Pittsburgh Tarot: A Gilded Age Deck & Guide

New deck and guidebook zine offer an oracular tour of the Steel City

Iron and stained glass, brick and stone, clouds and rain—Pittsburgh is arguably America’s most gothic city. Permeated with an old-world sensibility, this once perennially dark and smoggy metropolis that built its wealth through coke and steel is moody, atmospheric, melancholic, and beautiful.

Eschewing contemporary stereotypes that reduce the city to football or sandwiches with fries on them, The Pittsburgh Tarot expresses the complicated and conflicted period of the city’s greatest expansion and influence during the 19th century. This is the same era that inspired the iconic Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot illustrations, and each of the cards in this deck pays homage to those original designs. The Major Arcana features significant historical figures, while the Minor Arcana is divided into suits of Neighborhoods, Rivers, Nature, and Industry.

The Pittsburgh Tarot features people, events, and themes from the 19th century and through La Belle Epoque, with a special focus on the Gilded Age, the city’s period of greatest significance. With an aesthetic style that calls to mind the work of artist Edward Gorey, this is a beautiful and unique expression of a city that’s as much sentiment and disposition as it is location.

Read on for an excerpt from the guidebook by Ed Simon! The Pittsburgh Tarot Deck and The Pittsburgh Tarot Guide, written by Ed Simon and with art by Steve Teare, are available for preorder from our site or your local bookseller (deck ships 9/1/25, guide ships 8/12/25).

“Mankind may wring her secrets from nature, and use their knowledge to destroy themselves.”
—R.H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926)

The year after the end of the Civil War, the assorted oil men of Pennsylvania—highly regarded engineers and geologists, drillers and miners—were humbled by a clairvoyant speculator named Abraham James. That was the year that James discovered that a farmer’s field in Venango County, which was assumed to be mineralogically fallow, contained millions of barrels of petroleum.

James, the son of Quakers, was a Spiritualist medium who made his fortune during the California gold rush by using divination, psychic seeing, and spirit contacting to unearth subterranean veins of wealth. In his 1873 book The Early and Later History of Petroleum, J.T. Henry compared James in Venango to Saul on the road to Damascus, while Harry Botsford in The Valley of Oil anointed the medium the status of Hebrew prophet. When The New York Times published its obituary of James in 1884, it compared his work at identifying wells not just in terms of American Manifest Destiny, but almost as a mystical theophany. The obituary describes how the “earth opened and an immense cavern yawned before them… [where] the spirit brought James to the margin of a lake of petroleum of unknown depth and extent,” where even after the vision disappated (and before the drill could get to work), the seer had been granted the promise of a “boundless store of wealth.” An American heaven.

Beginning in 1859, when the first oil drill in the world struck black gold in the Allegheny Mountains, western Pennsylvania experienced an economic boom as the black liquid spurted forth from Titusville to the appropriately named Oil City. The crude was transformed into kerosene in the refineries of Pittsburgh in order to light lamps from the shores of New York Harbor to the San Francisco Bay. For three decades, western Pennsylvania, already rich from coal, would accumulate even more wealth from the drilling and refinement of petroleum that had laid dormant beneath the Earth’s crust for hundreds of million years, the desiccated liquid remains of those creatures of the Devonian period who’d once skulked this landscape when it was a tropical paradise. The birthplace of the oil industry, Pennsylvania was the first Texas, the first Saudi Arabia, but not for the farmer George Porter and his presumed anemic land near Pleasantville, some hundred miles north of Pittsburgh.

A spare, slight, slender, and modest man, effete if not effeminate, the gentle-countenanced James was singular among the rough-neck oil men of the boom years; his psychic vocation was more apt for those Spiritualist drawing rooms that proliferated in the nineteenth-century, summoning knocking souls from the hereafter at seances and in trances. Spiritualism, that quasi-Christian faith that held to the medium’s ability to contact those who had departed this earthly realm, helped mourning parents to contact children lost at Gettysburg and Antietam, or aided editors in connecting with sage personages of the past, from Shakespeare to George Washington. James’ interests, on the other hand, were wholly more practical, which is to say lucrative.

Most Spiritualists searched for ghostly ectoplasm, but James’ fluid was oil. While surveying Potter’s field alongside two other men, James was suddenly struck into a convulsive fit, what his associate J.M. Peebles described two years later as being “in the body or out” whereby “Indian spirits controlled his body mechanically, while wisdom spirits induced the trance condition” (from Peebles’ The Practical of Spiritualism: A Biographical Sketch of Abraham James, Historic Description of his Oil-Well Discoveries in Pleasantville, Pa., through Spirit Direction). Suddenly, the medium pulled out a worn, copper penny that he used as a scrying tool for divination; he twisted about and fell to the green-grassed, frosted ground of Venango on that Halloween Day in 1866, and declared that a drill should be assembled directly on that spot. So was established the first “Harmonial Well,” named for the occult philosophy that defined James’ eccentric method. From Potter’s field, at its height, the Harmonial Well would produce around a hundred barrels of oil a day, making the farmer (and James) rich men.

“James and his Harmonial wells have largely disappeared from the historical record,” writes literary scholar Rachelle Raineri Zuck in the Journal of American Studies. She continues: “despite scientific innovation and revisionist history, the oil industry still bears traces of its psychometric past and must contend with the ways in which its future is dependent on successfully channeling the unseen.” Not just the oil industry, I would argue, but those other technocratic marvels that made Pittsburgh and her countryside the veritable forge and kiln of Gilded Age America: the coal studded through those veins of the earth, the very name conjuring the potency of blood; the iron transformed into steel as if the alchemist’s dream of the Philosophers’ Stone had been accomplished by a Bessemer Convertor; the raw silica sand rendered into glass as clear as a scrying mirror; and eventually the computers and robots that would be assembled in the shells of old mills, these novel devices as if the oracles and brazen heads of Medieval legend.

Want more Pittsburgh lore? Order The Pittsburgh Tarot Deck and The Pittsburgh Tarot Guide, coming to a shelf near you!