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Writer's pictureSara Raztresen

Can Christians Use Tarot Cards? | Discussing Witchcraft, The Occult, and the Biblical Validity of Cartomancy

This question seems to spark some heated debate, so let's take a look.

Christian Witch, Witchcraft, Mysticism, Magic, Crystals, Bible, Incense, Folklore, Sara Raztresen, God, Spirituality, Tarot, Occult, Evangelical, Demons, Sin, Danger, Possession, Idolatry, Discernment, Church, Solomonic Magic, Occult, Left Hand Path, Demonolatry, Demonology, Tarot

"Oh, no! No, no, no!"


Such was my cousin's wife's reaction when she found out I used tarot cards to talk to God. Granted they're Jehovah's Witnesses, so they're a little more strict and conservative with this stuff anyway, but interestingly, this is one of the many takes they seem to have in common with other typical, mainstream Christians. Many folks genuinely believe that tarot cards can open a portal to demonic realms and invite nasty spirits into your house.


And you know what? They're right. Tarot cards can do that... if you're specifically looking to invite spirits like that.


But what exactly are tarot cards? And why do many more crunchy, New Age-y, witchy types of Christians use them when they could just pray to God? Why do they seem to need these cards to have the same relationship with God so many people have without it—and is it really a relationship at all, if tarot cards are actually a problem?


There are a million questions that the average Christian might ask about tarot cards. But as it turns out, there's actually nothing wrong, and nothing even unbiblical, about using a tool to get God's ideas, answers, and directions.


When Were Tarot Cards Even Invented?

"The Bible forbids tarot cards!" So say some Christians—but given the Bible was first canonically established in 367 CE, and tarot cards weren't what we would now recognize as the modern card set until around the 1400s in Italy, you're going to be hard pressed to find any actual verses that say they're forbidden to use. In fact, these cards were originally created to play card games like Italian Tarochini or Slovenian Tarok, a game of chance that one of my friends in Slovenia showed me how to play once. After he showed it to me, I realized it perfectly matched the set-up of what is called the Minor Arcana in tarot: four suits of cards numbered one through ten, with then four "face cards" (the Page, Knight, Queen, and King). Sound familiar? That's because they're almost exactly like the set of normal playing cards you no doubt already have in your house for family game night, just with an extra face card instead of the typical Jack, Queen, King you're used to (and before you start wondering, yes: you can use your standard deck of cards, with the spades, clubs, hearts, and diamonds, to ask questions just as much as you would a set of tarot cards).


Around the time this card game was developing in Italy, twenty-two "trump cards" were also added to the deck on top of those four suits in Germany, possibly as early as the 1420s, which could overtake any of the suits of cards in the game when played (hence their being called trump cards).¹ Those cards were ones that modern tarot readers will now recognize, going from the Fool (0) all the way to the World (21), an example of which can be seen in The Visconti-Sforza Tarot, thought to be created in around 1450, painted for "Francesco Sforza, a mercenary commander who served in both Milan and Venice and married the only child of Filippo Maria Visconti."² Even today, the traditional set of tarot cards is still used as a playing card set, and a certain James D. Wickson once wrote a column imploring American libraries to teach about tarot as more than just occult tomfoolery:


"Teens and young adults should be aware that Tarot cards are not just used for the occult or divination. We should teach them the rules for Tarot card games that are still being played today in continental Europe. We should educate young people about all aspects of culture, including Tarot, and not present one-sided views of these matters."³


As far as most researchers into history, art, culture, religion, and sociology are concerned, these cards had absolutely nothing to do with spirituality and were simply a means to pass the time, gamble, and have some fun—nothing magical about them, nothing esoteric about them, and certainly nothing demonic about them. And it stayed this way for centuries: tarot cards, simply used as game cards.


Until the 19th century.


The Occult Origins and Uses of Tarot Cards

Christian Witch, Witchcraft, Mysticism, Magic, Crystals, Bible, Incense, Folklore, Sara Raztresen, God, Spirituality, Tarot, Occult, Evangelical, Demons, Sin, Danger, Possession, Idolatry, Discernment, Church, Solomonic Magic, Occult, Left Hand Path, Demonolatry, Demonology, Tarot
The Ace of Coins from the RWS Deck.

If you search up stock imagery of tarot cards, you may notice some colorful and heavily saturated images pop up, with art that looks pretty old-school in terms of style—and that's because they are old-school. This deck, the standard when anyone talks about tarot, is known as the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot Deck, and it popped up England in 1909 via the Rider Company under A.E. Waite, with art by an often overlooked Pamela Colman Smith (in fact, you may have heard it simply called the Rider or Rider-Waite Deck). And before 1909, the only idea that these cards had any mystical leanings was thanks to, interestingly, a 17th century Protestant pastor and French Freemason, Antoine Court de Gébelin, who wrote a (mostly baseless, practically purely conjecture) book: Le Monde Primitif, "tracing the mysticisms of the ancient world and their surviving traces in the modern [world]," and insisting that the French version of the tarot deck was somehow "connected to Egyptian deities Isis and Thoth." However, many of these ideas, while fringe at the time, soon snowballed as European thinkers grew more and more interested in the occult—namely hermeticism, a type of philosophical thinking based on the legendary, mythological figure, Hermes Trismegistus (or Thrice-Great Hermes).


According to sociologist Mike Sosteric, this philosophy of hermeticism was one that allowed for changing the world with spiritual means. As he puts it, hermeticism is "a belief that the world can be influenced through contact with and exploitation of 'heavenly forces'—magic in other words. In this view, the tarot is a book of 'special symbols" that could help people meditate and better understand the higher celestial realms—and God Himself. Topolsky notes that people were getting extremely interested in the occult in 19th century England, and that included things like the apparently mystical tarot cards:


"In 19th century England, however, interest verging on a mania raged for all things occult. Suddenly, worlds of knowledge, coupled with current thinking on the psychology of the human mind opened up, and people of all walks of life became enamored with contacting the spirit world to find out the future or to commune with the dead. Christians began reading the Kabbalah. Interest in photographing ghosts rose. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, devoted to study of the occult, and one of the first organizations of its type to fully admit women in addition to men, was founded with its first temple in London in 1888."


Now, here's the thing. It's interesting that Topolsky mentions Kabbalah, including how one of the Rider-Waite-Smith deck's creators, A.E Waite, wrote books about it, because Kabbalah a form of medieval Jewish mysticism. In fact, that previously mentioned Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn would be using a lot of what call "everything-but-the-kitchen-sink occultism," in which they took inspiration from many different esoteric and spiritual philosophies, from Hermeticism to Kabbalah to even Egyptian lore, creating a mish-mash of spiritual soup that would effectively stand as the culmination of magical philosophy and science (yes, science) up to that point. With tarot, as Sosteric puts it, "tarot is variously a teaching tool used to develop special skills," which various writers have credited with being able to reveal secret truths and mysteries to its users. People were interested in this stuff not because it was of the devil or whatever the hell people commonly stereotype occultism and hermeticisim with, but because it would help people figure things about about the world (and even themselves, with how psychologists like Carl Jung later grabbed onto it). People literally thought it was another type of science that would help us better understand the world! (Or have you never heard people say that alchemy, another interesting philosophical system, was the chemistry-before-chemistry?)


But Jewish Kabbalah, while heavily misunderstood, is in fact nothing demonic at all. It stems out of the Zohar, a more mystical reading of the Torah (the first five books of the Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Deuteronomy, Numbers, and Leviticus) to better contemplate, understand, and access the great knowledge of God, that people might become closer to Him and more spiritually developed and in tune. There are Christian versions (Cabala) and the Hermetic version (Qabalah), both of which heavily rip it off (and, in the Christian case, have been used as tools to try and convert Jewish people more than actually do anything with the mysticism—a real bait and switch, y'know?).


Still, this means that actually, the tarot cards people are most familiar with—that Rider-Waite-Smith Deck—actually include a lot of Jewish, and by extension Christian, symbolism. Take the Lovers card, for instance: it depicts an angel hovering over what appears to be Adam and Eve in the garden. And the Ace of Cups is quite literally the Eucharistic wine chalice, with the Holy Spirit (dove) hovering over the recognizable Eucharist wafer above the overflowing chalice. There is a ton of Abrahamic symbolism here, because the occultists everyone gets so spooked about in mainstream media were, by and large... Abrahamic. Jewish and Christian, namely, when we're talking about western occultism (though Islamic mysticism, known as Sufism, exists, too). And whether used as a "powerful therapeutic tool" to dig into people's psyche—"a reflection of the four gateways of childhood, bursting with deep psychological meanings"¹⁰—or as a divination tool to contact God, or just as a plain old playing card game, the fact of the matter is that, by and large, the concept of Tarot has always been a European, namely Jewish and Christian, item.


But Isn't Divination Bad No Matter What?

Christian Witch, Witchcraft, Mysticism, Magic, Crystals, Bible, Incense, Folklore, Sara Raztresen, God, Spirituality, Tarot, Occult, Evangelical, Demons, Sin, Danger, Possession, Idolatry, Discernment, Church, Solomonic Magic, Occult, Left Hand Path, Demonolatry, Demonology, Tarot

Depends on how we define divination.


In our book, Discovering Christian Witchcraft, my co-writer Mimi and I break down many a different verse that includes concepts like sorcery, witchcraft, and of course, divination, to see what was really being talked about. For a quick example and quick read on a verse that mentions divination specifically, you can also read my blog on the real context of Deuteronomy 18:10-12. But to give you a (somewhat) shorter answer on whether divination is bad, again: it depends what you mean.


Asking God a question and using tools to help you make sure you don't miss the answer? That's totally fine. In fact, God commands this practice in Exodus 28, with the introduction of the Urim and Thummim: two stones that stayed in a priest's breastplate. When scholars couldn't agree on how to interpret the law, they'd ask the priest, who would ask God a clarifying yes or no question and root around in his pocket until compelled to pull one of these two stones. One signified yes, and another no, and then bam, question answered.


This is actually a type of divination called cleromancy, or the art of casting some kind of dice or object for a message. It shows up all over the Bible, from Old Testament to New Testament, and that includes in the Book of Acts, where the Apostles use it to determine who will replace Judas (Acts 1:23-26):


23 So they nominated two men: Joseph called Barsabbas (also known as Justus) and Matthias. 24 Then they prayed, "Lord, you know everyone’s heart. Show us which of these two you have chosen 25 to take over this apostolic ministry, which Judas left to go where he belongs." 26 Then they cast lots, and the lot fell to Matthias; so he was added to the eleven apostles.


Take special notice of verses 24 and 25. Most who deny this as a type of divination will insist it's just like flipping a coin, just mere chance, nothing special about it—but they're specifically asking God to reveal a message to them in those verses. They aren't just goofing around and taking it on chance; they're fully expecting God to manipulate those lots to fall just how He wants them so the Apostles can know His will. That's divination, baby.


(At least, that's how Christian Witches define divination.)


If we're defining divination how Deuteronomy does, though—in which you're bothering the spirits of the dead by sticking bones in your mouth to try and channel the spirit to literally inhabit your mouth and speak with your own tongue—then yeah, that'd be more problematic. That practice, called ov and yide'oni, is a previously pagan Canaanite practice that the Israelites were banned from for numerous reasons, and one that has nothing to do with something like, say, tarot cards. Again, my blog on Deuteronomy goes much more in-depth into this verse specifically, and Discovering Christian Witchcraft covers yet more.


And before anyone says that casting lots, or cleromancy, is allowed but tarot, or cartomancy, isn't, let me stop you. There's a little something most Christians miss when it comes to, like, reading in general, and that's the concept of application. In fact, the way many Christians interpret the Bible reminds me of the debacle between Federalists and Jeffersonian Republicans when it came to interpreting the U.S. Constitution: the former said it was fine and dandy to do anything so long as the Constitution didn't specifically forbid it, and the latter said it was illegal to do anything not specifically outlined in the document. I fall into a more Federalist approach to the Bible. Given how many oddly, even ridiculously specific things the Bible does take the time to forbid, you'd think that they'd have gone the extra mile and really forbidden things like casting lots and such if it was really that big a deal, and if they weren't actually singling out more specific Canaanite practices like the one mentioned in Deuteronomy. If in fact asking God a question with a physical tool is fine despite prohibitions against "divination," then what the hell? Fair is fair; you could use any tool, from dice to beads to chopsticks to whatever else, to ask Him a question, so long as you defined concrete meanings for what you're using.


Let me put it more simply. If something like casting lots is fine, because you're trusting God to throw them down just the right way for His will to be clear, then how is trusting Him to throw down a specific picture on a piece of card stock any different? To be against tarot sounds almost as silly as being against texting someone (and thus visibly preserving a conversation) over talking to them face to face (and then risking forgetting or misremembering something later). Again, the Bible does not need to specifically outline that tarot is permissible, first of all because the card game wasn't invented yet, and second of all because it is functionally the same thing as casting lots. There are no demons that jump out at the Apostles after casting lots, and frankly, there won't be any that pop out of a deck of cards, either (unless you specifically invite them over for an interview). And if you're really worried about it, you might do what us Christian Witches do: consecrate the deck to God as His tool and bless it in His, His Son's, and His Spirit's name. No pesky demon wants to touch what basically has Christ scrawled on it in big energetic letters, right?


So... Can Christians Use Tarot Cards or What?

Tarot is therefore, in my opinion, a really good tool for people who feel like they pray but "never get an answer." Chances are people are getting answers, but just don't know how to identify or interpret them, and so having a physical, undeniable symbol like a lot or a tarot card is useful. Could you misinterpret the tarot card to say what you want instead of what God really means? Sure, but you could misinterpret the answer to a prayer (whatever the hell that even looks like to you) the same way. In fact, I'd argue it's a lot harder to misinterpret tarot than it is to misinterpret things people have called answers to their prayers: snippets of a song, a butterfly, the number four, a chance encounter with a stranger, etc. All of these things can be mis-colored by our faulty human perception. Hell, our very understanding of God is mis-colored by our faulty human perception. To get an answer from God at all, whether with a tool or without, requires a certain level of humility and self-awareness that many people simply do not have, whether they go to church and read their Bible every week or whether they cut a deck and draw a card.


So if you're a Christian worried about tarot cards, don't be. They're just a tool. Just pretty pictures on card stock. And with every tarot deck having the same 78 cards and same general idea, you can also say that tarot is a language—one that, when you learn to speak it, helps you learn to better identify how God speaks both with and without the cards. Think of it like training wheels for divine revelation. There's nothing wrong with it, and in fact, it's even got some biblical backing when you understand the Bible's many intricacies that people often write off.


For those looking for their first deck, I can personally recommend a few:

  • Kat Black's Golden Tarot, which is modeled off the Rider-Waite-Smith deck and uses gorgeous renaissance art

  • Amrit Brar's Marigold Tarot, a macabre and beautiful deck combining Punjabi symbolism with traditional tarot meanings

  • Threads of Fate's Weaver Tarot, a more minimalistic, yet still very pretty deck that interprets its cards in a much more forgiving way than traditional meanings do.

    • It seems their website shut down, but some people are still selling the decks on Amazon or Ebay.


So grab a deck, learn the meanings, ask God your questions, and have fun! I hope this helps you feel better about the cards, and I hope it lets you know that no, your loved ones who flip a card around here and there aren't condemned to hell (though if they say they just "ask the cards"... that may be a conversation starter, because the cards themselves don't really say anything; it's either their own intuition asserting meaning to the combination of cards they get, or someone on the other side influencing them to pull this card over that one. Make sure you know who's on the other side of what is essentially a 78-card telephone!)


Take care!


Sources:


¹ Husband, Tim. "Before Fortune-Telling: The History and Structure of Tarot Cards." Met Museum. 8 April 2016. https://www.metmuseum.org/articles/tarot


² Ibid.


³ Wickson, James D. “Unveiling the Tarot Mystery.” American Libraries, vol. 38, no. 7, 2007, pp. 9–9. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/27771244.


⁴ Sosteric, Mike. “A Sociology of Tarot.” The Canadian Journal of Sociology / Cahiers Canadiens de Sociologie, vol. 39, no. 3, 2014, pp. 357–92. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/canajsocicahican.39.3.357.


⁵ Topolsky, Laura June. "The Deck of Cards That Made Tarot a Global Phenomenon." Atlas Obscura. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-deck-of-cards-that-made-tarot-a-global-phenomenon


⁶ Ibid.


⁷ Sosteric, "A Sociology of Tarot," 361.


⁸ Topolsky, "The Deck of Cards That Made Tarot a Global Phenomenon."


⁹ Sosteric, "A Sociology of Tarot," 362.


¹⁰ Ibid., 362.


 

Christian Witch, Witchcraft, Mysticism, Magic, Crystals, Bible, Incense, Folklore, Sara Raztresen, God, Spirituality, Tarot, Occult, Evangelical, Demons, Sin, Danger, Possession, Idolatry

Sara Raztresen is a Slovene-American writer, screenwriter, and Christian witch. Her fantasy works draw heavily on the wisdom she gathers from her own personal and spiritual experience, and her s


piritual practice borrows much of the whimsy and wonder that modern society has relegated to fairy-and-folktale. Her goal is to help people regain their spiritual footing and discover


God through a new (yet old) lens of mysticism.



Follow Sara on Tiktok, Instagram, Twitter, and Youtube, and explore her fiction writing here.


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