The Witchcraft Act 1735 & Why Tarot Reading Was Illegal in Britain Until 1951

The Witchcraft Act 1735: Why Reading Tarot Cards Was Illegal in Britain Until 1951

Most people who practice tarot, read palms, or offer psychic readings in Britain today do so without giving much thought to the legal history that surrounds their practice. They should. Until 1951, fortune telling in Britain — which included reading tarot cards for payment — was a criminal offence. The law that made it so was over two hundred years old, and the last person imprisoned under it went to jail in the middle of the Second World War, while Winston Churchill was Prime Minister. The story of how Britain came to criminalise divination, why it kept that law on the books for so long, and what finally forced its repeal is one of the strangest threads in the history of British law — and it matters directly to anyone who picks up a tarot deck today.

The Law That Ended the Witch Trials

To understand the Witchcraft Act 1735 you need to understand what it replaced. Britain had been executing people for witchcraft since the reign of Henry VIII. The Witchcraft Act 1542 made witchcraft a capital offence for the first time in English law. A new Act in 1562 under Elizabeth I extended the penalties and transferred trials from church courts to ordinary criminal courts. The most severe version came under James I in 1604 — a king who was personally obsessed with demonology and had published a book on the subject. Under the 1604 Act the punishment for witchcraft was death, and witch hunting in Britain reached its peak in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Estimates of the number of people executed for witchcraft in Scotland alone during this period range from 2,500 to 4,000. The great majority were women. The last person to be legally executed for witchcraft in Britain was Janet Horne in Scotland in 1727.

By 1735 the intellectual climate had shifted dramatically. The Enlightenment had taken hold among educated circles and the idea that witches could genuinely cause harm through supernatural means was increasingly regarded as superstition. The Witchcraft Act 1735, passed under George II, reflected this changed view entirely. It did not simply restrict the prosecution of witches — it abolished the entire legal concept of witchcraft as a genuine phenomenon. The Act stated that no prosecution could be commenced against any person for witchcraft, sorcery, enchantment or conjuration. Witch hunting was over.

But the 1735 Act replaced one crime with another. Rather than punishing people for practising witchcraft, it punished people for pretending to practise it. The new criminal offence was the fraudulent claim to possess supernatural powers — including, explicitly, undertaking to tell fortunes. The relevant clause made it an offence to pretend to exercise or use any kind of witchcraft, sorcery, enchantment, or conjuration, or undertake to tell fortunes, or pretend from skill or knowledge in any occult or crafty science to discover where or in what manner any goods or chattels supposed to have been stolen or lost may be found. The maximum penalty was one year in prison, public exposure in the pillory, and a requirement to post surety for good behaviour on release. The pillory provision was later abolished but the imprisonment provision remained.

The logic behind this clause is worth dwelling on. The lawmakers of 1735 did not believe witchcraft or fortune telling was real. They believed it was fraud — that people claiming occult powers were exploiting the credulous for money. The law was not designed to suppress genuine spiritual practice but to prosecute con artists. The practical effect, however, was that anyone charging money for a tarot reading, a palm reading, or any form of divination was potentially committing a criminal offence.

The Vagrancy Act Makes Things Worse

In 1824 Parliament passed the Vagrancy Act, which added another layer of legal prohibition on fortune telling. Under the Vagrancy Act anyone who pretended or professed to tell fortunes, or used any subtle craft, means, or device by palmistry or otherwise to deceive and impose on any of His Majesty's subjects, was deemed a rogue and vagabond and liable to imprisonment for up to three months. Unlike the Witchcraft Act which required a full jury trial, the Vagrancy Act allowed magistrates to deal with cases summarily without a jury, making it a much more practical tool for prosecuting fortune tellers. In practice fortune tellers were more commonly prosecuted under the Vagrancy Act than under the Witchcraft Act throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A 1921 judge stated plainly that the act of fortune telling was an offence in itself and that intention to deceive did not need to be separately proved.

Undercover police operations against fortune tellers and spiritualists were common throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Plainclothes officers would attend séances or consult fortune tellers, pay a small fee, and then use that payment as the basis for prosecution. The sums involved were often trivial — a few shillings given as a donation to a spiritualist church was enough. British spiritualists, whose movement had grown enormously following the mass bereavement of the First World War, were particularly targeted. Their community meetings were raided, their ministers prosecuted, their donations treated as evidence of fraud.

Helen Duncan and the Last Witch Trial

The most extraordinary prosecution under the Witchcraft Act came in 1944, in the middle of the Second World War. Helen Duncan was a Scottish medium born in Callander in 1897 who by the 1920s had built a substantial reputation giving séances across Britain. During her performances she claimed to produce ectoplasm — a physical manifestation of spirit energy — from her mouth and nose, which would form into the apparent shapes of deceased individuals. The London Spiritualist Alliance investigated her in 1931 and concluded her ectoplasm was cheesecloth, and she had already been convicted of fraudulent mediumship in Edinburgh in 1933. Nevertheless she continued working as a medium and retained a substantial following.

Her problems with the wartime authorities began in November 1941 when, during a séance in Portsmouth, she claimed to have spoken with the spirit of a sailor who told her that his ship, HMS Barham, had been sunk. This was true — the battleship had been torpedoed by a German submarine and 861 men had been killed. The problem was that the Admiralty had kept the sinking secret from the public in an attempt to maintain morale. Nobody outside those directly informed should have known. The revelation through Duncan's séance alarmed the naval authorities, who began watching her.

In January 1944, as the Allied command was planning D-Day and wartime secrecy was at its most intense, police raided a séance Duncan was conducting at the Master's Temple Church of Spiritual Healing in Portsmouth. She was initially charged under the Vagrancy Act. The authorities then decided the case warranted something more serious and eventually charged her under the Witchcraft Act 1735 — a law that had barely been used in decades. The decision was not primarily because of any conviction that she was genuinely practising forbidden occult arts. The Director of Public Prosecutions noted that counsel felt the case might be more easily proved in the shape of conspiracy to contravene the somewhat ancient act than by seeking to substantiate a common law fraudulent conspiracy. In other words, the 1735 law was convenient.

Duncan's trial opened at the Old Bailey on 23 March 1944. It lasted eight days and attracted enormous press coverage. Around thirty people appeared as witnesses in her defence, claiming to have seen genuine spirit manifestations at her séances. One theatre critic testified to the integrity of her ectoplasm. The prosecution presented photographic evidence that her ectoplasm was made from cheesecloth, paper, and egg white, hidden inside her body and regurgitated during performances. She was found guilty and sentenced to nine months imprisonment at Holloway Prison.

Winston Churchill, then Prime Minister, was not impressed. In a memo to the Home Secretary Herbert Morrison dated 3 April 1944 Churchill wrote demanding a report on why the Witchcraft Act 1735 was used in a modern court of justice and describing the prosecution as a piece of obsolete tomfoolery that had wasted the time of the court during a period when the British legal system had more pressing matters to attend to. His contempt for the prosecution did not prevent it proceeding, and Duncan served six months of her sentence before being released in September 1944.

One more person was convicted under the Witchcraft Act after Duncan. Jane Rebecca Yorke, a seventy-two-year-old medium from east London who had among other things predicted the Second World War would end in October 1944, was convicted on seven counts against the Act in September 1944 and fined five pounds due to her age. She was the last person ever convicted under the Witchcraft Act 1735.

The Entertainment Purposes Only Disclaimer

The 1951 Fraudulent Mediums Act finally repealed both the Witchcraft Act 1735 and the relevant sections of the Vagrancy Act 1824 that had been used against fortune tellers and spiritualists. The campaign for repeal had been led largely by Labour MPs including Thomas Brooks and Walter Monslow, both of whom were sympathetic to spiritualism. Helen Duncan's prosecution was widely considered to have been unjust and to have demonstrated that the old law had become an instrument of harassment rather than genuine consumer protection.

The 1951 Act was not a simple legalisation of fortune telling. It still prohibited anyone from claiming to be a medium or to exercise powers of telepathy, clairvoyance or similar in order to deceive others and make money. But it acknowledged for the first time that not all mediums and readers were fraudulent. More significantly for the world of tarot reading specifically, the new Act included a clause that exempted anything done solely for the purpose of entertainment from its provisions.

That exemption is the direct origin of the entertainment purposes only disclaimer that tarot readers, psychics, and fortune tellers in Britain still add to their services today. When you see a tarot reader's website or promotional material describing their readings as being for entertainment purposes only, they are echoing the exact language of a parliamentary act passed in 1951 to protect spiritual practitioners from criminal prosecution. The disclaimer is not mere marketing caution. It is a direct inheritance from a law passed to resolve a two-hundred-year-old legal controversy about whether fortune telling should be a crime.

The Fraudulent Mediums Act 1951 was itself repealed in 2008 and replaced by the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations, which now govern claims made in a commercial context including those relating to psychic or spiritual services. The current legal position is that offering spiritual readings is entirely lawful provided practitioners do not make claims that constitute unfair commercial practices under consumer protection law. The centuries of explicit criminalisation are over.

What This Means for the Practice of Tarot

The history outlined above has a direct bearing on how tarot reading has been understood and practised in Britain. The long period of legal prohibition meant that tarot and other forms of divination existed in a grey area of British life for centuries — practised widely but always potentially subject to prosecution if someone with authority decided to act. The spiritualist community that kept many divination traditions alive during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did so under constant legal threat. The raids, the undercover prosecutions, the trivial fines and occasional imprisonments — these were the conditions under which British tarot and psychic practice developed.

The repeal in 1951 mattered not only legally but culturally. Gerald Gardner, the founder of Wicca, published his first openly pagan books directly after the repeal, having previously been unable to describe his practice publicly without risk. The modern British pagan revival, the growth of open tarot practice, the proliferation of spiritual shops and communities — all of this became possible in the legal environment created by the 1951 Act. The world of British spirituality that exists today, including the ability to buy a tarot deck freely, practise openly, and offer readings professionally, rests on a legal foundation that is less than eighty years old.

The tarot cards you pick up today carry more history than the imagery on them suggests. They were played with as a game in fifteenth century Italy, reimagined as occult tools by French scholars in the eighteenth century, suppressed by British law well into the twentieth, and finally freed into open practice within living memory. The entertainment purposes only notice that still appears on spiritual services across Britain is the last faint echo of two hundred years of prohibition, and a reminder that the freedom to read the cards is newer than most people think.

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