This post was prompted by a claim on social media: that tarot was never meant for fortune-telling, and that its true purpose is psychological self-exploration—a tool for examining the soul, not predicting the future. I’ve seen this position repeated enough to address it. It distorts the history and, more importantly, makes a rich tradition much smaller.
I’ve read tarot professionally for years, working predictively, oracularly, and magically. Your approach to a deck shapes everything: the questions you ask, how you interpret the cards, and what you do with the answers. There isn’t one correct way to use tarot, but there are distinct approaches. Conflating them or insisting that one is the only legitimate way to use tarot serves no one.
Let’s start with the history.
A brief history of tarot: from card game to cosmic mirror
Tarot cards did not begin their life as tools of divination. The earliest decks appeared in northern Italy in the early fifteenth century, most famously the Visconti-Sforza deck. This deck was commissioned by Milanese nobility around 1440. These were luxury playing cards, used for a trick-taking game called tarocchi. The allegorical trump cards, such as The Fool, The Tower, and The World, were part of the game’s structure. They were not symbols of fate.
Between the aristocratic Italian origins and today’s familiar tarot stands the Tarot de Marseille. By the seventeenth century, a standardised 78-card pattern had emerged, produced mainly in France and northern Italy, with Marseille a major production centre. The Tarot de Marseille is not a single deck but a family of related designs sharing structure and imagery: bold, graphic, unillustrated pip cards and striking trumps. This tradition, not the Italian luxury deck, became the working deck for French cartomancers and the basis of Western divinatory tarot. When the occult revival came, Antoine Court de Gébelin held a Marseille-pattern deck.
Court de Gébelin was a French Protestant pastor with a flair for grand theory. In 1781, he published a wildly influential — and largely invented — claim that tarot cards were fragments of ancient Egyptian wisdom. He was wrong. Still, the idea caught fire. By the late 1700s, figures like Etteilla were producing the first decks explicitly redesigned for cartomancy. These decks had divinatory meanings built into the imagery. All of it grew from the Marseille tradition.
In 1909, Arthur Edward Waite and artist Pamela Colman Smith, both members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, published the Rider-Waite-Smith (RWS) deck. Waite deliberately reworked the Marseille tradition, which had dominated for two centuries. The RWS’s key innovation was that all 78 cards featured narrative scenes. Previously, the numbered suit cards showed only suit symbols. This change transformed how tarot was read and taught and is why much of the English-speaking world learned tarot through this lens rather than the older Marseille system, which remains widely used in France and among cartomancers worldwide.
The twentieth century saw tarot pulled in new directions with the publication of the Thoth deck in the late 1960s. Aleister Crowley and artist Lady Frieda Harris created it between 1938 and 1943. They introduced a dense astrological and Kabbalistic framework unlike anything that had come before. Crowley remains one of the most notorious figures in Western occultism, but the deck stands as one of the most significant tarot systems ever produced.
The countercultural movements of the 1960s and 70s brought tarot into public consciousness. Tarot shed some ceremonial-magic ties and was reframed as a tool for personal liberation and spiritual seeking. The New Age boom of the 1980s and 90s followed, producing a flood of new decks. This period introduced millions to tarot through bookshops, mind-body-spirit festivals, and a growing therapeutic vocabulary. The psychological framing — tarot as a mirror for the self rather than a channel to anything beyond — gained real traction then.
The most recent wave has been driven by social media. Instagram and TikTok tarot communities from the 2010s onward have made tarot more visible and accessible than ever. They have produced a generation of readers who learned mostly through short-form video and digital communities. Books had been the primary vehicle since at least Etteilla’s instruction manuals in the 1780s. Over time, books were supplemented by workshops, courses, conferences, and tarot associations. Organisations like the Tarot Guild of Australia provide community, education, and professional standards for readers. For some practitioners, the most important transmission has been neither print nor institution; the cards and the spirits have been their own teachers. Social media has shaped the approaches that now dominate the conversation. In that environment, the psychological, self-help-adjacent framing has flourished.
Where do you already stand?
Most people come to tarot with an instinct already in place. Some want to know what’s coming. Some want guidance from something wiser than their own anxiety. Some want to understand themselves better. Some want to work magic.
None of these approaches is more sophisticated or valid than the others. They rest on different assumptions about what tarot is and how it works. Those assumptions are not equivalent, but that’s a feature, not a problem. Most readers use more than one approach. Often, they shift register as the reading requires, even in the same sitting.
Four approaches to tarot
1. Predictive tarot: what may happen?
This is what most people mean when they say “fortune-telling.” Contrary to the social media consensus, it is one of the oldest and most legitimate uses of the cards. The predictive approach treats tarot as a way of accessing information about likely future outcomes. The reader draws cards and interprets them as signals of what is coming. Sometimes, there is significant specificity about timing, events, or people.
Predictive reading has a long and serious history. In traditions like Lenormand, Marseille cartomancy, and many folk practices, the cards act almost like a telegraph from a reality beyond ordinary perception. You may understand this through a theological frame — the cards as a channel for divine communication. Or you may prefer a more esoteric one — the cards as a mirror of the underlying pattern or fate. Either way, the assumption is the same: the future has shape, and the cards can reveal it.
Try it this way: Bring a specific question about something unresolved — a decision pending, a situation in motion. Shuffle with that question clearly in mind. Then, draw three cards: past influence, present situation, and likely outcome. Read each card, not as an isolated image, but as part of a sequence. Notice where the narrative wants to go. The predictive frame asks you to trust that the cards are showing you something real, not just reflecting your hopes back at you.
2. Oracular tarot: what wisdom or guidance is available?
The oracular approach shifts the focus. It is less about what will happen and more about what the situation calls for. The cards are treated less as a forecast and more as a channel for wisdom. This wisdom may be divine, ancestral, or arise from some intelligence beyond the conscious mind.
This is the approach most at home in spiritual and devotional contexts. Many readers use tarot to commune with deities, ancestors, or other spirit guides. The card that appears isn’t necessarily telling you what the future holds. Instead, it’s offering counsel about how to navigate the present.
Try it this way: Rather than asking what will happen, ask what you need to understand. Frame your question as an opening: What is available to me here? What does this situation require of me? Draw a single card and sit with it before reaching for a book or a keyword list. Let the image speak first. The oracular mode requires a different quality of attention — receptive rather than analytical. If you work with deity or spirits, this is a natural place to make that invocation explicit before you draw.
3. Reflective tarot: what can I learn about myself or this situation?
The reflective approach is the dominant framing in contemporary psychological and therapeutic contexts. Here, tarot functions as a tool for self-exploration and meaning-making. The cards don’t predict or prescribe; they prompt. They hold up a mirror.
The intellectual framework most often invoked here is Jungian psychology. Carl Jung proposed that certain symbolic figures, such as the child, the mother, and the trickster, are archetypes residing in the collective unconscious. These are patterns shared across human cultures and expressed through myth, dream, and image. The Major Arcana map neatly onto this model: The Hermit as the archetype of solitary wisdom, The Tower as the archetype of necessary destruction, The World as integration and completion. In this frame, drawing a card brings something from the unconscious to the surface. The work is to interpret that material and integrate it. The significance of the cards is generated through the encounter between image and person, rather than being delivered from outside.
It has value, particularly for people who come to tarot without a magical or spiritual framework. The cards are good at surfacing things we haven’t consciously articulated. The problem is when this framing is used to explain away the other approaches — when “tarot is a psychological tool” becomes “tarot is only a psychological tool, and anyone who thinks otherwise is being credulous.” That’s not a neutral position; it’s a philosophical claim dressed up as common sense. The history of tarot is not the history of people processing their feelings. It’s the history of people seeking to know, to be guided, and to act on what they received. Psychology discovered tarot relatively recently. It didn’t invent it.
Try it this way: Draw a card without a specific question. Look at it for a full minute before you read anything about it. Ask: where am I in this image? What is the figure doing, and how do I feel about that? What would I want to say to them, or what might they say to me? Write for five minutes without editing. The reflective mode is less about the card’s meaning and more about what surfaces in you when you encounter it.
4. Operative tarot: how can I use these symbols to create change?
This is where tarot enters the territory of magic and ritual. The operative approach treats the cards not just as information or reflection but as instruments — active participants in the work of shaping reality.
In magical practice, images are understood to participate in what they represent. A card is not merely a picture of The Star; working with it operatively means treating it as a locus of that force, much as a magician works with a planetary seal or a devotee stands before an image of their god, not as a symbol to be interpreted, but as a site of real contact. This is a fundamentally different claim from anything the psychological model makes. The operative practitioner isn’t using The Star as a visual prompt for journaling about hope. They’re working with it as a living presence.
A practitioner working operatively with tarot might use a specific card as a focal point for spellwork, place it on an altar to draw those qualities into their life, incorporate it into a ritual working, or use the imagery as the basis for a visualisation designed to produce change. This approach has deep roots in ceremonial magic and is increasingly present in contemporary witchcraft. The cards speak, but they also act.
Try it this way: Choose a card deliberately, not randomly, that represents a quality you want to cultivate or a situation you want to move toward. Place it somewhere you will see it daily. In the morning, spend a few minutes with it: breathe into the image, notice the colours and figures, and consciously invite that energy into your day. You can also incorporate it into more formal spellwork, using the card as a visual anchor on an altar or within a ritual space.
Which approach is right?
Most experienced readers don’t work in a single mode all the time. They move between them depending on the question, the querent, and the context. A reading might begin predictively, open into something oracular, and close with reflective insight. A ritual working might incorporate cards whose meanings were first arrived at through divination.
Each mode has its own integrity and its own risks. Predictive reading can become fatalistic if it crowds out agency. Oracular reading can drift into wish-fulfilment if there’s no honest engagement with difficult messages. Reflective reading can become shallow if it refuses to take the strangeness of divination seriously. Operative work can become reckless when divorced from grounded intention.
What none of these approaches needs is to be mistaken for the only legitimate one.
The claim that tarot was ‘never meant’ for fortune-telling doesn’t survive contact with the historical record. But more importantly, it misses the point. Tarot has been many things to many people across six centuries, and that breadth is part of what makes it fascinating and enduring.