Are Tarot Cards Evil? The History, the Death Card, and What the Deck Actually Does
In an era where curiosity about spirituality meets healthy skepticism, the tarot deck often finds itself caught in the crossfire. Is it a window into the soul, or a source of unease at the garden party when Aunt Edna produces her deck from a floral handbag? Let’s unpack this nuanced question with wit, history, and a professional reader’s honesty.
The short version, offered upfront for the nervous: tarot is a mirror, not a magic wand. The cards reflect your inner world back to you; they don’t summon anything, curse anyone, or override a single ounce of your free will. The long version is far more interesting, so stay with me.
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Where Do Tarot Cards Actually Come From?
A parlor game for Italian nobility. Terrifying stuff.
Here’s the unconventional truth that deflates the whole “evil” argument in one paragraph: tarot began in 15th-century Italy as a card game called tarocchi, played by aristocrats between banquets. The oldest surviving cards, the gilded Visconti-Sforza deck, sit today in the Morgan Library & Museum, commissioned by a duke as luxury art. Nobody was divining anything; they were gambling.
The association with divination arrived some three centuries later, in the 1700s, as occult revivalists reimagined the game as a mystical system. Smithsonian Magazine’s history of tarot traces that whole colorful evolution from Renaissance parlor to reading table.
The ‘evil’ label is younger still, a modern invention fueled largely by Hollywood’s fondness for casting psychics as harbingers of doom. No historical evidence supports tarot as malevolent, and the reputation is, quite literally, younger than the lightbulb. National Geographic reaches the same verdict in its look at what tarot cards reveal about the past.
What Are Tarot Cards, Really?
78 illustrated pages of a diary you haven’t written yet.
Think of tarot as a visual diary: 78 beautifully illustrated cards, each representing themes, emotions, and archetypes that mirror the human experience. The deck maps the full arc of a life, from the Fool’s first step to the World’s completion, with every triumph and hard season in between. Artists have reinterpreted those 78 pages for six centuries, a lineage Artsy traces in its survey of tarot’s radical 600-year evolution.
The cards give voice to intuition. Nothing about them is a fortune-telling gimmick; they’re tools for introspection, surfacing the psychological patterns you already carry so you can finally look at them in decent lighting. In my practice, that’s precisely the lane they occupy: reflection and personal growth, while mediumship runs separately through the clairs, no deck required.
Curious what a session actually reveals? Here’s how the cards surface truth in a reading.
Does the Death Card Mean Someone Will Die?
The scariest card in the deck is secretly the most hopeful.
Few cards evoke as much dread as the infamous Death card, and few are as misunderstood. Death doesn’t signal literal death; it marks the closure of a chapter making way for transformation, the ending that clears ground for a beginning. Growth requires letting go, and the deck is blunt enough to say so. Biddy Tarot’s full breakdown of the Death card’s meaning makes a fine companion read.
Notice what the fear-narrative always skips: the same deck holds the Sun, the Star, the Lovers, and the World. A tool containing every human season can hardly be reduced to its winter, and in thousands of readings I’ve watched the Death card bring more relief than any “positive” card, because someone finally had permission to release what was already over.
Can Tarot Cards Be Used for Evil?
A knife made dinner tonight. A knife made the news tonight.
Tarot, like any tool, is defined by how it’s used. A knife in a chef’s hands creates a meal; in the wrong hands, a headline. The cards’ value lies in the intention behind each reading, which is why the honest answer to “can tarot be misused” is yes, by people, never by cardstock.
Misuse looks like fear-peddling: curses discovered on cue, doom predicted unless you pay for removal, readings engineered to create dependency. Ethical use looks like the opposite: clarity over prediction, empowerment over fear, and your free will honored as the final authority in every spread. Tarot is less about predicting the future and more about gaining the clarity to author it, a distinction I hold so firmly that yes-or-no fortune-telling questions are gently declined at my table. If a reader ever makes you feel cursed, frightened, or dependent, the problem was never the deck.
I’ve written more on separating the real practitioners from the predators in is tarot a scam?
What About Religion? Is Tarot a Sin?
The cards were painted for devout Renaissance Christians.
Worth handling gently, because many people asking “are tarot cards evil” are really asking about their faith. Opinions vary widely across religions and denominations, and I won’t pretend otherwise; some traditions discourage divination outright, and those convictions deserve respect rather than argument.
History complicates the easy answer, though. The earliest decks were commissioned by devout Christian nobility, painted with virtues like Temperance, Justice, and Fortitude straight from the moral imagination of the church. The imagery on the Visconti-Sforza cards is Renaissance Christian art, full stop. Many of my own clients hold deep religious faith and treat a reading as reflection rather than divination, and where the intent is self-understanding, most find the practice sits comfortably alongside their beliefs. Where it doesn’t, I’d rather someone honor their conscience than book a session.
So, Are Tarot Cards Evil?
The verdict: guilty of nothing but honesty.
In truth, tarot cards are neither good nor evil. They’re tools that reflect our thoughts and emotions, offering clarity during turbulent times and steadiness when life feels overwhelming. Cardstock and ink carry no agenda; the person handling them does, which is exactly why choosing an ethical reader matters more than fearing the deck.
The next time you encounter a tarot deck, consider it an invitation to engage with your inner self rather than an omen. These practices were never about predicting doom; they’re about understanding yourself on a deeper level, and the reflection waiting in the cards tends to be gentler and more useful than the reputation suggests. Aunt Edna, for the record, was never the menace at the garden party. She may have been the wisest one there.
Ready to see your reflection? Book a reading with me here and discover the clarity waiting within the cards.
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Chris Bennett is an internationally recognized psychic medium and tarot reader, widely considered one of the best in the world. Through The Tarot Medium, he reads exclusively online for clients across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand, with more than 200 published articles and hundreds of five-star reviews to his name. His work blends evidential mediumship, conducted purely through the clairs, with the grounded symbolism of Tarot, always as a supplement to good therapy rather than a replacement for it.
