Tarot card reading has captured the imagination since the Middle Ages. Hollywood has popularized the image of the Gypsy fortuneteller using the cards to read the future. Some occult practitioners use the cards in this traditional manner. Others take a more philosophical or psychological interpretation of the cards’ symbolism. Non-practitioners dabble with the cards as a parlor game. Religious critics denounce the cards as a form of divination, while skeptics question whether Tarot readers’ predictions amount to anything more than self-fulfilling prophecy.

Without attempting to settle such heated debates, this article attempts the cooler-headed approach of presenting the objective, documented facts about the Tarot, with the aim of providing solid ground for informed investigation and discussion. Here we will review the contents of the Tarot deck and the history of how the cards have been used for card games, divination, Kabbalistic applications, and psychotherapy.

The Cards

A Tarot deck consists of 78 cards, which may be used for playing cards or read for occult fortunetelling, also called divination. In occult Tarot decks, the 78 cards are considered to be divided into 56 Minor Arcana (“lesser secrets”) and 22 Major Arcana (“greater secrets”).

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The 56 Minor Arcana are similar to the cards in a regular 52-card playing card deck. They are divided into four suits, usually called Swords (corresponding to Spades), Cups (Hearts), Wands (Clubs), and Pentacles or Coins (Diamonds). Each suit has 14 cards, resembling a regular 13-card suit, except the Jack is usually called a Page or Valet, and there is an extra face card called a Knight or Knave or Cavalier.

The 22 Major Arcana are numbered from 1 to 21. They represent images of people, such as the Magician; symbolic objects, such as the Chariot; and universal forces, such as Strength. There is also a wild card called the Fool, similar to the standard Joker. The Fool is placed between cards 20 and 21 in some decks and numbered as 0 in others.

The Tarot’s Original Use for Playing Cards

Tarot cards were originally used for playing cards, starting in Italy around the 15th century. Variations of the game are still played in Europe today, going by the name Tarroco or Tarocchini in Italy, Tarock in Germany, and Tarot in France. The game is played in tricks, similar to trick-taking games like whist or contract bridge. Some variations of the game only use some of the 78 cards.

Divinatory Uses of the Tarot

The Tarot was being used for fortunetelling by the 16th century. The earliest references to divinatory Tarot readings indicate that the cards were used to predict simple random outcomes, much like gambling on a dice roll. Later occultists would develop much more complex methods of interpreting the cards by giving the cards elaborate symbolic meanings.

When the Tarot is used for divination, the cards are laid down in a pattern designed to identify spiritual forces influencing a situation. The person querying the cards, known as the Querent, asks a question about some problem they’re concerned with. The cards are shuffled prior to drawing, and the draw of the cards is supposed to reveal the answer to the Querent’s question.

The traditional underlying assumption, implied but not always explicitly stated, is that the random selection of the cards will be guided by some spiritual entity. In traditional occultism, this entity is regarded as the guardian angel of the person querying the cards. This view has drawn criticism from religious opponents of divination and from skeptics who doubt the existence of spiritual beings.

Alternately, some modern Tarot practitioners have reinterpreted the guardian angel in parapsychological terms, suggesting that its role is played by the Querent’s subconscious exercising some telekinetic influence over the cards. Others have proposed that the cards serve as a psychological tool to help focus the Querent’s subconscious on the problem which prompted them to consult the cards.

Whatever interpretation is given to the cards, the method of drawing them remains similar. The most common divinatory drawing method, associated with the Tarot deck named after writer Arthur Edward Waite, lays the cards down in four columns. The first three columns form a cross-shaped pattern, called a Celtic Cross.

The column on the far left represents forces from the near past. The next column, forming the center of the cross, represents forces from the present. The third column represents the near future, while the fourth column represents the far future. The sequence of draws proceeds from the present towards the far future, culminating in the drawing of a card representing the ultimate outcome of the situation. The meaning of the cards is usually interpreted according to Waite’s interpretive system or a related system.

In other methods, the Celtic Cross is replaced with a different pattern. Other popular patterns include a wheel representing the houses of the Zodiac and a tree-shaped pattern representing symbols from the Jewish mystical tradition called Kabbalism.

Kabbalistic Uses of the Tarot: Background

Kabbalism underlies Waite’s method of Tarot divination as well as most other popular methods. It also guides non-divinatory uses of the Tarot.

Kabbalism first appeared publicly in 13th-century Spain in a book called the Zohar, published by Jewish rabbi Moses de León. De León claimed that the book was written by a 2nd-century rabbi, but many scholars think he forged it. The book reflected the influence of Neoplatonism, an ancient Greco-Roman mystical philosophy popular during the Middle Ages. It effectively used Neoplatonic ideas to interpret the Hebrew Scriptures.

In Neoplatonism and Kabbalism, all reality issues forth or emanates from an infinite spiritual source, which the Greeks called the One and the Kabbalists called the Crown (Keter). The infinite One issues forth into many finite things when the material world is created, in a complex process that divides reality into multiple worlds. Some worlds are closer to the original spiritual unity, while others are closer to the material world. Neoplatonists and Kabbalists sought to ascend back from the material world through the spiritual world to reunite with the One. In order to achieve this, they pursued meditative practices designed to heighten their awareness of higher worlds.

Kabbalism identified 10 distinct spheres of reality, called Sephirot, connected by 22 Paths. These paths are considered to correspond to the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, each of which can be represented by a coded number or image. This coding system enables Kabbalists to represent any aspect of reality through a number, word, or picture. Kabbalists use this type of coding system to find meanings in heavily symbolic Scriptural passages such as Ezekiel’s visions and John’s Revelation.

18th and 19th century French occultists pioneered the idea that Tarot readings could be interpreted through the lens of the Kabbalah. In the 1780s, occult writers began interpreting the Tarot’s cards as symbolic codes by cross-referencing them with Kabbalistic codes, along with codes from an ancient Greco-Roman system of astrology and alchemy called Hermeticism. The 22 cards of the Major Arcana were interpreted as corresponding with the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet. The 14 cards of the Minor Arcana suits were associated with Kabbalistic and astrological symbols. The four suits of the Minor Arcana were related to the four points of the compass and four Kabbalistic worlds mapping the ascent from the material world to the spiritual world.

This method of interpreting the Tarot was first publicly espoused by the late 18th-century French writers Antoine Court de Gébelin and Etteilla (Jean-Baptiste Alliette). Etteilla created the first Tarot deck designed specifically for occult divination purposes in 1788.

Kabbalistic Uses of the Tarot: Major Systems

Etteilla’s Kabbalistic interpretation of the Tarot was later modified by two 19th-century occult writers who would play the chief role in popularizing his ideas with later generations. The first was Alphonse Louis Constant, a defrocked Catholic seminarian who popularized ritual magic with Romantic literary leaders in France, writing under the name Eliphas Lévi. The second was Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, who led a British quasi-Masonic Kabbalist society called the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

Lévi’s method of interpreting the Tarot became popular in France, championed by the Martinist writer Gérard Encausse, who called himself Papus, and by Papus’ associate Oswald Wirth. Mathers’ method became the predominant method in the English-speaking world through the influence of his interpreters Arthur Edward Waite, Aleister Crowley, and Paul Foster Case.

A key difference between Lévi’s method and Mathers’ was how they interpreted the Fool card. Lévi’s coding system assigned the Fool a place between cards 20 and 21 of the Major Arcana. Mathers counted the Fool as card 0 and made it the key to interpreting the rest of the deck. Mathers also modified Lévi’s astrological correspondences by replacing them with ones from a medieval Kabbalistic document called the Sepher Yetzirah (“Book of Creation“).

Both Lévi and Mathers claimed they had learned their methods from earlier occult secret societies that preserved an authentic tradition dating back to ancient Israel, Egypt, Greece, Persia, and India. Both have been accused of forging these claims in order to lend false legitimacy to their teachings. As Waite pointed out in his English translation of Lévi’s work, Lévi’s writings are full of logical contradictions and factual errors that undermine his claims about the source of his ideas. For instance, when discussing the Kabbalah, he makes glaring mistakes revealing his ignorance of the esoteric Jewish tradition he claims to represent, committing blunders such as confusing the Kabbalah with the Talmud. As for Mathers, even researchers who admire his ingenuity, such as David Allen Hulse, have concluded that he modified Lévi’s system by doing research into the Kabbalah and other occult sources, and he misrepresented the originality of his own research by falsely attributing it to other authorities.

Lévi and those who followed him laid out complex systems where any Tarot card could be associated with a corresponding Kabbalistic number and letter, along with other symbols, including astrological signs, alchemical signs, plants, animals, parts of the human soul, angels and demons, and divine attributes. They then devised magical rituals employing these symbols. Each of these rituals was designed to achieve a state of consciousness conducive to experiencing the level of reality associated with the corresponding Sephirot or Path.

The original rituals designed by Lévi, Mathers, and their successors were complex affairs requiring initiation into a secret society, formal costumes and equipment, and elaborate religious ceremonies. Many practitioners today prefer to work on their own instead, by using simplified visualizations employing imagery from the Kabbalah and Tarot, a practice known as Pathworking. Today the Tarot is often used for Pathworking as well as divination.

Psychotherapeutic Uses of the Tarot

Another contemporary application of the Tarot is using it for psychotherapy. Psychiatrist Carl Jung speculated that a non-linear physics principle he called synchronicity caused Tarot cards to fall into a pattern representing the Querent’s subconscious. Jung viewed the cards as representing the subconscious symbols he called archetypes. Some Jungian therapists take Tarot readings as a way to analyze how their clients associate the cards’ symbolism with problems in their lives. This employs the cards as a tool modeled on traditional psychoanalytic techniques like free association and dream analysis.

Does the Tarot Work?

Jung proposed some experiments to test his ideas, but had to stop for lack of personnel and funding. Later psychologists and parapsychologists have done some follow-up proposals and research on a small scale, with scant results. As one group of researchers summed up the problems inherent in such an experiment as Jung envisioned:

How, for example, can we convincingly show that the divinatory procedures in fact converge, that appropriate subjects were chosen when an archetype was actually constellated, that the data was taken without biasing the interpretation, and that other extraneous factors are not distorting the outcome? These problems are not insurmountable, but to do more than “preach to the converted,” this experiment or any other must be done with sufficient rigor that the larger scientific community would be satisfied with all aspects of the data taking, analysis of the data, and so forth.
–Victor Mansfield, Sally Rhine-Feather, and James Hall, “The Rhine-Jung letters: distinguishing parapsychological from synchronistic events – J.B. Rhine; Carl Jung,” The Journal of Parapsychology, March 1998

In addition to this set of issues facing scientific researchers, practitioners of fortunetelling and Kabbalistic applications of the Tarot face the issues raised by disputes between competing Tarot authorities such as Lévi and Mathers. It is beyond the scope of this article to attempt to settle such disputes, or to address a number of other important issues that practitioners and critics of the Tarot might raise. I leave off at presenting the facts, and trust you will see to settling these more important matters in your own mind.

Worthy Readings

Trionfi: Tarot and its History
Internet Sacred Text Archive Tarot texts
Internet Sacred Text Archive Kabbalah texts from the Golden Dawn
Carl Jung and Tarot
Victor Mansfield, Sally Rhine-Feather, James Hall, “The Rhine-Jung letters: distinguishing parapsychological from synchronistic events – J.B. Rhine; Carl Jung,” Journal of Parapsychology, March 1998.

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