Where Do Tarot Card Meanings Come From?

Ten Building Blocks of Tarot Card Interpretation

We’ve all heard people talk about the meaning of a tarot card. And most tarot readers can probably spew out a commonly accepted meaning or two for any given card. But where do these meanings come from? Last week I introduced the concept of the building blocks of tarot interpretation, as well as the idea that story arcs hold a reading together. In this post, I’ll take the idea of card meanings back to basics. Let’s consider the following five essential and five contextual building blocks for card interpretation. I invite you to use these as a launching pad to explore where tarot card meanings come from. 

Where Tarot Card Meanings Come From

Any time you use a card meaning, you are expressing a limited perception of the card based on the tarot lineage and card images you prefer. In fact, there are a great number of factors that influence that meaning. How does the historical meaning of the card differ from modern usage? What happens when the deck creator changes the details of the card image? What do you do when there is no scenic image? On the one hand, limited perception is very useful in narrowing down what you see in a tarot spread to arrive at a quick answer. On the other, it can make it challenging to switch from one deck to another and downright frustrating when a deck designer incorporates symbolism that deviates from what’s familiar to you.

In order to truly understand the tarot, it helps to step back and get a wider perspective. Instead of thinking of cards as having denotative meanings, let’s postulate that our understanding of the cards is built on interpretive principles. In fact, we can call these the building blocks of interpretation.

In this post, I’d like to introduce a variety of building blocks for tarot card interpretations. I’ve come up with ten to get us started, but once we start thinking of cards this way, I’m sure you’ll think of many more! 

Once we stop thinking of tarot card meanings and instead focus on which building blocks help us interpret a card in a given context, we’ll see our ability to find the relevance of the card open up immensely. And remember, as we learned last week, the story that evolves through the spread becomes the limiting factor that helps you narrow down your interpretation.

why Tarot Card Meanings are Not universal

But guess what, there’s more! One other thing that makes these so-called card meanings hard to pin down is the simple fact that different people base their meanings on different things. Over the next few weeks, I’ll explore how even the interpretive blocks can be rooted in different philosophies, producing a yet wider array of potential influences on our understanding of the card.

For instance, most people take the number on the card into consideration. But how does that number affect the meaning? It depends on how you derive meaning from numbers! Are you following Pythagorean numerology? The correspondences of the qabalistic Tree of Life? Are you keeping it simple and thinking of the sequence from one to ten, a sequence from beginning to end? But what if you turned that on its head? We can see that a single building block already has the power to create an astonishing array of meanings!

If you’re curious as to what components I’m using to create the building blocks of tarot card meanings, following is my current list.

Five Essential Building Blocks of Interpretation

The five essential building blocks of tarot card meanings are: 

1. Card number
2. Card suit and element
3. Card image, which can include:
   1. Character
   2. Action
   3. Symbols in the forms of props and decorations, typically unique to the card image you’re working with
   4. Environment
   5. Mood and atmosphere, including the emotional feel of the image
4. Visible symbols that are common to the style of deck you’re working with, shown in the card artwork or printed in the card border
5. Hidden symbols, not visual in the card but commonly attributed to the card. These are called correspondences and includes astrology, qabalah, alchemy, and others

Five Contextual Building Blocks of Interpretation

But there are so many more influences that have helped card meanings to evolve! The five contextual building blocks of tarot card interpretation are:

1. Historical influence, such as cartomantic divinatory meanings
2. The reader’s choice of tarot lineage, such as Tarot de Marseille, Crowley-Harris Thoth Tarot, the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot, or another lineage.
3. The natural integrative overlap that happens when a reader has explored more than one deck, tradition, or lineage.
4. Cultural influences that the reader brings to the cards
5.  Intuitive insight and/or communication from guides or spiritual helpers
6. And many, many more influences!

And if any one of these building blocks must be based on a specific choice of philosophy, and if there are multiple philosophies to choose from, then we can see how quickly we arrive at an exponential increase of the number of possible interpretations for a single card. We realize that there cannot be universally accepted tarot card meanings. There can only be interpretations based on the choice of lineage, card image, symbolism, and all the components that make up tarot card meanings.

Learn more About the Building Blocks of Interpretation

If you’d like to learn more about tarot, my new Mythology and the Minor Arcana program is my best offer for how I can help you use more building blocks for tarot interpretation and better understand the philosophies that give meaning to the cards.