Last summer, a tarot querent – one who reads the cards for divinatory purposes – was on a train from London to Somerset when, hurtling past the stones at Avebury on a Virgin Pendolino, she got a phone call from her father telling her that he had been diagnosed with stage four prostate cancer. The treatment, to begin immediately, would be chemotherapy, radiation therapy and hormone suppressants. In panic, she went to the tarot and turned over the King of Cups, a card from the Minor Arcana, which came out upside down, or “reversed”. The card, in the Rider-Waite deck, depicts a king on a throne set atop a platform amid small, tufted waves; a fish jumps from the water behind him, and another fish hangs as an amulet around his neck, and he holds a cup and a sceptre. The querent consulted the book she carried, Rachel Pollack’s seminal 1980 work Seventy-Eight Degrees of  Wisdom: A Book of Tarot, which told her that the King of Cups represents mastery, assuredness, achievement in some creative work; upside down, or reversed, he represents dishonesty; the distortion or misapplication of authority; injustice, opacity and illness.

The King of Cups is also associated with the story of the Fisher King, a figure in Arthurian legend also named in scraps of stories in French, Welsh, Cornish and Breton, who was the last in a long line of kings charged with guarding the Holy Grail. Several texts from the late 12th century mention him, but by Malory’s Morte D’Arthur in the 15th century, his story became more detailed. In the Morte, the Fisher King fuses with the figure of the Maimed King when he’s wounded – in some stories by the lance that pierced the side of Jesus – in the leg, foot or thigh, a phrasing which is generally accepted to be a medieval euphemism for impotence. His lands become barren and fall into waste, and he falls into decline, spending his days listlessly fishing.

T.S. Eliot leaned heavily on the Grail legend in writing The Waste Land (1922), noting that “not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem were suggested by Miss Jessie L. Weston’s book on the Grail legend, From Ritual to Romance”. From here, he took his wide rotten wastes of the riverbank, the listless fishers, parsed by way of the poem’s clairvoyant Madame Sosostris’s “wicked pack of cards”. The Fisher King appears three times, though he’s not named as such. In the poem’s first section, Madame Sosostris turns over “the man with three staves” from the deck, or the three of wands, which depicts a man with his back to the viewer looking over a yellow-brown landscape. Later, the king turns up in the third section, “fishing in the dull canal / On a winter evening round behind the gashouse / Musing upon the king my brother’s wreck”. In the poem’s final section, a voice appears: “I sat upon the shore / Fishing, with the arid plain behind me / Shall I at least set my lands in order?” To Eliot, and the tarot querent on the train, the Fisher King becomes a metaphor for the father, the disaster of lost authority.

Esoteric forms of spiritual self-inquiry are hardly as mocked or maligned as they used to be. Wellness, a term existing at the centre of the Venn diagram between “health” and “success”, encompasses all sorts of practices and interests that, until recently, were firmly in the realm of the woo-woo. In June, palaeolithic standing stones were on the cover of Country Life; in July, the Guardian reported that the hottest new reference for experimental musicians is the 11th century mystic Hildegard von Bingen. Earlier this year, the Warburg Institute hosted Tarot: Origins and Afterlives, a collection of critical moments from the history of the practice: in its review of the show, the New York Times noted that “Today, tarot is everywhere.” Millennials daytrip out to ancient megaliths for Beltane, fashion students wear pointy peasant shoes, and everyone is more likely to have an interest in astrology, seed oils, mugwort, Sacred Harp, indigenously British fruit, midsummer rituals, Morris Dancing, natural dyeing, mead, fraternal guilds, chainmail, tallow, flower shows, folk horror and queer Cèilidhs.

Meanwhile, the idea that physical health relies on psychic wellness has become mainstream: The Body Keeps the Score (2014) has spent nearly four of the last five years on Amazon’s bestseller list. Elevated consciousness is a wellness premium. Traditional religion is also on the rise, as Lamorna Ash charts in her book Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever (2025), which documents a renewed, if sometimes tentative, interest in (some forms of) Christianity amongst young people. “We are leagues away from the New Atheist movement of the 1990s, which repudiated religion on supposedly intellectual grounds,” she writes, because our era is defined by “great financial instability, under austerity measures, our futures shadowed by the now unavoidable fact of planetary climate collapse … [while] the accelerative capacity of social media … leaves us feeling ever more atomised and isolated, craving the kind of physical community we might have once gotten through the mosque, the synagogue, the temple, the church.”

In György Lukács’ 1916 book Theory of the Novel, the Hungarian philosopher writes that an era’s “metaphysical conditions” inform the cultural forms they produce. The Homeric epic, Lukács writes, is a representation of the “totality” the Greek subject found themselves in – a world in which life, religion, action, meaning and intention form a continuous, harmonious whole. The novel, by contrast, emerged as a form more capable of expressing the fragmented, subjective experiences of individuals in the modern world. It is a form that centralises the subject, that “tells the adventure of interiority”. Our era’s metaphysical conditions, as Ash lays out, are not overwhelmingly positive. Tarot, a framework of accessing the mystic that relies upon a series of archetypes, may well reflect our metaphysical conditions of confusion and bewilderment born from a generalised atmosphere of ill health, social sickness and doom. The novel’s interiority gives way to a system of introspection marked by a context of fear: it is a form that takes, as its starting point, the existence and widespread distribution of catastrophe. But it also sets out to help navigate, rather than describe, this reality. Cameron Steele, a tarot reader, teacher and cancer patient, writes that “a radical freedom descends upon my life precisely through the mechanics of what seems like ruin or doom.” She asks, “Can I experience sickness and pain as liberation? Can that liberation help me cure me of the waffling between rage and aversion that happens when I find myself unable to deal with, never mind accept the circumstances of my health and body?”

The tarot is misunderstood by many to be straightforwardly divinatory, predictive of good or bad outcomes, but famously, some of its most apparently portentous symbols aren’t actually too bad. Death may come along riding on a white horse with red eyes, but he’s often met by querents with happiness if also trepidation, as he represents change rather than destruction. He reminds me of a plague stone I saw in Fortingall, Perthshire, yards from a yew tree that pre-existed the Roman occupation of Britain. A tablet on the stone reads, “Here lie the victims of the Great Plague of the 14th century, taken here on a sledge drawn by a white horse led by an old woman.” Pale too is the horse ridden by a pale rider in Revelations; the White Horse at Uffington was carved into the chalk of Oxfordshire in the later Bronze Age or early Iron Age. Tarot draws on a deeper esoteric language that means that images function as a gateway into a world of esoterica that unfolds like opening doors; in one’s own life, symbols proliferate.

///

Reading tarot is to respond to a general systemic overwhelm with systems of our own

On a warm June morning, I attended the preview of the joint Edward Burra and Ithell Colquhoun exhibition at Tate Britain. Mark Pilkington, co-founder of the esoteric publisher Strange Attractor, had introduced me to Colquhoun a couple of months before – Strange Attractor had published the first in-depth biographical study of Colquhoun and her work, by Amy Hale. Ithell Colquhoun was a surrealist artist who wrote a broadly dubious biography of British occultist Samuel MacGregor Mathers, founder of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, who translated the Book of Abramelin the Mage. It was one of the founding texts to lay out what became The Great Work, the term used to describe the very purpose and end-point of spiritual enquiry: “the uniting of the soul with God, of the microcosm with the macrocosm, of the female with the male, of the ego with the non-ego.”

Colquhoun’s interest in the occult and her membership of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn got her expelled from the British Surrealist Group (as Mark put it, they “aggressively rejected her well-evolved and serious ideas about magical consciousness between colours and mental states and creativity.”) She was also barred from exhibiting in the 1942 Leicester Galleries exhibition because of the “pornographic content” of her painting The Pine Family (1940), a strange oil painting of three truncated bodies, lopped off at the waist. One is female, one male, and one hermaphrodite: the male and hermaphrodite are missing their penises, the woman her right leg. The stumps point upwards like hacked-at trees; they lie in a featureless landscape. For the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the hermaphrodite represents the perfect union of masculine and feminine, the universe coming into knowledge of itself; it is, as the Ithell Colquhoun website notes, “The Magical Child, the Two-in-One, and the culmination of the Great Work”. In Colquhoun’s depiction, the hermaphrodite is castrated, suggesting, in the tarot-infused phrasing of the website, “personal transition, uncertainty and chaos.”

Colquhoun also created her own tarot, dispensing with the figures of the Rider-Waite deck and producing something like a series of auras, the energies behind each card rendered in pure colour. Swords are pale yellow, cups are deep blue, wands are red, and pentacles (which she called “disks”) are indigo. She also uses their esoteric titles: “The Daughter of the Mighty Ones”, on a swirl of green and pink, might be the queen of pentacles. The King of Cups is “The Lord of the Waves and the Waters”; a swirl of rich blue, pebbled with white at the edges like a shoreline, with a streak of red at the centre of the card to represent his kernel of fire. As Heather McCalden, writer and professional tarot reader, writes, “All kings represent fire, and so the King of Cups is the fire of water. Think about this for a minute. The King of Cups is the most emotionally mature man in the deck, most likely because he has to constantly negotiate his chemical composition of two diametrically opposed elements.” The King of Cups reversed, the fateful card pulled on the Virgin Pendolino, is a card that describes the chaos when balance has been lost. “I want to use the word ‘unhinged’ here,” writes McCalden, “but it’s really more of a whirlpool sensation ... a disorientation, a loss of a moral compass.” Colquhoun’s card depicts some of this whirlpool, the white at the edges like froth. The King of Cups, perhaps above other cards, is founded on this sense that a broader authority had been disrupted; that a collective morality was at risk of being lost.

Colquhoun and Eliot were making art as Europe fractured; their era was similarly defined by surveillance and secrecy; the mass obfuscation campaigns of blackouts and false signposts taking place amid a generalised fear of espionage. Mark Pilkington writes that the disinformation campaigns of the Second World War that took place in Germany – creating false newspapers with bad news from the front, for instance – were “the origins of many of the communications deception operations that exist now – the equivalent of the troll farms out there creating memes, fake news and media reports that flood our social media and email servers in an attempt to manipulate our political consciousness.”

Our era’s metaphysical condition is connection, but experienced as conspiracy, inference, interference and surveillance. Reading tarot is to try to set the barren lands in order; to derive meaning out of an essential inarticulation, and to respond to a general systemic overwhelm with systems of our own.

HEXEN 2.0, a tarot deck made by Suzanne Treister, features figures from the sciences and writing, tracing their connection to events, schools of thought and theory: it charts the collusion between cybernetics, programmes of mass surveillance and intelligence gathering, grassroots resistance, the rise of Web 2.0 and the implications of occult-influenced forms of social manipulation. Treister is, as art curator Lars Bang Larsen describes, “tapping into the dynamic potential of occult knowledge forms to connect seemingly disparate historical dots in a kind of alchemical hypertext.” The deck becomes, in Larsen’s words, a “structuring device” to render the ordinarily invisible systems that structure the world.

In HEXEN 2.0, the King of Cups is represented by Stafford Beer, the 20th century cybernetics theorist and consultant who, between 1959 and 1961, was tasked to create a cybernetics-based control system to be applied to the entire social economy of Chile, a real-time computerised system, using the technology of the time (the Pinochet coup meant it was never realised). Treister’s card reads “Hi tech socialism” – Beer was influenced by Trotsky – and explains what the Chilean scheme looked like: “500 telex machines positioned in factories across Chile linked to two control rooms in Santiago for co-operation between workers as opposed to surveillance and control”.

The tarot makes systems visible, and so it might help us conceive of systems to transcend them – as well as our interiority and solitude. Tarot is a narrative practice, and therefore a shared one, turning the father’s illness into the barrenness of the land. “Each card is, in a sense, a living being,” wrote Aleister Crowley, “and its relations with its neighbours are what one might call diplomatic.” In deathly times, such systems sustain meaning. .