Lunarcana

· FIGURES ·

Figures in the History of Tarot

Twelve people who pushed a card game into the practice it is today.

This page is about people, not events. Tarot's arc from an 18th-century European card game to a global reading practice was not automatic — it was pushed forward by a sequence of specific individuals making specific decisions. Court de Gébelin "recognised" Egyptian faces in a parlour tarot deck at a dinner party in 1781 and called it a lost Book of Thoth. Pamela Colman Smith, in 1909, redrew the 40 minor arcana from abstract pip symbols into readable scenes — after which any beginner could learn from a picture. Rachel Pollack, in 1980, docked narrative psychology onto the deck — after which tarot was no longer just fortune-telling but self-work.

Below, twelve short biographies in chronological order, each 200–300 words. No rankings, no fan ratings. Where the record is contested — Crowley's private life, Pamela's erasure, de Gébelin's Egyptian theory — we say so, without moral judgment. Every birth and death year, every work's publication year, has been checked online. Sources are listed in the comment at the top of this file.

Twelve Key Figures

Chronological order, from an 18th-century Enlightenment scholar to a Chilean-French filmmaker still alive in 2026. Click each card to read the bio and list of works.

Lineage

Laid out as a lineage diagram, the twelve arrange themselves clearly. Court de Gébelin → Etteilla take tarot from game to divination in the late 18th century. Lévi → Mathers weld it to the Kabbalah through the 19th century. Waite + Pamela Colman Smith visualise and popularise the system via the 1909 Rider deck. Crowley + Frieda Harris push systematisation to its limit in the Thoth (painted 1938–1943). Campbell — who did not write about tarot — supplies the narrative scaffolding through the monomyth. Greer + Pollack bring Jungian and narrative psychology in during the 1980s, completing the modern shift from occult practice to self-work. Jodorowsky, from the 1990s, circles back to restore the Marseille lineage that had been neglected in the meantime.

The line is not singular. Crowley and Waite disagreed in real ways; Pollack was publicly critical of some of Crowley's positions. But from the modern reader's vantage, the work of these twelve, taken together, is the knowledge stack beneath whatever deck you can now buy at the bookstore.

The Ones Undervalued

Two of the worst historical erasures in tarot both point to women artists. Pamela Colman Smith illustrated all 78 cards of the most influential tarot deck of the 20th century; for decades her name appeared on those cards only as "P.C.S." in the corner. The deck was branded "Rider Tarot" or "Rider-Waite Tarot" — Rider being the publisher. Only with work like Mary Greer's Women of the Golden Dawn (1995) and scholarship in the 2000s did the name "Rider-Waite-Smith" (or simply "Waite-Smith") become standard. Pamela did not live to see the correction; she died in poverty in 1951 and was likely buried in an unmarked grave.

Lady Frieda Harris is the parallel case. The artistic invention of the Thoth deck is overwhelmingly hers — her projective-geometry training, her hand, her negotiations with Crowley over draft after draft. For fifty years the phrase "Crowley's tarot" did all the talking in teaching materials. Her 1942 Berkeley Galleries exhibition was her moment of public standing; serious independent evaluation of her as an artist begins only in the 2000s. The two cases together make a structural point: tarot's knowledge production, like any other field's, has its own male-centred narrative that keeps needing correction.