Is Tarot Celtic? The Real Origins of Tarot, the “Celtic Cross” and Runes

Tarot began as a game

The earliest tarot decks were made in fifteenth-century northern Italy, for a trick-taking card game — tarocchi — that is still played in parts of Europe. Nothing about the early decks suggests fortune-telling.

That changed in eighteenth-century France. In 1781 the scholar Antoine Court de Gébelin claimed tarot preserved the wisdom of ancient Egypt (it didn't), and soon afterwards the Parisian occultist known as Etteilla published methods for reading the cards. Divinatory tarot grew from there.

The deck most people know

The Rider–Waite–Smith deck, published in London in 1909, was designed by Arthur Edward Waite and illustrated by the artist Pamela Colman Smith. Her fully illustrated minor cards shaped almost every modern deck.

Why is it called the Celtic Cross?

The ten-card spread known as the Celtic Cross was published by Waite in The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910). Waite introduced it as "an ancient Celtic method of divination", but gave no source, and no earlier record of it has been found. The layout's cross shape echoes the ringed high crosses of Ireland and Britain; the spread itself is a modern one.

Runes are Germanic

The runic alphabets were used by Germanic-speaking peoples; the oldest, the Elder Futhark, dates from roughly the second to the eighth centuries AD. Norse settlers brought the later Younger Futhark to Ireland — they founded a town at Dublin in the ninth century, and rune-inscribed objects have been found there — but runes are not a Celtic script. Ireland's own early script is Ogham.

The Roman writer Tacitus described Germanic peoples casting lots marked with signs, but he does not say they were runes. Most modern rune-reading, with a meaning for each rune and set layouts, dates from the late twentieth century.

So why does Emerald Seer offer them?

Because they are rich symbolic systems that many people find useful for reflection. We present tarot and runes as what they are — neighbouring traditions with their own histories — and keep our Irish inspiration for what is genuinely Irish: Ogham, folklore and the landscape.