Thomas Leek

Historiography of the Tarot conventionally assumes a strict division between games and divinatory practices. Drawing from structural linguistics and folklore studies, I examine the development of Tarot as a generative symbolic system with continuity in hermetic philosophical tradition. Fairy tales share similar roots with Tarot as logical systems of meaning generation, but their transformation in the 19th century into canonical nationalist monuments contrasts sharply with Tarot’s reception as a flexible system of storytelling and magic. The Tarot’s persistence as an open, generative system offers insights into how and why symbolic technologies resist institutional control, with implications for understanding contemporary concerns around AI and narrative generation.

Thomas Leek is Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. He completed his PhD at the University of Minnesota in Germanic Philology and Medieval Studies. Most recently, he has been researching at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin on the use of embedded language models to evaluate semantic similarities between phrases in pre-modern languages. He has published on linguistics, folklore, and religion in journals including Indogermanische Forschungen, Folklore, and Western Folklore.