The Oswald Wirth tarot of 1889

Oswald Wirth (1860–1943) was a Swiss-born occultist, writer and freemason who spent most of his working life in France. Freemasonry was not a footnote for him: he edited masonic journals, wrote at length on the symbolism of the lodge, and read the tarot in the same key — as a graded series of images through which a person comes to understand himself.

In Paris he moved in the circle around Stanislas de Guaita, the Marquis who founded the Kabbalistic Order of the Rose-Croix, and worked alongside figures such as Papus. Where Papus systematised the tarot, Wirth refined its pictures.

The first version of the deck appeared in 1889 and consisted solely of the twenty-two Major Arcana. Wirth drew the cards by hand for a small, limited edition made for de Guaita's students, based on the old Tarot de Marseille but with its symbolism deliberately deepened: attributes corrected, gestures made meaningful, colours chosen for what they signified rather than for what the woodblock printers had happened to use.

He returned to the images decades later for Le Tarot des Imagiers du Moyen Âge (1927), the book that carried his deck to a wide readership and shaped nearly every esoteric tarot that followed. The plates shown here are the 1889 drawings, scanned by the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

For Wirth the Major Arcana are complete in themselves. Twenty-two images answer to the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet and to the twenty-two paths of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, so the series is a closed alphabet of the soul: the numbered arcana from the Juggler to the World describe a single journey, and the minor cards add nothing to it.

He kept the Marseille ordering, with Justice at VIII and Strength at XI, and left Le Fou outside the count — the wanderer who is either the initiate too free to be numbered, or the man who has lost his thread. His plate of the 22 Arcanes du Tarot Kabbalistique gives Aleph to Resh for arcana I to XX, Shin to Le Fou and Tau to Le Monde.

This is the heart of Wirth's approach. The cards describe stages of development, not events: the Chariot's victory is over oneself, Strength closes the lion's jaws without a weapon, the Hanged Man consents to his own suspension, and the Tower falls because it was built on presumption. Read this way, a card never tells you what will happen — it shows you which work is in front of you.

His symbolism carries the lodge with it: an apprentice at his bench, a threshold guarded, a trial at the fork in the road, a raising up. None of it requires initiation to be useful, and Wirth wrote for readers who had none.

In The Veil, a Wirth reading uses the twenty-two arcana alone. Each card shows its number and Hebrew letter and carries a note in Wirth's own symbolic reading, and the interpretation treats the draw as a mirror for your own inner work — set, as always, beside your chart and your numbers.

The Three Worlds spread suits this deck as well as it suits Papus: one card for the divine, one for the human, one for the natural, so the same law can be traced through all three.

The plates are Wirth's 1889 drawings, held by the Bibliothèque nationale de France and published on Wikimedia Commons. They are in the public domain.