10/13/2026
🔮 Tarot Tuesdays: The Uncensored History of the Cards ✨
Welcome back to ! Take a deep breath with me, clear your space, and let's get into some real, unvarnished history today. As your Mystical Muse, it is incredibly important to me that we are completely honest and ethical in this series.
There are so many romanticized myths out there about where tarot comes from. You might hear people claim that the cards are an ancient Egyptian code or that they were invented by specific medieval mystics to predict the future. But the real history is a little different.
Let’s lay out the true origins of the deck, honor the people who actually built it, and bust a few myths along the way.
📜 The Timeline
First, the physical concept of a structured card deck with four suits (cups, coins, swords, and batons) did not start in Europe. It actually traveled into Italy and Spain through trade routes from Mamluk Egypt in the 14th century.
In the 1440s, wealthy Northern Italian nobles took that basic structure and added twenty-two illustrated triumph cards to play a game called Tarocchi. It was a popular parlor game, similar to modern day Bridge. There was no occult meaning at the time. It was purely for entertainment. It wasn't until the late 1700s that French occultists looked at these game cards and began creating the very first divinatory meanings, spinning the myth that the cards held ancient, hidden secrets.
🌍 Crediting the Innovators
As an ethical witch, it is vital to me that we don't whitewash this practice. While the deck itself started as an Italian game, the art of professional card reading and modern fortune telling across Europe was heavily popularized by Romani communities.
Romani readers were deeply intuitive innovators. Under extreme historical persecution, they took ordinary playing cards and early tarot decks and perfected the art of cartomancy. European folk practitioners and Irish seers also relied heavily on standard playing cards for domestic scrying long before official tarot systems ever reached them.
🎨 The Mystic Scholar and The Theatrical Genius
The biggest shift in tarot history happened in 1909, and it was a massive, collaborative effort between two unique minds. Arthur Edward Waite was a prominent occult scholar and mystic. He wanted to design a new deck that moved away from old Christian dogmas and leaned deeper into universal spiritual mystery.
He spent years researching the deep symbolism, and he laid out the structural blueprint for the 22 major arcana cards. He knew exactly what esoteric concepts needed to be on those pages. But to bring his vision to life, he hired a brilliant bohemian woman named Pamela Colman Smith, nicknamed Pixie. She was a folklorist, an artist, and a theater set designer. Waite gave her the strict outlines for the major cards, but he gave her total artistic freedom to design the lower cards, the Minor Arcana.
Pixie painted all 78 cards in just six months using watercolor and ink, and her creative process was incredibly magical:
• Main Character Energy:
Because of her background in theater, Pixie treated each card layout like a stage design. She modeled many of the figures, like the Queen of Wands and the Fool, directly after her real-world theatrical friends.
• Musical Trances:
Pixie experienced synesthesia, meaning her senses naturally blended together. To tap into her intuition, she would listen to classical music, slip into a light trance state, and visually channel the colors and shapes she saw directly onto the paper.
• Global Art Styles:
She drew deep inspiration from her childhood years living in Jamaica, her passion for West African folklore, and traditional Japanese woodblock prints. That famous interlocking PCS monogram stamped on every card was a custom maker's mark she designed while studying Japanese composition.
Because she didn't look like a rigid Edwardian Englishwoman, her peers often cruelly alienated her. While formal paperwork lists her parents as white, her actual genetic heritage remains an unproven historical mystery. What we do know is that she was treated as an "Other" due to her dark skin, and she may have taken on her artistic persona as a way to find belonging after being so deeply questioned and bullied. As neurodivergent folks, we know how common masking and mirroring are just to survive and fit in.
It is also vital to know that Pixie didn’t just copy these cultures for a cheap trend or a corporate cash grab. In fact, she made absolutely zero profit from them and died completely penniless in an unmarked grave. Her heart was rooted in deep, respectful devotion to a culture that showed her love and magick when her own society threw her away. When she published her books on Jamaican folklore, she explicitly credited the oral storytellers and insisted on keeping the text in authentic Jamaican patois. She even included references to Obeah, an African-derived spiritual practice that the British colonial government had strictly outlawed.
She used her temporary platform to amplify Black folklore that the British Empire was actively trying to erase. She was paid a tiny flat fee for her tarot work, and her name was completely left off the deck. For a hundred years, the world called it the Rider-Waite deck. Today, ethical readers explicitly call it the Rider-Waite-Smith deck to restore her legacy and honor how Waite's scholarly mind blended with Pixie's intuitive, inclusive artistry.
📚 Dig Deeper: My Personal Reading List
I am always learning right alongside you, and it is important to me that we look to high confidence, verified sources as we study. These are the highly regarded texts currently on my own reading list that I am diving into for this series, and I invite you to research and explore them right along with me:
🖤 The Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination by Robert M. Place
🖤 Pamela Colman Smith: Artist, Feminist, and Mystic by Elizabeth Foley O'Connor
🖤 Secrets of Romani Fortune-Telling by Jezmina Von Thiele and Paulina Stevens
Let’s chat in the comments 👇🏼
Did you know that tarot started as a parlor game, or that Pamela used musical trances and her love for global folklore to channel the art?
