Over the past year, I kept finding tarot cards in the books I read. Not physical cards, but their appearance as images, plot devices, and symbols—everywhere and in such frequency that it prompts the question: why should a symbol so thoroughly divorced from what it was once meant to signify survive in our collective awareness, and what can we make of this seeming contradiction?
It started with Pittsburgh author John Pistelli’s recent novel Major Arcana. I thought little at first that this formidable work invoked tarot cards for both its title and as a leitmotif running throughout its recursive plot. The cards, known in this country exclusively for their use in fortune telling, constitute a rich well of symbolic potential, one that any writer can dip into as needed. Their evocative illustrations and unfamiliar suits and trumps—the seven of swords, the High Priestess—conjure an esoteric neverland, while the act of divining the cards’ meaning implies a subjective relationship between signifier and signified, inviting authors to think expansively about ideas that the cards could stand in for.
Then it continued, as I watched allegorical tarot card references pile up throughout the 2025 novels that I managed to read. The Death card in Thomas Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket; the Fool card in We Love You, Bunny by Mona Awad; Patricia Lockwood casting the whole deck as a metaphor for how a lifetime of choices can seem to lock one’s fate, in her hypnotic work of autofiction Will There Ever Be Another You. That’s not including the diegetic allusions not heavily laden with figurative meaning, in novels like Old Soul, by Susan Barker; The Unveiling, by Quan Barry; The Night that Finds us All, by John Hornor Jacobs; and Metallic Realms, by Lincoln Michel. (Many of these novels were mentioned as Best Books of 2025 on a recent episode of our PRoB-affiliated podcast, Third Person Limited.) Tarot-based imagery popped up in older novels I read this year, too, such as Francesca Lia Block’s The Hanged Man. Tarot cards as metaphors seemed to be everywhere I turned.
My individual reading habits are not a large enough sample from which to draw conclusions, and authors using tarot cards as a source of or inspiration for writerly metaphors is nothing new. Italo Calvino devised a whole book of interconnected stories around the tarot deck more than fifty years ago, for example. But what’s noteworthy is the tarot endures entirely as a symbolic enterprise, while its utility has all but disappeared in our world. That is, millions of people read novels or see movies with allegories built on tarot cards, yet virtually no one actually uses them to attempt to predict the future.
Interestingly, tarot cards have not lost their original meaning, at least not collectively. The average American might not know that the Hierophant card could mean marriage, alliance, captivity, or servitude (per Arthur Edward Waite’s 1910 Pictorial Key to the Tarot), but they do know the cards as a whole signify humanity’s efforts to apprehend our fates through whatever arcane tools we can create or discover to do so. They stand for the belief that beneath the rational, scientific world lies another one governed by forces we can only grasp blindly toward, invisible and capricious like the odor of woodsmoke after lightning strikes an ancient tree. That if we can just find the right sign-reading device and interpret it correctly, we can tame this weird life and figure out what will happen to us.
We might know this conception of the cards, but we also know cartomancy isn’t real, any more than crystal gazing or the alleged effects of Mercury in retrograde. Tarot cards are like Santa Claus, then: something we no longer believe in, but which we keep around as a convenient symbol, be it for occult mystery or wholesome Christmas joy. (I don’t think I noticed any Santa metaphors in novels this year.)
One is also reminded of Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, which posits four stages of sign meaning, from direct representation (e.g., green light means “go”) to a state where the sign represents nothing but itself, with no connection to reality. The disconnect between the signifier and signified also aligns with the perspective of the French Symbolist poets, a 19th century movement promoting imagery and language designed solely to emblematize great ideas (as opposed to the mundane focus of the Realists who preceded them). As poet and essayist Jean Moréas declaimed in his 1886 manifesto, “concrete phenomena do not manifest themselves; they are sensory appearances intended to represent an esoteric affinity with primordial ideas.” In other words, a symbol is never the thing itself, but rather the abstraction underlying it.
To a semiotician, this is elementary: a word is not what it refers to, but a concatenation of sounds, visual marks, and cognitive actions that recall the referent in its real form. But hair-splitting sophistry aside, this claim leaves us somewhat cold. The characteristics of the real-world object making up half the metaphor lend strength and particularity to the trope as a whole. It means a lot more to say something is light as a feather if you’ve held that speck of plumage in your hand—felt the warp and weft of its interlocking barbs, discerned how easily the slightest gust of air would send it spiraling aloft. Even when it’s not a physical object, the same holds true: I grasp what the title of Jeanne Thornton’s novel A/S/L could figuratively mean, because I typed that shibboleth myself in many ’90s AOL chat rooms.
But if nobody uses tarot cards, can they maintain any utility as a literary symbol and metaphorical stand-in for seeking answers from unseen forces? I’ve never sat before the cards, never tried to glean what their haunting illustrations are trying to say. Nor has almost anyone. Yet writers of fiction continue to make use of the tarot in symbolic contexts, as though cartomancy were as commonplace as other frequently employed literary symbols, like phallic rockets or the angry color red. The difference is red remains a part of our everyday visual spectrum, and rockets still take off into space. But aside from a dwindling number of storefront psychics and the occult-curious, who is using tarot cards in a legitimate effort to divine future events?
Two theories could explain this paradox. One is that the tarot is such a powerful concept, and one embedded so deeply in our collective consciousness, that we all know it well enough to use it in this way, even without ever having experienced its physical incarnation. The other is that, in fact, a lot of us are consulting tarot cards: a Pew survey from earlier this year found 11 percent of American adults do so once or twice a year. That’s a tiny minority of us, but it’s still millions of people.
Both of these explanations feel true, but I would peel back another layer as well. Tarot cards weren’t made for looking into the future—they’re playing cards. In parts of Europe, people use them in games like Tarocchi or Königrufen the same way we use the 52-card deck for poker or solitaire. It might seem odd to imagine shouting “Blackjack!” after flipping over the Ace of Pentacles and King of Wands, but that’s a result of our cultural bias, not some secretly magical characteristic that is inherent to the cards themselves. They’ve been around since at least the 1500s but only gained valence as a tool for cartomancy in the late 18th century, when the French writers Antoine Court de Gébelin and Jean-Baptiste Alliette both published books explaining how to use the cards for divinatory purposes. These made-up occult associations caught on, perhaps by giving comfort to average Europeans unsettled by the Enlightenment’s focus on reason and empiricism, which had extinguished many of the superstitions previously underlying day-to-day life.
I was wrong when I inferred an “original” utility behind the cards, one linked with fortune telling. That simply doesn’t exist. It may be best, then, to see tarot cards as standing in for figurative expression itself—a set of symbols that no longer adhere to any core meaning, and serve only to depict symbolism as such, that synthesis of signifier and signified. More than that, the cards represent not just representation but interpretation; squint hard enough and the act of divining meaning from a spread of illustrated cards resembles a funhouse-mirror version of deciphering symbols, metaphors, and conceits in a work of literature. That whiff of the occult is appropriate, too; we might take it for granted, but it’s nothing short of magical for Shelley to turn the moon into loneliness, for Shakespeare to summon guilt out of a bloodstain in Macbeth. This, then is the answer to my question: a literary symbol remains metaphorically useful once sundered from its original meaning only if we note that said “original” “meaning” was itself not a fixed and purposeful intention, but more a semiotic flexibility that provided people with a path to their own creativity and interpretive faculties.
Symbols are how we think, how humans make sense of the strange environs we find ourselves in. Those symbols in turn cohere into ideas and complex systems, to the point where our own creations add more disorder to our lives than the mysteries we inherited to begin with. There’s something fitting that we would turn to a set of symbols to think about symbolism, to identify or assert order in a chaotic world increasingly impervious to our efforts at taming it. The Death card might mean death; it might ask what it means to face death. Or it might mean you have to figure out the meaning for yourself, because sooner or later, Death comes for us all.
