The Christian Tarot Mystic: Reclaiming the Early Church Tradition ⋆ Angelorum Tarot

For many a contemporary Christian Tarot Mystic, there’s an uneasy tension between personal spiritual experience and institutional religious dogma. This has certainly been true in my own life, to the point of this tension resulting in a couple of religious trauma relapses.

The Tarot, often dismissed as occult or forbidden, is still largely seen as incompatible with Christian faith. But this view is the result of centuries of suppression, not theological necessity. I can say this with great certainty after the pain caused by my own confusion and religious trauma forced me to do the research.

Before modern Christianity became dogmatised and institutionalised, mystical traditions within the faith embraced spiritual gifts, divine visions, and sacred symbolism. The Tarot also belongs to this older lineage, where contemplation, prophecy, and direct communion with the Divine were central to the Christian life.

This post explores why the institutional Church abandoned these practices—and why the Tarot still belongs within a Christian (or as I like to call it, Christo-Sophianic) contemplative path.

Contemplation as Communion

In the ancient world, contemplation was not merely quiet reflection. It was a sacred attentiveness to divine communication through dreams, symbols, signs, and oracles.

In the Pagan world, augury—the interpretation of signs in nature or the stars—was part of how one listened for divine will. These weren’t fringe practices. They were foundational to how humanity knew and interacted with the Divine.

Early Christians did not immediately abandon this worldview. In fact, the writings of Paul and the practices of early Christian mystics indicate that the gift of prophecy and visionary experience were outcomes of life in the Spirit. To “pray without ceasing” was not a metaphor for repeating formulaic prayers, but an invitation to live in continual divine awareness.

This is precisely the space where Tarot fits: not as fortune-telling, but as a tool for contemplative listening, a spiritual discipline that invites the practitioner to tune in to divine wisdom through symbols and archetypes.

The Sibylline Oracles and Early Christian Prophecy

A prime example of the early Christian embrace of prophetic vision is the Sibylline Oracles. These were originally Pagan texts attributed to prophetesses (Sibyls) who received messages from the gods, usually Apollo. By the 2nd century CE, Hellenistic Jews and Christians had begun to revise and expand these texts, infusing them with monotheistic and Messianic prophecies.

Christian religious leaders like Lactantius quoted them as authentic evidence of Christ’s coming. The idea was simple yet powerful: the Spirit of God could speak through the symbols, voices, and seers of the ancient world, even before Christ’s incarnation. And seriously, why wouldn’t an omnipresent and omniscient God have made that happen? The idea that he would have focused on only one group of people to carry his signs and messages forward is the ultimate form of elitism. It seems impossible to consider that sort of elitism with a loving God.

The more inclusive perspective opens the door to seeing symbolic systems like the Tarot not as heretical, but as tools the Spirit can sanctify for divine communication.

Why the Church Turned Away from Prophecy, Symbolism, and the Sacred Feminine

As Christianity moved from a loosely connected network of Spirit-led communities into a highly structured state religion under Constantine and his successors, everything changed.

1. Centralised Authority Over Inner Experience

Movements like the Montanists, which included women prophets and ecstatic revelations, were suppressed as heretical, not for their content, but for their source. The Church increasingly insisted that divine messages had to be sanctioned by bishops and official doctrine. The idea that someone might receive a vision or insight outside of ecclesiastical control became a threat.

2. Anti-Pagan Sentiment

To strengthen its distinct identity, the institutional Church distanced itself from anything associated with Paganism. It increasingly started demonising astrology and all forms of divination. The Sibyls, once celebrated, were removed from acceptable discourse. Even dream interpretation was restricted. The message was clear: only trust and believe what we tell you to trust and believe.

3. Suppression of the Divine Feminine and Symbolic Wisdom

The early Church also distanced itself from spiritual traditions that honoured the sacred feminine, intuitive knowing, and inner gnosis. Gnostic sects, which often taught that Holy Wisdom (Sophia) could be known experientially and directly, were aggressively shut down. What survived was a more rigid theology, focused on external authority and rationalism.

Hermeticism: The Hidden Lineage of the Christian Tarot Mystic

“The essence of Christian Hermeticism is the same as the essence of conventional Christianity, except that one actually practices and realizes this essence instead of merely believing it.” ~L. Ron Gardner

Despite institutional suppression, a mystical lineage remained. Christian Hermeticism, arising between the 14th and 17th centuries, preserved many of the older truths under the cloak of esotericism. Influenced by Neoplatonism, Kabbalah, alchemy, and early Christian mysticism, the Hermetic tradition proposed that divine wisdom was hidden in all things and could be accessed through contemplation, symbolic understanding, and purified will.

In Hermetic Christianity:

Christ as Logos, the divine pattern underlying all reality.
The soul’s journey is one of reintegration and remembering divine origin.
Symbols are not dangerous—they are sacred carriers of spiritual truth.
Tools like the Tarot are vehicles for contemplating the divine order.

While the Tarot deck as we know it today took shape in the late 18th century, its roots in earlier mystical and symbolic systems make it a natural fit within Christian Hermeticism. The Major Arcana in particular becomes a symbolic map of the soul’s journey, paralleling the path of transformation and soul alchemy described in mystical texts.

Examples include:

The Fool as the soul’s descent into incarnation
The High Priestess as veiled Divine Wisdom (Sophia)
The Hanged Man as sacrificial initiation
Judgement and The World as resurrection and reintegration

This symbolic journey is not foreign to Christianity. It mirrors what mystics like Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross described about the soul’s ascent.

The Tarot as a Christian Tool of Contemplation and Prophecy

To use the Tarot as a Christian is not to seek forbidden knowledge. It is to return to a sacred tradition of symbolic contemplation, once central to the spiritual path.

Much like lectio divina invites us to listen to scripture with the heart, Tarot divina invites us to listen to divine patterns through symbol. It is a means of prayerful inquiry, divine play, spiritual reflection, and sometimes, prophetic insight—not in the predictive sense, but in the revelatory sense.

This is not a novelty. It is a reclamation.

Final Thoughts

The fear of the Tarot in traditional Christian circles is largely the product of historical shifts—of power, not purity. The early Church was far more fluid and mystical than what survived in later dogma. The mystics, prophets, and seers of both testaments received their guidance through dreams, symbols, visions, and signs. This is the spiritual company the Tarot keeps.

When approached prayerfully and reverently, the Tarot can serve as a tool for listening to the same Spirit that inspired the prophets, the sibyls, and the saints. The wisdom was never forbidden by Yeshua—it was simply hidden, waiting for us to find it again.