Tarot Reading

Trionfi cards in fifteenth-century Italy

The tarot pack began as a set of playing cards for a game. Simon Wintle, writing for The World of Playing Cards, says that cards called carte de trionfi were invented in northern Italy in the first half of the fifteenth century. He describes the Visconti-Sforza deck as appearing to have been made in the Bembo workshop at Cremona, around 1460, for Bianca Maria Visconti, in the courtly circle of Francesco Sforza, who married into the Visconti family in 1441.

Edmund Leach, reviewing Michael Dummett's study of the game in the London Review of Books in 1980, reports Dummett's view that the pack much as now known in England was invented in Italy around 1430. On that account trump cards were added to a four-suited pack that had been in use for roughly seventy years. This is a 1980 review, Dummett's book was not opened for this draft, and later scholarship may refine the dates.

From ordinary cards to tarot fortune-telling

Leach, summarising Dummett, says the earliest reference to cards used for fortune-telling in a European source is an Italian work of 1540, and that the cards concerned were an ordinary pack. He reports fortune-telling with regular playing cards becoming established around 1760, and the tarot pack not being used for the purpose until about twenty years later. On this account, the idea that tarot was designed for divination or occult use is without foundation and recent.

In 1781 Antoine Court de Gébelin published an essay in volume 8 of Le Monde primitif proposing that tarot preserved Egyptian priestly wisdom linked to the Book of Thoth. Wintle reports that most of his assertions were found to be incorrect, although the belief in mystical origins shaped later esoteric thinking. Wintle dates the first pack designed for cartomancy to 1788, by Jean-Baptiste Alliette, known as Etteilla.

Nineteenth-century occultism and the Rider-Waite-Smith deck

Wintle says that in the nineteenth century Eliphas Levi and Papus linked tarot to the Kabbalah and hermetic traditions. William Pooley, a historian at the University of Bristol, describes the French occultist theories of Egyptian or Jewish magical origins as groundless. These links are best read as beliefs held by occult writers, not as established history.

The Rider-Waite-Smith deck was published in London in December 1909 by William Rider and Sons Limited, with Arthur Edward Waite's guidebook and designs by Pamela Colman Smith. Both belonged to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. It is described as the first tarot with pictorial scenes on the minor cards, and it became a model for much later design.

Tarot, trionfi and cartomancy

The early game and its cards were called trionfi, meaning triumphs, which is the term in the Visconti-Sforza account. In modern usage the trump cards are known as the Major Arcana, while the suited cards are the minor arcana. Cartomancy is the wider term for fortune-telling with cards, and Leach notes that it began with ordinary playing cards, so tarot reading is one form of cartomancy and not a synonym for it.

Readers, querents and spreads

An ethnographic study of tarot readers uses the terms reader and querent for the person who gives and the person who receives a reading. Counselling writers describe the arrangement of cards as a layout or spread, and Semetsky treats the spread as a projection of the client's view of herself. This framing is the author's and belongs to a particular counselling tradition; it is not a general definition.

Terms from esoteric writing

Book of Thoth is a phrase from eighteenth-century writing on tarot and does not refer to a surviving ancient text, since Wintle reports that Gébelin's Egyptian claims were mostly incorrect. Waite described his own deck as using rectified symbolism, meaning a revision of earlier card imagery. Tarot de Marseille names the pattern on which Gébelin based his interpretations. These terms identify historical positions, not agreed technical vocabulary.

Settings and working arrangements

A 2020 ethnographic article describes readings given at psychic fairs and in private practice. It reports that tarot readers and other psychics are independent contractors who work outside conventional credentialing systems and are reputationally marginalised, and that they handle questions of identity, ethics and interactional boundaries with clients. These findings come from the abstract of a US study, and the sources reviewed do not describe session length, fees or standard protocols.

How a reading is described

Semetsky, a counsellor-researcher, describes a reading as a layout of cards that a client interprets with a reader, with the reader's sense of relatedness giving support and congruence to the therapeutic relationship. Her paper presents one illustrative reading. Pejic, a psychiatry resident who observed readers in New Orleans, describes palm and tarot readings as supportive encounters that elicit hope.

Dutton describes cold reading, in which a reader makes calculated guesses about a client's background and problems and elaborates according to the client's reaction. He says such encounters with astrologers, palm readers, tarot readers and mediums typically involve it. This is a critical account of a technique and does not show that every reader uses it.

Self-directed use

A 2025 study asked participants to keep journals recording their tarot card encounters and reflections over four weeks. Self-directed use therefore appears to involve drawing cards and writing about them without a reader, although the abstract does not state how cards were chosen or how many participants took part.

None of the sources reviewed sets out a standard procedure for a reading, such as how the pack is shuffled, how many cards are drawn or how long a session lasts, and this page does not supply one.

Divination and guidance

Pooley, drawing on historical work, says clients of historical card readers used the cards less to predict the future than to address problems in their present, such as lost objects, unexplained illness, employment prospects and relationships. He compares the practice to psychoanalysis and describes modern tarot as a creative way of interpreting an uncertain present.

Lavin reports that tarot readers describe themselves as controlling the future in order to support and empower clients. These are the readers' claims as reported by a sociologist, not findings about outcomes.

Who reports using tarot

In the 2001 Scottish Social Attitudes Survey, interest in alternative practices fell into two groups, one concerned with personal well-being and one with divination. A minority of younger, less well-educated women were more likely to say horoscopes, astrology, fortune-telling and tarot were important in their lives, and churchgoers tended to find divination antithetical to religion. The data are Scottish and from 2001, so they should not be generalised to other places or years.

Reflection, counselling and coaching

Semetsky proposes tarot readings as a counselling tool that can fulfil some assessment tasks, using the projective hypothesis associated with the Rorschach inkblot method and Jungian sandplay, and reports that bringing the shadow into awareness through readings leads to therapeutic change. The paper rests on an illustrative case, and its claims are those of the author.

Pejic suggests that palmistry and tarot may be understood as forms of archaic psychotherapy that use supportive treatment and placebo to elicit hope. This is a descriptive opinion from a psychiatrist, not a trial finding.

No controlled trials identified

On 5 October 2026 a PubMed search for tarot in titles or abstracts, restricted to randomised controlled trial, systematic review or meta-analysis publication types, returned no records. A broader search of tarot with divination, cartomancy, card reading or psychic returned five records, none of which was a trial of tarot readings for a health outcome. A Consensus search for randomised trials of tarot and well-being, anxiety or depression also found no tarot trial. These searches cover two databases only and could miss work in psychology or non-English journals.

Small exploratory studies of reflective use

Krow and colleagues studied tarot interpretation combined with mindfulness journaling over four weeks, with outcomes of well-being and perceived control. The abstract says the combination appears to support positive changes, but the number of participants, any comparison group and the measures were not confirmed from the abstract. Because journaling was part of the activity, any change cannot be attributed to the cards alone, and the finding should not be applied to other groups or to clinical conditions.

Semetsky's illustrative reading and Pejic's observations offer descriptions of how readings may be experienced, but neither includes a comparison condition or a systematic outcome measure, so neither can show that a reading changes how a person feels or acts.

Why a reading can seem accurate

Dutton reviews psychological research on the Barnum effect, the tendency to accept generalised personality descriptions as one's own, and argues that cold reading depends on it. A reading can therefore seem uniquely appropriate to a client without any paranormal process. This explains one way readings may be convincing, and it does not show that a reading has no value to the person receiving it.

The sources reviewed contain no test of whether tarot readings predict future events. The research reviewed does not establish effects on health outcomes, so statements about benefit remain untested.

Care boundaries

No source reviewed reports adverse events from tarot readings, and no trial has been identified that would record them. A reading is not a diagnosis or a form of treatment, and it should not delay or replace assessment or care for a health problem, or urgent help for a person in crisis. Pejic describes readings as supportive and hope-eliciting, which indicates why a person in distress may rely on them.

Training and regulation

The US study by Lavin reports that readers work as independent contractors outside conventional credentialing systems, so a reader's title does not indicate a recognised qualification. The sources reviewed identify no training standard for tarot readers and do not describe how readers are regulated in the United Kingdom, Ireland or elsewhere, and practice may differ by country and region.

What the sources do not cover

The sources reviewed do not quantify costs, repeated paid readings, dependence on readings for decisions or the effect of a distressing reading. Dutton describes cold reading as producing an illusion of paranormal origin, which bears on how much weight a person gives to a reading. People considering a reading can ask what it will cost, what the reader's approach is and whether they can stop at any point.

Pooley and Lavin both describe readings as used for relationships, work and personal difficulties, which are areas where decisions can have lasting consequences. A reading is one source of perspective among others and does not replace professional advice on medical, legal or financial matters.