The Secret Romani History of Tarot
Everyone wants the cards to reveal their future. But their past holds a mystery stretching from India to Italy.
I didn’t go in with any preparation. My tarot readers could take the lead. At a time when it feels essential to take responsibility for every choice, this felt like a deep relief. On my screen, Paulina Stevens sat in her shop in San Diego and Jezmina Von Thiele joined from Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The two Romani fortune tellers had never read for anyone as a duo before. “We tried a new thing for you,” Jezmina told me.
Tarot is everywhere. On TikTok alone, the topic has drawn over 85 billion views. But despite its ubiquity, it holds a contested history. Parisian occultists swore it was Egyptian. A Swiss psychiatrist saw in it a map of the human mind. Europeans later associated it with the Roma.
The Juggernaut set out to follow tarot back through all these claims, starting with the nearly 600-year-old tarot cards the Morgan Library in New York just exhibited and ending with two Romani fortune tellers.