Tarot is everywhere. First used as a game in 15th-century Italy, but now enjoying a full-blown renaissance, the fortune-telling cards are the subject of a new exhibition exploring their long and labyrinthine history.
As is to be expected of any bona fide cultural phenomenon, tarot hashtags are a big thing on TikTok, where you can run the full gamut, from Mystic Meg-style cartomancy to a no-nonsense tutorial on how to get the most out of your DIY card-reading session.
Such diversity is matched by the sheer range of card decks available to buy: just as with Top Trumps and regular card decks, there are themes for all tastes, from Nasty Tarot, a deck “that tackles women’s issues through nontraditional takes on the traditional suits of tarot”, to Flower Fairies and My Little Pony, to Star Wars. Christina Ricci launched her own tarot deck last autumn, a no-brainer according to British Vogue, for an actor who “embodies the dark feminine mystical archetype”.
The trend chimes with a recent poll suggesting that Gen Z are turning to astrology and other “spiritual” practices for guidance and meaning in an increasingly chaotic world. But do they know where their beloved cards came from?
Tarot: Origins and Afterlives is the first exhibition to take place in the Warburg Institute’s new Kythera Gallery, which opened last autumn following a two-year refurbishment of the entire Bloomsbury site.
A research institute of the University of London, dedicated to the study of global cultural history and the role of images in society, the Warburg holds a significant collection of materials and research on the history of tarot. This is mostly due to its founder Aby Warburg – one of the first modern scholars to treat tarot as a serious subject – including it in his magnum opus, an “image atlas” tracing the echoes of the ancient world in the visual culture of the Renaissance. His handwritten workings-out, in which he tracks ancient memes across time and place, are a joyful, if cryptic inclusion here.
A tarot deck from around 1906 (Photo: Darren Martin/The Magic Circle Collection)Drawing on its own holdings and supplemented with loans from public and private collections, the exhibition scratches the surface of recent research by curators Jonathan Allen and Martina Mazzotta, exploring the evolution of tarot from the earliest-surviving examples, represented here by an exquisite pair of cards from a deck made for the Milanese Visconti-Sforza dynasty in the 15th century. Surges of esotericism and interest in the occult followed in the 18th and 20th centuries, and the exhibition culminates with the tarot of today, presented in a “tarotkammer”, intended to recall the kunstkammers – cabinets of curiosities – favoured by the princely classes of the 16th century.
A word of warning about this exhibition: there are many wonderful things to look at, but it is utterly self-involved, and in the worst traditions of scholarly navel-gazing it gives no quarter to anyone for whom tarot is a mere passing interest. A case in point: there is no explanation of how a tarot reading might work.
An accompanying pamphlet explains that a tarot deck is typically composed of 78 cards, most of which are divided into four suits: Swords, Batons/Wands, Cups, Coins/Pentacles. Each suit contains Pip cards numbered Ace to 10 and four Court cards: King, Queen, Knight and Page. In addition, 22 picture cards called Trumps, all numbered apart from the Fool, depict the symbols for which tarot is best known. These can vary, but typically include the Lovers, the Wheel of Fortune, Justice, the Hanged Man, Death and the Tower.
This exhibition is deeply concerned with tarot’s shifting function, from its beginnings as a game similar to bridge, which then took on a more speculative, narrative-based character in the Renaissance, becoming a tool of divination from the 18th century, and returning in our own time to a more secular, storytelling role. Not being clear about the basics of a tarot reading feels like a huge oversight, that makes it very difficult to appreciate the evolutionary process the exhibition tries to elucidate.
Contemporary artist Suzanne Treiste has reimagined the traditional tarot deck as a tool for a world shaped by new technologies and climate change in ‘HEXEN 2.0’ (Photo: The Warburg institute)In their book Wild Card: Let the Tarot Tell Your Story, authors Jen Cownie and Fiona Lensvelt make clear the difficulties of a catch-all description: “There are myriad decks with different designs, and as many subtle shades of interpretation for each of the cards as there are readers. These cards are an encyclopaedia of experience and emotion: archetypes and narratives that anyone and everyone might encounter and explore.”
Even so, there is a basic procedure, to be followed whether a reader is consulting the cards alone, or for another person known as the “querent”, or “the one who seeks”. The deck is shuffled and fanned out face down, before the querent selects an agreed number of cards, which are then laid out in a particular arrangement, called a spread. A spread can be anything from three cards, signifying past, present and future, to more elaborate arrangements. The cards are interpreted by the reader according to the pattern of the spread, and relative positions of the cards to create a narrative, which might form an answer to a question.
Like many contemporary tarot enthusiasts, the pair describe themselves as secular: “For us the magic of the cards lies not in fortune-telling, but in story-telling. Tarot readings have given us, and those we read for, new perspectives through which to approach aspects of our lives and selves. They can help make sense of places, feelings and actions in an often chaotic world.”
In fact it wasn’t until the 1780s, at the height of the Age of Reason, that tarot became associated with the occult, which transformed it from a card game to an Ancient Egyptian tool of prophesy, called the Book of Thoth. This exotic and entirely spurious back story became orthodoxy after it appeared in an essay by the French scholar and clergyman Antoine Court de Gébelin, and by the 19th century it gained momentum as occult practices grew in popularity, and organisations such as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn became a significant force in Britain.
The English occultist Aleister Crowley joined forces with the painter Frieda Harris to create the Thoth Tarot, made between 1938 and 1943 (Photo: Warburg Institute)The Egyptian story resurfaced once again in the 20th century when the notorious English occultist Aleister Crowley joined forces with the painter Frieda Harris to create the Thoth Tarot. Made between 1938 and 1943, some of Harris’s paintings are included here. The imagery, though steeped in supposedly ancient wisdom, uses a 20th-century artistic lexicon that, in the design for Death for example, bears the influences of surrealism and futurism. By contrast, many of today’s tarot decks are decidedly more playful, even when overtly political designs confront the unique and unprecedented challenges of our age.
There’s Lockdown Tarot, which features Donald Trump as “King of Vaccines”, Jacob Rees-Mogg, and Upsy Daisy, a character from pre-schoolers’ TV show In the Night Garden. Black Power Tarot celebrates 26 African-American cultural and political figures; Katie Anderson’s Barrow Tarot was developed in 2020 as a way of strengthening community ties in Barrow-on-Furness, Cumbria. Together they represent an arcane but undoubtedly vigorous strand of popular culture.
For all the reported growth in esoteric spirituality, these 21st-century decks are noticeably non-“spiritual”, with artist John Walter’s Lockdown Tarot a case in point. Masked up, and presumably with hand sanitisers and social distancing measures in place, Walter used his deck as part of a “fortune-telling performance” in 2020, in which “audiences are empowered to ask me and the tarot anything”, he explains on his website. The “memorable and transformative conversations between strangers” that followed can only have been enhanced in the context of pandemic lockdown.
But though it is made clear that the current resurgence of the form is less to do with fortune-telling than storytelling, we are left to guess the reasons for this, guided in only the vaguest terms towards the conclusion that tarot can provide a mechanism for prompting conversations and chains of thought, that range from a form of therapy to creative problem-solving.
The Juggler card from Austin Osman’s Spare tarot deck (c1906) (Photo: The Magic Circle Collection)Authors Jen Cownie and Fiona Lensvelt again: “The cards don’t provide yes-and-no answers, but they can offer understanding, prompt conversations, guide people to new paths, and, sometimes, just hold space to acknowledge the more difficult feelings and moments in life.”
The exhibition brings clarity of sorts in a section focused on the Italian writer Italo Calvino, who like artists Leonora Carrington and Andy Warhol and the composer John Cage, who experimented with the Chinese divination system, the I Ching, became interested in tarot in the mid-20th century. Calvino used tarot as a “story machine” to create his 1973 novel The Castle of Crossed Destinies. In it, a group of enchanted travellers are struck dumb, and can communicate only through tarot cards, which are reproduced alongside the text as an autonomous narrative strand. The story begins as one of the travellers gathers the scattered cards, taking just one and placing it on the table in front of him. Calvino writes: “We all noticed the resemblance between his face and the face on the card, and we thought we understood that, with the card, he wanted to say ‘I’ and that he was preparing to tell his story.”
It’s a novel steeped in mysticism, its esoteric tone lightened somewhat by a set of photographs on display here, in which Calvino (wearing a suit) adopts the persona of the Juggler, one of three cards that he felt best represented his personality.
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Read MoreNo less unexpected are two sets of designs for cards by British contemporary artist Suzanne Treister, who for the past 15 years or so has set about reimagining the traditional tarot deck as a tool for modelling actions and future scenarios in a world shaped by new technologies, and climate change.
Treisters’s designs, titled HEXEN 2.0 and HEXEN 5.0, are fascinating, and appear like snippets of a manifesto that presumably becomes coherent during a reading. The Ten of Pentacles is titled The Redeployment of Everyone to Restore the Planet, and includes talking points from “The Super Rich” to “Donations of time and expertise to Initiatives”.
While hyper-modern in its preoccupations, Treisters’s set of cards adhere to the form established by the Tarot de Marseilles, which was widespread by the 18th century and is the basis for the modern deck. In its basic anatomy, it has barely changed, and yet its constant reinventions reflect the particular concerns of the time in a way that is not quite matched in any other cultural form.
Embraced by readers of Teen Vogue, activists and artists alike, the resurgence of tarot in our digital age is a cultural phenomenon of some immensity – but it’s going to take cultural commentators with considerable hinterland to really mine its depth and breadth.
Tarot – Origins and Afterlives is at the Warburg Institute, London, until 30 April (warburg.sas.ac.uk)
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