London’s First Tarot Exhibition Will Open At The End Of January

The University of London’s Warburg Institute reopened in autumn after a £15 million revamp – so it’s the perfect time to pay this extraordinary library-cum-gallery a visit. If you’re unfamiliar, the Warburg Institute is dedicated to the study of imagery and its cross-societal role across the ages, beginning as a collection in Hamburg before being saved from Nazi Germany and brought to London in 1933. Inside, visitors can find everything from books on Islamic astrology to studies on 21st century memes to explorations of the role of the occult in society. The latter is pertinent for the Institute’s upcoming exhibition, Tarot: Origins & Afterlives – London’s very first historical overview of tarot. Here’s what to know before you go.

Tarot: Origins & Afterlives At The Warburg Institute

Left to right:
1. Temperance card from the Tarot de Marseille-style Gassmann tarot deck (c.1865; Courtesy the Warburg Institute).
2. The Juggler, Austin Osman Spare tarot deck (c.1906; Courtesy The Magic Circle Collection)
3. Pamela Colman Smith, The Hierophant card from Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot (1909; Courtesy The College of Psychic Studies)

What Is It?

Spanning tarot’s origins in the 15th century to its use in the present day, Tarot: Origins & Afterlives is an upcoming exhibition curated by London’s Warburg Institute surveying the role of tarot in society, tracing the cards’ critical moments in history. It’s the perfect institution to present the exhibition: the Warburg Institute’s founder, Aby Warburg (1866–1929) was among the world’s first modern tarot scholars, elucidating the cards’ complex relations with astrology and iconography. Work from the Institute’s own collection will be displayed alongside pieces on loan from a range of institutions and private collections, all curated by the Institute’s director, Bill Sherman, with associate fellows Jonathan Allen and Martina Mazzotta.

‘Everyone knows that tarot is everywhere right now,’ Sherman says. ‘But few have had the opportunity to see its long history, covering more than five centuries of cultural and countercultural work. We at the Warburg are thrilled to be hosting this historic show.’

Beginning as a recreational courtly card game in Renaissance Italy, tarot’s striking symbols evolved into  a divinatory device and carrier of occult wisdom in the 18th and 19th centuries in the hands of artists, mystics, writers and even pseudo medical practitioners. In 18th century France, these mysterious cards transformed in the hands of occult thinking, and the cards became tools of divination – as we know them today. Once a preserve of the elite, tarot is better known today among marginalised communities and countercultures, and Tarot: Origins & Afterlives will trace this transformation. Displayed in London, there will also be a natural focus on Britain’s occult revival in the early 20th century.

Cover detail of Absolute Key To Occult Science – The Tarot of the Bohemians by Papus (1892). (Courtesy of the Warburg Institute)

What’s On Display?

Tarot: Origins & Afterlives’s highlights include:

• Samples of the mid-fifteenth century Visconti tarot cards from Northern Italy, the world’s earliest surviving examples of tarot cards
• Fragmentary playing cards found during archaeological work at the Castello Sforzesco in Milan, one dating from a period when Leonardo da Vinci was working at the castle in the 1490s
• A selection from the so-called Mantegna Tarocchi, a set of old master prints housed at the British Museum and once thought to be Andrea Mantegna’s designs for tarot cards
• A tableau of Etteilla’s Livre de Thot cards from 18th-century France (now in the Wellcome Collection), and the first tarot cards explicitly designed for fortune-telling
• Frieda Harris’s paintings for infamous occultist Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot, on display for the first time in England since the artist’s death in 1962
• Austin Osman Spare’s hand-painted tarot deck from around 1906, featuring his experimental system connecting its cards at their borders, and which recently resurfaced after more than 70 years in the collections of The Magic Circle
• Selections from Suzanne Treister’s new HEXEN 5.0 tarot deck, a timely update of her HEXEN 2.0 project which uses tarot to examine the relationship between new technologies, alternative belief systems and the potential futures of humanity
• A Tarotkammer (akin to a ‘cabinet of curiosities’) featuring decks by contemporary artists including Courtney Alexander, Katie Anderson, Ugo Dossi, Sharon Gal, Invasorix, King Khan & Michael Eaton, Plastique Fantastique, John Walter, Candida Powell-Williams and Anna Zett

Where & When?

Tarot: Origins & Afterlives will run from 31 January to 30 April 2025 at The Warburg Institute (Woburn Square, London WC1H 0AB).

How To Get Tickets

Admission to Tarot: Origins & Afterlives is free of charge, but timed-entry tickets are required and will be available to book soon. Book yours and stay up to date at warburg.sas.ac.uk