Madonna’s Mystical Eras: Tarot and Psychic Themes in Her Music

Pop stars and tarot cards have something in common: both have a few seconds to tell you who they are. A card does it with a scene, a figure, a posture, a handful of objects and a colour scheme. A music video or a tour opening does it with a set, a costume and a gesture the camera can hold for three seconds. Madonna has been unusually deliberate about this for more than forty years, which makes her eras a useful case study for anyone learning to read symbols. This is a pop-culture essay, not a profile, and it stays with the published work.

How tarot imagery works, and why pop culture keeps copying it

Tarot began as a card game in 1430s Italy, and its trump cards showed the stock figures of the period: an emperor, a pope, a hermit, a wheel of fortune, death. Divinatory use came centuries later, and the images most people now recognise come from one deck: the Rider-Waite-Smith, drawn by Pamela Colman Smith for Arthur Waite and published in 1909. That deck’s choices, a jester stepping toward a cliff edge, a veiled woman between two pillars, a figure hanging upside down from a tree, a tower struck by lightning, are what film posters, album covers and fashion shoots borrow when they want to signal “mystical” without a caption.

The images travel well because each is a compact scene with a clear mood. You do not need the guidebook to feel that the Tower is a crisis or that the Star is relief. A reader learns to name the parts of the scene, say what the mood is, and turn that into a question. The same steps work for a music video.

1983 to 1986: the crucifix as a prop

Madonna’s first look mixed lace gloves, rubber bracelets, rosaries and crucifixes worn as jewellery: religious objects lifted out of their setting and placed on a dance-pop star, which was the point. At the first MTV Video Music Awards in 1984 she performed “Like a Virgin” in a wedding dress with a “Boy Toy” belt buckle, a costume saying two opposite things at once. The “Material Girl” video of 1985 recreated Marilyn Monroe’s “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” number, borrowing a ready-made icon. In tarot terms this is the Magician’s move: a cup, a wand, a sword and a coin are only props until someone uses them with intent.

1989: “Like a Prayer” and the church as a set

The “Like a Prayer” video, directed by Mary Lambert, was built from church imagery: a small chapel, a gospel choir, burning crosses in a field, marks appearing on the singer’s palms, and a statue of a Black saint that comes to life. Pepsi withdrew a commercial that used the song after the video aired, and the controversy is now part of pop history. The companion video for “Oh Father”, directed by David Fincher, used a funeral, a church interior and a snowbound childhood home in black and white. On the Blond Ambition tour of 1990, “Like a Prayer” was staged with candles and dancers in cassocks.

A tarot reader looking at the “Like a Prayer” video would reach for Judgement, the card in which figures rise from their coffins at a trumpet call: an awakening staged inside religious imagery. The video is not secretly about a card; the card and the video simply use the same stock scene to land the same mood.

1993 to 1995: the clown and the dream

The Girlie Show tour of 1993 ended with Madonna dressed as a Pierrot, the white-faced sad clown of European theatre. The Fool in the Rider-Waite-Smith deck descends from the same family of jesters and travelling players, so this is the closest her stage work has come to a literal tarot figure. The “Bedtime Story” video of 1995, directed by Mark Romanek, took a different route into the mystical, borrowing images from the surrealist painters Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington and from Frida Kahlo, and adding whirling dervishes. Floating figures, birds, water, a woman in a bed suspended in air: this is dream vocabulary, which in tarot is the Moon’s territory.

1998: “Ray of Light”, “Frozen” and the desert

The “Ray of Light” album, made with producer William Orbit, is the era most people mean when they call Madonna’s work mystical. One track, “Shanti/Ashtangi”, sets Sanskrit verses to an electronic beat. The “Frozen” video, directed by Chris Cunningham, puts her alone in a desert in a black gown with henna designs on her hands, and has her turn into a flock of black birds and a black dog. The “Nothing Really Matters” video dresses her in a red kimono among slow, stylised dancers. The era’s visual language was about stillness, light and transformation rather than provocation.

Two cards sit naturally beside this era. “Frozen” has the mood of the High Priestess: a veiled, still figure, water and darkness around her, something known but not yet spoken. “Ray of Light” as a whole has the mood of the Star: a figure pouring water under an open sky, the card readers use for relief after a hard passage. Again, these are pairings a reader might make as an exercise, not hidden meanings.

2002 to 2006: Hebrew letters, red string and a mirrored cross

Madonna’s study with the Kabbalah Centre was discussed in interviews at the time, and this essay leaves her beliefs to her. What reached the screen is clear enough. In the “Die Another Day” video of 2002, Hebrew letters appear on her arm during the interrogation scenes. A red string bracelet turns up in photographs across the decade. The “Confessions on a Dance Floor” album of 2005 includes “Isaac”, built around a Yemenite Jewish song performed by Yitzhak Sinwani. On the Confessions Tour of 2006 she sang “Live to Tell” suspended on a mirrored cross wearing a crown of thorns, which drew public criticism from church figures.

There is a neat tarot footnote here. The one Rider-Waite-Smith card that carries Hebrew letters is the Wheel of Fortune, where the four letters of the divine name sit on the wheel between the letters T, A, R and O: a natural pairing for an era of cycles, reinvention and a disco mirror ball. The mirrored cross belongs with the Hanged Man, a figure suspended in full view, the card readers use for pause and a new angle.

2012 to 2015: cathedrals and nuns

The MDNA Tour of 2012 opened with church imagery on a stadium scale: chanting, a giant swinging censer, a bell, and the singer emerging from a confessional booth into “Girl Gone Wild”. The Rebel Heart Tour of 2015 staged “Holy Water” with dancers dressed as nuns on poles, followed by a Last Supper tableau. These are confrontational uses of religious scenery, and also the oldest part of her toolkit, going back to the crucifix necklaces of 1984. In tarot this is the Hierophant’s territory: the card of institutions and inherited rules, which readers use to ask whether a tradition is serving you or you are serving it.

2019: Madame X and the many-faced figure

The “Madame X” era introduced a character with an eye patch and a long list of roles: a secret agent, a teacher, a nun, a saint, a head of state, a prisoner, among others. The accompanying tour was staged in theatres rather than arenas. The “Dark Ballet” video cast the rapper Mykki Blanco as Joan of Arc, and “God Control” dramatised a nightclub shooting as a protest piece. One character who is also many characters is the closest pop analogue to the court cards: sixteen figures who are not people so much as roles and moods that one person moves through.

Eras and the cards a reader might pair with them

Why the method matters more than the pairings

Every pairing above could be argued with, and that is the useful part. Naming a scene’s parts, stating its mood and choosing a card trains the same muscle a reader uses when the Eight of Cups lands next to the Tower. Tarot, on this site’s view, is structured reflection: a card is a prompt for a better question about a real situation, and a music video can do the same job.

What this essay does not claim

• That the artist is psychic, prophetic or “channelling”. No performer predicts events, and neither does a tarot card.
• Anything about her private beliefs. Only the published work is discussed here.
• That songs “activate chakras” or carry healing frequencies. Music moves people; that is not evidence of energy transmission.
• That any era was designed around a tarot card. The pairings are a reading exercise, not a decoding.

Related reading

• Tarot and the Fool’s Journey
• Introduction to Tarot Cards and How They Work
• Using Kabbalah and Hermeticism with Tarot Cards
• Using Color Symbols in Tarot Cards
• What Does the Fool Card Really Mean?
• Meaning of the High Priestess Card

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