#crazygreat

tarot, although of unknown origin, is commonly believed to originate in judaism in ancient/near ancient times. each card of the major arcana represents each letter of the hebrew alphabet (therefore christians viewing tarot as of the devil is their twisted and unknowing antisemitism)

playing cards werent like A Thing until like the 900s CE and tarot cards were only around in europe for a good 150-200 years before tarotology is a recorded phenomenon. i wouldn’t call 500 years ancient by any means.

anyway this reply in and of itself (while i’m assuming you’re coming from a good place here!) is upsetting for a couple of reasons, and buys into antisemitic posturing from the middle ages and into the modern day by positing that Tarot Was Necessarily Originally Jewish. this is an incredibly common antisemitic tactic that is easy to mistake for Inclusion.

tarot (& the symbolism of tarot) was often made up pretty much wholesale (cf: ryder-waite was just MADE UP).

the fact of the matter is that christians trying to make their work seem more mystical often appropriated huge quantities of jewish imagery in order to do so; this both positioned them as somehow connected to orientalist and exoticized representation of the jew as sorcerer, while at the same time allowing them to pin the blame for their unchristian magic on jews. this was and continues to be a huge factor in justifying antisemitic thought from pogroms to blood libel to modern conspiracy theories.

you see this more with key of solomon type occultism but tarot is absolutely, definitely not exempt from this; it is near impossible to find tarot decks that don’t use made-up ~qabbalistic~ imagery at least somewhere, and that gets exhausting. that’s what that post was about.