The True Origins of Tarot Cards & Cartomancy - Part 3: Tarot in the Last 100 Years

This is the last part of a series. Go here to start at the beginning.

The First Artist Decks

Tarot remained underground and fairly static, reading cards was an obscure and rare talent, tarot was strictly a tool for esoterics and fortune tellers, and on the sidelines for a very long time. It hit widespread mainstream popularity in the 1960’s with new decks hitting the market, like the Hoi Polloi as well as Aelister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot, painted by Lady Frieda Harris. Salvador Dali released his own deck during the 1970’s. He was possibly inspired by the 22 card deck published by a group of Spanish artists right before he started work on his deck. His wife was a card reader, even during the Franco period when it was illegal to read cards in Spain. He sold the deck to an American publisher, who then in turn sued him & had his American assets frozen until he produced the deck. He got a new assistant who helped him get organized. He had to sign 250 proofs for each card, which totaled approximately 20,000 proofs in total.

Llewellyn and Weiser were among the first big publishers of tarot books and decks, and they still dominate the game today.

Finding meaning in random chance

Carl Jung was the first psychoanalyst to recognize the symbolism of the Tarot and connect the Majors with Archetypes. He is a contributing reason why so many therapists bring Tarot into their sessions. I will take a moment to note that he was a German man who lived during the Nazi regime and he had some very repugnant ideas about Black people as well as appropriated other culture’s ideas to build his fame. There are folks who disagree about his racism & appropriation but the evidence is there. I won’t deny it, and neither do many Jungians.

Jungian psychology is credited with popularizing the meaningful connection between unrelated things and called it synchronicity. Jung felt that it was a healthy and necessary function of our minds, and that by calling upon the deepest parts of ourselves we find that meaning, and that meaning sparks the connection we have to the collective unconscious, and fills us with a sense of numinosity. This sense of deep meaning in random occurrence is what all forms of divination are about. It takes a healthy suspension of disbelief to connect with a tarot reading. If you don’t think it’s going to work it won’t. That’s true of any sort of magic, and many other human efforts, really. You have to be willing to open up and be honest with yourself. Mirrors only work if you look into them. If you hide from your own reflection you can’t possibly see anything, and if we aren’t willing to look we will never learn or discover anything.

Tarot in the modern era

Tarot as we know it today was brought into being in the 1980s when authors like Mary K Greer & Rachel Pollack shared their take on using tarot as a way to heal and transform. They published game-changing books that made the way for the thousands of tarot enthusiasts & readers, all the many authors and deck creators, and people using Tarot in the mental health field, like Jessica Dore and Benebel Wen. The internet has democratized learning about Tarot so that anyone can do it. Just like Anyone Can Cook, anyone can be a great tarot reader. Tarot has become a tool for self help, for reflection, exploring archetypes, for unwinding our consciousness. This is why you see people who are traditionally “on the edge” who have developed this talent. It’s sort of a Hanged Man kind of energy.

A Tip for Beginners

I have one tip if you want to learn, and that's start with the Rider Waite Smith deck. Why do I specifically suggest this deck for people who are learning? Because it is the deck that 99% of all the books and guides are written about, and it’s the template for 99% of the decks out there. If you start with this deck and dedicate yourself to this study you’ll soon be able to read with any deck, because learning the tarot is learning a language of symbols. All of the wisdom in this deck is present on the visual plane. 

Thanks for reading about the history of tarot with me. :)