What Is Tarot? Cards, Cold Reading and Why a Spread Feels True
By the BrainSnail editorial team. How these articles are written and checked, and how to tell us when one is wrong.
A deck of 78 cards, painted with a hanged man, a tower struck by lightning, a woman taming a lion and the Sun, is laid out on a table, and the reader tells the client what the pattern says about a job, a lover or a decision, and the client, more often than not, goes away impressed. Tarot was invented in Italy in the 1430s as a trick-taking game and is still played as one in France and Italy, its occult meanings were attached in the 1780s by a Paris scholar who was wrong about their origin, and its popularity has grown through the 2010s and 2020s among people who mostly do not believe it predicts anything. What it does instead is the interesting question.
The cards
A tarot deck is a regular pack of four suits, cups, coins, swords and batons, with an extra court card each, plus 21 trumps and the Fool, 78 cards in all. The trumps, later called the major arcana, carry the allegorical pictures, the Magician, the High Priestess, the Empress, the Emperor, the Lovers, the Chariot, Justice, the Hermit, the Wheel of Fortune, Strength, the Hanged Man, Death, Temperance, the Devil, the Tower, the Star, the Moon, the Sun, Judgement and the World, and their order is a procession of the kind that Renaissance Italians painted and paraded, from the worldly to the cosmic. The earliest surviving decks were painted for the Visconti and Sforza dukes of Milan around 1440, and the game, tarocchi, spread across Italy, France and Germany as a trick-taking game with the trumps as permanent trumps, which is what the word meant.
How it became occult
The game had no divinatory meaning for three hundred years. In 1781 a French clergyman and Freemason, Antoine Court de Gebelin, published a claim that the cards were the Book of Thoth, the encoded wisdom of ancient Egyptian priests, on no evidence at all, since hieroglyphs would not be read for another forty years; a Paris fortune-teller called Etteilla produced the first deck designed for divination in 1789, and the nineteenth-century French occultists tied the 22 trumps to the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet and the Kabbalah. The deck that most readers now use was designed in 1909 by Pamela Colman Smith for the occultist Arthur Waite in London, and its pictured minor cards, a man burdened with ten batons, three women raising cups, are what made a reading possible for anyone with the booklet. The meanings, in short, are about 240 years old and were assigned by people who thought they were recovering something ancient.
What happens in a reading
A reading works on the client through several well-documented effects, whatever the reader believes:
- •The Barnum effect: the card meanings are broad, a struggle, a decision, an ending that is also a beginning, and apply to nearly any life, so the client finds their own situation in them
- •Cold reading: a reader, consciously or not, watches the client's face and posture, hears what they volunteer, and steers the interpretation towards what lands, dropping what does not
- •Confirmation bias: the hits are remembered and the misses forgotten, and a card that fits after the fact is counted as having predicted
- •Projection: the pictures are ambiguous, and the client reads into the Tower or the Lovers what is already on their mind, which is why the same spread means different things to different people
- •Ritual and permission: the shuffling, the silence and the reader's authority create a space in which the client says out loud what they want, and hears it said back
What the research says
No controlled test has found that tarot predicts anything. Readers given cards for real clients and for fictional ones produce readings rated equally accurate by the clients, readings for a stranger are rated as accurate as readings for the person who asked, and the readers themselves, tested on whether they can tell a client's real spread from a random one, cannot. What the research does find is that people leave readings feeling clearer, and a body of work in counselling psychology since the 2010s has treated the tarot session as a structured conversation, a set of prompts that makes a person articulate a problem, consider it from a set of angles the cards impose, and decide, which is roughly what a coaching session does with a whiteboard. The cards do not know the future; they get the client to say what they think it is.
Why now
Tarot's revival since about 2015, among the young, the secular and the online, tracks the same pattern as astrology's: a language for talking about the self that is richer than most people otherwise have, a ritual of attention in an age with few, a vocabulary shared with friends, and an aesthetic, since the decks are beautiful and there are thousands of them. Most of its current users say they do not think the cards are magic and use them for reflection, which is the honest version of what they always did. The trick-taking game, meanwhile, is still played in cafes in Marseille with the same 78 cards, the Hanged Man and the Tower among them, and nobody at those tables asks the trumps what they mean.
The takeaway
Tarot is a 78-card deck invented in Italy around 1440 for a trick-taking game still played today, whose allegorical trumps were given occult meanings in the 1780s by a French writer who wrongly believed they were Egyptian, and whose divinatory use rests on the Barnum effect, cold reading, confirmation bias and the client's own projection onto ambiguous pictures. It predicts nothing in any controlled test, and it works, when it works, as a structured way of making a person say what they already think.