Reading Tarot as a Christian Mystic | Christian Tarot

Can you read Tarot and follow Christ?

For some Christians, the answer is an immediate no. Tarot is classed as divination, divination is forbidden in the Bible and that, apparently, settles the matter.

Except it doesn’t.

The relationship between Christianity and divination is considerably more complicated than a handful of prohibition verses suggest. And once we move beyond the exoteric argument, Tarot offers the Christian mystic something far more interesting than simple fortune-telling: a symbolic map for contemplation, discernment and the transformation of the soul.

But Doesn’t the Bible Forbid Divination?

This is the obvious place to start.

Deuteronomy 18:10–12 condemns divination, sorcery, interpreting omens, consulting mediums and necromancy. Leviticus contains similar prohibitions. In Acts 16:16, Paul encounters a slave girl described as having a “spirit of divination”.

Those passages should not simply be waved away because we happen to like Tarot.

But neither should we pretend they represent everything the Bible has to say about seeking supernatural knowledge.

The same Bible contains divinatory dreams, the interpretation of dreams, the casting of lots, priestly consultation through the Urim and Thummim, prophetic visions and the deliberate request for signs.

Joseph interprets dreams that reveal future events. Daniel does the same. Gideon lays out his famous fleece and asks God for a physical sign, then repeats the experiment with the conditions reversed.

Lots are cast repeatedly. Most strikingly for Christians, the apostles cast lots to choose Matthias as Judas’s replacement in Acts 1:23–26.

The Urim and Thummim were sacred objects used within the Israelite priesthood to seek divine guidance.

Even the Magi reach Christ after interpreting a celestial sign in Matthew 2. This does not amount to a blanket biblical endorsement of astrology, but it certainly complicates the idea that reading signs in the heavens is intrinsically opposed to God.

So Scripture does not treat every method of obtaining hidden knowledge as one homogeneous forbidden practice.

The harder and more useful questions are: What is the source? What is the intention? What are we trying to accomplish?

Necromancy is not the same thing as casting lots. Manipulating another person’s fate is not the same thing as asking for guidance. Seeking power is not the same thing as seeking wisdom.

Lumping all of these together under the English word divination creates a certainty that the biblical texts themselves do not provide.

What Does the Bible Say About Tarot?

Absolutely nothing.

Tarot did not exist when the biblical texts were written.

The earliest historical references to Tarot date from fifteenth-century northern Italy. These early decks were used for playing a trick-taking game, with 21 trumps and the Fool added to the four familiar Italian suits of Cups, Swords, Batons and Coins. Their association with occultism and fortune-telling came much later.

The Tarot also emerged from an overwhelmingly Christian culture. Its imagery includes angels, virtues, resurrection, judgement, the Pope or Hierophant, the Devil and a cosmological World.

That does not make Tarot secretly Christian scripture. Nor does its origin as a card game prove that every later use of it is spiritually sound.

It simply means we need a better argument than Tarot = occult = Satanic.

Occult, incidentally, means hidden. Christian mysticism itself concerns realities that are not immediately visible to the senses. The question is not whether something is “occult” but what kind of hidden knowledge we are seeking and what we intend to do with it.

From Tarot Cards to a Western Mystery Tradition

The Tarot most Christian critics encounter today is not the fifteenth-century card game. It is Tarot after several centuries of Western esoteric development.

For me, this is where things become much more interesting.

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn brought Tarot into an elaborate system of Hermetic Qabalah, astrology, elemental symbolism, Hebrew letters and ceremonial magic.

In the Golden Dawn’s Book T, the cards are not treated as 78 isolated pictures with keywords attached. The Aces represent the roots of the four elemental powers. The numbered Minor Arcana are connected with the astrological decans, while the Major Arcana belong within a larger Qabalistic structure.

This creates something more akin to a symbolic language.

The ten Sephiroth of the Tree of Life provide stages or modes of manifestation. The 22 connecting paths can be contemplated through the Major Arcana, Hebrew letters and their associated elemental, planetary and zodiacal forces.

For the Christian Hermeticist, this opens another layer.

Tiphereth, the solar centre of the Tree, becomes a natural place to contemplate Christ as Logos: the divine centre through which the human and Divine meet. I am not suggesting that Jewish Kabbalah secretly teaches Christianity, nor that the Golden Dawn simply equated Tiphereth with Jesus. This is a Christian mystical reading made possible through the Hermetic framework.

The Tarot can therefore become a map of the soul’s movement towards greater integration, illumination and alignment with the Good.

Tarot as Christian Hermetic Contemplation

This approach is hardly unprecedented.

Meditations on the Tarot, written by Valentin Tomberg and originally published anonymously, consists of 22 meditations on the Major Arcana viewed through Christian Hermeticism. The cards become starting points for contemplation of Christian theology, spiritual transformation and divine wisdom.

This is much closer to how I now understand the deeper purpose of Tarot.

Divination remains part of it. But divination is not the whole thing.

The Tarot can illuminate patterns within the psyche. It can reveal where desire is overriding discernment. It can show tensions between different levels of the self. Through its Qabalistic, astrological and elemental correspondences, one card can open into an entire web of meaning.

The card is not the source of wisdom.

It is the doorway.

Can Tarot Predict the Future?

Yes, within limits.

I have never found the argument that Tarot cannot or should not make predictions particularly convincing.

My preferred maxim is:

Spell long, divine short.

Divination can show the direction in which events are moving. If the present conditions remain substantially unchanged, some outcomes are far more likely than others.

That is a forecast, not a decree of fate.

Christian scripture itself gives us an excellent model for conditional prediction. Jonah announces the destruction of Nineveh. Nineveh repents. The predicted destruction does not occur.

The point of the warning was not to demonstrate an immutable future. It created the possibility of a different one.

Tarot can work similarly.

If the cards show a Tower developing on the horizon, I want to know what is creating that trajectory and whether anything can be changed.

What I reject is fatalism.

A prediction can become especially dangerous when someone treats it as fixed and begins unconsciously making choices that fulfil it. What looks like fate may sometimes be self-fulfilling prophecy wearing impressive robes and hidden psychic chains.

Divination is most useful when it increases freedom rather than removing it.

Two Ways to Use Tarot on the Christian Mystic Path

1. Tarot as Contemplative Lectio

Choose a short passage of Scripture, a Psalm or a saying of Christ.

Read it slowly.

Then draw one Tarot card and ask:

What does this card illuminate within the text that I have not yet seen?

Do not rush to the conventional divinatory meaning. Look at the image. Consider its element, planet, zodiacal attribution, Hebrew letter or position on the Tree of Life if you work within the Golden Dawn system.

Then return to the Scripture.

The aim is not to make the card “explain” the Bible. It is to create dialogue between two symbolic languages and notice what emerges in contemplation.

Finish with prayer and, ideally, one practical way to embody what you have understood.

2. A Three-Card Discernment Reading

When facing a spiritual decision, draw three cards:

1. What is influencing me that I can already see?

2. What is influencing me that remains hidden?

3. What course best aligns me with the Good?

This is very different from asking, “Tell me what is going to happen.”

It leaves room for free will while still allowing the cards to reveal the trajectory already taking shape.

If the third card feels uncomfortable, resist the temptation to keep pulling until God agrees with you. That is not discernment. That’s negotiating with cardboard.

Sit with it.

Pray.

Then act according to conscience.

Reading Tarot as a Christian Mystic

I no longer feel any need to prove that Tarot is “safe” for Christians.

A tool containing Christian, Hermetic, Qabalistic, astrological and philosophical symbolism deserves more serious consideration than that.

The Christian mystic approaches Tarot neither as an infallible oracle nor as 78 pieces of spiritually dangerous cardboard.

It is a symbolic language.

Used contemplatively, it can illuminate Scripture and the movements of the soul. Used divinatively, it can reveal patterns and probable trajectories. Studied through the Western Mystery Tradition, it becomes part of a much larger structure connecting the human microcosm with the Divine.

The real question is therefore not simply:

Am I allowed to read Tarot as a Christian?

It is:

What am I seeking through the Tarot, and what kind of person is the practice helping me become?

Lisa Eddy — Tamar Iris LeFay