Do You Think That Tarot is a Part of the "New-Age Movement"?

January 22

Does tarot have anything to do with anything that is "new age"?

I was unsure of what the term "new age" actually meant, so I Googled it and this is what I came up with...

New Age. noun. 1. : a way of thinking arising in late 20th century Western society and adapted from a variety of ancient and modern cultures that emphasizes beliefs (as reincarnation) outside the mainstream and that advances alternative approaches to spirituality, right living, and health.

_______________________________________

What is your thinking just how the tarot fits into all things that are new age?

What do you think the general public's perception of the tarot is?

Thoughts, comments and ideas...

Rick-

January 22

New age co-opted Tarot, but Tarot was around long before new age, obviously. It required study of classic cartomancy and/or hermetic Qabala, etc. New age is essentially a marketing gimmick. Dribble at Gwyneth Paltrow/Doreen Virtue levels. "Anybody can do this just look at the pictures BOOKS ARE BAD!!!! HOW ARE THE CRYSTALS GOING TO TEACH YOU IF YOU HAVE YOUR NOSE IN A BOOK???" 🙄

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/New_Age

Edited January 22 by katrinka

January 22

I'm going to piggy back on @katrinka's excellent response (totally agree) and say that the 'new age' movement is never been clearly defined and seem to embrace and gatekeep any shiny new 'spiritual' practices. It's not that it's wrong to be 'new age' it's just that it doesn't take a whole lot to lump something into the 'new age' category. So I would say, tarot may be a part of the 'new age' movement, but that isn't to say tarot is 'new age'.

Thinking more about it, when I was a kid in the 70s and 80s, 'New Age' people were the hippies covered in tie dye blaring Peruvian pipe music, drenching everything in patchouli oil, wafting incense over their sprouted grain whatevers and reading their tarot cards. What does 'New Age' even look like any more?

January 22

In my mind, "New Age" is a term some slightly batty people coined so they could discover all sorts of things that had been around for ages and lay claim to them as something new and wonderful, Which was harmless enough when it all started, but now that they are trying to mould them into whatever floats their boats it's all getting particularly silly. It seems to make them feel important to devise "tarot" decks that only give positive readings, and which are all "Akashic" or whatever (I have nothing against Akashic, but it ISN'T tarot !) and the like.

59 minutes ago, Mystic_Owl said:

Thinking more about it, when I was a kid in the 70s and 80s, 'New Age' people were the hippies covered in tie dye blaring Peruvian pipe music, drenching everything in patchouli oil, wafting incense over their sprouted grain whatevers and reading their tarot cards. What does 'New Age' even look like any more?

This rings big bells with me. I wanted to be a New Ager in the 60s and 70s. I am heavily into tarot - and I absolutely don't want to be any kind of New Ager any more. They don't feel like people I really want to know.

January 22

ETA just read the definition given by the OP. That Ain't Tarot.

January 22

Of course, yea. Same thing, at the end of the day. At least in my humble view, that is.

January 22

3 hours ago, RickInBakersfield said:

Does tarot have anything to do with anything that is "new age"?

Tarot is not a product of the new age lifestyle but it is used in the lifestyle because it is timeless. Tarot will always have a place among seekers of knowledge.

3 hours ago, RickInBakersfield said:

What is your thinking just how the tarot fits into all things that are new age?

Tarot is something tangible. It is physical and can be exploited like other new age marketing products.

3 hours ago, RickInBakersfield said:

What do you think the general public's perception of the tarot is?

That's hard to say. I think more and more people have a good perception of tarot nowadays, better than 30 years ago. There are still skeptics, there always will be but because of the internet and availability of the tarot globally, tarot has a decent rep. It's just the charlatans that abuse tarot to gain money by unscrupulous means that have always given tarot a bad name since the beginning of its origin as a divination aid.

January 22

It depends on how you interpret new-age.

My thinking of new age is events like "the dawning of the age of Aquarius." New Age is applied to many things, but sometimes people use words or phrases and give them meanings of their own. Sort of like what you might find in the recent "urban dictionary." A word or terminology sticks in a cultural sense, so it has its original meaning that was its inception, and then another one that's applied socially and in this case, takes on a broad spectrum.

New age may mean transformational events that occur astrologically/astronomically, like the age of Aquarius, and refer to the wider human social system, or each one of us individually entering a new age transformation when we discover the spiritual path. Then there's the commercial sense "new-age" which may attract certain persons, who may wish to buy or attend events, or give themselves a status of being new-age, putting themselves or things into categories.

So is Tarot new age? Well it's been around a long time. For someone who picks up their first deck it may be a new age for them Individually.

January 22

Hi,

personally I think "New Age" coins something sugary and all-to simple. It misses that every achievement requires effort. It is merely superficial.

January 23

Think of tarot and New Age as a Venn diagram. Some New Agers are – superficially or more profoundly so – interested in tarot, but tarot is older than the New Age movement/milieu and there are many New Agers who aren't interested in tarot. Nor is the New Age milieu homogenous or standardised in any way. Most tarot users aren't New Agers.

The tarot deck was invented in the northern part of the Italian peninsula at some point between 1420 and 1550, more likely in the middle of that time period. You'll find the details in other threads, because the details are really complicated.

In the 1950s and/or early 1960s there existed a number of separate milieus not in touch with each other to begin with:

New Thought
Spiritualism
Splinter organisations from the Theosophical Society (Jiddu Krishnamurti, Lucis Trust, the I AM activity, Findhorn, Summit Lighthouse)
Astrological associations
Several types of alternative medicine (Bach flower remedies, homeopathy, acupuncture, cell salts, radionics, among others)
2-3 types of western Zen Buddhism (beatniks, Teitaro Suzuki and Alan Watts)
Curiosity about Vedanta philosophy, a sub-school of Hinduism (Alan Watts, for instance)
Curiosity about Daoism (Alan Watts again)
Humanistic psychology (Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, Rollo May), out of which Esalen Institute (1962) and the Human Potential Movement emerged
Psychological studies about psychedelic drugs (Humphrey Osmond, Timothy Leary, Stanislav Grof, Richard Alpert, - among the test subjects: Aldous Huxley, Allen Ginsberg, Anaïs Nin, Huston Smith and Robert Anton Wilson)
Groups and individuals claiming to have been contacted by space aliens in UFOs (Aetherius Society is just an example among many)

By the mid-1960s emerged a youth subculture that got the name 'hippie' in 1967, predominantly in the US and West Germany, but it did spread elsewhere. During the second half of the 1960s all the milieus mentioned above began to interact and influence each other, but it wasn't called 'New Age' at the time. In 1968, British pop band the Beatles visited India and studied Transcendental Meditation, one of the new religious movements. By the early 1970s, the term 'New Age' was used to describe the milieu.

Marilyn Ferguson wrote a utopian book with the title The Aquarian Conspiracy (1982), but her more intellectual and utopian approach to the New Age phenomenon didn't last. During the 1980s, the movement became commercialised, and from the 1990s there began a sort of mild rivalry with the Neopagan movement. During the 2010s (or perhaps already in the 00s), the term 'New Age' began to be used derogatorily, but I guess, that there still are some persons out there who self-designate as 'New Agers'. We live on a big planet. The financial crisis in 2008 affected households' and individuals' purchasing power, and this affected the ability to attend New Age fairs, buy books and paraphernalia, or attend workshops.

The New Age milieu doesn't have any dogma, and all beliefs are optional, but some beliefs and some practices are more or less widespread. I think it's safe to say, that many-but-not-all New Agers believe in reincarnation and 'positive thinking'.

Edited January 23 by Scandinavianhermit
financial crisis 2008

January 23

I cringe slightly whenever I go in a bookshop and see tarot and all divination in the New Age section or in a category for that in a online store. It's just the wrong category for divination. I bet the person who made that decision has no experience with tarot, oracles or any divination forms. It's hard to categorise in a mainstream shop but esoteric is better! I think people outside of our world, often see it as New Age, it's a catch all group but then we don't. I think we can say there are some decks with those themes but they not every deck is!

I think it's dying out as a term as well, it was a trend from the early 70's. Anyone younger than about 50, has no idea how it applies. It's subtly now changing from "New Age" to "Spiritual".

January 23

2 hours ago, DanielJUK said:

I cringe slightly whenever I go in a bookshop and see tarot and all divination in the New Age section or in a category for that in a online store.

It's embarrassing to be seen there in a brick and mortar store. Might as well wear a sign that says "I am extremely gullible." Good thing online shopping exists.

In the old days, the section was called "occult." That's not 100% accurate either, but at least it scared the pigeons off.

3 hours ago, DanielJUK said:

It's subtly now changing from "New Age" to "Spiritual".

But reading cards isn't spiritual, either, any more than anything else is. People just want to know about money and romance as a rule. I suppose you can practice mindfulness with it, but you can do that with anything: sweeping the floor, cutting your toenails.
I do like "occult" for the scare factor, but that's also incorrect. There's nothing secret about it.
And "esoteric" implies that it's only intended for a small group, when they're actually trying to sell to everyone in sight.
I'm not sure what to call it. Maybe an older, non-techy form of predictive analytics?

January 23

58 minutes ago, katrinka said:

I'm not sure what to call it. Maybe an older, non-techy form of predictive analytics?

'Divination' might make a good subsection to an occult area of a book shop imo, and could cover a lot of disciplines. Definitely better than lumping it in with the new-age stuff. Though 'non-technological predictive analytics' has a certain ring to it. 😁

My negative experience with new-age was toxic positivity, and I've seen that bleed into tarot everywhere. It's put me off modern decks for the longest time. Particularly with the suit of Swords. I'm not sure why everything needs to be positive and light, or focused inwards.

Edited January 23 by akiva
Spelling

January 23

In my humble view, New Age can mean different movements woven together in one.
Starting with Bailey channeling Djwal that was very specific. They expected the coming of the Rider on the White Horse, one of the 4 horseman of the apocalypse(more on that in Revelations, although not very clear there yet). That, in my humble view is an ongoing one that we are still anchoring and may keep working on next 3 more resets, long to go into what that is, here, though.

That is Theosophy, of course, by definition, however as later on thanks to Besant and LeadBeater, culminating in Krishnamurti as the end of the Theosophy movement back then(in my view, of course, others will likely disagree), so then Djwal through Bailey becomes the event by itself, as a isolated transmission, more then anything else.

Hippie movements after that was very focused on "age of aquerius", in my humble view, although too chaotic to point to specific thing. As Beatles members seem to be advertising TM for example, and that had its own vision... Technically Age of Aquerius starts in... a 100 years or so from now?A little more I think. Yet I'm open to view all happening now as preparation for whatever people will go through then.

The other point I personally find very valid was the Mayan Calendar and Jose Arguelles movement. That included the idea that the Mayan Calendar shows a very specific thing and only that(at its larger time span of Bahtuns I think was called, 13 of them).
So what was that... Well, its explained in great detail in "The Mayan Factor", its the "emergence" of the technosphere. The idea that technology was in latent form in a field around the Earth and humanity was the tool that takes from it and manifest it, so allowing it to "ground" in the world around us. From picks and mining, to PCs and integral circuits, that process was supposed to have begone long time ago and culminates 1989 with the Harmonic Convergence, when the Technosphere will be at the last few years until it fully manifest. That period "out of time" was ending soon after.

That ended 2013, with Hunbatz Men ceremonies and the crystal skulls, and few years after, the good old concepts of Deep Learning were reviewed again and today we have AIs carrying all that knowledge and connection, as manifested technosphere.

Considering that, the Jose Arguelles movement, that was what I personally connect most strongly with "New Age" for this period concluded 2013 and now we are on the aftermath of that.

That, sadly is also the only part of all this that is simple enough to trace and explain in this setting. As anything else will need one to understand what Shamballa is, as that is, and always have been, the connection of all these and to Tarot. And that is not easy to explain neither it will be short and sweet. Combining with the fact, I doubt someone would care enough to read it, seems a good place to stop here, anyway. : )

Edited January 23 by Deian

January 23

Seeing it as a section in a bookstore (when there is never any GOOD STUFF in that section - I find II need to go to the staff and ask where the tarot stuff is...) makes me feel almost as ill as that ghastly section several stores have now labelled "Painful Lives".... (which for me equals "let's just NOT....")

January 23

The vast majority of modern decks are anathema to me, Akiva. All solipsism and bad art.

True, "divination" is certainly better than "new age." But it's still problematic for me. From wikipedia:

"...through alleged contact or interaction with supernatural agencies such as spirits, gods, god-like-beings or the "will of the universe".^"

I'd much prefer "fortunetelling" since it perfectly describes what we do, telling the client if they will have favorable or unfavorable fortune with their issue, and it doesn't imply "supernatural agencies such as spirits, gods, god-like-beings or "the will of the universe." <groans> With all due respect to Quimbanda, Vodun, etc. I learned to read cards from books. Not as part of a religious practice. I don't invoke anything, I just shuffle and cut. YMMV, of course.

Yes, there's the toxic positivity. But the biggest, ugliest elephant in the room is the privilege and entitlement. It's Prosperity Gospel for people who have left Christianity but still want to consider themselves "The Elect" and look down on the less fortunate. Remember The Secret? All you have to do is see yourself getting what you want and stay (toxically!) positive! They don't even notice that it doesn't work - these are the people with money to throw away on yoni eggs. And people who are dealing with grinding poverty, chronic pain, etc.? Well they must have done something to deserve it! Look at them, they have such grumpy attitudes!

And there was this AIDS profiteer. An utterly revolting, morally reprehensible woman who played a big role in popularizing new age..
https://slate.com/human-interest/2017/09/new-age-guru-louise-hays-pseudoscience-harmed-the-aids-generation-of-gay-men.html

Edited January 23 by katrinka

January 23

On 1/22/2025 at 7:49 AM, Mystic_Owl said:

... the 'new age' movement is never been clearly defined and seem to embrace and gatekeep any shiny new 'spiritual' practices. ... when I was a kid in the 70s and 80s, 'New Age' people were the hippies covered in tie dye blaring Peruvian pipe music, drenching everything in patchouli oil, wafting incense over their sprouted grain whatevers and reading their tarot cards. What does 'New Age' even look like any more?

As @Scandinavianhermit and @Deian mention, we can trace some roots of *New Age* to the Occult Revival of the 1890s - 1920s. The Theosophical Society was one of the first organizations to introduce East Asian [India, Tibet] spiritual practices and beliefs to Westerners of Europe, USA, Australia, etc. So-called modern New Age philosophy often mixes East and West. This modern blending [co-opting?] of East Asian philosophies with Western philosophies started with the Occult Revival and got more mainstream in the 1960s.

A second sort of *occult revival* happened in the 60s-70s as you mention. In subtle ways this was influenced by Crowley [co-author of the Thoth deck].

We might say that although New Age and Tarot are completely separate and distinct--there is a relationship.

The popular RWS deck was created during the Occult Revival [1910]. And although Crowley is disparaged by many, his work and his deck influenced the 1960s-70s "occult revival" at least in subtle ways.

23 hours ago, Saturn Celeste said:

Tarot is not a product of the new age lifestyle but it is used in the lifestyle because it is timeless. Tarot will always have a place among seekers of knowledge.

Yes. The original Tarocchi of the 1400s-1500s was the deck for an obscure Italian card game ... that somehow survived for 500+ years and morphed into Something Else. Fortune Telling. Occult secrets. Esoteric knowledge. A style statement for Instagram Witches. It's become all these things.

17 hours ago, Scandinavianhermit said:

Think of tarot and New Age as a Venn diagram. Some New Agers are – superficially or more profoundly so – interested in tarot, but tarot is older than the New Age movement/milieu and there are many New Agers who aren't interested in tarot. Nor is the New Age milieu homogenous or standardised in any way. ...

Well said. There's an overlap or relationship of New Age lifestyle and philosophy with modern Tarot [RWS and Thoth decks + their clones] but this is recent. We also have 500 years of Tarocchi and TdM decks which have nothing to do with New Age and were used for gaming and/or fortune telling. Then we have older Occult decks like GD and Eteilla--but that's off topic.

Thanks for an interesting topic @RickInBakersfield

January 23

7 minutes ago, Misterei said:

As @Scandinavianhermit and @Deian mention, we can trace some roots of *New Age* to the Occult Revival of the 1890s - 1920s. The Theosophical Society was one of the first organizations to introduce East Asian [India, Tibet] spiritual practices and beliefs to Westerners of Europe, USA, Australia, etc. So-called modern New Age philosophy often mixes East and West. This modern blending [co-opting?] of East Asian philosophies with Western philosophies started with the Occult Revival and got more mainstream in the 1960s.

Well, actually ... 😁

The Transcendentalists –mainly in the 1830s and 1840s– took an interest in South Asian religion and philosophy, but the Theosophical Society (founded in New York 1875) had a more lasting influence in this regard.

The 'Occult Revival', so called, began in the mid-1880s and second half of the 1880s, when the Hermetic Society in London was founded (1884), the Martinist Order gradually emerged (1884-1891), the Symbolist Manifesto was published (1886), the Theosophical Society adopted the book The Secret Doctrine (1888), the British occult order Golden Dawn was founded (1888), the Ordre Kabbalistique de la Rose Croix was founded (1888), French Neo-Gnosticism gradually emerged (1888-1891) and the American occultist author William Walker Atkinson began his writing career (1889). The Hermetic Society in Dublin, not to be confused with the London society with the same name, wasn't founded until 1898.

And yes, certainly more mainstream in the 1960s.

January 24

Thank you, guys and gals, for helping me out with a topic I've been wondering about for a while now.

Rick-

March 2

I remember years ago that a Pagan was quoted as saying that the difference between Pagan and New Age was the placement of the decimal point.

That did, however, trouble those who otherwise fell under the New Age umbrella who were actually Christian or otherwise not actually Pagan, and needed some way of designating themselves as part of something: diviners, yes, but also Reiki practitioners and alternate nutrition promoters and practitioners of various meditation techniques and so on. And some of those were trying to distance themselves from Paganism which they knew would turn off many people who would otherwise be interested.

I do agree with most everyone's posts here (and I enjoy learning about the background of some of those avenues I haven't explored), but how else would one categorize all the different threads of spirituality or alternative beliefs or practices that have fallen under the umbrella of New Age? In a store, how could one put all the books in little separate categories? Possible (and even achieved) in small shops (some of which do call themselves New Age just so the passersby know what sort of shop it is), but very difficult in a big-box store that might have one stack (at most) of shelves dedicated to the whole panoply.

I haven't seen or heard of any "New Age" fairs in recent years, but they did offer workshops on many different topics, and there had to be some term that described the nature of the event. But I suspect that the term has since become derogatory to a much larger part of the population, and that the various disciplines have since found ways

to serve their own communities. It does make me wonder how the average somewhat interested person would find out about all these things, but of course now there's the Internet, and search engines will bring up sites that reference other areas of interest as well. All this without leaving home. There wasn't that option back when I was aware of New Age fairs (and yes, I attended a few). That's over 30 years ago.

Oh, and it's hard to call anything "spiritual" without freaking out everyone who equates the word with "religious" meaning belonging to any other religion than the one they hold most dear (or believe is the One True Way and everything else is evil).

March 2

Just for fun, I did an image search on "new age." Most of what came up was faux-Eastern psychedelic kundalini stuff like this:

followed by Shiny Happy People Who'd Like To Buy The World A Coke:

In other words (and this isn't directed at anyone here):

It's Little Match Girl stuff. Having pretty little daydreams but not actually doing anything. If things get really bad (and we have reasons to believe they will - climate change, bad "leaders", etc.), these people are going to get Darwined.

March 3

You have to admit the colors are pretty. (But all of them together all the time would give me a headache!)

I'm sure I've seen that second picture somewhere before.

March 3

3 hours ago, Morwenna said:

You have to admit the colors are pretty. (But all of them together all the time would give me a headache!)

I do like the colors, and I think they'd be nice in moderation - maybe a tapestry in those colors to perk up a dreary area. It's too bad they're wasted on a silly picture like that.

3 hours ago, Morwenna said:

I'm sure I've seen that second picture somewhere before.

Me too. Maybe some Motherpeace knockoff? I've been wracking my brain, but I just get this over and over:

I like the clothes, though. They remind me of junior high. I had stuff like that: peasant blouses, cummerbunds, the works.

But that ad was pure damage control. The Coca Cola corporation is disturbing when you start looking into it.

March 3

Esoteric and Exoteric views, right... Either we see the meaning deep within or we look at its surface. So we have the surface view of selling trinkets and offering reiki attunements for insane prices with other stuffs like that...

But the New Age is kinda defined by awaiting a new age, isn't it...
Hair and "let the sunshine in" and all the other stuff...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTKrefMHcJQ
Back then they were greeting the Age of Aquarius, while that may need a hundred or so more years to start, definitely something we all seem to prepare the way for...
So looking at it from today's peoples impression point of view is somewhat misleading. Inside all this we have sacred geometry, channeling material from all sorts of places, civilizations and people, and much, much more...

But more importantly, the new age movement, the real part of it, ended 2013. Same way as it was announced for 1989.

Both started with the mayan ceremonies august 1989 we can still watch in youtube I would guess(at least we could 10 years ago) and ended the same way.

That is over, we have AIs now, and that change is driven technologically, as the governments in US mostly, strongly kept deciding they will not allow deep spiritual change. Yet they seem fans of corporations and money, so the system adapted and presented the next step in technological ways driven by corporations instead. Why it didn't do this initially... If things go well, we may never see, outside of some sci-fi movies. If it doesn't will become very obvious why it tried spirituality first, as usual.

Back on the new age...The trinkets and the attunements that can often be shady(although some of them vital here, just not all of them), happen because the movement never tried to control who wants to be part of it. Same reason it was so easy to twist it around and see it disband into nothing, that was allowed as well, as some needed to play it through and that way of relating was based on lack of protection of the ones that are most afraid of change. It lead US and parts of the world where they are now, however, and that is not having the means to solve the problems that keep coming up, as what was needed to solve them was suppressed too early on, instead of looking into it deeply enough to realize how it was suppose to be used and why it was given.

At the end of the day in 2013 in the closing Mayan ceremonies with Hunbatz Men and the skulls, there were again people selling trinkets. Nothing wrong with trinkets. : )
But they aren't what the whole movement is about, they are side effect to allow it to still exist in the frameworks and structures that aren't adapting fast enough to the changes outside.

But its probably wise to leave all that behind... The New Age is over, at least that branch of it, but to be fair good amount of the other branches are concluded as well, some decades ago, the AIs are bringing the changes now, if humanity plays its cards right that can also end in a good way. If it didn't it won't, but that is always true, anyway.

Do You Think That Tarot is a Part of the "New-Age Movement"?

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