Fortune-telling methods: cards, palms and tea leaves
Where the methods came from, how they work in the tradition, and what history can and can’t confirm.
About this shelf
Fortune-telling methods don’t start from a birth date. Cards, palms and tea leaves are read in the moment, by a reader, and each method has a history shorter or stranger than its reputation.
This shelf traces where those methods came from, starting with tarot, which was a card game for about 350 years before anyone is known to have read fortunes with it. Each article sets what readers hold next to what historians can document, and the printed fortune card of the old arcade machines gets its own history here too.
What you will find here
- Tarot as a card game, and its later life as a reading deck
- Palmistry, tea-leaf reading and other parlour methods
- Coin-op fortune machines and the printed card
- How a reading is put together, in the tradition’s own terms
In brief
Fortune-telling takes many forms, from laying out cards to reading palms, tea leaves, crystal balls and talking boards.1
Tarot cards were known in Europe from the 1400s but were first read for divination in late 18th-century France, and palmistry and tea-leaf reading reached a peak of popularity in the late 1800s and early 1900s.1
On this shelf
Coming to this shelf
Questions we are researching now. Each one goes up once every fact has a source.
- Where did palm reading come from?
- How did tea-leaf reading become a parlour pastime?
- Who invented the Ouija board?
- What were the first coin-operated fortune-telling machines?
Down the midway
Sources for this page
- SFO Museum: One Step Beyond: Fortune-Telling and the Paranormal. Read on · Museum
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