How to Dispose of Old Tarot Cards — Retiring a Deck the Honest Way
Burn it, bury it, recycle it or pass it on? What a tarot deck is actually made of, which endings the material survives, and why no tradition requires any of them.
Contents
There is no rule anywhere in the historical record that requires a tarot deck to be destroyed, burned or buried. Tarot began as a card game in fifteenth-century northern Italy and was not used for divination until the 1780s, so the disposal rituals circulating online are modern inventions and entirely optional. Practically, the material decides most of it: almost every mass-market deck is paper cardstock with a plastic coating on both faces, which means it will not compost, is usually rejected by curbside paper recycling, and releases fumes from the coating if you burn it. That leaves the endings that actually work — pass it on, sell or trade it, retire it to a box, or put it in household waste after marking the ending yourself. The limit worth respecting is not spiritual but legal: open burning of household waste is restricted or banned in many US states and municipalities.
Tarot appeared in northern Italy in the 1440s as a card game (trionfi), and the earliest documented use of tarot for divination dates to the 1780s with Court de Gébelin and Etteilla.
Source/tradition: Michael Dummett, The Game of Tarot (1980); Decker, Depaulis & Dummett, A Wicked Pack of Cards (1996)
Most mass-market tarot decks are paper cardstock with a plastic coating or laminate on both faces, which is why they resist water, do not compost, and are commonly rejected by curbside paper recycling.
Source/tradition: Card-printing material specifications; municipal recycling guidance on coated and laminated paper (accessed 2026)
Open burning of household waste is prohibited or restricted by law in many US states and municipalities, with rules varying by county and by air-quality season.
Source/tradition: US EPA guidance on backyard burning; state open-burning regulations (accessed 2026)
Burning or burying an object to mark its ending is a genuinely old and widespread pattern in European and American folk practice — but it is not attached to tarot in any historical source.
Source/tradition: Folklore record; no tarot-specific attestation before the twentieth century
Readers commonly retire a deck by cleansing it, keeping a single card as a marker, and passing the rest on to another reader.
Source/tradition: Contemporary reader practice, reported consistently across tarot communities
A deck can hold, absorb or transmit negative energy to whoever receives it next.
Source/tradition: No evidence; the claim belongs to twentieth-century popular occultism, not to the older card or divination record
A tarot deck must be destroyed, must never be sold, or must never be given away.
Source/tradition: No such rule appears in any historical or traditional source
VERIFIED = verifiable in scientific or official sources · TRADITIONAL = historically or culturally recorded · LIVED PRACTICE = widely practiced, experiential knowledge · NOT PROVEN = spiritual interpretation, not scientifically established.
How to Dispose of Old Tarot Cards — Retiring a Deck the Honest Way
This article covers what actually happens to a tarot deck when you burn it, bury it, recycle it or hand it on, and which of those the material will survive. What it will not do is tell you that a deck has to be destroyed, or that passing one on sends anything along with it.
Quick answer
There is no rule anywhere in the historical record that requires a tarot deck to be destroyed, burned or buried. Tarot began as a card game in fifteenth-century northern Italy and was not used for divination until the 1780s, so the disposal rituals circulating online are modern inventions and entirely optional. Practically, the material decides most of it: almost every mass-market deck is paper cardstock with a plastic coating on both faces, which means it will not compost, is usually rejected by curbside paper recycling, and releases fumes from the coating if you burn it. That leaves the endings that actually work — pass it on, sell or trade it, retire it to a box, or put it in household waste after marking the ending yourself. The limit worth respecting is not spiritual but legal: open burning of household waste is restricted or banned in many US states and municipalities.
First: are you disposing of it, or just done reading with it?
These are different problems, and most people arrive with the second one while searching for the first.
Done reading with it covers the deck whose art you never warmed to, the beginner deck you outgrew, the gift that was never your system, the deck you associate with a bad year. Nothing needs to be destroyed here. A drawer solves it. So does giving it away.
Actually disposing of it is a narrower case: the deck is water-damaged, mouldy, chewed, missing cards, or you are clearing out an estate and there is more here than anyone can rehome. This is a waste question with a small ceremony attached if you want one, and the material facts below are what matter.
Sorting yourself into one of those two before you go further will save you from performing an irreversible ritual on a perfectly good deck at eleven at night. Which is, by a wide margin, the most common regret in this whole subject.
What a tarot deck is actually made of
This is the part that decides your real options, and almost nobody mentions it.
A modern printed deck is paper cardstock with a coating on both faces. Depending on the printer, that coating is a plastic film laminate, a varnish, or a UV-cured layer, and its job is to stop the cards absorbing skin oils, to let them slide against each other, and to survive years of shuffling. Better decks add a linen emboss under the coating. Some collector decks add metallic foil. A small number of decks are printed on genuine plastic composite rather than paper at all.
Three consequences follow, and they are the whole practical story:
It does not rot. Coated card in soil breaks down slowly and unevenly. The paper core eventually goes; the plastic layer does not, and it flakes into the ground as fragments.
It does not belong in paper recycling. Coated and laminated paper contaminates the pulp stream, which is why many municipal programs exclude it outright. Foil is worse.
It does not burn cleanly. You are burning plastic film and printing ink, not just paper. In an enclosed space that is genuinely unpleasant; in a garden fire pit it is also, in many places, illegal.
None of this makes any ending forbidden. It just means the gentle-sounding options — return it to the earth, send it back to the fire — are less gentle than they sound, and the boring options are cleaner than they sound.
The six endings people actually choose
Across reader communities the same short list comes up. Here is what each one costs you and what it actually achieves.
Burning a deck: what actually burns, and where it is illegal
Burning is the ending people reach for first, because fire reads as final. Two things are worth knowing before you strike the match.
You are burning plastic. The coating that made your cards shuffle well is a film over the paper, and film burns dirty — acrid smoke, soot, an unpleasant smell that lingers in fabric. Foiled cards are worse. This is not a moral objection; it is a practical one. Do not do it in a fireplace with the flue half open, do not do it in a cauldron on a balcony, and do not do it in a room you intend to sleep in.
It may not be legal where you live. Open burning of household waste is restricted or banned across large parts of the United States, with the rules set at state and often county level, and tightened further during fire season and on poor air-quality days. A seventy-eight card deck is a small fire, but a small illegal fire in a drought year is still the fire that gets away. Check your county's open-burning rules the same way you would before a garden bonfire.
If the gesture genuinely matters to you, there is a version that keeps it: burn one card — the one that carries the association — safely in a heatproof dish, and dispose of the other seventy-seven as waste. The symbolic weight was never in the volume.
Burying a deck: the part nobody mentions
Burial is the second instinct, usually described as returning the cards to the earth. Two problems.
The first is that they do not return. The paper core degrades over a year or two in damp soil; the coating persists and breaks into flakes. What you have buried is a slow-release scattering of plastic in a garden you may not own for long.
The second is that burial is not a tarot tradition. It is a general folk pattern — objects put into the ground to mark endings — that got attached to tarot recently and by association. That does not make it meaningless. It makes it yours, which is a different and more honest thing to say about it.
If the ground is the ending you want, the workable compromise is to bury the box or a single card and to dispose of the rest properly. And if the deck was in a natural fibre bag, the bag will genuinely compost; the cards will not.
Recycling: the coating problem, and how to check in two minutes
The honest answer is that it depends on your municipality and you can find out quickly.
Test the deck first. Bend a card. If it is glossy, slippery and springs back, it is coated. If it tears with a soft matte fibre edge and feels like heavy paper, it may be uncoated and recyclable with paper. Metallic edges or foil accents rule it out either way.
Then check the list, not the logo. Municipal programs publish an accepted-materials list. Look for how they treat "coated paper", "laminated paper" or "photo paper" — tarot cards sit in that category, not in the cardboard one. Rules differ between neighbouring counties, which is why generic advice about this is always wrong somewhere.
The tuck box is the easy win. The box almost always is plain paperboard and almost always recyclable, even when the cards are not. Separate them.
Temple tip: the thirty-day drawer
Before you destroy anything, put the deck in a drawer, write the date on the box, and set a reminder for thirty days out. That is the whole technique. The urge to get rid of a deck almost always arrives attached to something else — a reading you did not want, a breakup, a run of weeks where nothing landed — and it fades on roughly a month's timescale. What survives thirty days is a real decision about a deck. What does not survive thirty days was never about the cards. Readers who keep this habit report throwing away far less and regretting nothing, which is the only outcome that matters here, because the one thing you cannot do is un-burn a deck.
Passing it on — and the “what if it’s cursed” worry
The most common reason people hesitate to give a deck away is a fear that they would be handing something over with it. It is worth saying plainly: there is no evidence for that, and the idea is not old. It comes from twentieth-century popular occultism, in which objects are described as accumulating and discharging energy — a coherent and widely held framework, but a recent one, and not a finding.
What is real is association. A deck you used through a hard year will pull that year up when you handle it. That association is yours specifically; it does not travel, because the next person has no memories attached to those images. This is exactly why decks that were unbearable to one reader work perfectly well for the next.
If cleansing before handover makes the ending feel complete, it costs nothing and there are safe ways to do it. Smoke, a bell or bowl, a night on a windowsill, or simply sorting the deck back into Major-then-Minor order all work. What to avoid is anything wet or bright: no salt, no water, no direct sunlight. Salt scratches the coating, water swells the core, and sun fades ink faster than most people expect. Our guide to cleansing a secondhand or thrifted object covers the same problem for objects you are receiving rather than passing on.
Where the rules came from: a short, honest history
If you want to know how much weight to give the instructions you find online, it helps to know how old any of this is.
Tarot appears in northern Italy in the 1440s as trionfi, a trick-taking card game with a fifth suit of trumps, played by the same people who played every other card game. For roughly three hundred and forty years, that is all it is. It is still played as a game in parts of Europe today.
Divinatory tarot arrives in the 1780s in France: Antoine Court de Gébelin publishes the claim of Egyptian origin in 1781, and the cartomancer known as Etteilla produces the first deck designed for divination in 1785. The Egyptian story was invented and has no evidentiary basis, but it stuck, and the practice grew from there. The Rider–Waite–Smith deck most people learn on dates to 1909.
Which means: any rule about how a deck must be treated, retired or destroyed is at most a couple of centuries old, and in practice most of them are decades old and originate in books, forums and video. That is not a reason to dismiss them. It is a reason to hold them lightly, and to notice that the confident tone of “you must never” is doing work the history cannot support. If you are choosing a replacement, our comparison of the best first tarot decks and the difference between tarot and oracle cards both start from the same principle.
From the temple
The Witch of the Forest’s Tarot Magick Deck
Most decks get retired because the reader outgrew the system, not because anything went wrong. If what you want next is a full 78-card Rider–Waite structure with artwork that does not fight you, this is the straightforward answer — standard suits and titles, so every book and spread you already know still applies, with a guidebook for the cards you never quite settled. $22.99. Ships within 3 business days.
See the deckWhich ending fits your deck?
What condition is the deck in?
Voices from practice
Talking to people who have read for a decade or more, a few observations recur:
Long-time readers commonly report that the decks they nearly destroyed in a bad month are the ones they were glad to still own a year later.
A frequent observation among practitioners: a deck that felt impossible for one person tends to work perfectly well for the next, which is difficult to square with the idea that something travels with it.
Readers who have retired several decks tend to describe the useful part as the marking — a date, a kept card, a note about what changed — rather than the method of disposal itself.
What we don’t promise
We don’t promise that a deck holds energy, absorbs anything, or passes something to its next owner. There is no evidence for it, and the framework it comes from is about a century old, not ancient.
We don’t promise that any disposal method changes your circumstances, closes a chapter on its own, or protects the person you give the deck to. What a ritual reliably does is mark a decision you have already made. That is a real function and it is worth doing well; it is not a mechanism.
We don’t promise that a deck is bad luck, cursed, or dangerous, and we would encourage you to be suspicious of anyone who tells you otherwise while also selling you the fix.
And we don’t promise that your local recycling program will take the cards. That genuinely varies by county, and the only reliable source is your own municipality’s list.
Practically: how to retire a deck
1. Wait thirty days. Drawer, date on the box, reminder. Skip this only for genuinely damaged decks.
2. Sort it and check it. Back into order, count to seventy-eight. A complete deck is worth rehoming; an incomplete one is not, and knowing which you have decides everything downstream.
3. Mark the ending, if you want one. Pull one card that represents the period the deck covered, note the date on the back of the box, and keep that card or burn it safely in a dish. Small and specific beats large and dramatic.
4. Cleanse only with dry methods. Smoke, sound, moonlight, or reordering. Never salt, water or direct sun — all three damage cards.
5. Choose the ending by condition, not by feeling. Usable to a person; collectible to a sale or trade; sentimental to a box; damaged to waste, with the tuck box separated for recycling.
6. If you burn, burn small, outdoors, legally. One card in a heatproof dish, never a whole coated deck indoors, and check your county’s open-burning rules first.
If you are about to start over, it is worth reading how to prepare for a reading before the new deck arrives — the habit around the cards does more for the quality of a reading than the deck does. The full Tarot, Books & Divination range is where the replacements live, and the Sacred Smoke & Cleansing shelf covers the dry methods above.
Frequently asked questions
Do I have to burn or bury my tarot cards?
No. Nothing in the documented history of tarot requires it, and neither burning nor burying suits the material — coated cardstock does not compost and its plastic layer is not something you want in a fire pit. Burning and burying are modern practices borrowed from wider folk custom. They are available to you if the gesture matters; they are not obligations.
Can I give away a tarot deck I didn't get along with?
Yes, and it is the most common ending among long-time readers. A deck you never clicked with is usually a deck whose artwork or system did not match how you read, which says nothing about the deck and nothing about the next person. If it makes the handover feel cleaner, cleanse it first with smoke, sound or a night on a windowsill, and tell the recipient honestly why you are passing it on.
Are tarot cards recyclable?
Usually not in curbside paper collection. Most decks are laminated or plastic-coated cardstock, and coated paper is rejected by many municipal programs because the plastic layer contaminates the paper pulp stream. Uncoated, foil-free decks printed on plain card can often go in with paper. The only reliable answer is your own municipality's accepted-materials list — rules vary by county, not by country.
Is it bad luck to throw tarot cards in the trash?
There is no tradition that says so, and no evidence behind the idea. What is true is that binning something you had a long relationship with often feels abrupt, which is why people invent a gesture around it. If that is the pull you are feeling, keep one card, mark the date, and let the rest go as waste — the ritual is for you, not for the cards.
What do I do with a deck that came from someone who died?
Two patterns come up. Some readers keep the deck unused as an object of memory, which requires nothing of them. Others read with it deliberately, treating the deck as a continuing thread. Neither is more correct. If you want to use it but it feels heavy, work with it in short sessions at first rather than deciding in advance that it needs clearing.
Should I cleanse a deck before passing it on?
There is no requirement, but it is a courteous and common step, and the reason is social rather than metaphysical: it marks the deck as finished with you. Smoke, a bell or singing bowl, a night in moonlight, or simply sorting the deck back into order all serve. Avoid salt, water and direct sunlight — those genuinely damage the cards.
Sources & further reading
- Michael Dummett: The Game of Tarot (Duckworth, 1980) — the standard scholarly history of tarot as a card game from the 1440s onward
- Ronald Decker, Thierry Depaulis & Michael Dummett: A Wicked Pack of Cards: The Origins of the Occult Tarot (1996) — on Court de Gébelin (1781), Etteilla (1785) and the invention of the Egyptian origin story
- US Environmental Protection Agency: guidance on backyard and open burning of household waste, and state-level burn regulations (accessed 2026)
- Municipal recycling guidance on coated, laminated and photo paper — check your own county’s accepted-materials list, which is the only authority that applies to you (accessed 2026)
- Arthur Edward Waite: The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1911) — the source text for the Rider–Waite–Smith deck, for what the early modern system does and does not prescribe
- Related on the blog: Best first tarot deck compared · Tarot vs. oracle cards · Cleansing a secondhand object
