Walking Through 600 Years of Tarot · Final Part
What Does Tarot Reflect?
From game to divination, esotericism, art, and self-reflection, look back on 600 years of tarot and ask what the cards reflect for us today.
Read the storyTAROT STORIES
Tarot Stories
Let one card lead your thoughts a little farther.
These essays are not rules for the correct way to read. They are small observations gathered while living with Tarot and noticing what makes the cards interesting.
LATEST STORIES
New stories
Choose a title that catches your interest and take your time.
Walking through 600 years of Tarot · Part 10
How Did Tarot Survive Into the Modern Age?
From mass publishing and New Age culture to psychology, diverse decks, apps and AI, explore how tarot kept changing—and survived into the modern age.
Read the story
Walking through 600 years of Tarot · Part 9
Two Tarots from the Same Root—RWS and Thoth
How did the same Golden Dawn tradition lead to two such different Tarots? Part 9 follows Waite and Smith, Crowley and Harris, and the two visual languages their collaborations created.
Read the story
Walking through 600 years of Tarot · Part 8
The Woman Who Drew a World of Seventy-Eight Cards—Pamela Colman Smith
Pamela Colman Smith transformed the Minor Arcana from listed meanings into stories in which people grieve, walk and discover hope. Part 8 follows her many-sided art and the visual language created by her seventy-eight pictures of 1909.
Read the story
Walking through 600 years of Tarot · Part 7
Who Was Arthur Waite?
Arthur Waite rejected the Egyptian-origin legend yet still found profound meaning in Tarot symbolism. Part 7 follows the scholar-mystic who separated history from legend and set a new seventy-eight-card deck in motion.
Read the story
Walking through 600 years of Tarot · Part 6
What Was the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn?
Founded in London in 1888, the Golden Dawn turned Tarot, Kabbalah, astrology and alchemy into a graded curriculum. Part 6 explores the common ground from which the RWS and Thoth traditions later grew.
Read the story
Walking through 600 years of Tarot · Part 5
How Did Tarot Become Entangled with Magic?
In the nineteenth century, Éliphas Lévi linked Tarot with Kabbalah, the Hebrew alphabet and Western magic. Part 5 follows the transformation of twenty-two trumps into a symbolic system for contemplating an unseen order of the world.
Read the story
Walking through 600 years of Tarot · Part 4
When Did Tarot Become Divination?
When did a game of Tarot become a way to read the future? Part 4 follows Court de Gébelin’s influential claim of 1781 and Etteilla’s practical system, tracing the years in which Tarot acquired a second life as divination.
Read the story
Walking through 600 years of Tarot · Part 3
How Did People Play Tarot in the Past?
Before Tarot became divination, how was the game actually played? Part 3 follows the earliest known printed rules from 1637: ranked trumps, a shortened 66-card pack and the Fool’s singular ability to lose no trick and be captured by no one.
Read the story
Walking through 600 years of Tarot · Part 2
What Is the Tarot de Marseille?
The Tarot de Marseille is not a single deck invented by one person in Marseille. Through seventeenth-century cards and recent research, Part 2 follows the visual tradition behind the name and its surprising relationship with Paris, Lyon and Marseille.
Read the story
Walking through 600 years of Tarot · Part 1
Tarot Was Not Born for Divination
Tarot did not begin as a way to tell the future. Its story starts with a card game in fifteenth-century Italy. Through surviving Visconti-Sforza cards, this first part traces the early structure that would eventually become the familiar deck of 78 cards.
Read the story
Thinking about Tarot with AI · 03
Can I ask the cards the same question again?
Wanting to ask the cards the same question again is not unusual. Before the search for a desired answer becomes painful, this story uses an AI perspective to consider why you want to ask again, how the question may have changed and what it means to wait.
Read the storyThinking about Tarot with AI · 02
If a reading does not feel right, was it wrong?
When the cards do not match reality, you do not have to force them to mean something. From an AI's point of view, this story considers both the freedom to say a reading was wrong and the interest of looking back once more for another interpretation.
Read the storyThinking about Tarot with AI · 01
When the answer is not clear, try changing the question
You do not need a perfectly formed question at the start. From an AI's point of view, this story explores how the cards can help you reshape a question little by little and move closer to what you truly wanted to know.
Read the story
Cards that give thought a direction
Is Tarot only there to give us answers?
Tarot's appeal is not limited to predicting the future. When thought keeps circling, a card can give it one direction to follow. This story considers that experience through Tarot research and the NTTarot creator's own observations.
Read the story