Tarot and the Dreaming Mind

Origins: a card game before it was an oracle

The single most stubborn myth about tarot is that it is ancient, Egyptian, and secret. None of that is true, and the real story is stranger. Tarot begins in fifteenth-century northern Italy as a card game — tarocchi, from the earlier trionfi, "triumphs" — played by the dukes and courtiers of Milan and Ferrara. The oldest surviving cards are not a fortune-teller's tools but luxury objects: the hand-painted, gold-leafed Visconti-Sforza decks, commissioned for the Milanese court in the mid-fifteenth century, with figures dressed in the fashions of the family that paid for them.

What set tarot apart from an ordinary pack was the addition of a fifth suit of allegorical "trumps" — what later occultists would rename the Major Arcana. These twenty-two images were not occult ciphers; they were the common visual furniture of the medieval and Renaissance imagination. The Wheel of Fortune, the dance of Death, the Devil, the Last Judgement, the cardinal virtues of Strength, Justice, and Temperance — a literate Italian of that era would have recognised every one from churches, sermons, and processions. The cards triumphed over one another in play the way these forces were imagined to triumph over human life. The mysticism came later. The pictures came first.

What it meant: from triumphs to a "Book of Thoth"

Tarot's transformation from pastime to oracle happened almost entirely in the eighteenth century, and we can name the men who did it. In 1781 the French scholar Antoine Court de Gébelin published an essay in his sprawling encyclopaedia Le Monde primitif claiming that the tarot was a survival of the lost wisdom of ancient Egypt — a "Book of Thoth" smuggled into Europe disguised as a game. He was writing decades before Champollion deciphered hieroglyphs, and he offered no evidence at all. It was a beautiful invention, and Europe fell for it.

Hard on his heels came a Parisian seed-merchant turned occultist, Jean-Baptiste Alliette, who reversed his name to Etteilla and became arguably the first professional tarot cartomancer, publishing methods of divination and producing his own redesigned deck in the 1780s. Then, in the mid-nineteenth century, the French magus Éliphas Lévi made the connection that bound tarot to the rest of the Western esoteric tradition: in his Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie he matched the twenty-two trumps to the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet and to the paths on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. He presented it as a rediscovered ancient secret; it was his own invention, and the Renaissance card-makers had intended nothing of the kind. No matter — Lévi's correspondence stuck, and tarot was now wired into Kabbalah, astrology, and ceremonial magic.

The Golden Dawn and the deck most people dream in

If you picture a tarot card in your mind's eye, you are almost certainly picturing the work of one British occult order and one extraordinary artist. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, founded in London in 1888, systematised the esoteric tarot — its attributions of element, planet, and Hebrew letter to each card became the grammar most modern readers still use. From that milieu came the deck that conquered the English-speaking world: the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot, published in London in 1909, devised by the scholar-mystic Arthur Edward Waite and illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith — a London-born artist of American parentage who spent her childhood between England, New York, and Jamaica, and whose name was for decades left off the box.

Smith's genius was to illustrate every card — including the fifty-six Minor Arcana, the pip cards, which earlier decks had left as bare arrangements of cups and swords. Suddenly the Three of Swords was a heart pierced by three blades against a rain-grey sky; the Ten of Swords a body face-down on the ground; the Six of Cups a sweetness of childhood gardens. She gave the deck a dreamlike, scene-based visual language, and it is that pictorial vocabulary — far more than any Egyptian fantasy — that the sleeping mind reaches for. When people say they "see a tarot card" in a dream, they usually mean a Smith image.

In dreams: why the deck and the dream speak the same dialect

Here is the quiet claim at the centre of this page: tarot and dreaming are built from the same raw material. Both work by image rather than argument. Both compress a whole situation — grief, ambition, the end of something, the lure of the senses — into a single charged picture. The classical dream-interpreters understood that dreams speak in this condensed, symbolic code; Artemidorus, in his second-century Oneirocritica, insisted that a dream image means nothing in isolation and everything in context — that the same symbol turns lucky or ruinous depending on the dreamer's life and circumstances. Replace "dream" with "card" and you have described a tarot reading exactly.

So a tarot dream tends to arrive in one of a few shapes. Sometimes a specific card appears — the Tower mid-collapse, the Moon with its two dogs baying at a path between towers, Death on his pale horse — and the dreaming mind has simply chosen the most economical image it owns for a feeling it cannot yet name. The Tower is the dream of sudden, necessary ruin. The Moon is the dream of not trusting what you see. Death — the card occultists are forever reminding the nervous about — almost never means literal death in either tarot or the older dream-books; it means a threshold, the moulting of one life-stage into the next. Sometimes the dream is of the reading itself — being dealt cards, a reader you cannot quite see, a card turned face-down or refused. That dream is usually less about the future than about the wish to be told it: the longing for a verdict on a life that has not yet decided itself.

Carl Jung took both dreams and tarot more seriously than most of his contemporaries did; in a 1933 seminar he described the cards as psychological images, "archetypal ideas" that mingle with the flow of the unconscious. On that reading the trumps are a gallery of archetypes — the Fool, the Magician, the Empress, the Hermit, the Devil — the same recurring figures he believed surface from the collective unconscious in myth and in sleep. To dream a tarot card, then, is not to receive a message from outside but to meet a part of yourself that has put on a costume old enough for you to finally recognise it.

How a reader thinks about the images

To understand why these cards haunt dreams, it helps to know how the deck is structured, because the structure is itself a kind of story. The seventy-eight cards divide into two worlds. The twenty-two Major Arcana — the old trumps — are read as the great, archetypal forces and turning-points: fate, not errand. They run, loosely, from the Fool (number zero, the soul setting out, the cliff-edge optimist) through to the World (number twenty-one, completion, the dance at journey's end), and readers have long called this sequence "the Fool's Journey," a life told as the Fool walks the full arc of trumps.

The fifty-six Minor Arcana are the texture of ordinary days, sorted into four suits with old elemental and Kabbalistic correspondences: Wands (fire — drive, work, the will), Cups (water — love, feeling, dream itself), Swords (air — thought, conflict, the cutting word), and Pentacles or Coins (earth — money, body, the made world). A reader does not decode a single card so much as listen to how cards converse — a triumph beside a humble pip, a suit that floods the spread, a card that arrives reversed. The meaning lives in the relationships, exactly as the meaning of a dream lives less in the snake or the stairway than in everything around it.

A careful note: history and symbol, not prophecy

Everything above is offered as folklore, art history, and symbolism — a tradition to think with, not a system that tells the future. Tarot's documented past is a Renaissance game that eighteenth-century romantics dressed in borrowed Egyptian robes; its dream-resonance is real, but it is the resonance of a powerful set of pictures meeting a mind that thinks in pictures, not evidence that cards foresee events. No deck, dreamt or dealt, can know what has not happened.

There is also a long and humane thread of caution running through the older traditions themselves, and it is worth honouring. The Hebrew Bible and the Talmud both record the view that not every dream carries meaning, and that some are merely the mind replaying the day; Artemidorus warned that a careless interpreter misreads the very images he is most sure of; and tarot writers from Waite onward have warned against using the cards to outsource a decision that is properly yours to make. Read your tarot dream the way a good reader reads a spread — as a mirror that sharpens the question, never as an oracle that answers it.

How to sit with a tarot dream

If a card or a reading surfaces in your sleep, treat it the way you would any vivid dream-symbol on this site: as a question, not a sentence passed on you. Which card was it, and what does that image already mean to you — not in a guidebook, but in your own memory of having seen it? Was the card given to you, drawn by you, hidden, or refused — and who held the deck?

The most useful tarot dreams are rarely about the literal card. The Tower may be a relationship you already know is about to fall and have not let yourself name. The Death card may be a permission to end something you have been keeping artificially alive. A reading you could not hear may be your own reluctance to decide. The deck, in the end, is a lamp the dreaming mind borrows to look at what it is already carrying. The light is real. The future it seems to show is only ever your own.