The first professionals, tarot goes out onto the street
Imagine eighteenth‑century Paris: bustle, cafés, newspapers, and next to that - Jean‑Baptiste Alliette, known as Etteilla, the first person to make a profession out of tarot. He was not just a “fortune‑teller”, but something like an early consultant of symbols. He created his own spreads, published decks and manuals, trying to put in order what had until then lived mostly in the half‑shadow of oral tradition.
This is an important moment: tarot stops being an elitist pastime of courts and reaches a wider public. The cards begin to speak about everyday life - about money, love, health - but underneath they remain images of inner tensions and desires.
Waite, Crowley, and the birth of the language of modern tarot
At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, tarot meets a new wave of occultism and mysticism. Arthur Edward Waite, a member of hermetic societies, decides to give the cards a more coherent language. Together with Pamela Colman Smith, he creates a deck that almost every beginner tarot reader knows today - the Rider-Waite-Smith.
Thanks to Smith’s illustrations, each Minor Arcana card becomes a small scene - a miniature psychodrama. It is no longer just “three of swords” but a concrete story about pain, loss, conflict. In describing the cards, Waite deliberately shifts the emphasis from prediction to symbolic meaning. Tarot begins to resemble a psychological project before psychology itself fully enters the parlour.
A few decades later, Aleister Crowley, together with painter Frieda Harris, creates the Thoth deck - dense with astrology, Kabbalah, and Hermeticism. Crowley sees in the cards not only a magical tool but a map of psychic forces that pass through a human being. His tarot is like a laboratory of intense energies: not for everyday use, but for confronting what is most extreme within us.
The voice of psychology: from Eden Gray to Rachel Pollack
In the twentieth century, tarot is less and less often just a “prophecy”. It becomes a private handbook for working with oneself. Eden Gray writes the first accessible guidebooks that explain to beginners how to read the cards without excessive pathos.
Then comes a generation of authors such as Mary K. Greer and Rachel Pollack, who explicitly connect tarot with psychology, including Jungian thinking. Pollack, in “78 Degrees of Wisdom”, often called “the bible of tarot readers”, presents the cards as a system of archetypes rather than a closed catalogue of destinies. Greer proposes methods of working with cards that resemble a therapeutic conversation - with an emphasis on introspection, responsibility, and growth rather than passively waiting for a “verdict”.
Tarot becomes something like a mobile psychological office: you can open it on a table, in a café, on a plane. Each spread is a mini‑session with your own unconscious.
Alejandro Jodorowsky, tarologist rather than fortune‑teller
A special place in the modern history of tarot is occupied by Alejandro Jodorowsky - director, writer, and comic‑book creator, who speaks about the cards more like a psychotherapist than an occultist. For years he studied the Tarot de Marseille, bringing it - as he himself claims - to a form as close as possible to the originals.
In his books and public talks, he emphasises that tarot is not meant to predict the future; he even calls fortune‑telling “a fraud”. For him, the cards are:
- a “nomadic cathedral” - a movable temple of symbols,
- a theatre in which the Arcana are characters playing out our inner conflicts,
- a tool of “tarology” - working with personal history through images and narratives.
A psychological curiosity: Jodorowsky connects tarot with his own concept of psychomagic - a quasi‑therapeutic method in which symbolic rituals help to disarm deeply rooted patterns and traumas.
Women artists who talk with the cards
The surrealist Leonora Carrington treated tarot as a private language of the soul. In her biographies, the theme returns of the cards as a guide in moments of crisis - creative, existential, spiritual. The cards appear in her paintings, stories, and everyday practice: as a tool for tracking her own dreams, fears, and visions. Tarot did not “tell her the future”; it helped her name what was happening inside before it appeared in outer reality.
Today, many artists use tarot in a similar way - as a map of moods and unspoken stories. Musicians such as Stevie Nicks, Madonna, Lana Del Rey, or Björk happily draw on the aesthetics of tarot and sometimes on the cards themselves when they talk about inspiration or the creative process. It is no longer “magic” as kitsch but a deliberate flirtation with archetypes: the Fool as the seed of a new stage of a career, the Tower as a sudden crisis, the Sun as a moment of triumph.
Tarot in the hands of stars. Between ritual and image
When the media report that Lady Gaga reads tarot, it is easy to chalk it up to PR. Yet in interviews and behind‑the‑scenes stories another thread appears: the cards as a private ritual before a decision, a concert, entering a new era of image.
From a psychological point of view, this makes sense. A spread of cards:
- orders the chaos of thoughts,
- gives structure to what is unclear,
- shifts the weight of decision‑making from fear to a dialogue with a symbol.
Seen in this way, tarot acts like an external screen for internal processes. What usually stays inside - intuitions, hunches, fears - is projected onto the cards. A person can look at them from a distance, like a stage on which their own inner conflicts are being played out.
Politics and tarot. The realm of gossip..
The world of politics admits to using cards much less frequently. Sources mention astrologers or “spiritual advisers” more often than concrete stories about tarot. If politicians reach for a deck, they do so in the quiet of their offices, not in front of the cameras.
Perhaps that is why it is much easier to find stories about artists than about ministers: art has long accepted dialogue with the unconscious, while politics still prefers to speak the language of “rational decisions”.
Tarot as a mirror of an era
When we look at renowned tarot practitioners and users - from Etteilla, through Waite and Crowley, to Pollack, Jodorowsky, and contemporary stars - we see more than just a fascination with “magic”. We see a change in how we think about the human being:
- from fate imposed from outside
- to a process that takes place inside - in the psyche, in personal history, in the unconscious.
For some, tarot is still a game with the unknown. For others - a sketchbook in which they draw a map of their own soul.
Perhaps this is precisely where its extraordinary vitality lies: regardless of the era, deck, school, or star currently holding the cards in their hands, tarot keeps asking the same question: Who am I when I look at these images - and why do they move me so deeply?