The Semiotics of Divination: On Tarot Art’s Evolution

Penny Slinger, White Lady/Mother of Pearl, 1977 (2010/2025). Archival quality inkjet print from original collage, 8 x 13 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Gallery 33.

At its most reduced, the act of looking at art is an exercise in extracting meaning from visual choices that exist on a plane outside of spoken or written language: the gesture of a brush stroke, the form of a sculpture, the blending of multiple colors to create a more nuanced hue. A viewer can observe an artwork in an instant, but true resonance with a piece emerges from deeper engagement with it, when details beyond the superficial form a subtext that allows for greater truth and heightened perception.

The act of divination, then, is not so dissimilar from the act of seeing. Both are exercises in seeking more, using the visual to uncover metaphorical meaning. A close analysis of an aesthetic object mirrors the way divination practices like cartomancy have been used to connect with spirit—both activities are united by a visual decoding process that necessitates some magical thinking and a belief that the unseen is just as present as what is visible to the naked eye.

Tarot cards, illustrated tools for divination, are based on a set of standard images associated with specific messages. This approach to spiritual guidance came to prominence in the fifteenth century after the development of playing cards, which were used as fortune-telling devices before tarot cards were introduced. Traditional tarot imagery is claimed to have originated in central Europe in the 1400s. One of the earliest known decks to use the 22 Major Arcana and 56 Minor Arcana structure (still utilized today) was commissioned by the Sola Busca family from an unknown Venetian artist circa 1490 to be used for casual game playing.¹ According to philosopher and tarot historian Michael Dummett, “it was only in the 1780s, when the practice of fortune-telling with regular playing cards had been well established for at least two decades, that anyone began to use the tarot pack for cartomancy.”²

Over the next few centuries, tarot—as a system, and vessel for visual art— was gradually reimagined. The most popular tarot deck, which has endured for over a century and inspired myriad others, is the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith and published in 1909. Over the years, countless artists have used tarot’s iconic symbols and archetypes to reinterpret longstanding themes associated with cards like Temperance or The High Priestess. While tarot cards represent fixed spiritual concepts, as culture and society have evolved across eras, so too have the cards (and their affiliated artworks). Today, tarot is a method of personal self-discovery and reflection, and even a pathway toward more inclusive commentary on—and energy reading of—society writ large.

In contemporary culture, tarot remains relevant and has even gained popularity in recent years due to widespread disillusionment with society as designed. The fluidity of tarot’s role in culture, from providing leisure to prediction to emotional clarity, is a testament to the cards’ power, which is really the power of a well-defined set of symbols. Particularly during times of both personal and socio-political turmoil, people turn to tarot for answers to core human questions. During the pandemic (and years of cultural change and political upheval flanking it), tarot has re-emerged as an appealing counterpoint to mainstream thinking and a solution to engineered confusion. The allure of tarot art in an era of political uncertainty, technological advancement, and a culture that cycles rapidly through various trends and ideas is not that it promises any certainty, but instead that it invites creative interpretation driven by personal perspective: The symbols offer guidance, but not a set of ordered rules to live by.

Tarot cards have long been a site for artistic exploration, perhaps due to their reliance on a set of rich archetypical images which resonate with many artists’ related desire for universality in their work. Not only are the symbols of tarot aesthetically interesting, they are also useful visual tools for telling stories and drawing conclusions about the human condition.

The symbols depicted on tarot cards in the Major Arcana have remained more or less consistent throughout the ages: The Strength card is usually depicted with a woman holding the jaws of a lion; The World, a dancing figure surrounded by a laurel wreath. The development of a codified visual language for the tarot deck means that the meanings are impossible to separate from the imagery. These esoteric, pre-coded meanings behind tarot illustrations make them seductive ready-mades for artists to engage as graphic templates to reinterpret in their own image and style. In this way, artists who dabble in the realm of arcana art are less interested in creating singular works anew than they are in adding to the chorus of artistic and philosophical voices that have formed the legacy of cartomancy that is now as wide as it is deep.

Twentieth-century Surrealists interpreted tarot symbols to investigate the self as opposed to events. The art and cultural movement that blossomed in 1920s Paris was rooted in an exploration of the unconscious mind, symbols-as-codes, and freedom from logic. Inspired by Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung’s study of dreams and archetypes, Surrealists viewed tarot cards as oracular tools for personal reflection and psychoanalysis.

Isa Beniston, Temperance, “The Gentle Thrills Tarot” (2020). Gouache and colored pencil, 3.5 x 5.75 inches. Image courtesy of the artist.

Salvador Dalí’s “Universal Tarot” deck, published in 1984, borrowed inspiration from other artists, resulting in a collage-like menagerie of references and iconography that reimagined tarot’s traditional motifs. The Magician card, symbolizing manifestation and new beginnings, is traditionally depicted as a figure holding a wand upright, along with a workbench displaying a wand, sword, cup, and pentacle (the suits of the Minor Arcana). In Dalí’s deck, he himself is depicted as The Magician, except flowers are replaced by flames, his arms are crossed as if to embrace himself, and his workbench is instead populated by bread, a glass of liquor, and his characteristic melting clock.

Dalí visualized his wife, Gala, as The Empress—in an art historical twist, Gala’s face is superimposed atop the statue of a goddess depicted in Eugène Delacroix’s painting Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi (1826). And Dalí’s Lovers card is derivative of Jan Gossaert’s painting Neptune and Amphitrite (1516),³ with the addition of a flower and a butterfly, a symbol of transformation Dalí often returned to in his enigmatic environments. Though Dalí’s deck departs from the visual codes associated with standard tarot cards, his reinterpretations are still legible, their original meanings retained. Case in point: Dalí’s Ten of Swords is illustrated with the assassination of Julius Caesar, a perfect visual shorthand for the theme of betrayal the card represents.

Fellow Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington’s 1939 painting Portrait of Max Ernst can be interpreted as a variation on the classic Hermit card. It shows Ernst, her fellow artist and longtime mutual muse, cloaked and carrying a lantern-like object, much like the Hermit is traditionally depicted. In 2017, Susan Aberth, a professor of art history, discovered a small collection of Carrington’s illustrated tarot cards (known as her “Major Arcana Tarot deck,” which she had created in the 1950s)—previously unknown, shrouded like a secret in a private collection. “When you see the cards,” Aberth has said, “you realise they were central to her entire production, including the question of what is the nature of the esoteric. What makes the cards so unique is that they were her own tools for exploring her own personal consciousness.”⁴

Carrington’s interpretation of The Moon, for instance, is deeply rooted in Mesoamerican mythology and Indigenous witchcraft, inspired by her years living in Mexico City. Her version shows two wolves howling at a moon in its fullest phase painted over a silver leaf backdrop. In one approach to reading the card, the artist’s own personal consciousness shows up in this rendering: The howling of the wolves toward the luminary most associated with feminine energy potentially mirrors the noise of Carrington’s own mind, as described in her 1972 memoir Down Below.

Today, artists continue in this tradition of tarot deck reinterpretation. L.A.-based artist Isa Beniston’s colorful “Gentle Thrills Tarot” deck is “a tool to connect both outward to the universe and inward to your intuition with its weird, wonderous, and whimsical messages,”⁵ as evidenced by her line-heavy Star card anchored by a non-traditional, singular all-seeing eye. Ceramic artist Julia Haft-Candell describes her own limited-edition “Infinite Deck” as being made up of her ongoing “glossary of symbols.”⁶ The deck eschews tarot’s traditional characters and motifs (like The Sun, Devil, and Hanged Man) for more tangible totems like The Knot, The Chain, and The Braid, along with images for abstract concepts like The Yearning, to emphasize the generative potential of the absurd.

Mieke Marple, Justice (Angela Davis), “Art World Tarot” (2018). Ink and graphite on paper, 9 x 12 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Gallery 33.

There is perhaps no greater absurdity than reality itself, and artist Mieke Marple’s tarot-inspired works acknowledge how fraught and directionless the world feels today. Marple’s 2018 interpretations of traditional Major Arcana were included in ARCANA (October 8–November 15, 2025), an exhibition at Gallery 33, a boutique jewel box gallery nestled inside The Georgian Hotel in Santa Monica. Curator Jessica Hundley, editor of Taschen’s Library of Esoterica series, brought together 13 contemporary artists who have illustrated, painted, and designed tarot cards or created works of art inspired by the Major and Minor Arcana. Marple’s deck directly acknowledges the political weight of contemporary (and historical) moments in American democracy: The Justice card is a portrait of activist Angela Davis, The Tower card portrays the White House with an upside-down royal crown hanging in the balance above it.

The Tower symbolizes sudden change, a crisis moment, a disruption in the order of things to make way for new growth. While traditional Tower cards depict a tower struck by lightning and figures leaping from the burning building to show the intensity of the destruction, Marple’s rendering takes this meaning a step further. Her deck was published in 2018, in the milieu of the midterm elections during President Donald Trump’s first term. The polarized political moment called for consideration of what the White House (itself a symbol of power) truly represents. Marple’s card seems to infuse this context with her own personal reflection, illustrating her own beliefs (or questions). The structure of tarot offers a way to subtly, under the guise of mysticism and play, address injustices—or, at the very least, call attention to them by showing rather than telling. As a result, many artists have reimagined tarot decks that correct a historic lack of inclusive representation. Michael Eaton and King Khan’s “The Black Power Tarot” deck, also on view in ARCANA, replaces traditional tarot figures with recognizable Black entertainers like Tina Turner and Tupac Shakur.

While some artists work within the restrictions of the tarot deck, other artists extract tarot’s symbols, rich with spiritual codes, from the context of cards and repurpose them into other mediums. Feminist Surrealist artist Penny Slinger (who co-created “The Tantric Dakini Oracle Deck” in 1977) has long been interested in the self, the erotic, and the subconscious. Her artworks on view in ARCANA exemplified this interest through their reliance on symbols, without being tied to tarot-specific iconography. White Lady/Mother of Pearl, 1977 (2010/2025) and Way Through, 1977 (2010/2025) are collages rooted in environments like the cosmos and the sea, and she uses symbols like the nautilus shell and a skeleton key to allude to pathways toward unlocking the divine. And while these objects don’t necessarily mirror ones seen in tarot decks, Slinger’s treatment of them in her compositions—like floating totems designed to conjure inquiry—reflects the way tarot cards use symbols as storytelling devices.

Michael Eaton and King Khan, Tina Turner, “The Black Power Tarot” (2015). Unique print of ink work on archival paper, 12 x 17 inches. Image courtesy of the artists and Gallery 33.

Elena Stonaker’s painting The Portal (2025), also included in ARCANA, shows a calla lily, a flower representing purity and rebirth, braided into a woman’s hair. And She Blooms (2021) is an acrylic portrait of a full-figured woman whose fingertips bear leaves that spiral into flowers blooming in the darkness around her. These works both recall The Empress card, which features a crowned woman in a lush garden as a symbol of fertility, abundance, and the archetype of Mother Earth; they wink at tarot’s themes without outright illustrating them. Stonaker’s paintings demonstrate that even when the viewer may not default to drawing a direct visual reference to tarot, the associated themes and messages are implied thanks to the artist’s application of a robust feminine figure intertwined with nature as a stand-in for similar, yet more codified images.

As evidenced by the range of artistic interpretations on display in ARCANA, this visual genre has evolved to be more diverse with time, but as a symbolic vocabulary, its meanings have not changed in the mainstream much since the fifteenth century. The cards’ glyphs retain their interior definitions even when the style of their surroundings change, or when they are removed from their surroundings altogether.

Contemporary artists’ attraction to exploring the visual codes of an ancient practice lies in the fact that universal truths and archetypical images will always be compelling formulas to investigate in art. The symbols are familiar and the cards are established objects, but are not so rigid that they cannot be adapted for new aesthetic goals. And as with any artistic genre or movement, tarot decks contain gestural clues that reveal details about the era in which they were made—revealing visual trends and styles as much as political or social truths that serve as a timestamp of culture and the artist’s personal consciousness.

A study of tarot cards (and the genre of arcana art they’ve given birth to) is ultimately a lesson in the power of association. Even when we experience symbolically-loaded objects in new styles and different contexts, we are still conditioned to understand what they represent in the etheric realm, their spiritual import and meaning codified in the minds and spirits of whomever chooses to opt into seeing.

Elena Stonaker, She Blooms (2021). Acrylic on canvas, 40 x 60 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Gallery 33.

Evan Nicole Brown is a Los Angeles-born writer, editor, and journalist who covers the arts and culture. Her work has been featured in Architectural Digest, Dwell, Getty Magazine, The Hollywood Reporter, L.A. Times Image, The New York Times, T Magazine, and elsewhere. She is also the founder and host of Group Chat, a conversation series in L.A.

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