Tarot as Living Heritage: Preserving Britain’s Living Tarot Culture
Finbarre Snarey
- Region:
- Anywhere
- Notice Period:
- Regular (more than one month's notice)
- Type:
- Professional speaker / journalist and researcher
- Fee:
- Paid: From £75, plus agreed travel expenses where applicable. Online talks by arrangement.
- Category:
- Humanities
- Updated:
- 14th August 2026
- Tagged:
- Tarot | Rider Waite Smith | British Cultural History
I spend a huge amount of my time studying historical tarot cards and I have found myself wondering if we have been focusing our preservation efforts on the wrong thing.
The physical cards themselves actually survive remarkably well in archives and collections. What is far easier to lose, and far harder to record, are the real human beings, personal rituals, and oral traditions built around them.
Tarot is not just a museum piece or a set of antique pictures, because it is a living, breathing culture. Readers learn face-to-face from other readers, decks are annotated with hand-written notes and handed down through families, distinct local styles develop, and communities form around shared tables.
Through my work with the British Tarot Archive and the UK Rider-Waite-Smith living-heritage submission, I have become deeply invested in finding ways to document this intangible culture while it is still actively thriving around us.
In this talk, we will trace the story of the Rider-Waite-Smith tradition in Britain, looking beyond the cardboard cards to the living readers, teachers, collectors, and quiet everyday practices that have sustained tarot for over a century. If we only preserve the physical objects, we risk keeping the cards while losing the human warmth that gave them meaning in the first place.
No prior knowledge of tarot is required, so just bring an interest in how human traditions endure.
Views: 76 | Enquiries: 0About Finbarre Snarey
Hello! I am an arts and culture journalist, podcast producer, and tarot researcher based in Nottinghamshire.
I founded the British Tarot Archive and created Tarot Interviews: a world-first international interview platform where tarot cards guide conversations with best-selling authors, musicians, and cultural leaders.
At the heart of everything I do is a fascination with hidden stories sitting just beneath familiar things: the real human lives that might be tucked away in century-old tarot cards, the gentle ways traditions survive as they are passed from hand to hand, and the magic that happens when you approach an interview or a piece of technology fitting into your work like a jigsaw piece.
Much of my research focuses on the iconic Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot, the extraordinary life and world of artist Pamela Colman Smith, and tarot as a vibrant, continuous thread in Britain’s cultural history. I have presented my research at places like Goldsmiths, University of London, and my day-to-day work spans writing, producing podcasts, digging through archives, and speaking at festivals.
My talks almost always start with a spark of curiosity. I find a little thread, pull on it, and see where it leads us. Sometimes that thread is an easily overlooked detail in a single card. Other times it is a 400-year-old witchcraft trial, or the simple question of whether an everyday mobile phone can pull off the job of thousands of pounds’ worth of studio tech.
Above all, these sessions are crafted for curious minds. You do not need to arrive knowing anything about tarot or history, so just bring your enthusiasm and we will explore it together.
Other Talks on SpeakerNet by Finbarre Snarey
- Arcana Symmetry: The Hidden Structure of Tarot Cards
- Ghosts and Swords: Hidden Lives in the Tarot
- Left on Read: Rethinking the Art of the Interview
- High Art, Low Budget: Making Big Ideas with Tiny Tech
- By Wicked Practises: Witchcraft, Power, and the Fall of Belvoir
- A Beginner’s Guide to Tarot
- A Beginner’s Guide to Podcasting
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