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New York Times
30-01-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
The Curious Power of Tarot Cards to Explain and Reveal
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.
The Guardian
27-01-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
From secret societies to Selfridges: the eccentric geniuses responsible for the macabre world of tarot
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. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion 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.
