Tarot

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Tarot began as a deck of playing cards in fifteenth-century Italy, and for more than three hundred years it was a card game. Its reputation as an ancient Egyptian book of wisdom starts in 1781, when Antoine Court de Gébelin guessed at an Egyptian origin in Le Monde primitif, forty years before anyone could read hieroglyphs. That guess has been thoroughly disproved, but it launched the occult Tarot: Etteilla’s fortune-telling decks in the 1780s, Éliphas Lévi’s link between the trumps and the Hebrew letters in 1856, and S. L. MacGregor Mathers’s synthesis for the Golden Dawn in 1887–88, which nearly every later English author built on. (Dummett, The Game of Tarot, 1980; Skinner, The Complete Magician’s Tables, Table T.)

Those traditions do not agree with one another, and I don’t think they should be blended into one voice. So here you choose which system you read from, using the selector at the top of the Tarot pages or the Tarot System section of the settings panel. Each system speaks only for itself. Where a system has nothing to say about something, the Guidebook leaves it blank rather than borrowing from another system.

• Waite-Smith (the default): A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910), quoted in his own words, since the book is in the public domain. This includes his “additional meanings” and the places where he rejects older readings. The card art throughout the site is Pamela Colman Smith’s, from the 1909 deck she drew for Waite.
• Golden Dawn: Book T, the Order’s own Tarot papers, as printed in Israel Regardie’s The Complete Golden Dawn System of Magic. Regardie’s edition is still in copyright, so these meanings are closely reworded rather than quoted. The Golden Dawn did not read reversed cards: a card “has the same meaning and forces, whether right side up or inverted,” and the cards around it strengthen or weaken it instead. In this system, cards are always drawn upright.
• French occult: Papus (Gérard Encausse), The Tarot of the Bohemians (1889; English translation 1896), quoted in his own words. Papus deliberately does without reversed meanings, numbers Justice 8 and Strength 11, and places the Fool as the twenty-first card.
• Etteilla: the card meanings printed in the Dictionnaire synonimique du livre de Thot (Paris, 1791), sold by Etteilla himself. The translation from French is my own. Etteilla rebuilt the deck in his own order, so each traditional card shows the Etteilla card he matched to it, using the concordance table in his own writings.
• Mathers 1888 (an optional lens under Etteilla): S. L. MacGregor Mathers, The Tarot (1888), written the year the Golden Dawn was founded. His meanings for the minor cards follow Etteilla’s closely, and he adds his own meanings for the trumps.
• Modern reading: my own modern interpretation, labelled as mine rather than as any historical system’s.

Correspondences (the Hebrew letters, paths, decans, angels and titles shown at Adept depth) have their own selector, because they come from separate traditions. The Golden Dawn correspondences are taken from Regardie’s Book T and cross-checked against Stephen Skinner’s The Complete Magician’s Tables. The French correspondences are Papus’s: they give different Hebrew letters, because the Fool sits in a different place. The Etteilla option shows his own card numbers and original French titles.

Spreads. The Celtic Cross is Waite’s own “Ancient Celtic Method of Divination” (Pictorial Key, Part III §7). The Horseshoe comes from the Golden Dawn’s Opening of the Key. The Three-Card spread is a modern layout. Three historical methods sit beside them: the Golden Dawn’s full Opening of the Key, five operations from Book T, reworded; the French Method, Papus’s two layouts (The Tarot of the Bohemians, lesson 5); and Etteilla’s Method, his four deals as Papus records them (lesson 6), with their instructions quoted. Every spread can be read in any system: the system decides what the cards mean, not how they are laid out. Under the Golden Dawn, cards laid in a row are also scored for dignity, following Book T’s rules about the cards on either side.

At Adept depth, research notes appear alongside the meanings: textual variants, the sources for each mapping, and the authors’ own asides. You can hide them in the settings panel.

As always, this is not meant to be a strict and unassailable presentation of truth. If you can improve its accuracy, please email me with your sources. I will review them, update the page, and gladly credit your help in the citations section.

— Evander Blackwood