Tarot in the 20th and 21st centuries: from secret knowledge to self-reflection

A deck from 1909 is today the best-selling tarot in the world. In between lie decades in which it was almost forgotten, a new departure in the United States, its discovery by psychology, a boom in Germany and, most recently, the leap onto screens. This part tells how the occultists’ tool became a mirror for your own thinking, and why it is precisely this old deck that is so freely available today.

Quiet decades

After 1909 the Waite-Smith tarot remained in its London publisher’s list and appeared in several printings up to the 1930s, without causing much of a stir. In 1931 the American esotericist Paul Foster Case brought out a deck of his own that traced Smith’s pictures and was intended to be coloured in by hand. Tarot also left traces in literature, for instance in T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land of 1922 with its card reader Madame Sosostris. The Second World War interrupted production; new momentum came in the 1950s from the other side of the Atlantic.

Counterculture and Stuart Kaplan

In 1959 an edition of the Waite-Smith tarot with Waite’s companion book appeared in New York, and a year later Eden Gray presented The Tarot Revealed, the first of several easy-to-understand guides. She shaped the idea of reading the 22 trumps as the Fool’s journey through life. This struck a chord with a generation that was opening up to astrology, the I Ching, Eastern religions and the expansion of consciousness. In the 1960s tarot became part of the counterculture: in student halls, in communes, on record sleeves and, in 1973, even in a James Bond film.

The decisive step was taken by a businessman. Stuart R. Kaplan (1932 to 2021) discovered a Swiss tarot at the Nuremberg Toy Fair in 1968, imported it into the United States and founded U.S. Games Systems. In 1971, under licence from the London publisher, he brought out the Waite-Smith tarot and made it the standard of the American market; the name “Rider-Waite” was registered as a trademark by his company. Kaplan remained a collector and researcher: his four-volume Encyclopedia of Tarot appeared between 1978 and 2005, and in 2018 he and others published the first comprehensive biography of Pamela Colman Smith. The 1970s also brought a wave of new decks, from the Aquarian Tarot in 1970 and the Morgan-Greer Tarot in 1979 to the round, feminist Motherpeace Tarot of 1981. In 1969, moreover, the Thoth Tarot by Aleister Crowley and Lady Frieda Harris had been published, created between 1938 and 1943, which founded a second major line of tradition.

The psychological interpretation

At the same time, the question of what tarot actually achieves shifted. In the 1930s Carl Gustav Jung had remarked in passing that the tarot pictures were related to the archetypes, those primordial images which, according to his theory, all human beings share. He himself did not work with cards, but others took up the idea. In 1980 Sallie Nichols’ Jung and Tarot appeared, reading the 22 trumps as stages of individuation. In the same year Rachel Pollack (1945 to 2023) published the first volume of Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom, followed by the second in 1983, to this day one of the most influential tarot books of all. Pollack treated the Waite-Smith deck as a visual language for inner processes, not as an oracle for outward events. In 1984 Mary K. Greer added, with Tarot for Your Self, the idea that you lay out the cards for yourself, writing and asking questions.

With this, a new understanding had been formulated: the cards predict nothing. They show pictures to which a person responds, and that response reveals something about them. A card you draw is an invitation to a conversation with yourself, not a verdict. This understanding also underlies this website.

Germany: the boom of the 1980s

In Germany, tarot was hardly present until the 1970s; with the esoteric wave of the 1980s, it arrived with full force. Publishers such as Hugendubel, Knaur, Heyne and Goldmann, as well as the Swiss card maker AGMüller, brought decks and books onto the market; in 1986 Evelin Bürger and Johannes Fiebig founded Königsfurt Verlag, a publishing house devoted entirely to tarot. The most important voice was Hajo Banzhaf (1949 to 2009), who published Das Tarot-Handbuch in 1986. This was followed by Schlüsselworte zum Tarot and, in 1997, Tarot und die Reise des Helden, in which he linked the 22 trumps with Joseph Campbell’s research into myth. Banzhaf wrote clearly, without mystifying murmurs, and combined depth psychology with astrology. His books sold in large numbers and were translated into many languages; through them, a whole generation came to know tarot as an instrument of self-knowledge, not as fairground fortune-telling.

Indie decks, diversity and screens

Since the 1990s, tarot has become a field for artists working outside the publishing houses. From 2009, crowdfunding platforms made it possible to finance a deck without a publisher; Kim Krans’ The Wild Unknown of 2012 began as a self-published deck and became a worldwide success. Many new decks respond to what is missing from the Waite-Smith tarot: people of different skin colours, bodies, genders and ways of life. Decks such as Slow Holler, Next World Tarot or Modern Witch Tarot stand for this development. At the same time, tarot moved onto the screen: programs for home computers, websites, apps from 2008, learning platforms, videos. In the 2010s social media gave rise to a new, young scene, and during the pandemic years from 2020 publishers reported markedly higher sales. The online tarot you draw from here belongs to this lineage.

Why a deck from 1909 is free and a modern one is not

One final note, which explains why it is this particular deck you see here. In the European Union, copyright in a picture expires 70 years after the death of its creator. Pamela Colman Smith died in 1951, and her cards have been in the public domain since 1 January 2022; Waite’s texts have been since 2013. Anyone may therefore use, adapt and publish the scans of the first edition of 1909. This does not apply to modern decks: their artists are still alive or died only recently, and their pictures will remain protected for decades to come. Caution is needed even with newer editions of the Waite-Smith tarot, because recolourings and revisions can give rise to rights of their own; what is free is the original of 1909, not every later version. And the name “Rider-Waite” is a protected trademark, which is why this site consistently speaks of the Waite-Smith tarot. The interpretations on this site are our own texts. So everything stays legally sound, and Pamela Colman Smith receives what was denied her during her lifetime: her name on the deck.