The worlds of tarot: Students explore the history and meaning of divinatory cards

Whether by fate, chance, or serendipity, the moment Professors Thomas and Jones started to explain their tarot course over lunch, a Yale College student across the table began to give a friend a reading.  

Todne Thomas, Associate Professor of Divinity and of Religious Studies, and Nicholas Jones, Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese, are co-teaching a course on tarot this semester. “The World(ing) of Tarot” is an interdisciplinary exploration of tarot—its history, its enduring place in popular culture, and its aesthetics.

“Tarot” refers to a deck of cards used for divination, self-development, and entertainment. After emerging in fifteenth-century Italy as a card game, tarot has undergone numerous transformations through the centuries to become a tool for fortune-telling, spirituality, and personal growth.

A typical 78-card tarot deck contains 22 “major arcana” cards, which depict significant scenes and life events, in addition to 56 “minor arcana” cards.  The latter are divided into four “suits”: wands, pentacles, swords, and cups, each of which contains fourteen cards with different divinatory and symbolic meanings—ten numbered cards and four “face” cards, featuring a knight, page, queen, and king.

Thomas and Jones decided to co-teach the course because of a shared interest in the early modern world and a desire to rigorously examine tarot from numerous academic angles.  

“If you learn about tarot, what can you teach?” Thomas said of her and Jones's approach to the course. “What broccoli can you smuggle into the mac and cheese? How can we make this a humanities class, not just a religious studies class, or something that's beholden to a particular disciplinary orientation?”

“Pedagogically, intellectually, we have a lot of overlapping, unexpected interests that make the class great,” Jones said of co-creating and co-teaching the course with Thomas.

“This is an effort to really participate in the collaborative humanities culture that I imagine Yale to be really invested in,” Thomas added.

Hands-on with archival materials  

Thomas and Jones were keen for students to have a tactile experience in the class, rather than limiting their experience of tarot to lectures and reading assignments.  

“One of the many things about tarot that makes it such an enduring divinatory medium is that it's a multi-sensory experience,” Thomas explained. “It's visual, and it’s tactile, and when you're getting a reading there’s conversation, so it's [also] an auditory experience.”

Each class begins with a student pulling a tarot card for the group, followed by a short writing assignment on the imagery and meaning of the card. Their students have also had ample opportunities to interact with tarot decks from different historical periods during visits to Yale's Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library and its extensive tarot-related collections.  

The Beinecke is home to 3,300 decks of playing cards (about 350 of which are tarot decks), over 300 uncut sheets of cards, 25 printing blocks, and plenty of tarot-related print material, according to Danijela Matković, Assistant Director of the Bibliographic Description Unit, and Moira Fitzgerald, Program Director of Reference Services and User Assessment.

During their first Beinecke visit, the class examined 12 tarot decks and two fragments of sheets of uncut tarot cards, which offer a glimpse into how tarot cards were once manufactured.  

“Playing cards are definitely under-researched, and in that sense, also perhaps underappreciated,” Matković said of the tarot collections she curated for the class. “What I’m hoping is that they catch a glimpse of our holdings and then go ahead and explore for themselves.”  

The visits also provided inspiration for students’ final assignment: create a major arcana deck incorporating symbols, colors, and meanings inspired by their studies throughout the semester, as well as their personal ideas about the tarot.

Speaking about the course's emphasis on physically engaging with tarot, Thomas said she and Jones had hoped to create a more experiential course than the norm. “I think there's a sense of ‘play’ that we kind of lose in the university space,” she said. “‘Play’ doesn’t mean it's not a serious intellectual inquiry. We can engage with a phenomenon in an intellectual way that's not divorced from the senses.”

Jones added that it’s important to find ways to keep students involved in the learning process, rather than only exposing them to lectures and course readings. “I'm always thinking practically, pedagogically, of how to keep students engaged, active, moving, and taking ownership over the learning process,” he said.

The many worlds of tarot

Thomas and Jones have tried to incorporate as many “worlds” of tarot into the course as possible. “We try to assign readings that are historical, that show tarot's evolution and that look at its entanglement with other practices like gambling, divination, prophecy, witchcraft, and alchemy,” Thomas explained. “But we also look at contexts of practice, which I tend to favor because I'm an anthropologist: where people are doing readings, and what these practices accomplish in real time.”

For Jones, the “worlding” of tarot is represented by the practice’s accessibility to people from all walks of life—its “legibility, its fluidity, and how it moves and travels.”

“Tarot, in and of itself, represents the moment. It's utilized and sought after to address different kinds of world problems,” he said. “We have units in the syllabus where we put tarot reading and tarot practice in conversation with present day witches who are fighting for social justice, or fighting against different kinds of systematic or systemized repression and disenfranchisement.”

Thomas also noted the importance of not only situating tarot in its historical context, but in its present-day usage as well. “How does tarot become engaged in discussions about decolonization, imagination, and world building—building new worlds?” she asked. “Tarot was and is a kind of technology for imagining and deconstructing social worlds.”

Students explored the varied meanings of tarot in its many contexts as they held, read, and discussed items in the Beinecke’s collections.  

Though Yale College seniors Thara Joseph and Norma Mejia hail from different disciplines—Joseph is majoring in Ethics, Politics, and Economics and Mejia in Film and Media Studies—they’ve found themselves in the same classroom this semester.  

“I think one of the most striking things to me was that a majority of the materials presented had some sort of interpersonal quality to them,” Joseph said of one Beinecke visit in which tarot-inspired letters, poems, books, and homemade decks were available to touch and discuss. After seeing the value of tarot as a form of social connection rather than only a tool for divination, Joseph said she might incorporate an interpersonal perspective into her final project for the class.

Mejia said that tarot is a common fixture in her culture as a Mexican American and that she took the course to deepen her understanding of the practice. As an experimenter in both digital and black-and-white photography, artist Bea Nettles's “Mountain Dreams” tarot deck—in which each card is a photograph of a person posed to evoke the tarot’s meaning—particularly piqued her interest. 

“Everyone in the class has varying experiences with the tarot, either as something that they picked up for fun or something that they really dove into,” she said. “I think this class has really helped me understand the different contexts and history of tarot and how it emerged into this modern, more occultist practice.”

Joseph noted that the course was “one of the first classes where I've been able to physically immerse myself in the materials that were discussing.” She also highlighted the advantages of having two instructors for the course, with Thomas and Jones each bringing their own unique academic training and perspective to the material.

“I think Professor Jones has an extensive knowledge of the historical context behind the cards, and Professor Thomas has an anthropological, occultist understanding,” Joseph said. “Those two coming together make for a very interesting class.”