The Curious Power of Tarot Cards to Explain and Reveal

New York Times

30-01-2025

A street artist dances with his dog, a blind Cupid lifts a flaming apple and a hunched Atlas holds the world on his back. Taken together, the images could mean a new venture will lead to love and success; or that the viewer should beware a hasty proposal of marriage; or that the search for love is a fool's errand. Painted by the Italian Baroque artist Giuseppe Maria Mitelli, these tarot cards refuse a single interpretation.
Today, tarot is everywhere — inspiring fashion lines, books and apps — but its images have been evolving for centuries, shape shifting to reflect different ages. A new exhibition opening Thursday at the Warburg Institute in London, 'Tarot: Origins and Afterlives,' looks at what the curators call 'critical moments' in tarot's history to show how a recreational card game of the elite in Renaissance Italy transformed into an esoteric tool for divination and, eventually, a mainstay of alternative spirituality.
The exhibit begins in 1909, when Aby Warburg, the German art historian for whom the institute is named, began collecting tarot decks and books on the history of magic. Warburg's interest in tarot was part of a much larger scholarly project to investigate how myths and symbols from the ancient world had persisted into modernity. He was especially interested, the show's co-curator Martina Mazzotta said, in 'endlessly recombining photographs of artworks, including tarot, to mark out alternative visual and conceptual possibilities.'
The precise origins of tarot are murky, but visitors will find some clarity in the elaborate, gold-leafed miniatures by the Italian artist Bonifacio Bembo from the mid-15th century, which are among the earliest known tarot cards. Probably too valuable to play with, they were more likely used as tools of reflection, Mazzotta said, adding that their design showed the growing influence of Renaissance ideals in Europe: In The Star card, a young woman reaches toward a shining beacon of light, perhaps a metaphor for knowledge. Displayed alongside these precious objects are card fragments that were fished from the waterworks of Castello Sforzesco, a Milan castle. Some of those date from as early as 1499, and their casual discarding suggests tarot was also just treated as a card game at the time.
Tarot left Italian courts and spread throughout Europe with the help of French soldiers returning from the Italian Wars in the 16th century. In the French city of Marseilles, more efficient printing techniques standardized and popularized the game, so that by the 18th century, all decks contained 78 cards in four suits: coins, clubs, cups and swords, with 56 numbered and 21 trump cards (today known as the 'major arcana'), plus The Fool.
But tarot didn't become associated with mysticism until 1781, when the French clergyman and scholar Antoine Porte de Gébelin discovered the game.
An associate of Benjamin Franklin, Diderot and other Enlightenment figures, de Gébelin saw a group playing tarot at a salon in Paris. He was immediately struck by what he believed was ancient Egyptian symbolism hidden in the cards. Though this interpretation had no factual basis, de Gébelin and his followers published essays pushing this view. On view at the Warburg Institute is a poster created by a devotee of Gébelin', the mystic Etteilla, which lays out how the cards were supposedly once arranged in the Egyptian temple of Memphis, along with instructions for fortunetelling.
By the late 19th century, tarot had evolved along two parallel tracks, becoming both a popular fortunetelling device and a key to esoteric knowledge. Perhaps the most influential tarot occultist group was the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a British secret society whose members included the poet W.B. Yates. Arthur Edward Waite, another member, created a deck with illustrations by Pamela Colman Smith, whose Art Nouveau style helped make these cards famous throughout in the world.
Other occult decks on view offer more eccentric visualizations. Among them is a fascinating 1906 hand-painted deck by Austin Osman Spare, which depicts the traditional arcana of tarot in an almost psychedelic style. Spare's words and images flow across the cards, indicating convergences and relationships.
The show's co-curator Jonathan Allen discovered the deck more than a decade ago in the archives of the Magic Circle, a London society for theatrical magicians. ' I couldn't quite believe what I had in my hands,' he recalled. Allen's fascination with Spare's deck sparked the idea for the 'Origins and Afterlives' show.
The magic era of tarot persisted into the 1960s, when it was adopted by the counterculture, along with astrology and other alternative belief systems — but this period also saw tarot become a means of artistic experimentation, said Mazzotta, the co-curator, given that the 'cards are ideally suited to telling stories.'
Tarot's narrative powers are on full display in Italo Calvino's two-part 1973 novel 'The Castle of Crossed Destinies.' In the book, strangers in a castle and later a tavern lose their ability to speak and must tell their stories by arranging tarot cards on a table. Calvino spent years obsessively arranging and rearranging cards in order to write the stories, and wrote in the afterward: 'I publish the book in order to be free of it.'
This paranoid style of tarot is taken to the extreme in two decks by the contemporary artist Suzanne Treister, whose work explores the hidden intellectual and political history behind the rise of the internet. In her 'Hexen 2.0' deck, The Ace of Swords becomes a dark portal with a shining sun at its center, surrounded by 'infowar,' 'hacktivists' and 'unencrypted communications.'
In the final room of the show, visitors will find an interactive space with more decks exploring societal and personal concerns. Katie Anderson's 'Barrow Tarot' was created as a 'conversational artwork' to help the residents of the English town of Barrow come to an agreement about how to develop the run-down, postindustrial area. The deck invites users to participate in what Anderson calls a 'fortunetelling for a future town.'
Leaving 'Tarot: Origins and Afterlives,' visitors may still wonder what exactly these cards are for. Is tarot a game? A cheaper form of therapy? An alternative to traditional religion? In this era of uncertainty, it may be most useful to turn back to tarot's origins as a tool for reflection and imagination.
'There are so few cultural spaces now where genuine speculative thinking can happen,' said Allen, the co-curator. This exhibition offers one more.