What Does
Tarot Reflect?

01 · BEFORE DIVINATION

At First, Nobody Was
Reading the Future

The earliest tarot decks already contained an Emperor. A Pope. Lovers. Death. The Star. The Sun. The World. And then there was the strange figure of the Fool.

VISCONTI-SFORZA · c.1450

But those images did not begin with the divinatory meanings familiar to us today. They showed things that were recognizable to people of their own time: society, religion, morality, fortune, life. They appeared as images on the trump cards of a game.

And yet, from where we stand now, there is something a little uncanny about them. So much of what people encounter in life was already there. Power. Love. Change. Death. Hope. Success. And fortune—the things no human being can completely control.

It was not divination yet. But perhaps the cards already contained enough of human life for later generations to want to find more meaning in them.

02 · A FUTURE IN THE CARDS

Then Someone Tried to See
the “Future” in the Cards

In the eighteenth century, the way people looked at tarot began to change.

Antoine Court de Gébelin believed that the cards might preserve secrets handed down from the ancient world. Today, there is no accepted historical evidence for his theory that tarot came from ancient Egypt.[5]

But people who encountered his ideas began to see tarot as something more than a game.

Then came Etteilla. He developed a practical system for using tarot in divination.[4]

Tarot had changed profoundly.

03 · THE INVISIBLE ORDER

“The Future”
Was Not Enough

In the nineteenth century, Éliphas Lévi entered the story.

He did not see tarot only as a tool for saying: “If this card appears, this is what will happen.”

What if there were an invisible order beneath the world? What if different symbols were simply different ways of expressing that same hidden structure? Lévi placed tarot inside a way of thinking like this.

Is there really such a structure behind the visible world? We have never tried to settle that question in this series. We have kept historically verifiable facts separate from the things people believed within esoteric traditions.

But one thing is certain: people imagined that such a hidden world might exist. And they were drawn to that possibility.

They wanted to understand an uncertain world a little better. They wanted some clue to what they could not see. Those wishes accumulated around tarot.

04 · A WORLD BUILT TOGETHER

Building a World Together

Then came the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

At the end of the nineteenth century, people gathered to study, systematize, and practice forms of esoteric thought that had developed before them.[6]

Tarot. Kabbalah. Astrology. Alchemy. Color. Numbers. Letters. The elements. A single tarot card could now be linked to many different symbolic systems.

Among the people who studied in that world was Arthur Edward Waite. And also Aleister Crowley.

The two famous decks we now associate with them did not yet exist. But the seeds of both were present in the same place.

05 · HUMAN STORIES

Then Human Beings
Entered the Cards

In 1909: Waite, and Pamela Colman Smith. From their work came the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot—the RWS.[7][8]

Think again of one card we have returned to many times since Part 1: the Five of Cups.

In older decks, there were five cups. In the RWS deck, there is a person.

A black cloak. Three fallen cups. Two cups still standing. A river. A bridge. A building in the distance.

RWS · 1909

Look at the card and a story begins. What has this person lost? Why are they not looking at the two cups that remain? Will they ever cross that bridge?

And then, before you notice it, you are no longer thinking only about the person inside the card. You are thinking about yourself.

Smith’s seventy-eight images had an enormous influence on later tarot art. The Morgan Library & Museum’s 2026 exhibition likewise treats the 1909 RWS as a major point of departure for twentieth- and twenty-first-century artists who continued to reinterpret tarot.[2]

06 · ANOTHER BRANCH

But It Did Not Become
the One “Correct” Tarot

From the same world of the Golden Dawn, another path emerged. Crowley. And Frieda Harris.

Together they created the Thoth Tarot. There, rather than everyday human scenes, a single card might concentrate color, form, astrology, Kabbalah, magical philosophy, and many layers of symbolism.[9]

RWS and Thoth look strikingly different. Yet both branched out of the same historical roots.

The Warburg Institute’s 2025 exhibition on six centuries of tarot likewise placed fifteenth-century cards, RWS, Crowley and Harris’s Thoth project, and contemporary artistic tarot within one continuing history of transformation.[1]

By this point, it becomes difficult to say: “Tarot must look like this.”

07 · SURVIVING BY CHANGING

Tarot Has Always
Been Changing

Something that began as play became divination. Divination became connected with esoteric philosophy. Cards that once showed little more than suit symbols gained illustrated stories. The same symbols were redrawn through entirely different philosophies.

And today there are thousands of decks. Classical ones. Fantastic ones. Contemporary ones. Animal decks. Decks rooted in particular cultures. Abstract decks. And, of course, cat tarot decks.

But this is not the history of tarot being broken apart. Perhaps it is the opposite.

Tarot may have survived for six hundred years because it was able to change.

People in each age redrew the cards in a language they could understand. They brought to them the questions their own age needed to ask. That process is still continuing.

08 · DOES IT KNOW THE FUTURE?

So Does Tarot Really
Tell the Future?

Before ending a six-hundred-year journey, let us face this question directly one more time.

Does tarot really have the power to know the future? When we draw a card, is some invisible force at work? Or is it all chance?

Throughout this series, we have never answered: “Yes.” And we have never answered: “No.”

At the very least, supernatural prediction of the future through tarot has not been scientifically established.

But a person looking at a card can still begin to think. They can remember. Associate. See themselves in the image. Imagine another possibility. Ask: “What do I actually want?”

There is no need to dismiss all of that movement within the mind as meaningless simply because the card may have been drawn at random.

09 · THE GIFT OF CHANCE

Chance Can Bring Us to Thoughts
We Would Never Have Chosen

When we think alone for too long, we can end up walking in circles. Around what we already know. What we already fear. What we have already decided must be true. We keep looking for an answer inside the same boundaries.

Then we draw a random card. Something we would never have chosen for ourselves appears in front of us. We ask: “Why this card?”

And sometimes our thoughts move, just slightly, in a direction they had not gone before.

Did the card know the answer? Or did we create an answer through the card? We do not know.

Perhaps that alone can be one reason to use tarot.

Tarot Is More Than “Getting It Right”

Of course we sometimes want to know the future. What will tomorrow be like? What will happen to this relationship? What about work? Family? Me?

That is a deeply human wish. People centuries ago wanted to know the future too. So there is no need to reject divination itself.

But what we can receive from a card is not limited to: “This is what the future will be.”

A card drawn in order to look at the future can end up reflecting the person we are right now.

10 · MIRROR, WINDOW, QUESTION

Then Is Tarot a
“Mirror of the Mind”?

It is a common expression: tarot is a mirror of the mind. It is certainly easy to understand.

But perhaps it is still not quite enough. A mirror reflects what is already there.

Tarot can sometimes throw back at us something we had not brought with us at all. A thought such as: “I have never looked at it that way before.”

So perhaps tarot can be a mirror, a window, and something that asks questions back. A slightly unusual kind of tool.

11 · THE CARDS DO NOT COMMAND

The Cards Do Not Give Orders

And this is something worth holding on to.

There is no need to hand your life over to the cards like that.

For six hundred years, in the end, it has been human beings who gave meanings to tarot. Cards can offer material to think with.

But how you receive that meaning, what you choose, how you live—the final decision does not belong to the cards.

It belongs to you.

And perhaps that is also why tarot does not have to be frightening.

12 · LEAVE SOME MYSTERY

And Yet, We Can Leave
a Little Mystery

Still, there is no need to explain everything away and close the box neatly.

Why, today, with this question, did I draw this card? Sometimes it fits our present situation so closely that it feels strange.

Was it chance? Maybe. Did it mean something? Maybe. We do not know. And that is all right.

If there really is some larger current in this world that we cannot yet see, then perhaps the hand that shuffled the deck, the card that happened to appear, and everything we thought after seeing it are all part of that current too.

And if there is no such thing—if we simply drew one card by chance—the thoughts that followed do not become false because of it.

Either way, we can think about something through that card.

There is enough room there to enjoy tarot without forcing an answer.

13 · HANDS ACROSS SIX CENTURIES

The People Who Held These Cards
Across Six Hundred Years

During this journey, we met many people.

They were not all looking at the same tarot. They did not all believe the same things. Some of them strongly disagreed with one another.

But those differences, too, became part of the tarot we inherited.

We thought we were following the question of how the cards survived for six hundred years. But after walking all the way to the end, perhaps we were looking at more than the history of cards.

We were also looking at a history of human beings trying, despite everything, to understand a world they cannot fully know.

14 · WHAT DOES TAROT REFLECT?

What Does Tarot Reflect?

Let us return to the question in the title. What does tarot reflect?

Perhaps this question does not have one answer either. For six hundred years, too many meanings have accumulated around tarot for that.

So let us end with one possibility.

Because we do not know, we draw a card. We look. We think. And then we return to ourselves.

Was the answer in the card? Was it already somewhere inside us? We do not know that either.

But sometimes, after drawing the card, we are standing in a slightly different place from where we stood before. Sometimes that is enough.