“Are Tarot cards evil?”
That’s one of the most common Google searches on the Tarot and I assume it comes from people who were raised as, “good Christian folks.” After all, for centuries Christianity has railed against the Tarot. Preachers and pastors are still screaming that the cards are the gateways to the Devil and dangerous tools of shadowy occultists.
One of the weird things about that is the Tarot actually contains a strong Christian thread that was intentionally stitched into the deck as camouflage. It’s chock full of angels and not so subtle allusions to the Bible. Without them, the Tarot would never have survived the Inquisition.
So let’s take a little closer look at how the Church’s iron grip shaped the early Tarot, what Christian symbols were embedded to disguise it, and what the cards may have actually looked like before that clever cover was sewn in.
TAROT WAS BORN IN DANGEROUS TIMES
The first historical references to the Tarot are in Europe in the 1450s. Right in the middle of one of history’s most brutal religious crackdowns: the Inquisition. It’s hard for us to imagine it today, but ANY sort of fortune telling or divination could mean an automatic death sentence.
The Bible was explicit in its warnings. Leviticus 19:31 commands: “Do not turn to mediums or necromancers; do not seek them out, and so make yourselves unclean by them.”
We may casually lay out a reading today, curious as to what the cards can tell us. To the Church, though, there was nothing casual about it. It was witchcraft. And witchcraft meant torture, trials, and being put to a horrible death.
The death toll from the Inquisition is still debated. Some historians estimate the death toll from the Catholic Church’s witch hunts as, “low” as 30,000 victims. Others, like Leonard Shlain in, “The Alphabet Versus the Goddess” place the number as high as 10 million.
Whatever the numbers actually were, the climate of terror was real, daily, and all pervasive. So how did the Tarot survive?
HOW THE TAROT HID IN PLAIN SIGHT
The disguise of what the Tarot actually is was quite brilliant.
First, the makers announced that it was a card game, plain and simple. Nothing to see here. It’s just poker, only with archetypes.
And then they wove Christian symbols directly into the deck.
Take The World card. It’s four corner symbols – lion, ox, eagle, and angel – aren’t just random. They’re the traditional symbols of the four evangelists: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
Even more striking are the Four Cardinal Virtues, lifted straight out of Catholic theology:
Justice
Temperance
Fortitude (Strength)
Prudence
By embedding these virtues, the creators of the deck could claim that the Tarot promoted Christian morality rather than undermining it. It was a survival tactic: “See – these aren’t pagan symbols. Ripping up a Tarot deck is just like ripping up a Bible.”
Prudence eventually vanished from the deck (see my previous post, “Dear Prudence – The Mysterious Case of the Missing Tarot Card”), but the other three virtues remain mainstays of the Major Arcana to this day.
WHAT DID THE ORIGINAL DECK LOOK LIKE?
So what happens if we get rid of the Christian overlays, the cards that don’t really belong in the deck?
What remains are the raw archetypes. Timeless figures like The Fool, The Magician, The Lovers, The Devil, The Wheel of Fortune and Death. Those cards pulse with universal energies that transcend any single religion.
A question that arises naturally out of this is: if we’re getting rid of the Virtue cards, why not get rid of The Hierophant, too? After all, it was originally known as, “The Pope,” and what could be more Catholic than that? The answer is The Hierophant is nothing but The High Priest in disguise and is the partner card to The High Priestess in the same way that the Emperor is linked to The Empress.
Beneath the Christian veneer lies a much older symbolic system, one that might have looked very different if it hadn’t been forced to wear this mask.
WHERE DID THE TAROT REALLY COME FROM?
Contrary to many modern assumptions, the Tarot did NOT evolve out of Christianity.
Instead, it seems to have appeared fully formed in the mid-1400s, as though it had been carried forward from some older source. What that source was – Ancient Egypt or an even older, lost esoteric tradition – remains a mystery.
What’s clear is this: the Christian layer was camouflage, not origin. It was a survival strategy, not a birthing.
SEEING THE REAL DECK
The, ‘Christian Themes’ in the Tarot were never a part of the original deck. They were just part of a clever disguise to get past the censors of the Inquisition.
When we peel back that layer, what we find is a universal language of archetypes. The Fool, Magician, Death, The Star – these are symbols that speak to something much deeper than mere religious dogma.
And so the question remains: when we lay the cards out today, are we seeing the archetypes themselves? Or the clever veil that once kept them alive?
Just the Tarot 