The History and Mystery of Tarot: The Cards, Archetypes, and the Unseen Forces of Consciousness

I was recently invited to contemplate the history and mystery of Tarot. I found myself musing about what feels most mysterious and fascinating to me… Human consciousness. And what, other than consciousness, have the greatest mystics of time contemplated?

I am known for demystifying things by pulling them apart, looking closely, and then putting them back together. This demystifying process doesn’t always explain the how, but it can help us make sense of the why. And sometimes, understanding the why offers us, however briefly, an even deeper immersion in the world of mystery and magic.

Consciousness will surely come up again, but for now, I’m going to return to the mystery of Tarot.

One obvious mystery of Tarot is its origin story. Some say ancient Egypt and others say China. Some believe Tarot’s earliest form was in India, and many say it is an early derivative of European mysticism, before the Western world was what it is today.

I don’t know what I believe the truth to be, or whether it matters as much as the earliest proof we have of Tarot’s existence…

What we can confirm is the cross-cultural correspondence between early playing cards for entertainment and the earliest records of what we now know as Tarot, which brings us to 14th-century Italy. The earliest images of these cards were of Italian pageants called “Triumphs”—moral dramas thought to relate to ancient plays.

Ahhhh, yes.

This makes much sense to me… Moral dramas.

I could go on, but unless you are a history buff or a scholar, trying to hash out what came first and where becomes a tedious mystery to follow. So let’s land with the first known 78-card deck. It was divided into what we now call the Major and Minor Arcana and used for entertainment.

It doesn’t escape me that people in back rooms likely asked those cards for glimpses into their future.

Since I don't have written documentation to support my theory, I won’t unpack it here. But I will say that the Church is known to have burned Tarot decks in the late Medieval period, and laws against playing cards existed across Europe at that time. What I find fascinating about these ordinances and codes is that these “playing cards” seem to have been outlawed and appear in public historical documents at the same time.

And when we look closely at Tarot and playing cards themselves, a correspondence begins to emerge…

We can see the similarity between those early playing cards and the Minor Arcana. Each has four suits, with cards Ace through ten and court cards. While modern playing cards have only three court cards per suit, that was not always the case, particularly in 15th-century Europe.

I imagine the playing cards were always what we now understand as Tarot, meaning they were used in similar ways. And while nowadays there is a clear-cut difference between a deck of playing cards to host a game of rummy and a Tarot deck… I’d be lying if I said women in my family weren’t known to divine through the hearts, diamonds, spades, and aces that resemble the Minor Arcana.

When exploring a Tarot deck, we see the 56 Minor Arcana cards speak to the outer realms of life and help color the details with elemental and numerical correspondence.

The 22 Major Arcana point to the inner realm and the lasting effect of our personal experiences: the Hero’s Journey, beginning with the Fool and ending with the World. We can think of them as a series of images representing the journey to self-realization, the psychological equivalent of the mythical and archetypal Hero’s Journey.

And this is where Tarot becomes far more interesting to me than its history.

Archetypes are symbolic material common to all mankind. Images, roles people play, places, initiations, and circumstances—even these can carry archetypal meaning. These symbols evoke humanity's long-shared memory and, in many cases, our own personal experiences.

With that memory come sensations, feelings, intuitions, and a more immediate sense of meaning-making, if we trust ourselves enough to capture it.

By exploring the things these images evoke in us, we learn something about ourselves. Oftentimes, it is something that wants to be seen.

Over the few hundred years we know Tarot has evolved, we have seen the archetypal powers of astrology, Egyptian myth, Christianity, numerology, psychology, and Western mysticism woven into it again and again. More recently, Tarot has entered therapeutic spaces. I myself use it often with my clients in my mentoring and counseling practice.

Tarot, like Jungian psychology, is analytic. It activates our imagination, allowing us to see more than the mind’s cognitive functions allow and bringing into awareness what was otherwise unconscious.

Implicit memories, familial and ancestral legacies, cultural trauma, birth stories, and core beliefs, among other things, can come forward through the forces of our psychological archetypes, presenting as patterns of behavior that are mostly unconscious and below our scope of awareness.

From a Jungian perspective, Tarot represents a spectrum of human archetypal conditions and circumstances. The cards invite us to consider our questions from a different perspective and find power in new understanding about our minds, processes, and experiences.

More than rational or emotional intelligence, Tarot offers us access to archaic wisdom and the library of the collective unconscious…

The story written through the Tarot’s procession outlines the enormity and complexity of the human experience. Its ability to activate our personal power is incredible, but we often miss it when we rely on keywords or let the book tell us what a card means.

Let’s return to the mystery of consciousness now.

When aspects of our unconscious want our attention, they find ways to appear in our awareness. The question is: how long can and will our consciousness hold them before they slip away? The answer is: not very long. But they keep trying…

They will show up in our nighttime dreams and daydreaming, our creative states, our unconscious patterns of behavior, emotions, habits, and bursts of symbolism we encounter throughout our day.

Oftentimes, but not always, by the time these aspects of ourselves come into awareness, they have grown in power or magnitude and may not feel very good. Just like a child or a partner who has vied for our attention and snaps back unforgivingly at our distraction, our unconscious material can show up in inopportune ways.

This, in my opinion, is the beauty of the unseen forces woven into and contributed to Tarot.

They are not in the cards…

They are the forces within ourselves.

Forces we can utilize once we become aware of them.

The mystery is not the idea that we can see into the future as though we are not the co-creators of our lives; some force outside of us is more powerful, compelling us toward a predetermined time and space. But rather…

That we can see into the mystery of ourselves and answer the call of what would like to dialogue with us.

This is the true mystery of Tarot.

And another thing happens again and again: we miscredit that mystery to the cards.

By doing so, we risk overlooking profound insight and synchronicity, reducing Tarot to keywords. Just think: every word in the English language, every circumstance, and every human experience are boiled down to 78 cards.

Seventy-eight cards. Truly consider that… Each one of those cards is as vastly complex as our consciousness, and we humans are so wildly unique that the interpretations really are endless.

We do ourselves a disservice when we let buzzwords lead our imagination and intuition. A card can mean something very different to you than it does to me. And what it means to either of us can change depending on the question, the moment, the circumstances, and what is asking to be seen from within.

That is part of their mystery…

The cards are only images with traditional correspondences, and what we bring to them is human, but what they reveal has been inside us all along.

About the Author: Mary Szenasi

Mary Szenasi is a psycho‑spiritual, neuro‑emotional, and somatic practitioner based in Charleston, Tennessee. With a foundation in allopathic medicine and studies at the C.G. Jung Institute of Chicago, Mary spent 16 years in the medical field before turning toward holistic healing after her own profound journey through trauma, recovery, and self‑examination.

She later founded Sacred Wisdoms, a 508c1a Private Membership Association Ministry offering donation‑based resources, seasonal workshops, and international community connection. Mary’s work blends depth psychology, astrology, mindfulness, herbalism, aromatherapy, crystal therapy, shadow work, dream analysis, shamanic journeying, ritual, and trauma‑informed nervous system support.

Today, she brings her integrative, intuitive approach to Lunar Womb, supporting women in living more examined, embodied, and vibrant lives.