One by one, the cards are dealt upon the table while battles rage across the land. The Frenchman across the table desperately awaits the answers.
Or at least, that’s what Maria Grazia Chiuri, creative director for haute couture fashion house Christian Dior, imagines the company’s founder did when his sister Catherine, a French Resistance fighter, went missing during World War II.
“In my view, I think he was so scared about her situation that he probably went to the tarot cards to try to know some more, … trying to find hope in some signs,” she told Vogue.
Chiuri was fascinated to discover the common love she and the late designer shared—a penchant for divination through the deck of cards known as tarot. Since 2017, she has paid homage to the occult practice in three separate Dior collections, most clearly in her latest spring incarnation, which features replicas of the garb worn by the cards’ characters.
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“The now ubiquitous illustrated decks” have spent the last few years inserting themselves into social media and pop culture, with “Generation Z [as] … the driving force behind the renewed popularity and mainstreaming of the age-old esoteric system.”
And interest has only increased with the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, shrouded in uncertainty, people want to know the future more than ever—just like Dior.
Even the small town of Front Royal, Virginia, population 15,382, has been affected. In 2014, when Front Royal received “backlash” from Christians for taking steps to overturn “a law banning ‘magic arts,’” the single fortuneteller being affected decried it as an “instance of discrimination” and a lack of “interfaith tolerance,” waving the banner of religious liberty.
But that’s just one town. In a 2018 survey, the Pew Research Center found that 61 percent of American Christians actually follow these kinds of “‘New Age’ beliefs”—only one percent less than non-religious Americans. Is spiritualism becoming the chain that unites the world together?
As one practitioner said, “Today you’ll see people from all belief systems using tarot. … It’s not just for witches anymore.”
Sympathy for the Devil?
So, is that what tarot is—a beacon of enlightenment finally crawling out from under the victimhood of social “stigma,” as Religion News labeled it? Is it the whimsical balm for which the pandemic world has been pining? How do our kids respond to testimonies like Jenna Cargle’s?
“I got comfortable with myself. … I was no longer afraid to touch a tarot deck,” said Cargle, who began experimenting as a teenager.
In her tarot-inspired collection, Chiuri chose to pattern a look after the devil card. According to a tarot reader’s analysis published by Harper’s Bazaar, “This take on the card encourages embracing your darkness and integrating your animalistic side … into a new, evolved version of yourself. … Freedom comes in the understanding that your dark side isn’t dangerous, it’s intimate.”
What is being implied here is that there’s nothing scary about tarot; it’s simply something that comes with maturity and wisdom.
Truly, the serpent said it best: “You will not surely die. For God knows that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:4, 5). There’s nothing to worry about when it comes to practicing spiritualism, right?
Wrong.
Do not be deceived. This is the lie with which the devil seduced Eve in the Garden of Eden: You’re oppressed in obedience to God, but the devil can set you free.
“Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil; who put darkness for light, and light for darkness” (Isaiah 5:20); “this is the condemnation, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil” (John 3:19).
The Bible tells us, “Now the Spirit expressly says that in latter times some will depart from the faith, giving heed to deceiving spirits and doctrines of demons, speaking lies in hypocrisy” (1 Timothy 4:1, 2); “by … sorcery all the nations [will be] deceived” (Revelation 18:23).
The Bible is clear: “God is light and in Him is no darkness at all. If we say that we have fellowship with Him, and walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth” (1 John 1:5, 6).
It is the devil who is the “liar and the father of it” (John 8:44). He is “your adversary” (1 Peter 5:8). He has fashioned this darkness into the prophetic voice of our time—our “hope” even. No! There is only one way to know the future, and it is not in a deck of cards. It is through the Word of God: “We have the prophetic word confirmed, which you do well to heed as a light that shines in a dark place” (2 Peter 1:19).
Should we not instead be “looking for the blessed hope and glorious appearing of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ” (Titus 2:13)? “When they say to you, ‘Seek those who are mediums and wizards, who whisper and mutter,’ should not a people seek their God?” (Isaiah 8:19).
Do you have questions about the use of tarot or any other occult practice? So do many others. Listen to what the Bible has to say about it on this episode of Bible Answers Live.
The devil has thrown “deep darkness” (60:2) over the world, but God’s people have a mission: to “proclaim the praises of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light” (1 Peter 2:9). Learn how the light of God’s “glory will be seen upon you” (Isaiah 60:2) in Pastor Doug Batchelor’s free, online presentation “Adjusting to the Darkness.”
Shine God’s light today.