary evidence is complete enough to settle the question, and it settles it against the tradition's own story.

Tarot decks appear in northern Italy in the middle of the fifteenth century, Milan, Ferrara, Bologna, Florence, as playing cards for a trick-taking game with a permanent suit of trumps. The surviving Visconti-Sforza cards are luxury objects made for a ducal court. The rules of the game are recorded, the game continued to be played across Europe for centuries under the names tarocchi, tarot and tarock, and it is still played in parts of France, Italy, Austria and central Europe today by people with no interest in divination whatever.

There is no evidence of any esoteric use before the eighteenth century, and none of Egyptian origin at any point. The Egyptian claim was made in 1781 by Antoine Court de Gebelin, a French freemason and antiquarian, who declared the cards a surviving book of Egyptian priestly wisdom. He was writing before the Rosetta Stone was deciphered, so he could not read a word of Egyptian, and he supplied no evidence at all. Etteilla, a Parisian cartomancer, produced the first deck designed for divination shortly afterwards.

The historical work that established all this, principally by Michael Dummett and his collaborators, who reconstructed the game's spread from surviving rules and decks, is thorough and is not seriously contested by historians.

Occultists have generally responded not by disputing the evidence but by relocating the claim: that the game was a vehicle carrying older symbolism, or that the meaning was placed there later and is no less real for it. That is a defensible position about symbolism. It is not a claim about the fifteenth century, and the two should not be run together.

The tarot most people picture is a specific deck published in 1909, and almost every association it carries was assigned within the previous sixty years.

Eliphas Levi, writing in France from the 1850s, made the decisive move: he connected the twenty-two trumps to the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet and so to the paths of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. The correspondence is arithmetically neat and historically unfounded, the trumps were not twenty-two by design in the same sense, their number and order varied by city, and no fifteenth-century source connects them to Hebrew letters. Levi's scheme nevertheless became the backbone of every esoteric tarot since.

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, from 1888, systematised it: fixed attributions of trumps to letters, planets, elements and zodiac signs; the pip cards assigned to the ten sephiroth in four elemental worlds; and a decimal grid of meanings covering all fifty-six minor cards.

The Waite-Smith deck of 1909 then did the thing that made tarot usable by anyone. Pamela Colman Smith, an artist working from Arthur Edward Waite's direction and, by most assessments, contributing a great deal more than direction, drew fully illustrated scenes for the minor arcana, which older decks had shown only as arrangements of suit symbols. That single decision meant a reader could work from the picture rather than from a memorised table, and it is why this deck and its descendants dominate the English-speaking world. Smith was paid a flat fee and largely forgotten for most of a century.

Crowley's Thoth deck, painted by Lady Frieda Harris and published posthumously in 1969, is the other major line, with its own attributions and a different suit vocabulary.

Readers describe the practice in two broadly different ways, and it is worth keeping them apart because they make different claims.

The divinatory account treats the cards as informative about circumstances the reader could not otherwise know, whether by chance guided from outside, by synchronicity, or without any offered mechanism. The reflective account, now probably the more common among professional readers, treats the deck as a structured set of archetypal images whose function is to prompt the querent to articulate what they already know, with the randomisation serving to break habitual framings rather than to transmit information. Neither account is the whole field, and many readers move between them.

The mechanics are simple. Cards are shuffled, cut and laid in a spread in which each position is assigned a meaning, past, present, likely outcome, what obstructs, what helps. The three-card line and the ten-card Celtic Cross are the most common; readers also design spreads for a particular question. Reversals, cards drawn upside down, are read by some as inverted or blocked meanings and ignored by others, and that disagreement is longstanding.

Where readers disagree most sharply is on prediction. A substantial part of the professional field now declines to make specific predictive claims at all, both on principle and because in several jurisdictions doing so for payment attracts legal restriction. Others read predictively and always have.

The one claim the historical record does support is that the tarot has become the most widely used symbolic vocabulary in Western esotericism, the common language into which astrology, Kabbalah, alchemy and elemental theory were all mapped in the nineteenth century, and the reason those systems are now so often encountered together.

Several terms in constant use among readers describe handling rather than cards, and their histories are not alike.

A reversed card is one that arrives upside down relative to the reader, and most modern readers give it a different sense from the same card upright, commonly a blocked, internalised, delayed or excessive form of the upright meaning, sometimes a flat negation of it. Practice here is genuinely divided and always has been. Some readers use reversals throughout, some never do and deliberately square the deck so that none can appear, and some read them only in particular positions of a spread. Nothing in the tarot's history requires them. The deck began as a card game in fifteenth-century Italy, where orientation carried no significance at all, and reversed meanings appear in the divinatory literature only from the late eighteenth century, with Etteilla among the first to publish them systematically. A reader who declines to use reversals is not neglecting a tradition. They are choosing one of two established conventions, and the choice should be stated at the start of a reading rather than left for the querent to work out.

A significator is a card chosen before the reading to stand for the querent or for the matter in hand, and laid down as the base that the rest of the spread refers back to. It is usually a court card selected by the querent's colouring, age and temperament, or by their astrological sign; some readers instead pick a Major Arcana card matched to the question. The practice reaches modern readers through the Golden Dawn material and Waite's instructions for the Celtic Cross. It has largely fallen out of use, and one reason is plain enough: choosing a person-card by physical appearance is a nineteenth-century convention that reads very poorly now.

A clarifier is an additional card drawn when a position is unclear, laid beside the card it is meant to explain rather than replacing it. It is modern, informal, and readers warn each other about it, because the temptation to keep drawing until the answer improves is obvious and the discipline of sitting with an unwelcome card is generally held to be the point of the exercise.

A shadow card is the card left at the bottom of the deck after cutting, in some methods the one lying beneath the significator, read as the influence underneath the question that the querent has not put into words. The name borrows from Jungian vocabulary, and the practice is recent: late twentieth century at the earliest, and spread mainly through the online reading community rather than through any published system.