The History of the Tarot Cards

We can think of Tarot cards as an unbound book made up of seventy-eight pages, with each card representing any number of possible ideas. However, instead of using words, sentences and paragraphs, the pages of the Book of Tarot communicate key ideas by means of pictorial signs and symbols. Each card symbolically depicts a particular idea about human values, social norms and various kinds of typical human experience. As an artifact of history, the Book of Tarot stands as a kind of repository of universal ideas about human experience.

The art of reading tarot cards involves learning how to interpret the conventional signs and symbols used and how to apply these meanings to find answers. This particular use of the cards is called divination. The root of the word divination is divine, a verb meaning to “make out by inspiration” to foresee, predict or conjecture. This definition provides an accurate description of the general object of tarot card reading, that is, to divine future events. Unfortunately, the commonplace meaning of the word divination is loaded with unfavorable connotations implying the use of witchcraft or magic.

For example, the Oxford English Dictionary defines divination as: “Divining, insight into or discovery of the unknown or future by supernatural means.” As a method of divination, the tarot has long been suspiciously regarded as something that operates through the agency of unnatural, if not “evil” forces.

Indeed, one epithet for the tarot is “the Devil’s Picture Book, so named by the Roman Catholic Church when it issued a proclamation against the use of the popular playing cards in the fourteenth century. Divination is a word that carries a lot of baggage and misleading inferences grounded in the dark and violent superstitions of the Inquisition and these antiquated ideas are not useful guideposts to go by.

Knowledge of the human psyche and its remarkable abilities has evolved considerably since the dark ages, and it is well established, particularly in the writings of psychiatrist Carl G. Jung, that the human mind is capable of extraordinary feats of inspiration and even precognition.

Jung believed the true power of the tarot lies not in the substance or images of the cards themselves but in the ability of the reader to intuitively connect and bring forward the hidden content of the unconscious mind, which, according to Jung, holds more than what is known in the range of conscious perception.

He writes: “We therefore emphatically affirm that in addition to the repressed material, the unconscious contains all those psychic components that have fallen below the threshold, as well as subliminal sense perceptions. Moreover, we know, from abundant experience as well as for theoretical reasons, that the unconscious also contains all the material that has not yet reached the threshold of consciousness. These are the seeds of future conscious content.”

Jung’s concept of the unconscious allows for a broader understanding of how the human psyche works and explains the function of tarot and other methods of divination as intuitive keystones.

Jung’s investigation of the unconscious brings to light another intriguing phenomenon: establishing the value of divination techniques as a means of engaging the natural perceptive capacities of the mind. Jung’s theory of synchronicity, or meaningful coincidence, describes a perceived connection between seemingly unrelated and often statistically improbable events that are personally meaningful to the individual experiencing the coincidences.

Examples of synchronistic events include mistaking a face in the crowd of a busy street for a friend and then actually running into that friend just around the corner or learning a new word and then encountering that word over and over again throughout the rest of the day.

Everyone experiences synchronistic events, and these experiences are often written off as bizarre quirks of chance, but Jung’s observation of the phenomena shows that coincidences of this kind defy the known laws of probability and chance.

The shuffling and dealing of tarot cards, for example, would, on the surface, appear to produce outcomes consistent with the laws of probability, implying that there is no meaningful connection between the thoughts and feelings of the person consulting the tarot and the cards randomly selected, but Jung says that this is not so.

He specifically identifies divination, or “mantic methods, “as a category of synchronistic events in his essay, On Synchronicity, saying that these methods “incontestably” show a connection between the thoughts and feelings of an individual and the coincidence of the cards randomly selected.

The early ESP experiments of J. B. Rhine, otherwise known as the "Father of Modern Parapsychology”, also suggest that people are not only capable of perceiving information indirectly through thought but that they can also anticipate future events by this same means. Rhine’s experiments are especially interesting because they involve the use of randomly selected cards, as does the process of tarot reading.

Rhine developed a pack of twenty-five cards with five groups of signs: a star, square, circle, cross and two parallel wavy lines. He conducted a variety of experiments, asking subjects to guess the signs on sequences of cards they could not see.

Statistical probability determined an accuracy rate of one in five, but the results exceeded this expectation, with some individuals scoring more than double the probable number of hits. Time and distance did not alter these results. People could still accurately guess the right signs from as far away as 4,000 miles and predict a series of cards laid out within two minutes to two weeks into the future.

Jung contends: “The result of the spatial experiment proves with tolerable certainty that the psyche can, to some extent, eliminate the space factor. The time experiment proves that the time factor (in the dimension of the future) can become psychically relative.”

The work of Jung, Rhine and a great many other modern thinkers bring to bear a new appreciation of the perceptive capabilities of the human mind and its natural grasp of subliminal information. The old superstitions about the use of divination and tarot cards are based on an irrational fear of the unknown and that the unknown is largely the true expanse and capability of the human mind. There are no medieval hobgoblins hiding in the cards, whispering secrets to lure guileless souls to doom and damnation.

The cards, alone, have no power; they are merely symbolic tools that serve to prompt the intuitive imagination of the reader.