The Tarot Boom of the 1960s and 1970s

The tarot boom 1970s era turned a niche esoteric practice into a mainstream countercultural fixture almost overnight, closing out a century of history this series has traced from W. B. Yeats and the Golden Dawn Tarot's committed occultism back through poets, painters and surrealists. The Thoth Deck's First Printing in 1969 reached buyers right at the start of this surge, and its arrival alongside a wave of new publishers and new decks was no coincidence: a generation already drawn to Eastern mysticism, astrology and psychedelic experimentation was actively searching for symbolic systems that felt older and stranger than mainstream religion.

Stuart Kaplan, a games industry executive, encountered the Rider-Waite-Smith deck at a European toy fair in the late 1960s and recognised an opportunity nobody else in American publishing had acted on. He founded U.S. Games Systems in 1968 and secured rights to reprint the deck at scale, pairing it with accessible guidebooks aimed at total beginners rather than initiated occultists. That single business decision did more to put a tarot deck in casual hands than any single esoteric order had managed in the previous half-century.

Kaplan's instinct was as much archival as commercial. Alongside the mass-market reprints, he began assembling what became one of the largest private collections of historical playing cards and tarot decks in the world, eventually publishing multi-volume encyclopedic surveys of tarot history that remain standard reference works for researchers decades later. The same company that made the cards cheap and widely available also did more than almost anyone to document their older, rarer forms, a combination that shaped how two very different audiences, collectors and casual readers, encountered the tarot through the same publisher.

Counterculture adoption

The tarot fit naturally into a broader countercultural appetite for symbolic systems outside institutional religion: astrology columns proliferated in mainstream newspapers, I Ching translations sold briskly, and interest in witchcraft, paganism and Eastern meditation all surged together. Aleister Crowley himself, decades after his death and the cool reception The 1942 Exhibitions of the Thoth Paintings describes, became an unlikely countercultural icon; his face appears among the crowd on the cover of the Beatles' 1967 album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, a sign of how thoroughly his once-scandalous reputation had been repackaged as rebellious cool for a new generation.

New decks for the tarot boom 1970s market

Publishers responded with a wave of new decks aimed squarely at this expanding audience. David Palladini's Aquarian Tarot, published in 1970, updated the Rider-Waite-Smith imagery with an Art Nouveau-influenced style suited to the period's aesthetic. The Morgan-Greer deck followed later in the decade with warmer, more intimate close-up compositions. Feminist and neopagan-influenced decks began appearing too, reworking traditional figures to foreground goddess imagery and women's spiritual authority, a trend that would expand considerably through the 1980s and beyond.

From occult order to self-taught practice

The boom fundamentally changed how people learned the tarot. Where From the Golden Dawn to Waite and Crowley: Two Heirs, Two Decks shows a system transmitted through structured orders, initiation grades and sworn secrecy, the 1970s reader typically bought a boxed deck and guidebook from a regular bookshop and taught themselves at a kitchen table. This democratisation drew real criticism from some practitioners trained in older lineages, who argued that correspondences built for ritual magic were being flattened into simplified keyword meanings stripped of their original context. The criticism had some justice to it, though it also undervalued how many readers found a genuine, if self-directed, practice through exactly those simplified paperback guides.

Commercial growth and lasting structures

By the end of the 1970s, dedicated tarot publishers, specialty shops and a growing body of English-language guidebooks had established an infrastructure that persists largely unchanged today: most readers still encounter the cards through a boxed deck and a companion book, with online and app-based reading services as later additions. The period also normalised cartomancy as a legitimate subject for serious popular non-fiction, rather than something publishers treated as fringe or disreputable.

Specialty metaphysical bookshops, often family-run and concentrated in university towns and larger cities, became the physical infrastructure of the boom: a place to browse dozens of competing decks side by side, compare guidebooks, and talk to staff who had read professionally for years. Many of those shops have since closed or moved online, but the function they served, letting a curious newcomer handle several decks before committing to one, persists today mainly through online reviews and community recommendations rather than a shop counter.

Looking back at a pivotal decade

The tarot boom explains why so many readers today encounter the cards through a single popularised deck tradition, Smith's or Harris's imagery filtered through decades of successive reprints, rather than through the older regional decks this series traced back in its opening instalments. Mass publication did not erase the esoteric depth built by the Golden Dawn, Crowley and Harris; it simply made that depth available to anyone willing to buy a book, a shift whose consequences this blog's own practice still reflects today.

For broader context on the period's spiritual and cultural shifts, see the Wikipedia article on the New Age movement.