The Occultation Years: When Tarot Went Underground in 19th Century England

Today's Lesson While France was experiencing its tarot explosion in the 1780s, England's relationship with divination cards took a strange detour. Between roughly 1820 and 1880, tarot nearly disappeared from British consciousness—not because it was banned, but because it was simply... forgotten. Playing cards thrived. Fortune-telling with regular playing cards flourished in parlors and fairgrounds. But the full 78-card tarot system? It went dormant. This wasn't suppression—it was cultural amnesia. The few tarot decks that existed in England during this period were either Continental imports collecting dust in private libraries or treated as curious antiquities rather than living tools. What makes this blackout period fascinating is what happened when tarot came roaring back. When the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn formed in 1888, they essentially had to rebuild tarot knowledge from scratch, pulling from French occult texts and adding layers of Kabbalistic and astrological correspondence that the French hadn't emphasized. This wasn't a revival—it was a reinvention. The tarot that emerged in 1890s England was genuinely different from what had been practiced elsewhere, with new symbolic frameworks that would eventually influence the entire Western esoteric tradition. The Rider-Waite-Smith deck you might be using today is a direct descendant of…