Journal ·
Runes vs tarot: what the sources actually support
People ask me whether runes are "older" or "more authentic" than tarot. The honest answer is more interesting than yes or no. Runes are far older as a writing system. Tarot has the longer documented history as a divination tool. Modern rune reading as practiced today is largely a twentieth-century development that draws on genuinely old material. Here is the evidence, with each claim labelled.
Tarot: the floor
Tarot cards appear in northern Italy in the fifteenth century as a trick-taking card game. Their use for divination is documented from the eighteenth century: Antoine Court de Gébelin published his essay on the tarot in volume eight of Le Monde primitif in 1781, and the cartomancer Etteilla (Jean-Baptiste Alliette) issued the first manuals of tarot divination between 1783 and 1785 (Decker, Depaulis and Dummett, A Wicked Pack of Cards, 1996). That is roughly 250 years of continuous divinatory practice.Attested
Runes: the floor
The Elder Futhark is a writing system of twenty-four characters, attested in inscriptions from around the 2nd century CE. The inscriptions are mostly names, ownership marks, maker's marks and short formulas.Attested
The names of the runes are not attested from the Elder Futhark period. They are reconstructed from the later rune poems (Old English, likely composed early but surviving in a 10th-century copy; Norwegian, a 17th-century copy of a lost 13th-century manuscript; Icelandic, manuscripts from around 1500) and from the Gothic letter names. . (The Rune poem overview on Wikipedia summarises the manuscript dating.)Reconstructed
The link people want: rune divination in antiquity
Three pieces of evidence get cited. Each needs its status.
Tacitus, Germania 10 (c. 98 CE). He describes Germanic peoples cutting a branch from a fruit-bearing tree into slips, marking them with "certain marks" (notae), scattering them on a white cloth, and having a priest or head of household pick up three and interpret them. It is an attested description of lot-casting. He does not say the marks were runes, and the oldest securely runic inscriptions postdate his text. The link between his notae and runes is a hypothesis, not a record.Attested
Hávamál 138–145. Odin hangs nine nights on the tree, takes up the runes, and the following stanzas speak of knowing how to carve, read, stain and send them. It is attested poetry about runes as powerful knowledge. It describes no casting method.Attested
Sagas and later accounts. Various sagas mention runes carved for healing, cursing or protection, and some mention lots (hlutir) being cast. Runic magic and lot-casting are each attested on their own; the two are not described together as a system of reading a question.Attested
So: lot-casting is old, runes are old, runic magic is attested, and the specific practice of casting runes to answer a question is a connection the sources do not make explicit. Honest rune readers should say so.
Where modern rune reading comes from
The rune-reading method most people meet today, a set of twenty-four (or twenty-five, with a blank) small tiles, drawn or cast, with keyword meanings and reversals, took shape in twentieth-century popular books, especially from the 1980s onward. Reversals are borrowed from tarot practice. The blank rune is an invention of that period. Rune–zodiac and rune–moon pairings are contemporary eclectic practice.Modern
That does not make it worthless. It makes it modern, and it means the right comparison is not "runes vs tarot" as ancient versus recent, but "a smaller, older vocabulary with a short interpretive tradition" versus "a larger, newer vocabulary with a long interpretive tradition".
Why I read runes anyway
Three reasons, all personal.
First, the vocabulary is small. Twenty-four names, three poems, one myth of origin. I can hold all of it, and so can you after a few readings.
Second, the images are old and strange in a way I find useful. "Wealth is a source of discord among kinsmen." "Riding seems easy to every warrior while he is indoors." Those lines do work in a conversation about a real decision.
Third, the limits are visible. I can tell you exactly where the sources stop and where I begin. With a tradition this thin, there is nowhere to hide an invented certainty, and I like working without one.
If you want to try it
One question, in your own words. The first reading is free, and it comes with a photograph of your actual throw and a recording in which I label every claim the way this essay does. How a reading works.
Labels used on this page:
- Attested
- in a named, datable source
- Reconstructed
- a scholarly inference from later evidence
- Modern
- twentieth-century or later practice