Tarot – Origins & Afterlives

Foreteller of fate, conduit for common sense or magic? Tarot has been used as a tool for decision-making since the 15th century. A new show explores its Renaissance origins, its evolutions and adaptations and its enduring appeal for artists and acolytes

Installation view, Tarot: Origins & Afterlives at The Warburg Institute, 31 January – 30 April 2025. Photo: Stephen White & Co. Courtesy The Warburg Institute.

Warburg Institute, London
31 January  – 30 April 2025

by VERONICA SIMPSON

In January 1933, the Warburg family took the decision to relocate the vast art and photographic library compiled by the historian Aby Warburg (1866-1929) from Hamburg to the UK. The Nazis had just come to power. The Warburg Institute saw where the supremacist and nationalistic rhetoric was leading and, in December 1933, managed to get 531 boxes of books and photographs shipped to London on two steamers, the SS Hermia and the SS Jessica. The institute’s presence here then enabled them to whisk some of central Europe’s most respected art scholars out of various danger zones, including EH Gombrich, who fled from Austria to Britain in 1936 to take up a post at the institute, and went on to write The Story of Art, arguably the most influential book on art ever published.

What role does fate or luck play in our decision-making? Clearly, there were favourable winds behind the above decisions. But a celebration of Aby Warburg’s pioneering Tarot research is a fascinating way to kick off the art exhibition programme at the institute’s new Kythera gallery, set within the recently reconfigured and expanded building where the vast Warburg archive resides, as part of University of London School of Advanced Study.

Installation view, Tarot: Origins & Afterlives at The Warburg Institute, 31 January – 30 April 2025. Photo: Stephen White & Co. Courtesy The Warburg Institute.

Warburg began studying representations of the afterlife in Italian Renaissance painting in the 1890s and, by 1909, had homed in on tarot as a medium that distilled and disseminated classical imagery of planetary gods and goddesses. By the time he died, in 1929, he had dedicated an entire panel of his Bilderatlas Mnemosyne (an atlas of visual culture from antiquity to modern times) to tarot, showing its aesthetic evolution from 15th-century engravings to the 19th-century woodcuts of the Tarot de Marseilles. The panel has been reassembled for the exhibition.

The economic and political context that shapes and influences visual culture is at the core of the Warburg Institute’s activities. The exhibition makes clear that tarot evolved out of recreational card-playing, specifically in Italy (where these early cards were called tarocchi). It also reveals that, initially, only wealthy families were able to commission the most beautiful, luxurious playing cards from some of the leading artists of the day, including Bonifacio Bembo. On display are two ornate, gold-encrusted examples of the Visconti-Sforza deck Bembo was commissioned to do by Milan’s powerful Sforza family.

Visconti-Sforza tarot. Installation view, Tarot: Origins & Afterlives, Warburg Institute, London, 2025. Photo: Veronica Simpson.

The so-called Mantegna Tarocchi (c1465), also shown here, were not created by Andrea Mantegna or his pupils, and are not a tarot deck. They comprise 50 images whose themes and characters appear to represent humanist principles, and were possibly deployed for educational purposes. The images are grouped in themes, including the States of Man; Apollo and the Nine Muses; the Arts and the Sciences; the Seven Virtues and the Sun; Time and the World; and the Planets and the Spheres.

Tarot is nothing if not adaptable. And this show does an excellent job of demonstrating the flexibility of the format as it adapts to evolving tastes and sensibilities. Nicolas de Larmessin’s Habit de Métiers et Professions is a series of etchings and engravings produced in about 1690 showing workers and their uniforms, their bodies blended with the tools of their trades. And Giuseppe Maria Mitelli’s 1660-69 set of Tarocchino Mitelli, from Bologna, reinterpret the tarot tradition according to the prevailing values: for example, a suit of pentacles comprises medals featuring the artist’s own preferences for painting, sculpting, dancing, hunting and fencing.

This is clearly a show underpinned by great scholarship, as evidenced by the reduced lighting (to protect the many fragile and precious exhibits), the multitude of showcases revealing drawings, notebooks, original artefacts and observations, and occasional, lavishly notated texts.

Temperance Tarot de Marseille Gassmann tarot deck, c1865.

What Warburg’s collection didn’t chart, as the first wall text clarifies, is how tarot evolved from “a courtly card game to a tool for occult divination”. And while this exhibition does acknowledge the primary figures responsible for that transformation, its main gift is to demonstrate tarot’s beauty and significance as an early “technology for decision-making”, which has traction to this day.

“It’s no more magical than whist,” claimed BBC Radio 4 presenter Matthew Sweet, in an entertaining and informative tarot-themed episode of the programme Arts and Ideas, which first aired in January, in which this exhibition plays a starring role. Bill Sherman, director of the Warburg Institute, was among Sweet’s guests, and responded: “It starts really as a card game … [and] goes through a symbolic transformation … It’s not until the 1780s that the tarot deck is used for any sense of opening up the future or any sense of an occult secret past.”

In fact, it was the clergyman, Freemason and scholar Antoine Court de Gébelin who, in 1781, wrote an essay declaring that tarot cards draw on practices of ancient Egyptian magic, known as the “Book of Thoth”. That idea was then seized on by an enterprising Parisian print seller (and seed merchant) Jean Baptiste Alliette (who went by the pseudonym Etteilla). He had already published a book on fortune-telling using everyday packs of playing cards, but in 1783 he published one of several instruction manuals on the art of Egyptian cartomancy. He founded a society for its study and then produced his own deck – these being the first cards sold explicitly for the purpose of fortune-telling, some of which are presented here.

The Juggler. Austin Osman Spare tarot deck, c1906. Courtesy The Magic Circle Collection.

A century later, in 1892, the French physician and hypnotist Gérard Encausse (AKA Papus) published his book The Tarot of the Bohemians, conjuring assorted fantasies about Tarot’s ancient origins. In one showcase we have an original, leather-bound, gold-tooled copy of the book, whose use of the single, gold-embossed key symbol reinforces the claim for tarot as “the key to occult science”. Illustrations by Oswald Wirth of his then recently launched tarot deck are included. Warburg annotated some of these illustrations, flagging up Wirth’s references to astrology and astronomy. Wirth’s deck (examples of which are also on show) was the first set of specifically occult-leaning cards to be printed since Etteilla’s. And the wall caption directs us to see the similarities between this deck and those of Austin Osman Spare’s tarot (c1906) and the Rider-Waite-Smith deck (1910) that follow.

Pamela Colman Smith, tarot deck, 1909. Installation view, Tarot: Origins & Afterlives, Warburg Institute, London, 2025. Photo: Veronica Simpson.

Spare’s hand-painted cards combine ordinary playing cards with tarot cards, and feature interconnecting geometric shapes, texts and figurative images that link cards at their borders. These only resurfaced in 2013, having been hidden in the collections of The Magic Circle, London’s private club for professional magicians. In the same section, we have Pamela Colman Smith’s compelling designs, created for AE Waite, who was originally a member of the UK’s Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. That organisation had fractured by 1903, but out of its splinters Waite and Aleister Crowley subsequently made their names. In 1909, Waite commissioned Colman Smith to produce a tarot deck for his new Independent and Rectified Rite of the Golden Dawn. Smith’s designs drew on the 15th-century Sola-Busca Tarot, blended with Waite’s Christian mysticism and occult symbolism. The deck is now known as the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot and these designs will probably be the ones most familiar to visitors. With their bold outlines, cheerful palette and fluid lines, there is something seductive but creepy in Colman Smith’s designs – the Hanged Man looking positively jaunty as he dangles from his tree. And surely there’s a cheeky twinkle in Colman Smith’s eye, in the black-and-white photographic portrait presented alongside her work, where she can be seen swathed in silks and strings of necklaces; very Mystic Meg.

The Book of Thoth, original manuscript by Frieda Harris. Installation view, Tarot: Origins & Afterlives, Warburg Institute, London, 2025. Photo: Veronica Simpson.

However, we are into full-on gothic modern when it comes to Frieda Harris’s tarot designs, commissioned by Crowley, and created at the time of the second world war, between 1938 and 1943. These became known as the Thoth Tarot cards, and their dynamic geometric compositions and sculptural figures clearly draw on Egyptian imagery. The wall text is not wrong when it suggests they “reflect the turmoil of the years in which they were made”. But they also present a radical departure from the classicism of previous versions, resembling more the styles prevalent among Harris’s artistic peers.

Their reception also reflected the fame (or infamy) that Crowley and his dark arts attracted. According to a delightfully gossipy caption, an exhibition of Harris’s drawings, due to be displayed at an Oxford gallery in 1941, was cancelled “due to concerns over Crowley’s notoriety”. Though it was quickly relocated to a neighbouring site.

Thoth Tarot card, Death. Installation view, Tarot: Origins & Afterlives at The Warburg Institute, 31 January – 30 April 2025. Photo: Stephen White & Co. Courtesy The Warburg Institute.

While Harris exhibited her tarot paintings in galleries around the UK, they were not published as a deck until Crowley and Harris had died (in 1947 and 1962, respectively). Looking at these dynamic and darkly hued images, I can think of at least a dozen contemporary film-makers who might have been inspired by their mood, menace, symbols and palettes. The Lord of the Rings film series surely owes something to Harris’s depiction of The Tower, and I am reminded of several films by Tim Burton when I look at her depiction of Death: all black, windmilling (scissor)hands, harvesting souls with his scythe.

Curator Jonathan Allen (co-curator with Sherman and Martina Mazzotta) notes that the fascination with tarot has travelled deep into the art community and among other creative disciplines. He cites examples of tarot decks by artists not included here, such as Leonora Carrington and Ithell Colquhoun (now at Tate St Ives). He says: “The presence of this very versatile format is such an invitation to artists, who like to work with freedom but also within certain constraints.”

One of the reasons tarot as an inspiration and practice has regained popularity among the young is thanks to film and book franchises being translated into decks  – you can buy Dune and Hunger Games decks, as well as procure a reading in Selfridges. Allen says there was a tarot reading event recently at Tate Modern, hosted by Mark Pilkington (who will bring his cartomancy skills to the Warburg Institute, in April). Allen continues: “We’ve noticed a rising interest in collective readings: people gathering in spaces and experimenting freely together with tarot decks as part of wider discussions.”

Suzanne Treister, The Sun Hexen 2.0 tarot, 2009-11.

Two contemporary British artists making use of tarot for activism and engagement are represented here. One is Suzanne Treister, who has created two decks – Hexen 2.0 and more recently Hexen 5.0 – which lay out the forces of technology and extractivism darkening our future, but also the potential for resistance. The illustrative style draws on the same esoteric Renaissance symbolism of the older cards, but to envision radical alternatives. And there is a deck that passed me by (in a show so rich with small exhibits and festooned with clarifying texts, it is easy to miss things): the Barrow Tarot by artist Katie Anderson. This consists of a deck of 78 cards inspired by the artist’s residency in Barrow-in-Furness, working with groups of residents to navigate their way out of the grip of terminal post-industrial decline. She grouped the deck into four key “houses” or suits: community, environment, culture and industry. To these were added major arcana character cards, including the Wind Turbine and the Farmer. Allen says: “The artist uses the deck to help mediate difficult decisions. It’s usually very difficult to have those direct discussions, but when choices are presented in the form of a game, they seem easier to work out.”

Why are the young embracing this practice? Sweet posed this question to his panellists in the aforementioned BBC Radio 4 programme, wondering: “Is it because they have so little economic power?” To which his guest, KA Laity, film-maker and magic scholar, replied: “It’s always popular in times when people feel anxious; people say let’s look at things we ignore the rest of the time. Magic has always been the technology available to people who have nothing else.”

I found the idea of the exhibition intriguing, and the experience of it even more so, philosophically, contextually and aesthetically. And that is as someone who only vaguely dabbled in Tarot back in my 20s. I would recommend closer scrutiny of this fascinating art and game form, not to mention the reasons why we feel we need it now.