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Tarot: Origins and Afterlives Helen Cornish
The Warburg Institute, part of the University of London, recently made a commitment to hosting public and free exhibitions, as part of a significant renovation. The founder, Aby Warburg (1866-1929), a German art historian, was interested in interactions between classical images and myths found in visual culture produced from the European Renaissance onwards. Crucially, his was not a study of fine artwork, but stamps, cards, and other popular and portable paraphernalia. In autumn 2024, their first exhibition showed Warburg’s 1920s Bilderatlas, a series of panels that tracked connections between images and stories as a visual record of shifting social memories. This second exhibition, Tarot: Origins and Afterlives, is inspired by Warburg’s Tarot collection from Renaissance Milanese engravings to nineteenth century French divination cards. Alongside the vivid exhibits and images is an account of the ‘first modern tarot historian’, Gertrude Charlotte Moakley. Her 1966 book The Tarot Cards Painted by Bonifacio Bembo for the Visconti-Sforza Family encouraged art historians, including Warburgian scholar Erwin Panofsky, to take tarot seriously. This exhibition presents an interconnected story that braids two threads. One tells a cultural history of tarot as shapeshifter. It traces distinct chronological and thematic phases: from decorative card game, to occult technique, to countercultural inspiration for contemporary artists. The second thread considers tarot as artworks, rooted in contemporary movements. As Warburg showed more than a hundred years ago, these are hard to disentangle. Especially as iconographic images echo over the centuries, layered and refashioned over time. Tarot decks and original paintings are accompanied by contextual paraphernalia – books, pamphlets, letters, sketches, and a suffragette postcard drawn by Pamela Colman Smith around 1910. Together, these offer some fascinating insights into histories of tarot.
The historical strand starts by tracking tarot from a courtly game of chance using expensively decorated decks in fifteenth century Milan, to the Occult revival in eighteenth and nineteenth century France. Antoine Court de Gébelin proposed that Tarot concealed esoteric techniques found in the ancient Egyptian Book of Thoth. This inspired Etteilla to set up a cartomancie society and design a deck explicitly for the purposes of divination. The Warburg presents a visual history with some fascinating exhibits including Visconti-Sforza and Sola Busca decks. The fashionable Italian Tarot of Marseille was favoured by Éliphas Lévi’s who incorporated Kabbalistic symbolism into the images and texts set the tarot firmly in the occult imagination, key to the Golden Dawn and later generations of British occultists. The next two rooms trace the tarot through the reimagined symbolic designs by new generations of twentieth century British occultists working from principles set out by the Golden Dawn. Interconnections between art and magic are plain to see. Pamela Colman Smith’s arts and craft style is evident in her interpretation of Renaissance imagery in the Rider-Waite deck she created with AE White. These share the space with Austin Osman Spare’s pack (picture above) – only recently found in the Magic Circle archives – and their early twentieth century divinatory symbolism offerings, following words and images as they move across the surface of the cards. The Thoth deck has its own space (detail below). The walls are hung with Frieda Harris’s large original paintings, vividly inspired by art deco geometries that invite correspondences between hermeticism, astrology, and the kabbalah. Frieda Harris and Aleister Crowley negotiated these symbolic designs via correspondence at the outbreak of the Second World War.
The exhibition completes its cultural history strand with the more recent turn to countercultural art and ideological movements – inspired by tarot – that traces invisible cultural connections between groups, people, politics, and ideas. Tarot’s symbolic power through storytelling is made present through Susan Treister’s extraordinary Hexen 2.0, while Italio Calvino’s The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1973) is a reminder that cultural imagery also works through literature. The final small space is the ‘Tarotkammer’, where shelves are stacked with a variety of packs produced by contemporary artists – including John Water’s Lockdown Tarot and Ugo Dossi’s remarkable Trinity-Tarot – which challenge social norms, provide inspiration for improvisation, and imagine alternative futures. The historical account presented by the Warburg Institute is contested by Peter Mark Adams and Christophe Poncet in Two Esoteric Tarots (2023) who consider the Sola-Busca tarocchi and the Tarot de Marseille to contain traces of earlier esoteric and divinatory usage, concealed in plain sight since the fifteenth century. Regardless, this collection left me with a tangible sense of Aby Alburg’s curiosity about the portability of images. Literally, as small cards to be carried and shared from place to place, and metaphorically as images and concepts are refashioned in new times and milieus. Tarot plays many roles in teaching us how to read through, across, and between images. More widely, I appreciated how tarot brings women into the centre of modern art histories. Over all, I found this exhibition surprisingly immersive, in the midst of centuries of images I could recognise how deeply my twenty-first century eye is situated within specific visual contexts, histories, and assumptions about the interpretation of symbols found across the shifting landscape of tarot imagery. An afternote: any readers concerned about the influence of commodification and capitalism on contemporary occultism might be pleased to know there is no museum shop to tempt you. Although you should also note that a path appears to have been forged between the Institute and nearby Treadwell’s Bookshop. I walked there myself, my money burning a hole in my pocket, to find myself in the good company of several other gallery visitors!
Refs:
Adams, Peter Mark and Christophe Poncet. 2023. Two Esoteric Tarots.
London, Scarlet Imprint.
https://warburg.sas.ac.uk/events/tarot-origins-and-afterlives-2025
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