Oswald Wirth: the 22 Cards Behind Modern Tarot

Most readers know two lineages. There is the Tarot de Marseille, the woodcut pattern printed in France for centuries, and there is the Rider Waite Smith of 1909, the deck that taught the English speaking world to read pictures instead of pip cards. Between them sits a third deck that almost nobody names, and both sides borrowed from it.

In 1889 a Swiss magnetic healer named Oswald Wirth published Les 22 Arcanes du Tarot kabbalistique: twenty-two cards, the trumps only, drawn on the Marseille pattern with occult symbolism deliberately added. Hebrew letters appear on the cards. Details are corrected toward a doctrine rather than toward tradition. The same year, those images ran inside Papus's Le Tarot des Bohemiens, which is how they reached every French occultist at once.

If your deck carries a Hebrew letter in the corner of a trump, or a symbol that is clearly there to teach rather than to decorate, you are holding Wirth's decision.

Wirth was born on 5 August 1860 in Brienz, in the canton of Bern, and came to occultism through the body rather than the library. By 1887 he was working as a hypnotic healer, in the years when magnetism sat in the uncomfortable space between medicine and stagecraft.

That same year he met Stanislas de Guaita, the young Lorraine marquis who was assembling the Kabbalistic Order of the Rose Croix, and became his secretary and disciple for roughly a decade. De Guaita had the library, the money and the doctrine. Wirth could draw, and he had spent years watching what images do to people in an altered state.

The partnership explains the deck. It is not an artist's tarot and it is not a scholar's tarot. It is a working tool made by a practitioner, under the supervision of a theorist, for students who were expected to meditate on the cards rather than lay them out for a client.

Wirth's deck has no suits. That looks like a limitation and it was a thesis. If the trumps carry a doctrine, then the pip cards are the game, and a student of the doctrine has no use for them.

The consequence runs through the whole continental tradition. French tarot studies concentrate on the majors, treat the minors as circumstantial detail, and read the trumps as a sequence with a direction. The English tradition after 1909 went the other way, giving every one of the seventy-eight cards a scene and a story, which is why an English reader expects the Five of Cups to mean something specific and a French reader often does not.

Both choices are defensible. What matters is knowing which one your deck was built on, because a majors only doctrine loaded into a seventy-eight card reading produces the thing beginners complain about most: a spread where the trumps feel enormous and the numbered cards feel like filler.

Wirth kept working on the material for nearly forty years. In 1927 he published Le Tarot des imagiers du Moyen Age in Paris, the full commentary on his deck, and it remains the most careful statement of the French symbolic method. An English translation appeared as The Tarot of the Magicians in 2013, which is why the deck has a second life in English now.

The title is a claim in itself. Imagiers were the makers of medieval images, the carvers and illuminators, and Wirth is placing the tarot in the cathedral workshop rather than in a temple at Giza. That is a quieter and much more defensible pedigree than the Egyptian one his own tradition had been repeating since 1781, and he stated it in the middle of a milieu still committed to the pyramid.

Read the 1927 book next to Papus and the difference is obvious. Papus explains a system. Wirth explains a picture, one element at a time, and tells you what to look at.

Tarot was a sideline. Wirth's main subject was Freemasonry, and he wrote about it for fifty years. La franc maconnerie rendue intelligible a ses adeptes came out in three volumes, the first in 1893 with a second edition in 1908, the second in 1912, the third in 1922. Le Symbolisme hermetique appeared in 1910.

In 1912 he launched a periodical, Le Symbolisme, which outlived him by decades and ran until 1971. He died on 9 March 1943, at eighty-two.

That body of work is why his tarot reads the way it does. A man who spends his life explaining why a masonic tracing board is arranged as it is will approach a trump the same way: not as an omen to be triggered, but as a composition where every element was placed for a reason and can be accounted for.

Take one trump and give it fifteen minutes without a question in mind. Name every element out loud, one at a time, with no interpretation attached: the colour of the ground, what the figure holds, which way the head turns, what is behind, what is cut off by the frame. Only when the inventory is finished do you ask what the arrangement is doing.

This is the opposite of the reflex most readers learn, which is to look at a card and wait for an impression. The impression comes anyway, and it comes better after the inventory, because it now has something to attach itself to.

One concrete starting point: the Magician. Count the objects on his table, notice what is in his hands versus what is merely available, and see whether anything on that table is not currently being used. Wirth put nothing there by accident, and the exercise transfers to any deck you own.