The Modern Tarot Revolution: From Counterculture to Global Phenomenon

Tarot After the Golden Dawn

The publication of the Rider-Waite tarot in 1909 and the Thoth Tarot in 1944 established the two poles of the modern tarot tradition, but the explosion of tarot into a global cultural phenomenon did not happen immediately. For the first half of the 20th century, tarot remained a relatively specialized interest — the province of occultists, esotericists, and serious students of the Western mystical tradition. The mass popularization of tarot — its transformation from an esoteric specialty into a mainstream cultural practice — began in the 1960s and 1970s, driven by the counterculture movement and the broader spiritual awakening of that era, and has continued to accelerate ever since.

The story of modern tarot is the story of a remarkable democratization — of a practice that was once the exclusive province of initiates and specialists becoming accessible to anyone with curiosity and a willingness to engage with the cards. It is also the story of an extraordinary creative explosion — of the tarot image tradition being reimagined in hundreds of different artistic styles, cultural contexts, and philosophical frameworks, producing a diversity of tarot decks that would have been unimaginable to the card-makers of the Marseille tradition or the occultists of the Golden Dawn.

The 1960s and 1970s: The Counterculture Discovers Tarot

The counterculture movement of the 1960s and 1970s was characterized by a broad rejection of mainstream Western materialism and a corresponding openness to alternative spiritual traditions — Eastern religions, indigenous spiritualities, astrology, the I Ching, and the Western esoteric tradition including tarot. The publication of Stuart Kaplan’s Tarot Cards for Fun and Fortune Telling in 1970 and the founding of U.S. Games Systems marked the beginning of the mass market for tarot in America.

The most important tarot publication of this period was Eden Gray’s The Tarot Revealed (1960) and A Complete Guide to the Tarot (1970) — the first accessible, non-occultist introductions to tarot reading that made the cards available to a general audience without requiring knowledge of Kabbalah, astrology, or the Golden Dawn system. Gray’s books presented tarot as a tool for self-understanding and personal guidance rather than as an occult system requiring initiation, and they established the template for the popular tarot books that would follow.

The counterculture also produced the first significant wave of new tarot deck designs — decks that departed from the Rider-Waite visual vocabulary and reflected the aesthetic sensibilities of the 1960s and 1970s. The Aquarian Tarot (1970), designed by David Palladini, replaced the medieval imagery of the Rider-Waite with a sleek, Art Deco-influenced style that appealed to the aesthetic sensibilities of the counterculture. The Thoth Tarot, which had been published in a limited edition in 1944, was republished in a widely available edition in 1969 and found a new audience among the counterculture’s more serious students of the occult.

The 1980s and 1990s: The New Age and the Tarot Boom

The New Age movement of the 1980s and 1990s brought tarot to an even wider audience, integrating it into a broader spiritual marketplace that included crystals, aromatherapy, channeling, and a wide range of alternative healing practices. The New Age tarot was characterized by a shift in emphasis from the occult and the esoteric to the psychological and the therapeutic — from tarot as a system of magical knowledge to tarot as a tool for self-understanding, personal growth, and spiritual development.

The most important tarot publication of this period was Rachel Pollack’s Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom (1980, 1983) — a two-volume study of the Rider-Waite tarot that combined deep knowledge of the traditional symbolism with a psychological and feminist perspective. Pollack’s work established a new standard for tarot scholarship and helped to legitimize tarot as a serious subject of intellectual inquiry. Her approach — which treated the tarot as a map of the human psyche rather than as a system of occult knowledge — was enormously influential on the subsequent development of tarot reading and tarot scholarship. For a contemporary exploration of this same psychological approach, Jung and the Archetype: Tarot, Astrology, and the Bridge of the Unconscious maps the 78 cards onto Jungian archetypes with the same rigor and depth that Pollack brought to her work.

The 1980s and 1990s also saw an explosion of new tarot deck designs, as the growing market for tarot attracted artists and designers from a wide range of backgrounds. The Motherpeace Tarot (1981), designed by Vicki Noble and Karen Vogel, was the first explicitly feminist tarot deck. The Thoth-influenced Haindl Tarot (1988) integrated imagery from multiple world cultures. The Robin Wood Tarot (1991) offered a Wiccan-influenced alternative to the Rider-Waite tradition. Each of these decks reflected the spiritual and cultural concerns of its time and expanded the visual vocabulary of the tarot tradition.

The Internet Age: Tarot Goes Global

The internet transformed the tarot world in ways that are still unfolding. The emergence of online tarot communities in the 1990s and 2000s — forums, websites, and eventually social media platforms — created new forms of tarot community that transcended geographical boundaries and connected tarot readers from around the world. The internet made tarot knowledge accessible to anyone with a connection, democratizing access to tarot education in a way that had never been possible before.

The internet also transformed the market for tarot decks. The emergence of crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter in the 2010s made it possible for independent artists to fund the production of their own tarot decks without the support of a traditional publisher, leading to an explosion of independently produced decks that reflected an extraordinary diversity of artistic styles, cultural perspectives, and philosophical frameworks.

The Instagram and TikTok Era: Tarot Goes Viral

The rise of social media — particularly Instagram and TikTok — has brought tarot to an audience that would have been unimaginable even a decade ago. The visual nature of tarot makes it particularly well-suited to image-based social media platforms, and the tarot community on Instagram has grown to millions of followers, with tarot readers sharing daily card pulls, deck reviews, and reading tutorials to audiences around the world. TikTok’s “WitchTok” community has introduced tarot to a generation of young people who might never have encountered it through traditional channels.

The social media era has also produced new forms of tarot practice — the daily card pull, the collective reading, the tarot challenge — that have become central to the contemporary tarot community. The daily card pull — the practice of drawing a single card each morning and reflecting on its meaning for the day — has become one of the most widespread tarot practices in the world. Pair it with your morning coffee using our Coffee & Tarot Mug to anchor the ritual to something you already do, and use the Tarot Journaling Prompts: 100 Questions for Self-Discovery to go deeper with whatever card you draw.

The Diversity Revolution: Tarot for Everyone

One of the most significant developments in the contemporary tarot world is the diversity revolution — the growing recognition that the traditional tarot imagery, with its predominantly white, European, and heteronormative figures, does not represent the full diversity of the people who use tarot, and the corresponding explosion of decks that offer more inclusive and diverse imagery.

Decks featuring people of color as the primary figures, decks that draw on non-European cultural traditions, decks that feature body-positive imagery, decks that represent disability and neurodiversity — all of these developments reflect a growing recognition that tarot is a tool for everyone, and that the imagery of the cards should reflect the full diversity of human experience. This diversity revolution is one of the most exciting developments in the contemporary tarot world, and it is producing some of the most visually and symbolically rich tarot decks in the history of the tradition.

Tarot in the 21st Century: A Living Tradition

Tarot in the 21st century is a living tradition — one that is constantly being renewed and reinterpreted, constantly finding new ways to speak to the spiritual needs of the people who encounter it. The 600-year journey from the hand-painted luxury decks of the Italian Renaissance to the crowdfunded independent decks of the Instagram era is a journey of extraordinary creative vitality — a testament to the power of the tarot images to sustain and inspire the symbolic imagination of successive generations.

The contemporary tarot world is characterized by a remarkable pluralism — a diversity of approaches, traditions, and practices that reflects the diversity of the people who use tarot. There are traditional occultists who work with the Golden Dawn system; Jungian psychologists who use tarot as a tool for depth psychological work; Wiccan practitioners who integrate tarot into their ritual practice; secular humanists who use tarot as a tool for reflection and decision-making; artists who create tarot decks as works of art; scholars who study tarot as a cultural and historical phenomenon. All of these approaches are valid; all of them are part of the living tradition of tarot.

The tarot has survived for six centuries because it speaks to something deep in the human psyche — the need to find meaning in the events of life, to understand the patterns that shape our experience, to connect the individual story to the larger story of the cosmos. Whatever form it takes, the tarot continues to serve this fundamental human need.

If you want to carry the full symbolism of all 78 cards of this living tradition with you, our 78 Tarot Cards Scarf weaves every card’s imagery into a wearable piece of art — a beautiful way to stay connected to six centuries of tarot history throughout your day. And if you want to build a structured daily practice in this tradition, The 52-Week Tarot Journey gives you a full year of weekly spreads and daily pulls — a modern practice rooted in the same tradition that has been evolving since the Renaissance. The Third Eye: Intuition Activation & Trust Audio develops the intuitive channel that all of this history has been in service of — the direct knowing that the cards, across all their centuries and all their forms, have always been trying to help you access.