Tarot & Occult

Look at a tarot card the way a designer would: a neat border, a Roman numeral at the top, a name in capitals at the bottom and a little stage full of symbols in between. That is why a tarot card poster works so well on a wall. We treat these images as what they are historically, a piece of graphic heritage, not a way to predict anything.

Where tarot really comes from

Playing cards reached Europe in the late fourteenth century, most likely from the Islamic world; Mamluk decks from Egypt already used suits such as cups, swords and coins. Tarot appeared in fifteenth-century northern Italy as a courtly card game. The hand-painted Visconti-Sforza decks, made for Milan's ruling families and glowing with gold leaf, are its most famous survivors, and tarot is still played as an ordinary card game in France.

The mystical reputation came centuries later. In 1781 the French scholar Antoine Court de Gébelin claimed, with no evidence at all, that the cards preserved ancient Egyptian wisdom, and the myth stuck. In 1909 Pamela Colman Smith illustrated the deck devised by Arthur Edward Waite, setting the storybook style most modern designs still borrow.

Why a tarot card poster suits a wall

• Symbols: radiant suns, crescent moons, eight-pointed stars, towers, wheels, lions and scrolling banners.
• Colour: the Tarot de Marseille uses flat reds, blues and yellows outlined in black, like a woodcut; contemporary takes favour black and gold, midnight blue or sand.
• Structure: the frame-and-title layout gives every card a ready-made poster composition.

How to hang them

Three cards side by side, say the Sun, the Moon and the Star, make an instant triptych over a bed or sofa. A single black-and-gold card is enough for a dressing table or reading nook. Surround the prints with rattan, linen and plants for a boho mood, or pair them with Ravens & Skulls to tip the room into full gothic.

Browse the Gothic category and deal yourself a wall.