The American Occult Drought: Why U.S. Tarot Lagged Behind Europe for a Century

Today's Lesson While European readers were deeply embedded in occult tarot traditions by the 1780s, American engagement with tarot as a mystical tool barely existed until the mid-20th century. Despite the Spiritualist movement thriving in the U.S. during the 1800s—with séances, mediums, and psychic phenomena gaining massive popularity—tarot remained conspicuously absent from American occult practice. Europeans had Etteilla, the Golden Dawn, and Papus building complex esoteric systems, while Americans focused on automatic writing, spirit photography, and table-tipping. Tarot decks were occasionally imported as curiosities or gaming cards, but they didn't catch fire as divination tools the way they did across the Atlantic. The turning point came in 1909 with the Rider-Waite-Smith deck's publication in London, but even then, American uptake was slow. It wasn't until the 1960s and 70s—with the counterculture movement, the New Age boom, and Eden Gray's accessible tarot books—that American tarot culture truly exploded. What took Europe nearly two centuries to develop, America compressed into about two decades of intense interest. This late start actually shaped American tarot culture distinctly: less tied to European occult lodge hierarchies, more psychologically oriented (thanks to Jung's influence filtering through), and more democratized from the beginning. Today's YouTube readers, Instagram tarotscopes,…