[1] Moakley is notable for having written the earliest and most significant account of the iconography of Tarot, a card game which originated in the Italian Renaissance.

Today, Tarot is both a popular game, and an object of fascination for occultists, fortune-tellers, and New Age enthusiasts around the world.

Her 1956 article on the subject and her 1966 book were both praised by Erwin Panofsky,[3] the foremost art historian of the Warburg School, as well as by Michael Dummett,[2] the preeminent scholar of playing-card and Tarot history.

As background, in the hope that even non-cultist readers might appreciate the book, she summarized some of the notable appropriations of the Tarot of the previous fifty years.

[nb 3][13] Moakley repeatedly mentioned this common theme of 20th-century Tarot enthusiasts, including writers like Eliot as well as occultists and folklorists.

Moakley's introduction to The Pictorial Key provided some personal insight into Waite's character, his humor, mysticism, and scholarship.

Moakley's writing reveals a fondness for and understanding of all her subjects, whether occultists like Encausse, scholars like Waite, or artists like Smith.

Moakley suggested that art, psychology, and mystic meditation can be valuable adjuncts to rational modern life.

[nb 4] Moakley's book correctly identified the provenance of the Visconti-Sforza deck, the family for which it was created, and reported on them in some detail.

She also correctly identified the suit signs as typical of early Italian decks, being Cups, Coins, Swords, and Staves.Some aspects of Moakley's understanding of the Tarot have proven perfectly sound.

Unlike most writers before and since she approached the Tarot as a card game from 15th-century Italy rather than an esoteric manifesto of mysterious origin and transmission.

"The explanation is that the Tarot is not only a simplification of Petrarch's scheme but also a spoof, a ribald take-off on the solemnity of the original story in the spirit of the Carnival parade.

"[20]That criticism, that Moakley's interpretation is an ad hoc gloss rather than an explanatory analysis, is given a broader application by Dummett.

In the 19th century there were some writers who suggested that the meaning of the Tarot trump cards was most closely related to the Dance of Death works of pre-modern art.

[25] In addition, a number of new themes were suggested in Alfred Douglas' 1972 book,[26] speculations which continue to inspire esotericists today.

Perhaps the most notable advocate of this interpretation was Theodore Roszak, a prominent social critic and author of The Making of a Counter Culture (1969).

His 1988 booklet, Fool's Cycle/Full Cycle: Reflections on the Great Trumps of the Tarot, presents a fairly standard example of the interpretation.

[29] William Marston Seabury and Joseph Campbell suggested a different approach; they both asserted that the Tarot trump cards had some connection with Dante Alighieri's masterpiece, Divine Comedy.

[30] John Shephard attempted to explain the trumps and their sequence by reference to a medieval astrological concept known as Children of the Planets.

[31] Timothy Betts attempted to explain the trumps as a representation of medieval Christian legends about the Last Emperor and eschatological events.

[32] The vast majority of 20th-century interpretations explicitly appeal to would-be mystics, fortune-tellers, and enthusiasts whose primary interest in Tarot history and iconography is validation of New Age folklore and esoteric practices.

[33][34] The fact that Moakley's writings were intended to reach a broader audience, and to address more objective historical questions, distinguishes them.