Published April 24, 2025by Mathemagic

Tarot cards as an object of art

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Abstract

I'm currently running an artistic experiment, creating tarot cards with an all-female cast, because why not. We'll see if this ever ends up becoming a full 78-card deck.

It depends on how far I get in creating these before the next generation of GenAI steamrolls all progress.

Disclaimer: This is purely an art project. No occult connection implied.

A what and why?

Don't worry, I haven't gone off the deep end. For forecasting, I much recommend PDEs, with numerical methods such as FEM, and data-driven approaches such as classical statistics and AI. These have the important advantage of being based on the scientific method, so unsurprisingly, they actually consistently produce results that are better than random guessing.

Even according to modern tarot divination practitioners, the cards are a psychological tool, nothing else. There is, strictly speaking, no such thing as divination (in the historical sense of the word).

My interest lies in the object itself: a deck of picture cards, historically used for gaming, that predates any CCGs or LCGs by centuries.

While early designs used to have illustrations only on the 22 trump cards - nowadays also known as the major arcana - this changed a century or so ago, with the now classic Rider-Waite-Smith deck.

Ever since the early 1900s, each of the 78 cards has been illustrated, and connected to a predefined abstract concept or scene, yielding rich artistic possibilities drawing from humankind's (though primarily old-world) cultural heritage.

This is as good a mythology as, say, Final Fantasy or Lord of the Rings are.

Gaming-wise, I think the 78-card deck was a technically superior product that, due to historical reasons, got replaced by an inferior one, namely, the modern 52-card standard deck.

While the modern deck is simpler, some games have game-specific special rules such as that the ace stands for either rank 1 or 14, or for example, that the ten of diamonds stands for some other value. In the 78-card deck, there is the option of using unique cards for ranks 1 and 14, if so desired. For any special card from rank zero (!) through rank 21, one could simply use the corresponding trump card, which has that rank written on it. This to me seems better aligned with the design of some card games. Also, having an illustration on every card - leaving aside the question of what the picture represents - is something that adds to any gaming experience, by adding an element of art appreciation. (There's a card that encodes that very concept.)

Finally, the tarot deck is well established in popular culture, so it yields a standardized canvas, open for new artistic interpretations of the 78 predefined themes. Especially if we selectively modernize some parts of it.

This is the space my tarot card illustration project operates in. I'm purely creating an object of art, that is hopefully nice to look at, with a fresh interpretation of a rich mythology the cards draw from.

The style

The issue with classical tarot designs is that, by modern graphic standards, they're not very pretty.

The classic Rider-Waite-Smith deck, however, gets one important thing right: as I already mentioned above, all 78 cards have a full illustration, not just the 22 major arcana. Ever since then, having a full 78 illustrations has, in my opinion, become a requirement for a 78-card deck to be visually interesting. (Cyberpunk 2077, I'm looking at you.)

Production-time-wise, that standard is extremely demanding. But now we have GenAI. Particularly, as of early 2025, recent Illustrious checkpoints seem capable enough, when assisted with the usual curation and detailing.

So a project like this - think of it, a set of 78 original art pieces! - is now actually feasible for one hobby artist, in a reasonable timeframe. Stable Diffusion is a shining (perhaps an illustrious?) example of demonetization making us all richer.

Many modern tarot deck designs exist. But for the same reason everyone is making their own AI art, I'll be creating my own. This is my artistic vision. The only way to fulfill it is to create.

I have previously created one full 78-card deck, in the early 2000s, out of poached anime screenshots. That one was never published. Exactly one copy exists, which I used back in the day to play the tabletop strategy game Zarcana (or Arcana, as it was known back then).

In this new deck I'm creating now, the theming is a deliberately anachronistic mix of fantasy, steampunk, modern day, and cyberpunk. Most of the characters are one-shots, but I'll be including each of my female recurring OCs somewhere in the deck.

Obviously, having a female-only cast necessitates some deviation from classic Rider-Waite-Smith.

To start with, The Lovers are both female.

The original deck has both an Empress and an Emperor. So we need a role similar to Emperor for a second female character in a position of power.

Empress already fills the ancient/medieval fantasy role. Hence, we replace Emperor by its closest modern-day equivalent, the gender-neutral title of President. Whether this refers to the democratically elected leader of a country, or the CEO of a multinational corporation, either one works.

Hierophant, as a word, nowadays only ever appears in the context of the tarot deck, so although it originally means High Priest or Pope (or so Wikipedia tells me), I'm repurposing the tarot term as gender-neutral.

I'm also upgrading it to cyberpunk, because High Priestess already covers the ancient/medieval fantasy role. So, looking up the original (non-tarot) meaning of the word, what is the cyberpunk equivalent of "a person who brings religious congregants into the presence of that which is deemed holy"?

Obviously, a sysadmin.

Because there are no male characters in this deck, once I get to the suit cards, I'm planning to drop the title of King, in favor of Queen, which becomes rank 14. The gap this opens at rank 13 is filled by the new title of Princess. So the court ranks will be Page, Knight, Princess, Queen, in that order. Because as TVTropes once put it, everything is better with princesses.

All 72 remaining cards can be interpreted as gender-neutral (unless I'm forgetting something, in which case there will be surprises along the way).

Resources

I have used the online tarot course by Joan Bunning as a source for the standard meanings, to pick out what abstract concepts to prompt the AI to illustrate. This is incidentally the same source I used when creating my first deck back in the early 2000s.

Each card has several meanings, so there's an element of curation here. For most cards I've picked, arbitrarily, a meaning that best fits the artistic purpose.

Some other cards deliberately nod to the iconic Rider-Waite-Smith illustrations, or conceptually play on them.