THE IMPORTANCE OF HISTORICAL CONTEXT 

THE “FLIGHT TO EGYPT” 

Does it make sense to say that historical context matters when trying to understand something?

Let me offer a joke (because sometimes comedy teaches what argument can’t). 

A teacher asked her Sunday School class to draw a picture of a Bible story. One child held up a drawing of an airplane. The teacher asked which story it was meant to represent.

“The flight to Egypt.”

“I see,” said the teacher. “And that must be Mary, Joseph, and Baby Jesus. But who’s the fourth person?”

“Oh, that’s Pontius—the pilot.”

Kyle is what happens when context goes missing. He hears a phrase (“flight to Egypt”), knows modern airplanes, and assumes the Bible is describing an ancient version of what he already recognizes. But of course the biblical story is not about aviation. It’s about a family escaping violence. “Flight” means fleeing. And if you don’t know that—if you don’t know the world that produced the story—you’ll misread the whole thing, no matter how confident you feel.

Tarot gets misread in exactly the same way.

Some Classic Tarot Misunderstandings

Misunderstanding: “Tarot has always been what Tarot is today.”

Reality: The Tarot we know today is the product of centuries of reinterpretation, not a fixed ancient system. Tarot began as a 15th-century trick-taking card game, not a divinatory system. The trump images were not standardized; early decks varied widely in order, naming, and symbolism. The modern terms “Major Arcana” and “Minor Arcana” are 18th–19th-century innovations.

Misunderstanding: “Tarot has an exotic or supernatural origin.”

Reality: Tarot’s origins are European, pervaded by Christian morality but expanding beyond that. Tarot evolved from regular playing cards, which first spread across Europe in the 1300s. Claims that Tarot derives from a lost Egyptian scripture—or that it was brought to Europe by “Gypsies”—are 18th-century romantic fantasies. (“Gypsy” is a slur; Romani peoples are originally from India, not Egypt.) Finally, the idea that Tarot is demonic or anti-religious is moral panic, not a historical fact.

THE ROAD AHEAD

This chapter tracks Tarot’s evolution through three main developmental contexts. This is not to drain Tarot of mystery, but to clarify the kind of mystery it is. 

It begins as a card game—a cultural artifact born in Renaissance Europe. It grows into a predictive oracle shaped by social instability and popular need. Then it becomes an initiatory/psychological symbol system which treats Tarot as a “map of the soul.”

You can think of these as three layers. Later layers did not erase earlier ones; they repurposed them. Tarot is not one thing. It is a conversation across time. 

At a glance, here is the minimal timeline:

• Late 1300s: Playing cards arrive in Europe (various routes; rapid popularity)
• Mid-1400s (likely 1430s–1440s): “Triumph” decks emerge in northern Italy: a card game with a new suit of allegorical trump cards
• 1500s: The name shifts from Trionfi (triumphs) to Tarocchi / Tarocco in Italy; the game spreads and varies regionally
• 1600s–1700s: A stable visual tradition forms in France/Switzerland commonly called Tarot de Marseille (a key ancestor of modern Tarot iconography)
• Late 1700s: Tarot is reframed as an oracle (Etteilla systematizes cartomancy); Tarot is also reframed as ancient esoteric wisdom (Court de Gébelin)
• Mid-1800s: Esoteric synthesis deepens (Eliphas Lévi links Tarot to Kabbalah and a mystical “alphabet”)
• Late 1800s: The Golden Dawn builds a vast correspondence system (astrology, Kabbalah, ritual magic) using Tarot as a core text
• 1909: Rider-Waite-Smith deck publishes: a watershed for modern Tarot reading
• Late 1900s–today: Explosion of decks + pluralism: feminist, queer, pagan, Christian, therapeutic, artistic, pop-cultural, and everything in between

That’s the skeleton. Now let’s put flesh on it.

THE PATH TO THE TAROT’S CREATION 

HOW “TRIUMPHS” BECAME TAROT

The deck of cards that today bears the name “Tarot” did not begin as a tool of divination. It began as a game, and that origin matters. Not because divination is illegitimate, but because understanding the game helps us understand the structure Tarot already contained before anyone declared it a sacred book.

Playing cards were already common in Europe by the late medieval period. The basic four-suit format was familiar enough. What appears in northern Italy in the mid-1400s—especially among elite families—is something new: a deck that includes an additional suit of allegorical trump cards, often called Trionfi (“Triumphs”). These trumps outranked the suit cards in gameplay. They were not merely decorative. They were designed to win.

And that means Tarot’s later symbolic power did not arise from nowhere. Its symbolism was born inside a structure built for hierarchy, value, and dramatic reversal: the trumping card. Even before Tarot became a spiritual system, it already knew how to speak in the language of “this outranks that,” “this overcomes that,” “this interrupts the expected order.”

But how did this innovation come about? How do we explain it?

PETRARCH AND THE TRIUMPH IMAGINATION

At this point we meet a figure who did not “invent Tarot,” but who likely shaped the cultural imagination that made Tarot possible: Francesco Petrarch (1304–1374), often called a father of Renaissance humanism. Humanists looked to ancient times for lost wisdom which, they believed, would bring about renewal in the present.  They sought to revive the classic works of Greece and Rome–their texts of grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry, and moral philosophy–to promote the development of well-rounded, virtuous individuals. 

Petrarch’s key contribution embodies this commitment to spiritual renewal—to what historians today call “the Renaissance.” It was his book called I Trionfi (“The Triumphs”). This poem essentially tells a story about the soul’s journey through human existence and into eternity, as reflected in a procession of allegorical images drawn from classical Greece and Rome. 

First comes Love—romantic desire, so powerful in its own way. But the fires of love can fade, and so Love is followed by Chastity: faithful devotion, patience, and steadiness of heart. Yet even Chastity cannot overcome Death; Death never asks permission. The procession continues with Fame, the strange persistence of a beloved name beyond the grave. And yet, as years stretch into decades, even memory thins: this is the lesson of Time. Triumphing over them all is Eternity or Divinity: the horizon beyond all rise and fall, the soul’s return to its source.

This was not just poetry. Here, allegory becomes educational technology—images that train the soul. It was a way of thinking about life itself, a contemplative framework for recognizing how fragile we are, how easily we are swayed, how fleeting our accomplishments can be, and how the eternal horizon stands beyond all the rise and fall of human affairs. I Trionfi was quoted, staged, illustrated, and imitated throughout the Italian city-states.

Petrarch didn’t invent triumphal allegory. He lived in a world saturated with it, filled with pageants, processions, moral theater, virtues and vices made visible. But I Trionfi elevated the genre and helped consolidate a widely shared imaginative script: ascending powers, each overcoming the last, carrying the soul from material attachment toward ultimacy. It was a cultural sensation. It provided courts, artists, festival organizers, and theologians with a shared visual language of ascending powers, each overcoming the last. 

That is the world in which a “triumph deck” makes sense. A set of ranked images can function as moral theater in miniature—portable pageant. You don’t need a secret Egyptian priesthood to explain it. You need a culture that thinks in allegory.

Tarot is a moral-allegorical pageant, staged not in streets, but played through cards.

BUT WHY A GAME OF CARDS?

Play existed throughout early medieval Europe (c. 500–1200), but for many people it was more seasonal than habitual, clustered around feast days, fairs, and communal festivals rather than assumed as a daily entitlement.

Church authorities often warned against games tied to wagering—especially dice and gambling—because play could slide into idleness, vice, and neglect of duties. The result was a recurring pattern of moral policing and periodic restriction. 

Between 1350 and 1500, however, urban life fostered a late-medieval expansion of play—a “play explosion,” if you will. Cities like Florence, Venice, and Paris fostered guild culture, taverns, and public squares. With urbanization and commerce came new spaces for sociable recreation.

Cities also institutionalized Carnival, triumphal parades, and sacred theater. Play became public, aesthetic, and communal.

Another factor was the sudden appearance and rapid spread of playing cards in Europe in the late 1300s. Cheap, portable, and requiring nothing but a surface and companions, cards democratized play: from noble chessboards to everyday hands on tavern tables. 

Add to this the emerging humanist spirit. Renaissance humanism revalued play as an arena for wit, imagination, and grace—acceptable within limits, and even useful as a tool for learning and moral growth. 

In that cultural atmosphere, “triumph” decks make sense. It’s not that someone said, “Let’s turn Petrarch’s Triumphs into cards.” Rather, triumphal allegory was already in the air—just as cards became a widely-shared medium of recreation

In this context, Tarot’s emergence was natural.

So—what exactly were the first “triumph” decks?

TRIUMPHS TO TAROCCO TO TAROT 

HOW THE NAME AND THE IMAGES STABILIZED

The earliest known reference (currently) to the game of Triumphs appears in a journal entry by the Florentine notary Giusto Giusti, dated 16 September 1440, where he mentions “naibi a trionfi” (“playing cards of triumphs”). However, scholars generally believe that the earliest Triumph decks emerged slightly earlier—likely in the mid- to late-1430s.

The Visconti-Sforza ruling family of Milan played an important role here, in that they commissioned the creation of several of these decks. The most famous among them is the Visconti-Sforza (Pierpont Morgan–Bergamo) deck, dated around 1451. As one of the earliest surviving ancestors in the Tarot family tree, it shows many core trump themes that later decks keep developing

These were not mass-produced cards. They were luxury art objects: hand-painted, gilded, and often commissioned by ruling families. They resembled illuminated manuscripts more than ordinary playing cards.

While early Italian sources used the language of Triumphs, over time, the Italian name Tarocchi / Tarocco became standard (regional spellings and usage varied). This name shift is significant because it tracks the moment when the deck was no longer an exclusive possession of the nobility. From courtly luxury object, it moved into being a social game played widely. 

When Tarocchi spread across the Alps into France, the French term Tarot took hold—and from there it became the international name that endured.

This is also where Tarot images would stabilize. As Tarot took root in France, a recognizable pattern eventually coalesced into what many today call Tarot de Marseille. It is not a single deck but a family resemblance: a shared iconography that became a major ancestor of modern Tarot symbolism.

Controversial From the Beginning

By the late fifteenth century, the triumph game was already distinctive enough to draw clerical criticism. In an anonymous anti-gaming sermon entitled Sermones de ludo cum aliis (from around 1480-1500, found in the manuscript commonly nicknamed the Steele Sermon) the preacher thunders (in translation) that “there is nothing so hateful to God as the game of triumphs.” 

His complaint is revealing: he objects to sacred figures and moral powers (God, angels, virtues) appearing alongside worldly authorities (the Pope, the Emperor) inside a game—an arena associated with chance, laughter, wagering, and moral risk. For him, this collapses the proper hierarchy of the world: holy things are being handled as entertainment.

That intensity tells us two things. First, Tarot’s imagery was already being received as symbolically significant, not neutral decoration. Second, at least in some places, the game of trumps had become culturally visible enough to feel spiritually provocative—more than “just cards.”

FROM CARD GAME TO DIVINATORY TOOL

WHEN TAROT BECAME AN ORACLE

At some point, people began using Tarot not only to play, but to inquire.

Evidence for early divinatory use is scattered and often comes through literary references rather than detailed instruction manuals. We can say this cautiously: by the 1500s, Tarot is already flirting with the boundary between play and prophecy–between entertainment and the human hunger for guidance.

But Tarot divination as a formalized method—a teachable system with consistent meanings—emerges much later, and it emerges in a specific cultural mood: instability. 

The decisive shift into divination happens in 18th-century France, when Enlightenment curiosity, esoteric fashion, and social instability created a new hunger: not just for play, but for meaning that could orient a life.

This part of Tarot’s story—in which Court de Gébelin and Etteilla play key roles–deserves more detailed attention than is usually given in Tarot books. They reimagined Tarot as a repository of ancient, universal wisdom but did so driven by the crises of the times in which they lived, which they met full on with their personal ambitions and passions. 

COURT DE GÉBELIN AND THE EGYPTIAN IDEA

Antoine Court de Gébelin (1725–1784) was a French Protestant pastor, philologist, cultural theorist, and Enlightenment-era intellectual. Today he’s remembered almost exclusively for one claim: that the Tarot deck preserves fragments of ancient Egyptian wisdom. But in his own time, he was not known as an occultist. Rather, he was a respected erudite polymath, participating in Parisian intellectual salons, including the one hosted by Madame Helvétius, which Benjamin Franklin also attended. 

His life’s central project was Le Monde Primitif (The Primeval World), an encyclopedic multi-volume attempt to recover what he thought were the shared symbolic roots of all ancient cultures. This revolution in thought was matched by his revolutionary times, when long-standing authorities and inherited traditions were increasingly questioned side-by-side with the introduction of new ideas about reason, the origins of civilization, and the recovery of primordial wisdom. 

This dovetailed with a widespread Enlightenment conviction: that all languages, myths, and symbols must ultimately derive from a single original source–a source rational, pure and universal, predating later cultural fragmentation. If one could learn to read beneath the surface differences that characterize divergent cultures, one could reconstruct this lost foundation.

Essentially, The Primeval World was trying to accomplish what 20th century scholars such as Carl Jung, Mircea Eliade, and Joseph Campbell would become famous for—only about 150 years too early, and with very poor source material.

Interestingly, de Gébelin’s discussion of Tarot enters only briefly, in Volume 8 (1781), almost as an aside. According to his own account, he was at a gathering when someone produced a deck of Tarot cards to play a game. He was struck by them immediately. 

It would prove to be the spark that would transform Tarot forever. 

The Fateful Moment: An Imaginative Recreation

Here is an imaginative recreation of the fateful moment when Court de Gébelin discovered Tarot, sometime around 1777-1778–what he might have seen and felt: 

It was an ordinary winter evening in Paris, in the later years of Louis XVI’s reign, when the city’s great salons were still alive with talk of reason and reform. We were at Madame Helvétius’ house in Auteuil—the one with the long windows and the garden where, in warmer months, Franklin would sit under the lime trees and speak of the lightning he had caught.

Voices overlapped as they always did—philosophers arguing the nature of virtue, Franklin telling some American anecdote, a poet reciting lines half-finished. I was listening, but only half. My mind had been heavy that season—volume seven of Le Monde Primitif nearly complete, yet the whole system still wanting one last key.

The thought that all languages, all myths, all histories must trace back to a single ancient flame had begun to feel almost provable. Almost. And there is nothing more exhausting than almost.

Someone laughed at the far end of the room. Cards slapped against the table. The sound was common enough—people played games everywhere in Paris—but something in the rhythm drew my attention. Not gambling cards. Something else. A young noblewoman was teaching an Italian game. A deck of cards lay between her hands.

I drifted closer. Not intending to. Only… drawn.

The cards were larger than ordinary ones, longer. Painted figures, more elaborate than any mere diversion required. A Fool in motley with a bag upon his shoulder. A Magus with wand and cup and sword and coin. A woman enthroned between pillars. Death riding without crown or scythe. A Wheel with beasts rising and falling.

I felt my breath lift sharply. There it was—that electric stillness that comes when the world suddenly becomes coherent.

No one else seemed to see it.

They laughed, played, wagered counters. But to me, at that moment, each card was a page torn from a book I had been seeking my entire life.

Centuries of symbolic language hidden here, disguised as play. My father had taught me that forbidden truths survive in whispers, in psalms, in parables spoken behind shutters. Why not in cards?

The girl dealt me a hand and I barely heard her voice. My vision had narrowed to the images. The Fool stepping forward without fear—the beginning of wisdom is wonder. The Magus—the human will shaping the world through correspondences. The High Priestess—the veiled keeper of hidden knowledge. These were not inventions of an idle painter. These were fragments.

Survivals.

I felt suddenly the weight of centuries—Egypt, Chaldea, the lost libraries, Alexandria burning. The ancestors, knowing their temples would fall, their teachings exiled—so they hid their knowledge where no tyrant would suspect it.

In a game.

What better place to keep a treasure than in plain sight?

The room around me seemed to recede—the laughter, the fire, the perfume of pipe smoke. I touched the card of the Star. A woman kneeling, pouring water into water and water into earth, stars wheel above her in ordered sky. The ancient image of harmony between heaven and the world.

I whispered, without meaning to: “This is Egyptian.”

The room fell quiet for a moment. Someone asked me to repeat myself. I could not. Words would have cheapened it.

But now I knew. 

I had found the key. 

In Volume 8 of his encyclopedic The Primeval World, Court de Gébelin declared that Tarot was no mere Renaissance card game, but a surviving fragment of universal wisdom traced back to ancient Egypt. This was a claim born not from esoteric ritual, but from the world of scholarly study and Enlightenment conversation—from ink-stained manuscripts and the salons of Paris.

Like a candle’s flame passed quietly from one wick to the next, his interpretation prepared the ground for a new transformation: Tarot would soon become not only a symbolic relic of ancient wisdom, but a tool of divination.

THE FIRST CARD READER

From Alliette to Etteilla 

Jean-Baptiste Alliette (1738-1791) was born in Paris to a modest artisan family. As a young man, he held several small trades, most famously as a hairdresser and seller of prints and engravings. This was not unusual; Parisian artisans often moved among multiple trades. But it meant something important about him. He lived close to the street economy, where working people came to him with fears, hopes, gossip, and questions. He also lived near the salons, where the educated spoke of philosophy, magnetism, Egyptian mysteries, and secret sciences.

He stood between classes—a liminal identity that shaped everything that followed.

He was also ambitious and hardworking, intent on achieving fame. Fortune-telling with playing cards was already widespread in Paris by the 1760s and 1770s. The practice circulated informally—passed along in kitchens, courtyards, stalls, and back rooms—mostly as oral craft rather than printed instruction. Alliette learned within that world. But unlike many practitioners, he recognized that what was everywhere in practice was almost nowhere in print. There was an opening: to codify a folk art into a teachable system—and to build a public identity around it.

Seeking both income and recognition, in 1770 he published Etteilla, or A Way to Entertain Oneself With a Deck of Cards. This is the first known printed manual of cartomancy. It’s important to note that it did not involve Tarot at all. It was a system for reading ordinary playing cards. Tarot would come later, after an intellectual spark changed everything.

Note especially the manner of his self-promotion: He signed his book “Etteilla” (his surname Alliette spelled backwards) to create a stage name. This tells us that he understood branding long before the word existed. It also suggests that he wanted to escape the limiting role of artisan and become something much, much more. Etteilla is not merely an alias. It is a reinvention. By reversing his name, he inverts his social standing: artisan becomes sage; hairdresser becomes master of hidden knowledge. 

It’s as though he created a new self, in the same way Tarot’s Magician stands before the tools of transformation and declares: I am more than my circumstances.

Le Monde Primitif hits home

When Le Monde Primitif landed in Parisian intellectual circles, including its claim about Tarot’s ancient Egyptian origins, most people regarded it as a curious and romantic speculation. For Alliette, now Etteilla, on the other hand, it was a revelation. It offered him something he had long lacked: not just a market but an exotic mythos. The ordinary playing cards he had been reading for a decade suddenly seemed like shadows of a deeper, older system. 

He seized this claim with both hands and proudly declared that he had known it all along—that he possessed, or could reconstruct, the original Egyptian method. 

This moment is the pivot point of his entire career.

Etteilla’s appropriation of Court de Gébelin’s Egyptian thesis was bold. But he did what Gébelin never attempted: he turned a speculative origin story into a usable method. He offered procedures, meanings, spreads, and a teacher’s voice. A stream of publications followed, culminating in his “Grand Etteilla” deck (1789), designed specifically for esoteric cartomancy, and a companion teaching text presented as the “Book of Thoth.” Whatever we make of his historical claims, his practical impact is undeniable: he helped make Tarot divination systematized, publishable, and transmissible.

I will say more about Etteilla’s specific teachings on how to read the cards in a later chapter, since many of them continue to shape Tarot divination today. For now, note carefully that Etteilla’s public career as a Tarot reader peaks in the 1780s, just as the French Revolution erupts. He became the first professional card reader at the exact moment when the Church was violently disempowered, monasteries and religious orders were shut down, and many clergy were killed, imprisoned, exiled, or driven from public life. The result was the collapse of a shared cosmology that had once given daily life coherence. In the wake of this chaos, people needed a new map. 

The history of Tarot’s evolution into an instrument of divination must be understood in this specific context. People were asking: “Who will survive?” “Which side should I be on?” “Will the Revolution devour me?” “Is the future even safe?”

Etteilla’s readings were not frivolous entertainment. They were coping mechanisms—for making sense of a world unraveling in real time. Not only coping—also conscience, choice, and meaning when older frameworks were destabilized.

This is Tarot as a spiritual GPS system, though no one in Etteilla’s time would describe it like that. But we can, today. 

FROM DIVINATORY TOOL TO MYSTICAL INITIATORY TEXT

Etteilla had given Tarot its first full interpretive system. His approach was practical, systematic, and oriented toward the telling of fortunes. But after his death in 1791, and through the upheavals of the French Revolution and Napoleonic era, his work gradually faded from public attention. Tarot reading persisted in pockets—especially among women and working-class diviners—but the grand Egyptian mythos that Etteilla had constructed lost its momentum.

For several decades, Tarot lived largely in the shadows of European culture. It was read at tables and in kitchens, passed orally rather than through formal texts. While scattered references and esoteric undercurrents remained, Tarot was largely absent from serious intellectual discourse and lacked any sustained theoretical framework.

Then, in the 1850s, a former seminarian turned political radical named Éliphas Lévi rediscovered Tarot and re-enchanted it. He linked it not to ancient Egypt but to Kabbalah, medieval mysticism, Renaissance magic, and Christian-Hermetic symbolism. Where Etteilla had made Tarot a tool of personal survival during social collapse, Lévi reframed it as a mystical initiatory text—one capable of transforming the soul.

It is Lévi, writing more than sixty years after Etteilla, who reintroduces Tarot into the intellectual bloodstream of Europe and lays the groundwork for the occult revival to come.

ÉLIPHAS LÉVI

The Almost Priest

He was born Alphonse-Louis Constant (1810–1875), and as a young man he entered the Catholic seminary. His teachers recognized real brilliance in him and believed he was destined for the priesthood. He was deeply, achingly devout—drawn to the beauty of the liturgy, the music, the quiet shimmer of candles in the chapel.

Yet from the beginning, a tension lived in him: the longing to contemplate eternal things, and the equally urgent impulse to walk out of those chapel doors and answer the cry of the poor in the streets.

Then he fell in love with a woman, and he would not renounce that love. He was forced to leave the seminary and abandon the path to ordination. It created a wound that never quite healed. Constant always felt himself almost a priest, almost a mystic of the Church—but forever outside its gates.

In his twenties and thirties, Constant turned his efforts toward practical social reform. He wrote fiery pamphlets against poverty and exploitation and called for a society grounded in compassion and equality. The state responded by charging him with “incitement” and imprisoning him several times.

He had the heart of a prophet—the kind who stands in the city square crying out for justice to roll down like waters. But his fire, in the end, only burned him. The revolutions he called for stalled. His political allies fractured. He could not financially support his family, and his marriage dissolved. He spoke truth to power, and power struck back—hard.

He felt these failures keenly. Yet over time, they tempered his character, as fire tempers steel. He began to see that words alone cannot transform the human heart. A revolution of external political structures cannot succeed without a corresponding revolution of the soul.

This was the insight that broke him open.

The Turn Inward

Having walked away from the Church yet still feeling its absence like a phantom limb, Constant began to search for a spiritual framework capable of holding both his reverence and his conscience. He immersed himself in mystical and esoteric traditions: the Kabbalistic image of a universe knit together by divine emanations; the Hermetic principle of as above, so below; Paracelsian alchemy as a metaphor for inner transformation; medieval magical grimoires; the visionary cosmology of Swedenborg; and the emerging science of mesmerism, which suggested that hidden forces link human souls.

What he sought was not novelty. He sought depth—a system as spiritually rich as Catholicism, but not bound to its hierarchy or its alliance with the social status quo. He wanted a spirituality capable of justice.

It was during this period that he took the name Éliphas Lévi—a deliberate Hebrew calque of his given names:

• Alphonse → Eliphas
• Louis → Lévi, after the ancient priestly tribe

Etteilla had chosen his name to stand out—to brand himself as the first professional Tarot reader. Lévi, by contrast, chose his name as an act of devotion. It was a gesture of kneeling rather than marketing, an attempt to reclaim the priesthood he had lost.

At the same time, it was also an act of self-mythmaking. Lévi understood the power of symbols—including the symbol of himself. He was consciously stepping into a priestly role, though not one ordained by bishop or pope. He became, instead, a priest of the inner temple, ordained by the voice of the Divine he believed spoke within the depths of the soul.

Lévi’s Unique Contribution 

Lévi was familiar with Court de Gébelin’s claim that Tarot derived from ancient Egypt. He considered the historical argument romantic and ungrounded, yet he affirmed the intuition behind it: Tarot is not merely a card game, but a symbolic book encoding spiritual knowledge.

He also studied Etteilla’s Book of Thoth system, but rejected its primary focus on fortune-telling as spiritually insufficient. Where Etteilla said, “Let us foresee events,” Lévi replied, “Let us awaken the divine within.”

Lévi’s central contribution was to unite—through a highly creative, non-rabbinic, Christian-Hermetic lens—three symbolic systems that each revolve around the number twenty-two:

• the 22 Trumps of the Tarot
• the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet
• the 22 symbolic paths connecting the Sephirot on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life

Through this synthesis, Lévi reframed Tarot as a structured mystical language. The cards no longer merely describe fate or personality; they narrate the soul’s descent into embodied existence, its moral and psychological development through trial, and its ascent again toward union with the Divine.

Lévi also recovered an ancient understanding of magic—not as superstition, but as the disciplined training of the will to act in harmony with the deepest currents of reality. Under this view, Tarot becomes not an oracle of external events, but a manual of spiritual agency: a symbolic technology for learning how to become a conscious co-creator with the Divine.

Without Lévi, Tarot remains either an antiquarian curiosity or a divinatory craft. With Lévi, Tarot becomes a path of initiation—a system of symbols capable of awakening insight, responsibility, and transformation.

Much of what follows in Tarot’s modern history—the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot, and even Jungian psychological approaches—flows through Lévi’s reframing.

He stands as the great turning point between historical Tarot and modern spiritual Tarot: the moment when the cards cease merely to predict the future and begin to initiate the soul. 

MODERN EVOLUTIONS

The Order Of The Golden Dawn And Its Descendents

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, founded in London in 1887–1888 by William Wynn Westcott, Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, and William Robert Woodman, served as the alchemical crucible in which earlier currents of European occultism—Hermeticism, Kabbalah, astrology, and ceremonial magic—were fused into what we now recognize as modern esoteric Tarot.

Before the Golden Dawn, even occult thinkers such as Etteilla and Éliphas Lévi regarded Tarot as one symbolic system among many: a powerful illustrative tool within a much larger metaphysical landscape. Lévi, in particular, had reframed Tarot as an initiatory symbolic language—but it was still one language among several.

The Golden Dawn inverted that relationship. Tarot became the central organizing schema: the primary symbolic map through which other esoteric systems were taught, integrated, and practiced. Rather than merely illustrating metaphysical ideas, the Tarot was treated as the structural backbone of an initiatory worldview.

Within the Golden Dawn system, every card was assigned a precise initiatory meaning and woven into an exacting web of correspondences, including:

• the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet
• the 22 symbolic paths on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life
• the planets and zodiacal signs of astrology
• the four classical elements and their sub-elements (Fire of Fire, Water of Air, and so on)
• the 36 decans, the ten-degree divisions of the zodiac

Through this synthesis, Tarot was reconceived as a Book of the Universe—a symbolic filing system that organized both the structure of reality and the stages of inner transformation. The cards were no longer primarily tools for prediction; they became instruments for initiation, contemplation, and disciplined spiritual training.

The Golden Dawn’s influence radiates forward through its major descendants. The Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot (1910), created by Golden Dawn initiates Arthur Edward Waite and Pamela Colman Smith, translated much of this system into a public, accessible form—though often with deliberate modification and partial concealment. Thoth Tarot, developed in the 1940s by Aleister Crowley and Lady Frieda Harris, reworked Golden Dawn correspondences toward a more explicitly mystical and Thelemic synthesis. Meanwhile, Builders of the Adytum, founded by Paul Foster Case, adapted the system for psychological reflection and meditative development.

Directly or indirectly, the vast majority of modern esoteric Tarot decks and English-language interpretation guides trace their intellectual lineage through this Golden Dawn framework—whether they explicitly acknowledge it or not.

The Golden Dawn also established a precedent that permanently changed Tarot’s visual language: the illustrated Minor Arcana. Lodge members employed guided visualizations and symbolic sketches as meditation aids, treating the imagination not as fantasy but as a disciplined spiritual faculty. When Waite and Colman Smith later created the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, they expanded these visual cues into fully illustrated scenes for every Minor Arcana card.

What began as an internal initiatory teaching method entered the public world—and became the modern standard for Tarot imagery itself.

Themed Cards

Just as the face of Helen of Troy was said to have launched a thousand ships, the illustrated Minor Arcana created by Pamela Colman Smith eventually launched a thousand Tarot decks. But this influence took time to unfold. When the Rider-Waite-Smith deck first appeared in 1909–1910, public fortune-telling in Britain could still be prosecuted under the Witchcraft Act of 1735. Tarot was not illegal to own, but practicing or advertising divination carried legal and social risk. As a result, the deck circulated cautiously—studied within esoteric circles and private homes, but slow to enter mainstream public life.

When the Act was repealed in 1951, its removal coincided with a broader mid-century opening: a postwar loosening of cultural norms, renewed interest in psychology and spirituality, and a growing occult and countercultural revival in both Britain and the United States. In this more permissive climate, the Rider-Waite-Smith deck rapidly emerged as the most widely used Tarot deck in the world—a position it still holds today.

Its success opened the door to a flourishing of themed or niche decks: Tarot expressions that preserve the basic structure of the cards while foregrounding particular mythologies, spiritual paths, cultural identities, or aesthetic worlds. This was not merely a matter of novelty. People wanted to see themselves—their symbols, their histories, their communities, their passions—reflected in the Tarot.

In the late 1970s, for example, the Motherpeace Tarot reimagined the cards through the lens of the Goddess movement and second-wave feminism, reshaping Tarot’s imagery into a consciously female-centered cosmology. It remains in print not because it is fashionable, but because its symbolic world continues to resonate deeply with those who recognize themselves within it. Other decks have explored themes as varied as animals, specific cultural traditions, meditative paths, sports, fantasy literature, and natural elements—each creating a coherent symbolic universe through which Tarot can speak.

The contemporary Tarot landscape is thus not a single tradition, but a gallery of identity, imagination, and belonging. The deck becomes not only a mirror of the soul, but also a mirror of the cultural worlds people inhabit and cherish. At its best, themed Tarot extends the original promise of the cards: to make meaning visible, personal, and alive in the symbolic language of one’s own life.

EVOLUTION IN THE MAKING 

If we step back from all the dates, names, and turning points, a pattern begins to emerge.

From Petrarch’s Triumphs to the courtly decks of northern Italy…
from kitchen-table readers in Paris to Etteilla’s professional practice…
from Éliphas Lévi’s mystical synthesis to the Golden Dawn’s intricate correspondences…
from Pamela Colman Smith’s paintings to today’s hundreds of themed decks…

Tarot has never stopped changing.

At every stage, human beings have turned toward these cards with an ache for meaning, and the cards have answered—not because they are static relics from a perfect past, but because they are responsive symbols. Tarot endures precisely because it adapts. Each generation carves anew into the block of marble that is Tarot, and each age reveals a different facet of the statue within.

It is in this spirit that I am proposing an additional evolution in the cards—not a rejection of what came before, but a continuation of the trajectory that history itself reveals.

REFOCUSING THE MINOR ARCANA SUITS

The father of Tarot divination, Etteilla, helped the four Suits take a decisive step forward. Before him, the Suits largely mirrored the rigid social hierarchy of medieval Europe. 

• Swords belonged to knights and rulers → nobility
• Cups belonged to priests and sacraments → clergy
• Coins belonged to merchants → commerce
• Wands belonged to peasants and artisans → laboring classes

Etteilla shifted the basis of interpretation from social hierarchy to universal cosmology. Drawing on Renaissance natural philosophy, Paracelsian alchemy, and humoral theory, he proposed that the Suits correspond to the four elements–the building blocks of the universe, the human body, and moral psychology:

Suit	Element	Human Body	Emotion/Behavior
Wands	Fire	Choleric	Energy, enterprise, drive
Cups	Water	Phlegmatic	Emotion, pleasure, receptivity, relationships
Swords	Air	Sanguine	Intellect, communication, discernment, conflict
Coins	Earth	Melancholic	Material, practical, bodily

While few people belonged to the four medieval estates, everyone lived under the influence of the four elements. This elemental system was a genuine democratization of Tarot. It allowed the Suits to speak about inner experience rather than inherited rank, and it laid the groundwork for modern interpretation. Yet it also introduced a subtle limitation: it divided human life into four sealed categories that lived experience does not actually obey.

Life Does Not Divide into Neat Quarters

Every part of daily life involves relationship, emotion, and thought—just in different configurations.

Relationships shaped by material need and survival concerns reflect Pentacles. Relationships seeking joy, meaning, and emotional connection reflect Cups. Relationships forged through danger, conflict, and recovery reflect Swords. Relationships oriented toward creation and possibility reflect Wands.

To say that “relationships belong to Cups” is simply untrue to how human beings live.

The same is true of emotion. Pentacles carry anxiety and relief around survival. Cups hold longing and joy. Swords know fear and courage. Wands feel excitement and exhaustion. Emotion permeates every suit.

Thinking does as well. Pentacles calculate and strategize. Cups reflect on happiness and fulfillment. Swords articulate truth and risk consequences. Wands imagine what does not yet exist.

Intellect cannot be confined to Air any more than feeling can be confined to Water.

Etteilla’s elemental system was an important step forward—but it fragments the human being. The opportunity before us now is to move toward a more unified picture of human life.

A Human-Centered Reframing Of The Suits

This next evolution shifts the focus away from elemental boxes and toward the fundamental dimensions of being human.

• Pentacles mirror the truth that we are embodied creatures with physical needs who must navigate a world of finite resources.
• Wands mirror the truth that we are beings of aspiration, compelled to express what lives within us.
• Cups mirror the truth that we are relational selves who discover meaning, identity, and purpose through connection with what lies beyond us.
• Swords mirror the truth that we are vulnerable lives who can be harmed—and who must learn how to heal.

This reframing does not discard Etteilla’s contribution; it completes the arc he began. It allows the suits to reflect, with greater fidelity, the complexity of what it means to live, love, struggle, create, and endure.

REFRAMING THE COURT CARDS FOR A FULLER HUMAN LIFE

If the Suits describe the dimensions of being human, the Court cards describe the human beings who live within those dimensions.

The Courts represent people—not abstract principles. They show us personalities, roles, and developmental tensions. Yet for centuries, Tarot’s Court system has symbolized only three life stages: childhood (Page), youth (Knight), and adulthood (King and Queen). The final stage of human life—elderhood—has been entirely absent.

This omission matters.

When a culture has no symbolic place for elders, it forgets how to learn from experience. And when a person has no inner Elder to consult, they move through life without the gifts of hindsight, patience, and long-view wisdom. Tarot inherits this cultural blind spot—and so Tarot must evolve.

Restoring Elderhood to the Courts

The solution is not to discard the Court system, but to bring it into completion by aligning the four positions with the four primary stages of a human life:

Court Card	Life Stage	Core Question	Primary Orientation
Page	Child	How does the world work?	Learning & discovery
Knight	Youth	Who am I becoming?	Identity & risk
King	Adult	What am I responsible for?	Work, duty & leadership
Queen	Elder	What truly matters now?	Wisdom, memory & integration

This reframing accomplishes three essential things.

First, it loosens inherited gender hierarchy. Pages, Knights, Kings, and Queens represent stages of human development, not biological sex. Yet Tarot imagery has long portrayed Kings as male and placed them at the top of the hierarchy. By understanding Queens as the culmination of the life cycle rather than a parallel role, we resist this inherited patriarchal structure and affirm that authority ripens into wisdom, not dominance.

Second, it restores elderhood to the symbolic world. The Queen becomes the bearer of memory—the one who has seen patterns repeat, who knows what has been tried before, and who understands consequences over time.

Third, it deepens psychological interpretation. The Courts now map naturally onto the inner family: inner child, inner adolescent, inner adult, and inner elder. This gives readers a compassionate and practical way to understand inner conflict and growth.

In readings, the Courts become living voices:

• The Page invites you to begin again.
• The Knight presses for movement and risk.
• The King asks what must be built, protected, or sustained.
• The Queen invites reflection, integration, legacy, and perspective.

This evolution preserves what was most beautiful in Etteilla and the Golden Dawn while correcting the age and gender assumptions of their time. It gives us a Tarot that is fuller, wiser, and more human.

The Elder Enters

There comes a time
when the fire no longer burns to prove itself,
when the sword is no longer drawn in haste,
when the cup is held not for longing
but for remembering,
and the earth is tended
not for status
but for continuity.

There comes a time
when the heart grows spacious enough
to hold the past without regret
and the future without fear.

This is the time of the Queen.

Not the Queen of crowns or ceremony,
but the Queen who has seen enough
to know what matters
and what does not.

She does not lead by command.
She leads by presence.
By memory.
By the quiet authority of one who has lived.

She is the keeper of long stories,
the watcher of patterns,
the voice that says:
Wait.
Breathe.
Look again.
We have been here before.

Where she appears, the teaching is always the same:
Wisdom is not speed.
Wisdom is not power.
Wisdom is continuity.

The Page learns.
The Knight seeks.
The King carries.

But the Queen remembers.

And remembering is holy. 

CONCLUSION: A LIVING TRADITION

You have seen this now.

The earliest players saw a moral pageant—a procession of powers triumphing over one another, echoing Petrarch and Renaissance sacred theater.

Court de Gébelin saw a fragment of primordial wisdom—a universal symbolic language disguised as a game.

Etteilla saw a tool for survival—a way for ordinary people to navigate chaos and uncertainty.

Éliphas Lévi saw a mystical alphabet—a language of descent and ascent, a manual for inner transformation.

The Golden Dawn saw an initiatory system—a Book of the Universe encoded with astrology, Kabbalah, and ritual magic.

Modern deck creators see a mirror for their communities—feminist, queer, pagan, Christian, pop-cultural, artistic.

Each era encounters the same basic structure: twenty-two trumps, four suits, sixteen Court cards. Each era asks different questions. And each era hears the cards speak in a language shaped by its deepest needs.

Is this projection? Yes—partly. Human beings cannot help but see themselves in their symbols.
Is it fulfillment? Also yes. From the beginning, Tarot was built from a symbolic grammar steeped in Christian moral allegory, Neoplatonic ascent, and the triumphal logic of Petrarch. It was designed to carry many layers of meaning. It was designed to hold multitudes.

Tarot, in other words, is not a fossil. It is a conversation.

Our own reframing of the Suits and the Court cards belongs to this same long conversation. When we shift the Suits from four sealed elemental boxes to four fundamental human predicaments—embodiment (Pentacles), aspiration (Wands), relationship and meaning (Cups), vulnerability and resilience (Swords)—we are not vandalizing the tradition. We are asking a faithful question: How can the structure of the deck reflect human life more truthfully, more compassionately, right now?

When we realign the Courts to honor child, youth, adult, and elder, we are correcting a blindness that earlier cultures often took for granted: the absence of elderhood, and with it the absence of an inner elder in the psyche. We are carving the marble again—not to erase what others have shaped, but to bring forward features that were always implied, yet never fully revealed.

This leads us to the central question of our own moment: How can Tarot become a psychologically honest, ethically grounded, and spiritually rich practice for people today—people wary of grand claims, allergic to dogma, and yet unmistakably hungry for depth?

This is where the Rider-Waite-Smith deck becomes our home base. It stands at a crossroads: rooted in the Golden Dawn’s symbolic system, yet rendered in humane, story-rich images. It carries Tarot’s earlier layers in its bones, even as it invites new interpretations in every generation. It is both heir and beginning—an inheritance and an open door.

So where does this leave you, practically?

You do not have to choose between historical Tarot and modern Tarot. You can honor both. 

You do not have to believe fanciful origin myths—Egyptian priesthoods or secret ancient orders—to treat the cards as meaningful conversation partners.

You do not have to freeze Tarot inside any one era’s worldview. You are allowed—indeed, invited—to bring your full intelligence, lived experience, and ethical conscience into the work of interpretation.

The task ahead is to hold three commitments together:

1. Humility before history. We resist the temptation to invent ancient pasts or ignore context. We stay honest about when, how, and why Tarot took the forms it did.

2. Reverence for symbol. We recognize that Tarot was crafted as a meaningful sequence, not a random assortment. Its images carry real spiritual, philosophical, and psychological weight.

3. Courage to evolve. We allow ourselves—and our communities—to keep carving the marble: to rethink the suits, to restore elderhood to the Courts, to create decks and practices that reflect bodies, stories, and identities long left out of the picture.

You are not merely a consumer of Tarot’s history. By the questions you ask, the ethics you practice, and the meanings you draw, you are already participating in its future.

The conversation continues—and you are part of its next chapter.