From secret societies to Selfridges: the eccentric geniuses responsible for the macabre world of tarot

The Guardian

27-01-2025

There are few more appropriate venues in which to stage an exhibition about tarot than the newly refurbished galleries of the Warburg Institute. Based in Bloomsbury, London, since 1933 but founded in Hamburg at the turn of the 20th century by historian Aby Warburg – himself a pioneering modern scholar of tarot cards – its aim was the study of global cultural history and the role played by images, with particular emphasis on the relationship between the Renaissance and ancient civilisations.
'Tarot is a legacy of Italian Renaissance visual culture that spreads through time and space,' explains Bill Sherman, Warburg director, and co-curator of the exhibition Tarot: Origins & Afterlives. 'But how does something created in a mid-15th-century northern Italian courtly context, not at that point associated with divination or the occult, become such a pervasive global phenomenon?'
It certainly wasn't obvious from the beginning when someone in a Milanese court added 22 new picture cards – drawing on Roman gods or classical virtues such as temperance or love which could act as an allegory for life – to a standard deck in order to enhance the complexity and fun of the game. 'It wouldn't be until the late-18th century,' says co-curator Jonathan Allen, 'that a French pastor and scholar of the occult, Antoine Court de Gébelin, came to the conclusion that what he was looking at wasn't an ordinary set of cards, but actually a concealed Egyptian religious text called the Book of Thoth.' A Parisian print seller and former seed merchant called John-Baptiste Alliette soon appropriated the theory, founded a society dedicated to its study and established himself as interpreter of the Book of Thoth before producing a new tarot deck explicitly used for fortune-telling under the reversed pen-name Etteilla. His deck, largely used by secret aristocratic magical societies, set the visual and spiritual tone in thinking and practice for the next few centuries until the early 20th century and the British occult revival.
It was the various expulsions and fragmentations of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn – a secret society exploring magic and occult mysticism which included WB Yeats and Aleister Crowley as members – that then created the dominant decks of the 20th and 21st centuries. The Warburg exhibition includes the handpainted 1906 deck by artist and Golden Dawn member Austin Osman Spare, 'a lost relic' of British occultism that had been languishing unrecognised in the Magic Circle's museum. Also on display is the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot (1909) designed by artist Pamela Colman Smith, which contains some of the most stylistically recognisable tarot images, as well as Lady Frieda Harris's deck created with Aleister Crowley in the 1930s and 40s. Her adoption of modernist artistic innovations places her work closer to the contemporary artists of the time as opposed to the neo-medieval romantic tarot iconography of tradition.
The tradition of female artists shaping the visual grammar of tarot continues to this day. The exhibition will feature new responses to tarot including those by Suzanne Treister, 'who has taken these esoteric symbols', says Sherman, 'and used them to help us unlock today's hidden structures that can include covert, and sometimes conspiracy-friendly, areas such as systems of surveillance and control'.
At a time when you can buy Dune and Hunger Games decks and get a reading in Selfridges, it is clear that tarot is alive and well. 'But rather than being wedded to its occult history,' says Allen, 'it seems to be returning to its humanist origins as a kind of serious game that allows individuals to mediate the complexity of the world around them.' He suggests part of the appeal is that it is participatory and social – although of course there are now also tarot bots. 'Tarot's more than 500-year history is disparate and full of discrete and often strange projects. But when you set them alongside each other as we've been able to do here, all sorts of connections and echoes emerge that not only help us make sense of the past, but assist in informing our perception of the present.'
Tarot: Origins & Afterlives is at The Warburg Institute, London, 31 January to 30 April.
The Tarot, in the form of leaves of the book of Thoth, Egypt, JB Alliette (c. 1780)
Alliette/Etteilla, often described as the first person to make a living from tarot, had written several books on fortune telling with playing cards before coming across the Book of Thoth. We know this tableau contains his cards from the first deck explicitly used for fortune telling, but it does retain some mystery as it remains unclear why the images are cut to accommodate what appears to be folds.
The Juggler, the High Priestess, the Emperor and Justice card from the Austin Osman Spare tarot deck (c. 1906)
One of Spare's innovations was to employ images and text that bridged the boundaries between the cards. So when the deck is reconfigured, in addition to the permanent associations ascribed to specific cards, there are also new images created that can be read across the cards. Surrealist artists would later go on to explore similar ideas.
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Pamela Colman Smith's The Hierophant card from Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot (1909)
Smith was a wide-ranging artist interested in synaesthesia and the relationship between music and art as well as being involved with the suffragettes. The deck, commissioned by Golden Dawn member Arthur E Waite, was advertised in the occult press and made available for the first time to a general public making it one of the most famous and popular designs.
Frieda Harris's original painting of the Adjustment card for Aleister Crowley's Thoth tarot, 1937-43
Harris and Crowley took several years to agree on the final version of their deck and it didn't emerge in a purchasable version until after both of their deaths. This original Harris painting was given to the Warburg Institute by Crowley's executor and is exhibited in the UK for the first time since her death in 1962.
Ace of Swords card by Suzanne Treister, 2009-11
British artist Treister utilises tarot as a vehicle for probing her interests in technologies, beliefs and systems of influence and control, as well as a tool for unlocking these systems to offer some grounds for optimism by envisioning positive alternative futures. The exhibition will feature examples from an updated deck she has created to reflect conditions in 2025.