Discover the Renaissance Origins and Mystical Evolution of Tarot Cards
An exhibition at London’s Warburg Institute traces tarot decks’ evolution from the 1450s through the present
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In Italo Calvino’s 1973 novel The Castle of Crossed Destinies, two groups of travelers bed down for the night in a forest. One group heads for the castle. The other goes to a tavern.
Under normal circumstances, the travelers would pass the hours telling each other tales, but “it was clear that crossing the forest had cost us each the power of speech,” Calvino writes. Instead, they resort to using tarot cards to tell their stories, with a narrator at each location offering an interpretation for the reader.
“I realized the tarots were a machine for constructing stories,” writes Calvino. “I was tempted by the diabolical idea of conjuring up all the stories that could be contained in a tarot deck.”
Half a century after Calvino’s book—and nearly six centuries after tarot’s invention—our world is still rearranging the cards, trying to divine stories out of symbols just like Calvino and his characters.
The story of how tarot evolved from a Renaissance card game to a ubiquitous fortune-telling technique is the focus of “Tarot: Origins and Afterlives,” a new exhibition at London’s Warburg Institute.
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“Everyone knows that tarot is everywhere right now,” Bill Sherman, director of the Warburg, says in a statement. “But few have had the opportunity to see its long history, covering more than five centuries of cultural and countercultural work.”
The exhibition traces tarot’s roots back to 15th-century Italy. Although the images drew on classical and pagan imagery, the cards were still treated as a game, or, in the case of the gilded designs by artist Bonifacio Bembo, an art piece for elites to enjoy, as art historian Martina Mazzotta, who co-curated the exhibition, tells the New York Times’ Daniel Waite Penny.
Throughout the 16th century, the game spread across Europe as French troops returned home from the Italian Wars. Mass production in Marseille gave the deck its standardized “Tarot de Marseille” form with 78 cards in four suits, including 21 trump cards (also known as “major arcana”) and the Fool.
Tarot only took on an explicitly mystical connotation in the late 18th century. In 1781, French pastor and occultist Antoine Court de Gébelin came across a tarot deck and concluded 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,” co-curator Jonathan Allen says to the Guardian’s Nicholas Wroe.
Under the pen name Etteilla, Jean-Baptiste Alliette, a Parisian print seller, pushed de Gébelin’s theories further, creating the first set of tarot cards meant to be used for fortune-telling.
Into the 20th century, tarot continued to endure as an occult activity in secret societies like the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, of which Irish poet W.B. Yeats and occultist Aleister Crowley were members.
But at the same time, the cards entered the mainstream. German art historian Aby Warburg, the namesake of the institute, began collecting tarot cards in 1909 as part of his interest in how ancient images became popular in modern culture.
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Examples of tarot cards as an art form include Pamela Colman Smith’s iconic Rider-Waite-Smith tarot deck and the Thoth Tarot deck created by Lady Frieda Harris, which is on view in the exhibition for the first time since her death in 1962.
A one-of-a-kind set from 1906 by Austin Osman Spare shows sparse images floating across multiple cards, which Allen discovered in the archives of the Magic Circle, a magicians’ club in London, according to the Times.
More recently, tarot has become political. As Sherman tells ARTnews’ Karen Chernick, there’s “a lot of what I would call activist tarot at the moment.”
Lockdown Tarot, for instance, created by artist John Walter during the pandemic, features face cards like Theresa May and Donald Trump.
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Meanwhile, Suzanne Treister’s Hexen 2.0 deck uses the card form to examine topics like mass surveillance, anarcho-primitivism and quantum computing.
As Allen tells the Guardian, these developments aren’t aberrations from tarot’s beginnings but instead represent a natural progression. “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 explains.
One version, Barrow Tarot, was created by Katie Anderson as a “conversational artwork” to encourage residents of Barrow, England, to participate in “fortune-telling for a future town,” per the Times. In practical terms, that meant helping residents decide how to develop a run-down area.
That the game has endured for nearly 600 years while evolving to match contemporary interests and desires is a testament to the power of tarot and the stories it creates.
“It’s a very accessible form. It’s a given structure, a given symbol set and a given format,” Sherman tells ARTnews. “For the most part, it’s a small, handheld, rectangular object that pretty much anyone can make or buy. And I think that’s quite different from a lot of the art world.”
“Tarot: Origins and Afterlives” is on view at the Warburg Institute in London through April 30, 2025.
