Tarot: from a 1440s card game to pick-a-card videos
Who teaches tarot, which free lessons millions watch, what readings and courses cost in Brussels, and what science says about why a reading can feel so personal. Every number is checked and linked.
Start learning for freeTest it yourself
At a glance
Meet the cards
A tarot deck has 22 Major Arcana (named cards such as The Fool, Death or The World) and 56 Minor Arcana in four suits (wands, cups, swords and pentacles, or coins). The deck most English-language books use is the Rider-Waite-Smith deck of 1909: Arthur E. Waite directed it and the artist Pamela Colman Smith (1878–1951) drew every card, giving each suit card a full picture scene (Wikipedia).
Keywords are the common reading-tradition meanings, not predictions. Card images: Rider-Waite-Smith deck, Pamela Colman Smith, published 1909 by William Rider & Son; public domain (published before 1931 in the US; the artist died in 1951, so EU life+70 protection ended on 1 January 2022). Scans from Wikimedia Commons.
Three lives of the tarot
Where to learn tarot
The free options are surprisingly good. These are the teachers and schools in Web researcher’s report, with prices checked on their own pages on 10 October 2026.
Popular videos: lessons, history and sceptics
Learn all 78 cards
The history
Sceptics, pick-a-card and the “how does it work?” question
What readings and courses cost
| What | Price | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Reading in Brussels-Uccle (Roger Dzoltan) | €40 (30 min) / €70 (60 min) / €110 (in depth) | rogerdzoltan.be |
| Reading in Forest (Philippe Koeune) | €70 (1 h) / €95 (1 h 30) | selire.com |
| Phone readings, Keen | $3.00 to $9.99 a minute | keen.com |
| Phone readings, California Psychics | $5 to $23 a minute | californiapsychics.com |
| Marseille tarot workshop (Super Imaginaire) | €140 a day (solidarity €110) | superimaginaire.com |
| 8-workshop module (Roger Dzoltan) | €390 incl. VAT | rogerdzoltan.be |
| 45-hour training (CESOI, Brussels) | €900 | cesoi.be |
| Biddy Tarot Certification | $1,997 | biddytarot.com |
| Kickstarter deck: The Alleyman’s Tarot | $1,404,172 raised from 19,275 backers | World of Playing Cards |
Tarot in Brussels and Belgium
There is no tarot Meetup group in Brussels: ten searches on Meetup turned up only unrelated groups and our own THE Golden Library Research Group. The local teaching is mostly French-language Tarot de Marseille, with Dutch Rider-Waite courses in Flanders.
Is tarot growing?
In Belgium, interest in “tarot” fell from an average of 85.5 in the first year of the last five to 54.4 in the most recent year; “tirage tarot” fell from 66.4 to 11.1. Worldwide, “tarot” peaked in the week of 31 May 2026. Inside Belgium, the English “tarot reading” is searched most in Brussels, French terms in Wallonia and “tarotkaarten” in Flanders.
What science says
Test it yourself: the blind reading
You can run a small version of Blackmore’s test with friends:
- Everyone writes a short situation and a question on a card.
- A reader draws three cards for each person and writes a reading.
- Each person gets two readings in random order: their own and someone else’s.
- Rate both from 0 to 10 and guess which one is yours.
- Count how many guessed right. By chance alone, about half will.
With 10 to 20 people this is a demonstration, not a study, but it shows how the Barnum effect works.
FAQ
Sources
- Wikipedia: Tarot
- Wikipedia: Tarot card reading
- Wikipedia: Visconti-Sforza tarot
- Wikipedia: Tarot de Marseille
- Wikipedia: Rider-Waite tarot deck
- Wikipedia: Pamela Colman Smith
- Wikipedia: Etteilla
- Wikipedia: Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn
- Pew Research Center, 21 May 2025
- Blackmore 1983 (PDF)
- Wikipedia: Barnum effect
- Wikipedia: Cold reading
- RTL Info, 2 Nov 2025
- Biddy Tarot certification
- Benebell Wen: companion course
- Global Spiritual Studies
- Lisa Boswell: The Tarot Course
- Keen
- California Psychics pricing
- World of Playing Cards: The Alleyman’s Tarot
- Roger Dzoltan: consultations
- Se Lire (Philippe Koeune)
- Wikimedia Commons: Rider-Waite tarot deck
Also used: YouTube channel and search pages, Meetup searches, the Apple App Store and Google Trends (pytrends), all checked 10 Oct 2026, from THE Golden Library report “Tarot: history, schools, audiences, money and science”. Image credits: tarot card scans are public domain (Wikimedia Commons); video thumbnails belong to their YouTube channels; website previews are screenshots of the linked pages; charts are our own.
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