In 1922, T.S. Eliot placed a tarot-spreading fortune-teller in the opening lines of The Waste Land. Madame Sosostris “had a bad cold” and carried “a wicked pack of cards.” The poem never explains that the drowned Phoenician Sailor points to death and rebirth, that the Wheel is fate, that the one-eyed merchant hints at betrayal. Eliot assumed his readers already knew the imagery was ancient. Comparing religious imagery in tarot and literature means tracing how both borrow from the same sacred lexicon — Christian iconography, alchemical symbols, classical mythology — to encode spiritual meaning. Tarot does it through a fixed deck of 78 images; literature does it through narrative and metaphor. The overlap is not accidental: both emerged from cultures saturated in religious symbolism, and both continue to cross-pollinate.
How the Medieval Church Shaped Both Decks and Pages
The earliest surviving tarot decks, the Visconti-Sforza cards painted in 15th-century Milan, were luxury objects for the nobility. Their imagery was overtly Christian. The Fool was the Everyman of morality plays. The Pope was the Hierophant. The Last Judgment card showed the archangel Gabriel blowing a trumpet over naked souls rising from graves — a scene lifted directly from medieval church frescoes and mystery dramas.
Literature of the same period ran on the same fuel. Dante’s Divine Comedy (circa 1308–1321) structured the afterlife as a hierarchy of punishments and rewards that correspond card for card to the tarot’s sequence of trials and enlightenments. The seven deadly sins that appear in the poem map onto the seven planets that some early tarot theorists linked to the cards. Both the Comedy and the tarot were designed as spiritual itineraries: you move through suffering toward vision.
By the time the occult revival of the 18th and 19th centuries rediscovered the tarot, the line between card and text had already blurred. Antoine Court de Gébelin, in Le Monde Primitif (1781), claimed the tarot was a surviving Egyptian book of Thoth, a literary forgery that became a founding myth. Etteilla (Jean-Baptiste Alliette) wrote manuals that read like grimoires, treating each card as a verse in a sacred text. The tarot was never just a game. It was always also a library in miniature.
Where Do the Symbols Overlap?
Take the cross. In the Rider-Waite deck (1909), the Hanged Man hangs from a T-shaped gallows, his arms forming a cross. His expression is calm, not pained. Waite, a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, designed the card to evoke the alchemical solve et coagula, dissolution and coagulation, wrapped in Christian martyrdom. In literature, the cross functions the same way. In Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory (1940), the whiskey priest carries his cross as a burden and a lifeline. Both the card and the novel ask: what does it mean to surrender?
The Grail is another shared vessel. The Ace of Cups in the Rider-Waite deck shows a chalice with a descending dove, the Holy Grail. The suit of Cups as a whole derives from the chalice of the Eucharist, the cup of the Last Supper. That same Grail appears in Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (1485) and in Eliot’s The Waste Land, where the Fisher King’s impotence matches the reversed meaning of the Cups suit. The Grail is not a metaphor for abundance. It is a test of worthiness that the tarot reader and the knight both face.
For more on how these symbols function across traditions, see our guide to tarot symbolism and the glossary entry on The Fool.
Why Authors and Occultists Used the Same Deck
Arthur Edward Waite was a prolific author of occult books before he designed his tarot. He drew on the same pool of alchemical emblems, Kabbalistic diagrams, and Rosicrucian manifestos that poets like W.B. Yeats, also a Golden Dawn member, used in their verse. Yeats wrote in A Vision (1925) about a system of phases and gyres that reads like a tarot spread arranged in prose.
Aleister Crowley took this synthesis further. His Thoth deck (completed 1944) is dense with Egyptian gods, Greek zodiac signs, and alchemical symbols. Crowley also wrote The Book of Thoth as a guide, but his novel Moonchild (1917) imagines a magical war fought through symbolic operations. The imagery in the Thoth deck is the same imagery that drives the plot of Moonchild. The difference is only the medium.
Italiano Calvino made the convergence explicit. In The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1973), travelers who have lost the power of speech tell their stories by arranging tarot cards on a table. Each card becomes a word. The narrative emerges from the juxtaposition of sacred images. Calvino did not invent this method. Medieval preachers used similar pictorial sermons, the Biblia Pauperum (Bible of the Poor), to teach scripture to illiterate congregations using paired images. The tarot, the novel, and the sermon all share one root: the image that carries a sacred story.
Reading Sacred Symbols: Divination vs. Interpretation
When a tarot reader sees the Hierophant in a spread, they consider institutional religion, tradition, the need for a teacher. When a literary critic sees a hierophant figure in a novel, say, the priest in Georges Bernanos’ Diary of a Country Priest (1936), they consider the same cluster of meanings: authority, ritual, the gap between the sacred and the bureaucratic.
The practice differs in one crucial way. In tarot, the reader actively applies the symbol to a querent’s present situation. The card is read for someone. In literature, the symbol is read about someone. But both acts require a learned vocabulary. You cannot interpret the World card without knowing it represents completion, the fourth suit, the end of the Fool’s journey. You cannot interpret the cross in a novel without knowing what it meant in the culture that produced the book.
Some practitioners blur the boundary entirely. Bibliomancy, opening a book at random for guidance, treats literature as a divinatory tool. And some tarot readers use literary allusions to deepen their interpretations: seeing the Tower card through the collapse of Macbeth’s castle, or Justice through the scales in The Oresteia. We do this ourselves, sometimes, when a client’s question matches a story. The symbols are not owned by any single tradition.
What People Get Wrong About the Relationship
That tarot’s imagery is purely pagan. Most of the religious symbols in the tarot are Christian. The cross, the chalice, the Trinity implicit in the Magician’s gesture (as above, so below), the Last Judgment, the Pope. The pagan elements, the naked dancers on the World card, the horns of the Devil, were added during the occult revival, often by writers who saw Christianity as a veneer over older mysteries.
That literature’s use of tarot is just decoration. Eliot did not toss Madame Sosostris into The Waste Land for local color. The cards he names, the drowned Phoenician Sailor, the Wheel, the blank card (not a standard tarot card), structure the entire poem’s theme of cyclical death and failed rebirth. Without the tarot, the poem loses its skeleton.
That tarot and literature are in competition. They are not. They are two languages speaking the same root language. When we read a card, we are reading a text. When we read a novel, we are dealing with images that could be painted on cardboard.
FAQ
Did T.S. Eliot actually read tarot? He knew the deck through his interest in comparative religion and the work of Jessie L. Weston, whose From Ritual to Romance (1920) traced the Grail legend to pagan fertility rites. He owned a deck but we have no record of him reading for others.
Are there novels structured entirely around the tarot? Yes. Italo Calvino’s The Castle of Crossed Destinies uses tarot cards to generate its narrative. Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain (1973) is a film built as a tarot spread. More recently, Rachel Pollack’s Godmother Night (1996) uses the cards as chapter markers.
How do I interpret religious symbols in a tarot reading? Start with the symbol’s historical meaning, a cross means sacrifice, a cup means receptivity, and then ask what it meant in the culture that produced the deck. For the Rider-Waite, that culture was Edwardian Christian occultism. Do not project modern secular meanings onto medieval images.
The same sacred well that fed Dante, Blake, and Eliot also fed the artists who painted the Visconti-Sforza cards and the occultists who reinterpreted them. The images are not exhausted. Every time we lay out a spread, we are arranging verses from a poem that is still being written. For more on how these symbols move between systems, see our guide to tarot symbolism, the glossary entry on The Fool, and our exploration of the Major Arcana.