The Real, True, Honest, and Totally Authentic History of Tarot... NOT!

In 2017, The Future -- an artist market and project space in Minneapolis, MN -- opened up their shelves to The Tarot Garden for a 3-month-long gallery showcase of selections from our library of rare and significant cartomantic decks and artwork. To kick off the event, I was invited to do a presentation on the collection, including a broad overview of tarot's fascinating history.

Despite the recent availability of some really great scholarly research into tarot's origins, there is still a lot of misinformation on the subject being spread in the mainstream. I decided to address those fallacies head-on by preparing a 3-minute pseudo-documentary as the introduction to my talk. Executed in a "Ken Burns" style, the video purports to provide a "serious" look at how tarot came to be... and deliberately gets most of it wrong. I then went back through the video with the audience to discuss the inaccuracies, their sources, and the reality of tarot's story as we now understand it.

Since I probably won't have another opportunity to do this presentation in the foreseeable future, I've gone back and redone the original video with subtitles, and tacked on a second version that adds additional titles hitting the highlights of my corrective discussion (plus a few additional snarky comments for good measure). It wasn't practical to note my information sources on top of all those other titles, but I included a short bibliography of my research material at the end. I expect most readers of our blog are already quite familiar with tarot's true roots -- but hopefully you'll have fun picking apart those clichés which still make us roll our eyes every time we hear them.