The Real Magick Behind the Card Deck: Why I Had to Dig Up English History
Everyone talks about Tarot starting in Italy, right? That playing card history, the Visconti-Sforza decks, or maybe you jump straight to the French occult revival—Etteilla and the big shots linking it all to Egypt and crazy conspiracy theories. That’s the bog standard story you read in every introductory book.
I started there too. I really wanted to understand the cards, not just memorize meanings. So I spent months trying to read with pure historical reproductions—Marseille style, no pretty pictures on the minors, just cups, swords, wands, coins. And honestly? It was tough. It felt thin. Like I was missing the whole engine. It was great for simple spreads, but if you wanted deep psychological or spiritual insight, it often felt like flipping four of clubs and saying, “Yep, that’s four of clubs.”
I Knew Something Was Missing.
I needed structure. I needed the system. So I began to track back when the Tarot became more than just a fortune-telling gimmick and actually turned into a magical key. And every road, every single time, smacked me right into Victorian England. Not France, not Italy, but the weird, dusty, intensely structured minds of the late 19th-century British occultists.
My entire practice record shifted the minute I realized this. I stopped focusing so much on early Renaissance Italy and started wrestling with texts written by guys with massive beards and even bigger egos, specifically those tied up with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.
This is where the real work began. I didn’t just read the common books by Waite or Crowley; those are the distilled versions. I tracked down the actual, original Golden Dawn cipher manuscripts, the internal papers, the instructions they gave their members on how to integrate the Tarot. That was a serious commitment. Most of this stuff isn’t digitized. It’s sitting in archives, sometimes badly transcribed, sometimes written in awful, cramped handwriting, referencing things that were obscure even back then, like some forgotten treatise on Kabbalah or some deep cut astronomical chart.
The Messy Process of Tracking Down the Truth
I committed to finding out exactly how they took a simple 78-card deck and turned it into the comprehensive system we use today. I used a network of contacts I’d built up over years of studying historical societies. I begged, borrowed, and sometimes spent far too much money tracking down obscure printings and society newsletters. I spent a week straight staring at microfiche in a specific university library just because one random book referenced a single Golden Dawn member’s diary entry about the true meaning of the Suit of Swords.
Here’s what my practice revealed they did—and why it matters:
- They didn’t just guess at meanings; they mapped all 78 cards onto the Tree of Life (Kabbalah), giving every card a specific spiritual pathway and energy flow. This is the bedrock of the modern RWS system.
- They linked every single card—not just the majors—to astrology and elemental forces. This gave the minors depth and personality they simply didn’t possess in the old French decks.
- They demanded that the cards be used for internal spiritual growth and magical work, not just predictive reading. This elevated the tool entirely.
The English system took what was essentially a fun game with some light divination potential and forged it into a precise, systematic magical machine. That’s why the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, which came directly out of this intellectual furnace, is the deck everyone knows. It’s got the whole system baked in.
How I Ended Up Down This Rabbit Hole Anyway
You might be wondering why I put myself through all this microfilm squinting and obscure book chasing, instead of just reading the Wikipedia entry. Well, this whole obsession started because I was looking for something completely unrelated, something embarrassing, actually.
A few years ago, I was helping my cousin clean out our grumpy old great-aunt’s attic after she passed. We weren’t looking for history; we were looking for cash, frankly. Aunt Hilda was eccentric. Instead of finding a stash of money, I found a mildewed wooden trunk crammed with bizarre papers, old letters, and a bunch of dusty books about ceremonial magic. I nearly pitched the whole thing.
One of the boxes had a bunch of terrible amateur watercolor paintings of Tarot images, mixed with notes written in a very fancy, flowery script. It was a 1920s attempt to recreate a personalized Tarot deck based on what the writer called “True English Principles.” I initially thought it was just the ravings of some bored old lady. But then I found a letter hidden inside one of the books—a thank you note from a real person, a well-known esoteric scholar from the 1960s, thanking Aunt Hilda’s cousin (my great-great uncle Reginald) for his insights into the “Tattwas and the attribution of the Hebrew Letters to the Court Cards.”
I realized this messy box of junk wasn’t just old garbage; it was a physical artifact linking my family, peripherally, to this specific, dense lineage of English esoteric thought. Uncle Reginald, who everyone thought was just a cranky retired postal worker, had been seriously deep into the very systems that defined modern Tarot. I had to know what he knew. I had to understand how this seemingly normal, boring family had managed to accidentally safeguard a piece of the puzzle.
It was never about finding the oldest history; it was about finding the history that made the cards useful. And that history, the stuff that systematized the deck and gave it the profound magical weight it carries today, was cooked up right there in foggy, secretive, turn-of-the-century London study rooms. I had to reconstruct their thinking process, step by painful step, to truly understand the cards I hold in my hand every day.
That’s the magic origin story I now share in my own practice. It’s not Egyptian pharaohs; it’s English bureaucrats with a passion for Kabbalah, and I got the proof sitting in a trunk smelling faintly of lavender and damp.
