I procured my first Tarot deck while I was still in high school, from a tiny bookshop that has long since vanished. I was looking to buy books to gift my best friend on her birthday, when I chanced upon a metallic box, decorated in the royal colors of purple and yellow, that contained a deck and a guidebook. I was immediately drawn towards the Magician, with his charisma and motley assortment of tools, and was fascinated by the dog and the wolf painted on the Moon card, wondering if the creatures were howling a spell to escape the borders of the picture. Over the next few days, I pored frantically over the cards, inspecting each intricate symbol, divining my future, and learning about different “spreads”.
Like the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt, the Tarot cards are a pictorial system of storytelling, divination, and conveying information. A typical deck consists of 78 lavishly illustrated cards, representing different celestial forces as well as the familiar conundrums of everyday life, be it a lover’s spat (a reversed Two of Cups), a pregnancy (The Empress), money troubles (Five of Pentacles) or even a natural disaster (The Tower). The rich symbolism behind each image, as well as the unconscious associations made by our own imagination and intuition, creates a splendid polyphony of meaning and discourse.
For my teenage self, however, the Tarot cards were the closest thing to magic. Indeed, the fanciful history of the Tarot is shrouded in magic, secrecy, and conjecture. There have been claims that the origins of the Tarot can be traced back to Egypt; that like the symbols in alchemy, divine, and esoteric wisdom had to be carefully concealed in plain sight by encoding them in mundane illustrations, and passed down through the generations. Perhaps the occultists of yore really distilled the mysteries of the universe into a set of 78 cards, or perhaps not; but either way, the format of the deck that exists today initially appeared not as a tool of divination, but as a parlor game in the royal salons of 14th century Italy.
European nobles often commissioned artists to paint portraits of themselves to be hung in their castle hallways or exhibited in galleries. So, it wasn’t uncommon for a few wealthy individuals, such as the Visconti family of Milan to also commission their private sets of playing cards, illustrated with images of family members and friends. After all, if you look closely at a Tarot deck or a set of playing cards, you will notice the surplus of royalty: queens, kings, pages (or “jacks”), knights, princes, princesses, even a separate Emperor and Empress.
As a parlor game, the Tarot (or “tarocchi”) quickly grew in popularity, spreading to different parts of Europe including France and Austria. Most Tarot games were variations of different “trick-taking” games, with the aim of collecting as many points as possible. The 78-card deck is divided into two parts: the Major Arcana and Minor Arcana. The Major Arcana consists of 22 cards (numbered from 0 to 21) and represents varied cosmic forces, as well as the abstract concepts of justice, temptation, and karma, among others. Beginning with the Fool and culminating in the World, the Major Arcana can be interpreted to tell the story of the Hero’s journey— a truth that most querents can identify with, as they look for answers to their personal troubles. The other 56 cards form the bulk of the Minor Arcana and can easily double as a set of playing cards, with 4 extra cards (substituted by the Joker in common decks). In fact, in many countries, Tarot decks continue to be used as playing cards, without necessarily carrying any occult connotations.
While variations abounded among the Italian, French, German and Portuguese decks (the Minchiate of Florence had 97 cards!), the images in the Tarot reacquired esoteric significance with the efforts of Antoine Court and Jean-Baptiste Alliette in the late 18th century. Jean-Baptiste, a French occultist with a penchant for the mystique, published a book called Etteilla, ou manière de se récréer avec un jeu de cartes (“Etteilla, or a Way to Entertain Yourself With a Deck of Cards”) in 1770, where he assigned meanings to each card and laid down his rules of Tarot divination. He may have very well been the first professional tarot card reader in modern history, drawing upon astrological correspondences, the theory of humors as well as the symbolism of classical elements; soon after, another French occultist Antoine Court published a book Le Monde primitif in 1781, that hinted at arcane Egyptian origins to the Tarot.
The two most popular card decks used to this day. Image courtesy : Author.
The original Rider-Waite Tarot deck. Image courtesy : Author
The marvelous world of Tarot abounded in mystique and romance, and after my initial foray into it, I was only determined to learn more. Thus began my rather expensive hobby of collecting Tarot decks from around the world. The two most popular decks currently used in fortune-telling today—the Rider-Waite deck and the Thoth deck—have their origins in the resurgence of occultism and hermetic philosophies of the late 18th century, with the rise of secret societies such as The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and academic research into esoteric philosophies of different sects and cultures. The Rider-Waite deck, illustrated by Pamela Coleman Smith drew upon the teachings of occultists such as Elphias Levi and A.E. Waite, while the notorious ceremonial magician, Aleister Crowley drew upon the Kabballah and other disciplines and gave detailed guidelines to Lady Freida Harris to paint the Thoth deck. He also made some changes to the deck itself, renaming certain cards, while also adding a keyword to describe the “essence” of each card.
For instance, the Ten of Wands is named “oppression” which sums up the sense of exhaustion and being overburdened with duties and obligations that is commonly associated with that card.
Most Tarot decks being sold today are modelled on the Rider-Waite deck, first published in 1909. As I conducted readings, primarily for myself but also for friends and family, I learned a lot about my own insecurities, as well as techniques of narrativizing the past and present. The meaning behind a Tarot reading stems not just from the complex symbolism of each image, but also from the interplay of the surrounding cards that seem to communicate with each other to tell a story. Depending on whether a card is Reversed or Upright, the meaning too may change. Thus, based on the context of the querent and the other cards drawn, the same card may carry different meanings to different people. This lends a strangely intangible yet authentic wisdom to the Tarot reading. It functions in the shadowy realms of the occult and employs all the machinations of the fortune-telling market, yet never claims a singular truth. A Tarot reading remains subjective, and the process of meaning-making is conditional not just on the “chosen” cards, but also on the reader and the querent themselves.
Most guidebooks provide a few preliminary spreads (drawing a certain number of cards and arranging them in a specific pattern to answer a particular question or explore an issue in detail) but soon I was making my own spreads. The Tarot, to me, became less about predicting the future and more about becoming self-aware and discovering one’s deepest desires and weaknesses— a meditation tool to connect with my own unconscious, and perhaps comparable to the practice of psychoanalysis. More often than not, I sought clarity and closure, and instead of asking “What will happen?”, I cared more about the “why” and “how” and “what I can learn from this?”
Nor did I always abide by its tidings. In fact, when it came to matters of love, neither I nor my friends heeded the sagely wisdom of the Tarot. Despite the cards alerting us to the red flags, we pursued men who wouldn’t or couldn’t love us and got our hearts broken. Yet, almost like a ritual, I would turn turned to the cards to weigh the pros and cons of a situation, whenever I was faced with making difficult choices. I. When a Tinder date suddenly ghosted a close friend at a time of political turmoil, she was visibly distraught and we spent hours in an empty classroom, poring over the issue in detail. The cards assured us that the man was safe, but urged her to give up hope. Furthermore, the cards told us that things would soon get much worse. When my friend selected a single card to sum up her foreseeable future, she drew the Hermit, the traditional card of introspection and solitude.
“So, no matter what I do, I’ll still be alone?” she asked.
I scrutinized the card, wondering if it meant that my friend would remain single or if she would be physically alone. At last, I said, “I think you need to stay away from the community. Maybe, the cards are telling you to spend more time on your own, at home.”
Soon after that, the pandemic took over, bringing our dating and university lives, and much of everything else to a grinding halt.
The cards, I discovered, also had a whimsy sense of humor. A person who was determined to know the manner in which he would die, quite unironically picked out the Death card. Other times, the cards only reinforced my own intuition: I knew for a fact that I would fail at a specific task, and yet I still asked my deck how it would all turn out. The spirit of the Tarot definitely rubbed it in, when I turned over the card and revealed it to be the Five of Swords (the traditional card of defeat).
The Five of Swords
The Card of Death
As my deck collection slowly grew, I assigned particular uses for each deck. I kept my Raider-Waite deck for clients, while my Thoth deck became my traveling companion. From another deck, I drew a card each day as part of my morning ritual to meditate and set the tone for the day. I also learned about “pip decks” where the Major Arcana are illustrated in detail, while the Minor Arcana are painted minimally. One of my sets is inspired by fairytales and folktales from all around the world, and it is my go-to deck for storytelling. I adapted traditional spreads to help me map out the plot and pacing of my speculative short stories, while the images offered endless sources of imagination. Of course, the use of the Tarot in storytelling isn’t anything new— in Italo Calvino’s famous novel The Castle Of Crossed Destinies (1973), the travelers who are unable to speak, communicate their story with the help of Tarot decks. Perhaps the images appeal to some primal element in the Collective Unconscious — a concept proposed by Carl Jung to explain the certain similarities in world mythologies across disparate cultures. Like leitmotifs in a musical piece carrying layers and layers of meaning and story, the archetypes enshrined in a Tarot deck simultaneously encapsulate a vast variety of human experiences and point towards truths that aren’t always apparent.
Fat Folks Tarot – a Tarot project re-imagining traditional Euro-centric cards with more diverse representations. Courtesy : Author.
In the 21st century, with the popularity of New Age trends and the reclamation and appropriation of witchcraft, Tarot decks too have exponentially grown in fame and quantity. Artists and writers often design and offer their own spin on Tarot decks, drawing from elements of their culture, prioritizing gender and racial diversity in the illustrated characters, or altering the symbols themselves to reflect varied experiences. It isn’t uncommon to find professional or fan-made decks geared around a particular media, allowing customers to connect with their fandoms and their own selves in a deeper and enriching way. Of particular note is the Fat Folks Tarot project that reimagines and reinterprets the traditional Euro-centric cards (with typical patriarchal beauty standards) with illustrations featuring fat BIPOC and LGBTQ+ people, making the wisdom and playfulness of a Tarot deck accessible to a more diverse audience, and challenging societal norms.
From a parlor game meant for royalty, the 78-card Tarot deck has come a long way. It has participated in arcane rituals, carried forward the mystical teachings of secret societies across centuries, substituted as a set of playing cards, and become a powerful tool of self-healing, empowerment, divination, and storytelling. You can use it to understand the state of things in your life, make sense of the world around you or fuel your creative pursuits— but like all others forms of art, it might even help you reimagine a better future.